When people who love the Bible and love Christ are shown how to see Christ from the beginning to the end of the Bible, their joy explodes. Seeing the beauty, sufficiency, and necessity of Jesus Christ from every part of the Bible — including from the Old Testament — has the power to truly, deeply, and eternally change our lives.
Sunday school has marked me since my childhood — literally. I have a scar on the top of my right hand from being burned by the popcorn popper when I was about 3 years old. Sunday school has left much deeper impressions, however, in my heart and soul and in the way I have read and understood the Bible for most of my life — especially in terms of how I have read and understood the Old Testament.
For most of my life, I saw the Old Testament primarily as a series of disconnected stories about people showing how (or how not) to live the life of faith. I knew that the Old Testament spoke of Christ, but in my mind, that was limited to the prophecies about the coming of the Messiah.
I did not see that all of the Old Testament prepares us to understand who Jesus is and what he would do. I didn’t understand that from Genesis 3:15 onward, we’re meant to trace the woman’s line to the promised offspring — the descendent of Abraham, the son of David — who would deal with the curse and the serpent for good. I was in my forties when I began to understand that the Bible is one story of God’s redemption through Christ.
When I began to understand that the Old Testament can be understood only in light of Christ, a new world opened. I determined that I needed to go back to kindergarten in terms of understanding the Bible’s story. I bought several books on the topic, including one that revolutionized my Old Testament reading.
Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament
I got no further than the introduction of Christopher Wright’s Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament when I read a passage that blew my mind. Speaking about Jesus’s connection to the Old Testament, he writes,
These are the words he read, the stories he knew. These were the songs he sang. These were the depths of wisdom and revelation and prophecy that shaped his whole view of life, the universe and everything. This is where he found his insights into the mind of his Father God. Above all, this is where he found the shape of his own identity and the goal of his own mission. (11)
This paragraph caused me to think about the humanity of Jesus more deeply. It challenged me to read the Old Testament differently. And it sent me on a mission.
Humanity of Jesus
Though Jesus is fully human and fully God, the deity of Jesus has been easier for me to grasp than his humanity. This passage caused me to stop and give more thought to what it must mean that Jesus “increased in wisdom and stature” (Luke 2:52). Jesus grew in his own understanding of who he was, what his life was all about, and even what his death and resurrection would mean from meditating on the Old Testament Scriptures.
Jesus, typical of Jewish boys of his time, learned from hearing the Old Testament scrolls read in the synagogue.
