“When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt: And was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son.”
St. Matthew ii:14-15
The prophetic witness of the Old Testament is a central theme of the gospel writers and appears throughout St. Matthew’s work as evidence of Jesus’s status as the Messiah. Through textual quotations, allusions, and implicit references St. Matthew offers his Hebrew audience dozens of examples of how Jesus fits the messianic qualifications of their own Scriptural tradition. Yet, St. Matthew often handles these references in ways that seem out of context with their original narratives. Established stories and characters are recast from their historical plots to take on symbolic or even typological meaning in the life of Jesus. While St. Matthew’s interpretation of the Old Testament is under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, it is unlikely that his contemporaries or even the prophets themselves always understood how their words pointed to a future Messiah. One example is the fulfillment of “Out of Egypt have I called my son” cited by St. Matthew from the Book of Hosea. St. Matthew understood how the phrase fulfilled Scripture in terms of messianic prophecy, but also informs our interpretive lens for the Old Testament.
Prophecy and Providence
Basic to the idea of Biblical prophecy is the doctrine of providence by which we understand the divine governance of God in history. God fulfills his purposes as he unfolds the natural years of human history. Dutch-American theologian Louis Berkhof describes providence as, “whereby He rules all things so that they answer to the purpose of their existence.” a God’s sovereign orchestration of history is clearly explained in passages like Psalm 103:18 where we read, “The LORD has established His throne in heaven, And His kingdom rules over all.” The mechanism of messianic prophecy demonstrates the special promises possessed by the Hebrews as they expected the God over their history to also superintend a savior in their future. Contrast this with the writings of Sophocles and his Delphic oracles that entrap man’s future into an Oedipal tragedy.
St. Matthew’s use of messianic prophecies is therefore primarily a matter of demonstrating God’s power in time and not intended to be mere proof texts for qualifying Jesus’s own messianic candidacy. We see in the messianic prophecies God’s fingerprints of providence and signposts of his imminent work in establishing his renewed Kingdom. Dr. Edmund Clowney of Westminster Seminary explains in his popular book Preaching Christ in All of Scripture that the patterns that seem to repeat and find fulfillment in Jesus point to the magnifying work of Israel’s Messiah. “God will not merely repeat his deeds of the past; he will do greater things, climatically greater: a second exodus, involving spiritual deliverance; a new covenant, a new creation, a new people, including Jews and Gentiles; and a greater than Moses, than David, than Elijah.” b We should then expect that the interpretive methodology that St. Matthew will employ in relation to the fulfillment of the Old Testament will cast a greater weight to prophetic statements and allusions that point to the Messiah’s greater role in the destiny of the covenant People.
Greater Fulfillment in the Gospels
The narrative employed in Matthew 2 functions to highlight God’s past faithfulness and connect it to the greater promises that come through or are fulfilled by His Son. St. Matthew’s emphasis on the holy family’s refuge in Egypt employs not only a reference to Old Testament scripture, but invokes the historic symbolism of Moses and Hosea. Harkening back to an Exodus-like story, St. Matthew introduces Herod as a new Pharaoh and Jesus as a new Moses. The Messianic prophecy itself attempts to connect or memorialize a past event in redemptive history to the life and ministry of Jesus. This method of weaving pictures of previous covenantal epochs into the successive stages of Israel’s growth matches the entire pattern described as “covenant renewal” in James B. Jordan’s book Through New Eyes. Jordan explains that, “…time is opportunity.” and the Covenant history builds in a linear-spiral fashion. c The connections between messianic prophecy and their fulfillment point to God’s work at fulfilling his promises through successive covenantal renewals with mankind (e.g. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David). With each successive Patriarch’s renewal, God reveals more of his glorious plan to be fulfilled in the future Messiah. Here St. Matthew appeals to Jesus as a new stage of covenant renewal.
Fulfillment and Covenant Renewal
On the notion of fulfillment, Strong’s two succinct synonyms make St. Mathew’s use of the word rather plain: “accomplish, complete” d and we do well to understand that Jesus accomplishes the words of the prophecy by completing their whole meaning. As NT Wright puts it, “for Matthew, part of Jesus’ role and vocation is precisely to make Israel’s story complete: as ‘son of God’ he is, as it were, Israel-in-person, succeed at last where Israel had failed.” e The picture of Israel as a son is common throughout the Old Testament because redemptive history is pointing to the Divine son’s role as Israel. Beyond the mere idea of sonship, in Exodus the Lord uses messianic language to describe Israel as the firstborn: “This is what the LORD says: Israel is my firstborn son.” (Exodus 4:22). Similarly, Archbishop Michael Ramsey says something similar in that “He [Jesus] is also Israel, the people of God.” f
St. Matthew must frame his gospel around the idea that the true Israel of God is fulfilled in the humanity offered by the incarnation so even the life events of Jesus match as a microcosm of redemptive history. A new fulfillment is necessary due to the failure of the previous Israel in the last Exodus.
