Jesus, the fruit of God's loins

“[David] therefore being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him, that of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, He would raise up Christ to sit on his throne.” (Acts 2:30).

“Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God, (which He had promised afore by His prophets in the holy scriptures,) concerning His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh.” (Rom. 1:1-3).

I believe those New Testament statements are based on the following promises to David.

“Now therefore thus shalt thou say unto My servant David, Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I took thee from the sheepcote, even from following the sheep, that thou shouldest be ruler over My people Israel:

And I have been with thee whithersoever thou hast walked, and have cut off all thine enemies from before thee, and have made thee a name like the name of the great men that are in the earth.
Also I will ordain a place for My people Israel, and will plant them, and they shall dwell in their place, and shall be moved no more; neither shall the children of wickedness waste them any more, as at the beginning,

And since the time that I commanded judges to be over My people Israel. Moreover I will subdue all thine enemies. Furthermore I tell thee that the LORD will build thee an house.

And it shall come to pass, when thy days be expired that thou must go to be with thy fathers, that I will raise up thy seed after thee, which shall be of thy sons; and I will establish his kingdom.

He shall build Me an house, and I will stablish his throne for ever.

I will be his Father, and he shall be My son: and I will not take My mercy away from him, as I took it from him that was before thee:

But I will settle him in Mine house and in My kingdom for ever: and his throne shall be established for evermore.” (1Chron. 17:7-14).

“Take of them of the captivity, even of Heldai, of Tobijah, and of Jedaiah, which are come from Babylon, and come thou the same day, and go into the house of Josiah the son of Zephaniah;

Then take silver and gold, and make crowns, and set them upon the head of Joshua the son of Josedech, the high priest;

And speak unto him, saying, Thus speaketh the LORD of hosts, saying, Behold the Man whose name is The BRANCH; and He shall grow up out of His place, and He shall build the temple of the LORD:

Even He shall build the temple of the LORD; and He shall bear the glory, and shall sit and rule upon His throne; and He shall be a Priest upon His throne: and the counsel of peace shall be between them both.” (Zech. 6:10-13).

As quoted above, “Therefore being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him, that of the fruit of his loins(G3751), according to the flesh, He would raise up Christ to sit on his throne” (Acts 2:30).

G3751 osphus Of uncertain affinity; the loin (externally), that is, the hip; internally) procreative power: -loin.

This text literally refers to King David, that out of his loins Christ (first referring to Solomon in 1Chronicles 17, and then to the Branch or Messiah in Zechariah 6, which would also grow out of the root of David in Isaiah 11:1 and Jeremiah 23:5) would come to His people.

“Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth. In His days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely: and this is His name whereby He shall be called, THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.” (Jer. 23:5,6).

“In those days, and at that time, will I cause the Branch of righteousness to grow up unto David; and He shall execute judgment and righteousness in the land.

In those days shall Judah be saved, and Jerusalem shall dwell safely: and this is the name wherewith she shall be called, The LORD our righteousness.

For thus saith the LORD; David shall never want a man to sit upon the throne of the house of Israel;

Neither shall the priests the Levites want a man before Me to offer burnt offerings, and to kindle meat offerings, and to do sacrifice continually.” (Jer. 33:15-18).

So, in a figurative sense, King David could represent God the Father, having lived a millennium in the deep, misty past of the apostolic church. Like King Arthur of English lore, the concept of David brought to the Jewish mind something that was very much a glorified myth. It was Babylonian and Egyptian ancestor worship. To them David was sinless, and worthy of godlike status. And, when in vision David witnessed, “The LORD said unto My Lord, Sit Thou at My right hand, until I make Thine enemies Thy footstool” (Ps. 110:1), the rabbis who lived after the failed Nehemiah-Ezra revival, and who were spoken of in Malachi as “sorcerers” (Mal. 3:5) that the Messiah would quickly condemn in judgment, interpreted David to write in Psalm 110 that “the Lord” was David himself and that David was singing an ode to himself, or that that psalm was Jehovah reciting a praise to David. In keeping with Babylonian thought, the post-exilic rabbis taught that not only David, but all their ancient fathers were faultless and their nation had never been in captivity. “They answered Him, We be Abraham’s seed, and were never in bondage to any man.” (John 8:33).

The Jews’ Babylonian Judaism was not the original, peculiar Hebrew religion, and the vast majority of Jews had lost their faith in Jehovah. “Then said He unto me, The iniquity of the house of Israel and Judah is exceeding great, and the land is full of blood, and the city full of perverseness: for they say, The LORD hath forsaken the earth, and the LORD seeth not.” (Eze. 9:9). Thus, they adopted the name of Jove (Jupiter) for Jehovah, which became Yahweh to match the Roman pronunciation of Jove, and they exalted their famous historical figures to the place of Jehovah. Nonetheless, Jehovah still watched over His people because they were to be the family through which He would send His Son to redeem the world. While He did not want those heroes to be looked upon as replacements of their God, He did desire His people to see His ancient servants as object lessons of Himself. Those heroes of faith in Him testified of Him, and didn’t want to be worshiped as if they were Jehovah. 

