We feel we ought to view the Old Testament as Christian Scripture, but we’re not quite sure why or how. It seems like such a crunch of gears. But is it? Perhaps we’d be helped by a simple framework for how Christ is at the heart of the Scriptures: he is patterned, promised, and present from Genesis onward.

Ten years ago, I was leading a feedback group for young preachers. A youth pastor gave an exposition of Judges 14 for us to critique. At the very end, he spoke of “another Savior who came to deliver his people eternally.” He didn’t make anything of the point, and he didn’t mention the name “Jesus,” but he included the sentence.

During the feedback session, I asked him, “Why did you include that line at the end?” In a flash, another student answered with a line I’ve never forgotten: “Because we’re supposed to.”

The whole room groaned its approval. Everyone felt the same obligation. None of these preachers in training was sure why they ought to “shift gears to Jesus,” but apparently there was a rule. I see this everywhere among Christians. We feel we ought to view the Old Testament as Christian Scripture, but we’re not quite sure why or how. It seems like such a crunch of gears. But is it?

Perhaps we’d be helped by a simple framework for how Christ is at the heart of the Scriptures: he is patterned, promised, and present from Genesis onward.

Christ Patterned

The flood and the ark, the Passover and the Red Sea, the wilderness and the Promised Land, exile and return, war and peace, kingdom and kings, prophets and priests, the temple, its sacrifices, and its rituals, wisdom in death and in life, songs of lament and rejoicing, the lives of faithful sufferers and the blood of righteous martyrs — the Old Testament is extraordinarily Jesus-shaped.

The story as a whole and each of its parts are like a fractal. To step back from the details is to view portraits, at ever-increasing scale, of the same pattern — the suffering and rising Christ (as in 1 Corinthians 10:1–11). But even as Paul teaches us the gospel patterns of the Old Testament, he is at pains (in verses 4 and 9) to point out that Christ was not merely patterned — he also was promised and present to the Old Testament believers.

Christ Promised

Old Testament saints were not simply tiles in a mosaic, witnessing, unwittingly, to a gospel pattern of which they were ignorant. They too looked forward to the fulfillment of these patterns. How? Through the promises. This is how Jesus, Paul, and Peter saw it (Luke 24:25–27; Acts 26:22–23; 1 Peter 1:10–12). Each of them characterizes the Old Testament shape as proclaiming “Christ’s sufferings and glory,” yet, at the same time, each of them maintains that this message is what Moses and the prophets themselves “wrote,” “said,” “prophesied,” and “predicted.” All along, true faith was messianic faith, centered on Christ himself. He was the one held out and the one trusted by the faithful.

Christ Present

But more than just patterned and promised, perhaps the most underappreciated facet is that Christ also is present. It’s surprising how explicit the New Testament authors are about Jesus’s presence in the Old Testament:

• The “I Am” in whom Abraham rejoiced was Jesus (John 8:56–58).
• The Lord who motivated Moses was Christ (Hebrews 11:26).
• The Redeemer who brought them out of Egypt was Jesus (Jude 5).
• The Rock in the wilderness was Christ (1 Corinthians 10:4).
• The King of Isaiah’s temple vision was the Son (John 12:40–41).

Jesus is not merely patterned and promised in the Old Testament; he is present. This is vital since the essential character of neither God nor faith has changed from the first covenant to the new. God has always worked in the Trinitarian pattern: from the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. He did not begin to be triune — the Father did not begin to need a mediator — at Christmas (John 1:1–14). And faith has not changed fundamentally either. True faith does not merely resign itself to a divine plan, nor trust detached promises; faith embraces a promising Person.

Christ comes “clothed in the gospel,” as Calvin frequently wrote. We must remember the promises in which Christ is clothed, but let us never preach a set of clothes. It’s the person of the Son that stands at the center of saving faith.

As It Was in the Beginning?

The passages quoted thus far have been from the New Testament. Armed only with these, you can mount a strong case that the Hebrew Bible proclaims Christ. But perhaps, it might be argued, this Christian interpretation is found only by looking backward from the New. Is it possible to also read the Bible forward, from Genesis onward, and see the same Christ-centeredness? I believe so.

It’s my contention that Christ is either patterned, promised, or present on every page of the Hebrew Bible. More than this, in certain key passages, he is portrayed in all three ways at once. Below I select just three of these occasions and hope that it inspires you to see the whole Bible through these lenses.

Jesus Walks in Eden (Genesis 3)

Christ Patterned

Adam and Eve, ashamed at their sin, cower among the trees. Soon they are cloaking themselves in fig leaves. They attempt to manage their sin by hiding their badness and projecting a false goodness. Their Lord, though, has a different solution. He covers them, not with vegetation but with skins. We’re not told what innocent creature died to clothe the guilty, but Isaiah and Paul pick up the substitutionary pattern: we, the guilty, are robed by an alien righteousness — clothed in Christ, you could say (Isaiah 61:10; Galatians 3:27).

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