Jesus as the Recapitulation of Israel’s History
Dr. RJ Rushdoony explains this failure: “God called his adopted son, Israel, out of Egypt, but Israel carried Egypt, we are told, by Ezekiel 20, verses 6 through 9, into the Promised Land.” g Just as Israel the first son went down into Egypt under Joseph and up out of Egypt under Moses, now this new Israel has gone down into Egypt with a new Joseph. He returns from Egypt as a greater Moses, but his name Jesus (that is Joshua) represents this recapitulation of Israel’s story now embarking on a greater conquest and fulfillment. He has none of the shortcomings of Moses, nor Joshua, nor Israel, and is able to fully obey the commands to fulfill the promises of previous covenantal promises. Therefore St. Matthew highlights how Jesus fulfills the failures of even Israel’s most glorious history.
While the direct quote of a “Out of Egypt have I called my son” from Hosea itself is a reference to an event backwards in history, St. Matthew right alludes to the proper prophet as the linchpin for Jesus as the future anointed one. For as many Bible Commentaries point out, the themes of repentance and restoration in the Book of Hosea are promises concerning the future restoration of Israel. Yet fulfillment of these promises must be understood in a future sense for several reasons. First, because the text speaks of God’s restorative work as something he will do in the future, “I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely…” (Hosea 14:4). And secondly, the Hebrews of the Northern Kingdom find themselves under Assyrian Captivity awaiting Hosea’s prophetic hope to come to life. His words are in one sense fulfilled as Biblical history describes the fall of the Assyrians to the Babylonians and then later the return of the exiled northern tribes in the Book of Ezra and the new temple, yet these same prophecies await a greater fulfillment in the Messiah. Hosea, like the Exodus narrative, builds out the expectations of the covenant people of what restoration will look like when the prophecy is wholly fulfilled. Although Hosea’s Israel is more like Christ in that they must leave the promised land to a place of exile in order that what was promised by God may be fully received. These are parallel themes of both the Assyrian and also Egyptian captivity. Just as Hosea points to Israel’s unfaithfulness as God’s justification for their 8th century BC assyrian captivity, he also returns a broken and contrite remnant to restore and renew their covenantal identity. Likewise God brought Israel down into Egypt through the sin of Joseph’s brother and chastens them toward the Great Passover of the First Born and the renewal and restoration of Israel. So too does St. Matthew points to Israel’s unfaithfulness. Clear similarities are personified in Herod as the evil King of the Jews, he brings Jesus into exile and restores to the promise land a faithful Israel through the Messiah himself.
St. Matthew, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, communicates in the term fulfilled how Jesus and his ministry transform how the Old Testament will be read. Every line of Scripture is received in a different way after the advent of Christ. History remains history, but the meaning is forever transformed as the anticipated messiah completes the story of redemption. Borrowing from St. Augustine, “the Old Testament is unveiled in the New.” h While surely, as some Biblical commentators have noted, there are 351 or so messianic prophecies of the Old Testament that were lived out in the life of Christ, the fulfillment of the Scripture that we find in the words of St. Matthew are not limited to these, but rather that every page of inspired text is fulfilled by Christ who give life to the words that were faithfully delivered from one age to the next.
- Berkhof, L. (2005). A Summary of Christian Doctrine. Part II. Ch. X. The Banner of Truth Trust. (back)
- Clowney, E. P. (2003). Preaching Christ In All of Scripture. pg. 40. Crossway Books. (back)
- Jordan, J. B. (1999). Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World. Wipf and Stock Publishers. (back)
- Strong, J. (1890) Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. Abingdon Press. (back)
- Wright, T. (2004) Matthew for Everyone. pg. 28. Westminster John Knox Press. (back)
- Ramsey, M (19 ) The Gospel and the Catholic Church. Pg. 18. (back)
- Rushdoony, RJ (1967) Law and Life: God’s Son, Israel. Chalcedon Foundation. (back)
- Augustine, (2016) Questions on the Heptateuch trans. by Lienhard. New City Press. (back)
