One of my favorite aspects of Christopher Nolan’s movies is his strategic application of what is known as “the plant and payoff.” This is a deliberate inclusion of a significant detail or object that may not be immediately apparent. The payoff happens later when that same detail or object is revealed to be a major part of the plot or twist in the movie. This technique is probably most evident in his movie Inception, where ideas are planted in a man’s dreams to bring about a particular payoff in real life.
Plant #1
Sometimes, I think of the way New Testament authors use the Old Testament as a form of the plant and payoff. For example, in Exodus 4:22-23, God tells Moses, “Then you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says the LORD, Israel is my firstborn son,’ and I say to you, ‘Let my son go that he may serve me. If you refuse to let him go, behold, I will kill your firstborn son.’”
God calls Israel his “son,” and is commanding Pharaoh to let his son go. God’s intent was to ransom Israel out of Egypt to worship him in the wilderness and the Promised Land. Through a series of historical events and miraculous realities being revealed, God is planting a truth that will be instrumental in understanding the twist in the story.
Plant #2
Hundreds of years later, God’s people were enslaved differently. Rather than being enslaved to Egypt, the book of Hosea tells us that God’s “son” (Israel) was enslaved to their own idolatry. In describing his own love for his son, God says, “When Israel was a child, I loved him and out of Egypt I called my son.” Hosea is clearly picking up plant #1 and using it in his own context to remind Israel of God’s covenantal love for them, reminding them of how he powerfully ransomed them from Egypt. While Hosea was recalling plant #1, little did he know that the divine Author was using it as plant #2, preparing the people of God for the coming twist in the plot.
Climax
When Matthew writes his Gospel, he is purposely writing under this narrative that Jesus is the True Israel. One of the ways he does this is by using plant #1 and plant #2 to reveal the payoff, or twist. In Matthew 2, Herod is doing what Pharaoh had done to God’s son Israel in Exodus: Committing genocide by killing all male children two years old and under. In God’s providence, he sent an angel of the Lord to Joseph in a dream, commanding him to take his family and flee to Egypt (Ex. 2:15; Matt. 2:13). Joseph, Mary, and Jesus stayed in Egypt until the death of Herod.
It is there, in that move to Egypt, awaiting Herod’s death, when the payoff/twist is revealed. After the death of Herod, Matthew quotes Hosea 11:1, showing the true meaning all along was intended to be about Jesus, God’s true Son and the True Israel, being called out of Egypt. Matthew 2:15 quotes Hosea, saying, “Out of Egypt I called my Son.”
Matthew scholar, Michael Daling, writes, “Matthew’s story of Jesus isn’t just a retelling of the story of Israel and the exodus but the story of Jesus as the true Israel bringing forth a new and final exodus” (Daling, Connecting Scripture New Testament, 6).
God’s only Son, the True Israel, did indeed come out of Egypt. Not only did he walk obediently under the law, but he went to a Roman cross to bear the sins of all of his people. It was there that real ransom and redemption happened as he set people free from their sins, gaining them access to the True Promised Land, the New Heavens and New Earth. Never has a payoff/twist benefited people the way the greatest story ever told has. Plant, plant, payoff.
Old Testament Allusions 