C. S. Lewis and others find in Christ Jesus the reality of which ancient mythologies had only the intuition or foreshadowing. And this is of course true. The real death, the real resurrection, and the real, heavenly renewal of Jesus do indeed establish and maintain the operation of God’s creation. He is the deus ex machina, both of the material world and – what the ancients did not intuit – of the spiritual.

But the Hebrew intuition with its dramatic mythology goes dramatically far beyond theirs. It is an intuition of the redemption, testing, and final adjudication of God’s own children. And Jesus the Christ is also the reality of that mythology.