All Old Covenant imagery relates to Christ and has its fulfilment in Him. This is what made the church distinctive in its early years. It claimed that Christ fulfilled all the expectations and hopes of Israel. A doctrine that does not find its fulfilment in Him, but in some peripheral idea or event, is not Christian. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for,” which means all the types under the Old Covenant (Heb 11:1).
To think that the Jews, or a millennial kingdom in Israel, were to be a fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecy was unthinkable. All is fulfilled in Christ. Christ is everything. This is what makes Christianity Christianity and not a Judeo/Christian sect. There is no fulfilment of scripture outside of Christ. He is the theme of the entire word of God. This was Paul’s view:
But when the Jews spake against it, I was constrained to appeal to Caesar…because that for the hope of Israel I am bound with this chain…he expounded and testified the kingdom of God, persuading them concerning Jesus, both out of the law of Moses and out of the prophets, from morning till evening. (Acts 28:19-20, 23. See also Matt 5:17 and Luke 24:44).
Jesus is the hope of Israel, meaning that all of their hopes are fulfilled in Him. All of the prophetic and symbolic expectations are fulfilled in Jesus Christ. This is what the church stood to declare in the book of Acts. Israel’s hopes are not fulfilled in a national kingdom, but in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, for eternal life. The scriptures claim that those from Israel who do not follow Christ are cut off from God’s people (Deut 18:15-19, Acts 3:22-23). This is the plain teaching of the word of God.
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