Claim. Unlike Moses’s third national course — which Joshua could complete substantially because the Tabernacle provided an external object of faith independent of Israelite faithlessness — Jesus’s third worldwide course had to begin as a spiritual-only course because the worldwide focus of faith was Jesus himself, and his crucifixion left no external substitute.
Elaboration. dp-3-the-providence-of-restoration-under-the-leadership-of-jesus §3.3.1 isolates the asymmetry from Moses’s structure. In Moses’s third national course, even when most Israelites lost faith, the Tabernacle as object of faith remained intact upon the foundation Moses had laid through his forty-day fast. When Moses himself faltered at the rock, Joshua’s stewardship preserved the Tabernacle. The providence could pass on a substantial level because the external Tabernacle survived.
In the worldwide course, the focus of faith was Jesus himself, as the fulfillment of the Tabernacle. When even the disciples became faithless, Jesus “had to walk the path of death and be crucified, as he had foretold” via the lifted-up-serpent typology (14). With Jesus dead, the Jewish people “no longer had a basis upon which to begin the third worldwide course to restore Canaan as a substantial course.” There was no Tabernacle-equivalent to inherit.
The structural solution: the third worldwide course had to begin as a spiritual course, with the resurrected Jesus as the spiritual fulfillment of the Tabernacle. Christians as the Second Israel would exalt the resurrected Jesus by faith until Christ at the Second Advent could resume the substantial-course completion in flesh.
The structural inevitability of this spiritual-only third-course is what generates DP’s insistence that the Second Advent must come in the flesh — only an embodied returning Christ can complete the substantial restoration that Jesus’s crucifixion left unaccomplished.