Second, I now want to drill down and examine the piety of the OT believers. I want to divide this analysis into two sub-questions: How did the special leaders of Israel experience their relationship to God under the Law? How did the average Israelite experience his relationship to God under the Law?
With regard to the first class, it is apparent that there is a sense in which they knew themselves, in their role as (typological) federal heads, to be able to obey as the basis or ground of national felicity. David was able to speak of his “merit” or “entitlement” in some sense:
“The LORD dealt with me according to my righteousness;
according to the cleanness of my hands he rewarded me.
For I have kept the ways of the LORD
and have not wickedly departed from my God.
For all his rules were before me,
and from his statutes I did not turn aside.
I was blameless before him,
and I kept myself from guilt.
And the LORD has rewarded me according to my righteousness,
according to my cleanness in his sight” (2 Sam 22:21-25 [= Ps 18:20-24] ESV).
Does this mean David thought he was without sin? Certainly not. The Psalms contain plentiful evidence that David recognized his sinfulness (Pss 25:7, 11; 32:5; 38:1-4, 18; 51:1-19) and praised God for his forgiving grace (Ps 32:1-2; 103:3, 10). So when David speaks of his righteousness and cleanness of hands, he is not claiming sinless perfection. Commentators have pointed out that in such passages (there are many others) there is always a contest between the righteous anointed king and the wicked who assail him. The wicked are persecuting God’s anointed and seeking to condemn him on false charges, but the anointed one calls out to God for vindication. Thus, when David appeals to his own righteousness and integrity as the reason for God to vindicate him, he is speaking in a relative sense in the face of the false charges brought by his enemies.
Such prayers were composed for a person who was in the right in comparison with the antagonist. They are the expressions of a good conscience before hostility and opposition …. The innocence claimed by the petitioner was not an absolute righteousness but a rightness with respect to the charges (James Luther Mays, Psalms [Louisville: John Knox, 1994], 64, 433).
Yet, in the context of the typal sphere, his limited righteousness “with respect to the charges” had typological significance. Since he was God’s anointed king, his obedience pointed ahead to the obedience of Christ. David’s vindication pointed ahead to the vindication of Christ at his resurrection, when he received a God-approved righteousness. And just as David’s vindication was not his vindication as a mere private person but in his public role as the anointed representative of the people, so Christ’s vindication took place in his role as our federal head, so that his righteousness is now reckoned as ours in union with him.
At the same time, David recognized God’s grace in being the recipient of the Davidic covenant and being appointed as a type of the Messiah to come:
Then King David went in and sat before the Lord and said, “Who am I, O LORD God, and what is my house, that you have brought me thus far? And yet this was a small thing in your eyes, O LORD God. You have spoken also of your servant’s house for a great while to come, and this is instruction for mankind, O LORD God! And what more can David say to you? For you know your servant, O LORD God! Because of your promise, and according to your own heart, you have brought about all this greatness, to make your servant know it” (2 Sam 7:18-21 [= 1 Chron 17:16-19] ESV).
Kline recognized that if OT leaders like King David are to be seen or regarded as having any “merit” at all in the post-Fall redemptive context, it must be typological merit, that is, it must be merit that is based on God’s “gracious favor” (GHHM 128) by which he appointed them to function as types of the Messiah’s active obedience and “invested” (KP 237) their imperfect obedience with symbolic and typological significance. Any outstanding works on the part of such leaders could have such typological merit only because they were graciously “accorded by God [as having] an analogous kind of value with respect to the typological stage represented by the old covenant” (KP 325).
This means that just as the Mosaic economy as a whole has two layers, so the obedience of these OT leaders who functioned as types of the Messiah’s obedience can be viewed from two aspects. From the lower-layer ordo salutis point of view, their obedience is the obedience of faith. It is flawed and imperfect and graciously accepted by God through the covenant of grace. From the upper-layer typological, redemptive-historical point of view, their obedience has been invested with greater meaning and can be seen as symbolically “meritorious,” that is, functioning as the ground of reward.
Similar considerations apply to other OT saints whose obedience was invested by God with typological significance. For example, with regard to Abraham’s act of obeying God by not withholding his only son, and God’s rewarding him with the future Israelite kingdom (“because you have done this,” Gen 22:16-18), Kline wrote:
From the perspective of Abraham’s personal experience of justification by faith, this act of obedience validated his faith (Jas 2:21ff.; cf. Gen 15:6). But from the redemptive-historical/eschatological perspective, Abraham’s obedience had typological import. The Lord constituted it a prophetic sign of the obedience of Christ, which merits the heavenly kingdom for his people. (GHHM 102)
There is no tension or schizophrenia because Abraham and David knew that it was by God’s grace that their imperfect obedience was invested with typological significance as a “prophetic sign of the obedience of Christ.”
KP = Kingdom Prologue (2006)
GHHM = God, Heaven, and Har Magedon (2006)
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