Meeting Christ in the Old Testament

Many people are interested in finding Christ in the Old Testament, but often we miss the most important element of this approach to Scripture. Today, Sinclair Ferguson shows how Jesus Himself related to the Old Testament.

Welcome to another week on Things Unseen. Something has happened, I think, in the last few decades in some evangelical preaching and in the training of younger men and women to read, and some to preach, the Bible. We hear a lot more about finding Christ in the Old Testament or preaching Christ from the Old Testament. And the key verse is almost always Luke 24:27. That verse is in the passage about Cleopas and his companion meeting Jesus on the road to Emmaus on Easter Sunday and not recognizing Him at first. And we’re told that “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, Jesus interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.”

And what you may have noticed, as I have, at pastor’s conferences and in training programs on Bible reading, and yes, in the preaching of many younger ministers, is that there’s developed a huge emphasis on what I would call getting to Christ, or it might be called preaching Christ from the Old Testament. Now that’s not a new idea, is it? People have been doing that for a long, long time. And I’m all for preaching Christ from the Old Testament because it points to Him. But I have to confess that sometimes today I’m left with the feeling that it’s being done in a very mechanical way. There are actually books that will tell you the five, or the seven, or the ten ways to do it, so that after listening to a number of sermons, you can begin to guess which way the preacher is going to connect the text to Christ. And it can end up sounding more formulaic than organic, more like applying a system than talking about a real living flesh and blood person. So, it doesn’t sound as though Jesus is someone who is loved, so much as Jesus is someone who solves a problem in the incomplete story of the Hebrew Bible.

And one of the inadequacies in all this that I’ve noticed is that when some preachers have shown you how to get to Jesus from the Old Testament passage, they just stop. They don’t actually present the incarnate Lord Jesus as the wonderful person He is, full of perfect love and wisdom and kindness and grace and patience and humanity. It feels more like someone finding the answer to the final clue in the daily crossword puzzle than finding the living, breathing, loving Savior.

And sometimes I’ve noticed that next to nothing is said about the personal psychological realities that are being described in the Old Testament passage that’s being preached. And, paradoxically, I’ve also noticed this: preachers who have learned a method of preaching Christ from the Old Testament always—and who follow that method every time they come to the Old Testament—when they come to the New Testament, they don’t always connect passages in the New Testament to the Lord Jesus.

So why do I say all this? Are we going to be thinking about preaching the rest of the week? No, my concern here is to underline that there can be a significant difference between reading and teaching the Bible as a piece of literature using certain principles of interpretation, and meeting with the living Lord Jesus, to whom the Bible points, who isn’t Himself a piece of literature, but a living person. What we need is to meet Him through His Word, not to confuse Him with the pages of the Bible that point us to Him. That’s so important because only then does reading or preaching the Bible past the litmus test Cleopas and his companion experienced. When the Old Testament points us to this Christ, our hearts burn within us.

So no, we’re not going to talk about preaching or even principles of studying the Old Testament. No, all this is just background to the fact that this week I actually want to focus on four passages in the Old Testament that very clearly point to Christ because the New Testament itself makes it clear that they do.

When Luke tells us Jesus showed them things about Himself in all the Scriptures, I don’t think he began with Genesis 1:1 and went through the Bible verse by verse, but I am sure He would have mentioned the four passages we’re going to focus on the rest of this week. And I think He might have said to them: “Don’t you see now how the person described in these verses was Myself? Do you see how they promised that I would suffer and then be glorified?”

So, what do you think these passages might be? Well here’s a clue: they all belong to the same section of the same book of the Bible. Intrigued? Know the answer? Well, I hope you’ll join us again tomorrow for the first passage.