Therefore, to His later faithful ones who were witnesses to Christ’s resurrection, the greatest and godliest king of ancient Israel, and the ancient founder of the kingdom, David would be the perfect object lesson and likeness for their ancient God, whose kingdom reigns over heaven and earth. Thus, David’s loins could represent God’s loins. And a son, eons later coming out of David’s loins, according to the flesh, could speak of the Anointed One coming out of God’s loins, by the anointing “power of the Highest” (Luke 1:35).  “A greater than Solomon” (Luke 11:31), “came out from God” (John 16:27), “and He shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of His kingdom there shall be no end” (Luke 1:33, cf 1Chron. 17:14; Rev. 21:7). And it all reveals the first begetting from the infinitely more distant past, when He “whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting” (Mic. 5:2), and “who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature” (Col. 1:15) was begotten and became “the Son of the Blessed” (Mark 14:61). “Being made so much better than the angels, as He hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they. For unto which of the angels said He at any time, Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee? And again, I will be to Him a Father, and He shall be to Me a Son?” (Heb. 1:4,5, cf 1Chron. 17:13).

“The dedication of the first-born had its origin in the earliest times. God had promised to give the First-born of heaven to save the sinner. This gift was to be acknowledged in every household by the consecration of the first-born son. He was to be devoted to the priesthood, as a representative of Christ among men.…

Thus the law for the presentation of the first-born was made particularly significant. While it was a memorial of the Lord’s wonderful deliverance of the children of Israel, it prefigured a greater deliverance, to be wrought out by the only-begotten Son of God. As the blood sprinkled on the doorposts had saved the first-born of Israel, so the blood of Christ has power to save the world.” Desire of Ages, p. 51.

King David, a man after Christ’s own heart, relative to “the Son of David” whose heart infinitely more imitated the image of His Father’s heart, was a similitude for the purpose of teaching and confirming the Messiah in the Jews’ minds of Christ’s day. And it also overlays the similitude of Abraham in relation to Isaac, which taught and confirmed the minds of the children of Israel during the long era of the judges. As King David had lived during the misty past in the minds of the Hellenized Jews, and great ages separated their first faithful and holy king from the present dictatorial Herods, so, during the period from Moses to David, had Abraham lived as a past figure of misty aural tradition recently put into the new innovation of writing. Equally great ages had existed in the minds of the children of Israel between them and that godly progenitor of Jehovah’s blessing. Therefore, in the Hebrew minds of the post-Egyptian enslavement, Abraham could be likened to Jehovah. In either respective generation of captivity, both Abraham and David seemed as ancient as God Himself, who used those consecrated men to represent Himself in each Israelite mind, “from whence also he received Him in a figure.” (Heb. 11:19).

Likewise again, a similar similitude for the sake of hope and faith could also be drawn from the 10 generations between Noah and Abram. As Abram, one day to be the father of faith, came from the loins of his father Noah who was himself a preacher of righteousness by faith, so light could shine on the descendents of Shem during their darkening world which was being overrun by the satanic, occult rebellion of Ham, Cush, and Nimrod.

God has always given promise and prophecy through types as the source of encouragement to His people. Through His parabolic metaphors the people of God have always had something with which to bring hope to each other and about which to witness to others who never heard of the most ancient Creator God of love. So, Acts 2:30 can be seen as evidence of the Prototokos coming from the loins of God, the Only Begotten beginning of the Son of God, the First-begotten of God, “the Beginning of the creation of God” (Rev. 3:14).

In extension to the first-born model, as Melchisedec (Christ) is contrasted to Levi, Levi who paid tithes to Melchisedec because he was in the loins of his father Abraham (that is, in Abraham’s DNA), so Christ created the universe, while He was yet deep in the womb of His Father, Jehovah. “And as I may so say, Levi also, who receiveth tithes, payed tithes in Abraham. For he was yet in the loins of his father, when Melchisedec met him.” (Heb. 7:9,10). (Human reproduction, made in the image of the Godhead, gives a corporeal picture of Jehovah’s virtue-filled power to create.)

In the womb of God, the Son of God gradually received from His Father that dynamic, holy power to create, as well as the infinite creative information as His Father taught Him everything.

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father do: for what things soever He doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise. For the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth Him all things that Himself doeth: and He will shew Him greater works than these, that ye may marvel.” (John 5:19,20).

“For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them; even so the Son quickeneth whom He will.”  (John 5:21). Here we see the spiritual role that the Son plays in our existence. The Father affects us physically, and the Son was made “a quickening spirit” (1Cor. 15:45), in order to affect us spiritually with conviction of the heart and new birth in conversion. Jesus is the Spirit that we know, He is the one who quickens us from spiritual death. By water (His convicting words of grace and truth) and by Spirit (His own virtue) we are born again. He is our Prince and Saviour. The Father through Jesus is the Spirit of truth and the Comforter.

“Concerning His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh; and declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead: by whom we have received grace and apostleship, for obedience to the faith among all nations, for His name.” (Rom. 1:3-5).

“And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory.” (1Tim. 3:16).

“God was manifest in the flesh”, “declared to be the Son of God with power”, “justified in the Spirit”,“according to the spirit of holiness”, “by the resurrection from the dead”, “received up into glory”.