Speaking of Yahweh as the Lord of Time and its relationship to New Testament Christology, Markus Witte wrote:
As the one who directs individual and collective destinies, Yahweh is the Lord of time and eternity, which is ultimately also expressed in Yahweh’s miraculous transformation of life (Isa 35:5-6, 42:7, 61:1-3) and in his power over death (Isa 25:8). The wide variety of interpretations and metaphors for the experience of and the hope of in Yahweh as God of life found in the received form of the Old Testament goes back religio-historically to a successive expansion of Yahweh’s competencies. Significant factors in this process include the development of monotheism, a theology of creation that is consistent with monotheism, as well as the question of divine justice raised by the suffering of the righteous. Thus, the images of a new creation after death (Ezek 37:1-14), resurrection and reawakening (Isa 26:19), immediate rapture by God and beyond the boundary of death (Ps 73:24), the immortality of the soul (Ps 29:16, Wis 3:1), or the ultimate defeat of death (Isa 25:8, cf. 1 Cor 15:26), which have different tradition-historical origins, are juxtaposed and merged in the notion that God’s nature is revealed in God’s act of giving life (Rom 4:17, cf. Wis 11:26).
The New Testament’s descriptions of the post-crucifixion fate of Jesus, who according to an early Christian tradition became the son of God precisely through his divinely-ordained overcoming of death, draw on these images and focus them (once again through an adaptation of Isa 52:13-53:12) on the possibility of life after death by participating through faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ (John 3:15, cf. Rom 8:17).
In this way, the Old Testament’s forms of experiencing divine presence—the Sabbath (Exod 31:13-17, Ps 92), the temple (Ps 36:9-10), the Torah (Deut 30:16, Sir 24:23), and Wisdom (Prov 3:18, Sir 24)—were modified Christologically. In mythic terms, Jesus Christ thus appears as a new means of accessing the tree of life (Gen 3:24) and indeed as life itself (John 11:25). (Markus Witte, The Development of God in the Old Testament: Three Case Studies in Biblical Theology [Critical Studies in the Hebrew Bible 9; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2017], 98-99)
