“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.
(more…)- 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)
In this interview, Uri Brito speaks with Gary DeMar, author of 
