The Bible is unique, and everything contained in it is significant. At the very beginning, the Bible tells us that God created Adam as a creature in His kind (Gen. 1:26). Adam was God’s kind only in likeness and appearance, not in life, nature, and constitution. God’s desire was that Adam would be His kind not only in likeness but also in life, nature, and constitution.
In Genesis 3:15 God promised that He would come to be the seed of woman. Later, He prophesied further He would come to be a seed of Abraham, which would be the blessing to all the nations (22:18). Eventually, God Himself was incarnated to be a man. However, God first, through His continuous labor, took more than one thousand years to produce and form the nation of Israel as a great type.
God selected Abraham, whose descendants fell into Egypt. God sent Moses to them to deliver them out of Egypt as a great nation, numbering about two million, and brought them to Mount Sinai, where they stayed for nearly a year to be educated by God. God’s intention was to have Israel as His testimony, but according to their Egyptian culture they were a testimony of Egypt. For this reason God kept them at Mount Sinai to give them the Ten Commandments, all the statutes for the Ten Commandments, all the ordinances for the statutes, the tabernacle with all the furniture and all the offerings, the priesthood, and all the feasts, in order to build them up with a heavenly, divine constitution instead of an Egyptian constitution.
As a result of this time of education and training, the nation of Israel became an army not only formed and organized but also constituted to be God with man and man with God. Hence, in typology the Israelites were God-men. They were God-men, and everything related to them, even their environment with the pillar of cloud in the day and the pillar of fire at night, was God’s expression. Their going forth became God’s going forth (Psa. 68).
After a short time, however, the children of Israel no longer expressed God, and He let them die in the wilderness. Then God raised up the second generation, and they crossed the river Jordan by a great miracle. As a heavenly constituted army they came to Jericho. When they shouted, the city of Jericho fell. This was God’s testimony. This was the move, the living, of God-men; it was God marching on. But when they came to the city of Ai, one among them caused them to fail. From that time onward, there was nothing among the Israelites but degradation. God sent the prophets to warn them and bring them back, but they refused to go along with God. Eventually, God brought in the Babylonians to possess the good land and carry the people of Israel away to Babylon to be disciplined and punished.
God could not forget the good land, the promised land, the land of Immanuel (Isa. 8:8). The good land should be the land of God-men for the testimony of God. First, there was a return under the leadership of Zerubbabel, a descendant of the royal family. It was fitting for him to take the lead in the first return from captivity, because he had the capacity to administrate and to govern. He was a strong governor and he led the people in rebuilding the temple with the altar.
However, the people were still unruly, for they had become Babylonian in their constitution. Therefore, there was the need for an Ezra, a priest who served God, and also a scribe, a scholar, who was skilled in the Word of God, skilled in the law of Moses (Ezra 7:6, 11). He bore the totality of the heavenly and divine constitution and culture. Ezra called the people together and confessed not only his own sin but also the sin of Israel, to bring them back to the Word of God.