Jesus on Every Page: 10 Simple Ways to Seek and Find Christ in the Old Testament

by David P. Murray

But being an Israelite did not guarantee salvation. Outward privileges and outward observance saved no one.

Just like today’s preachers, the prophets stressed again and again the need to

move beyond the outward to the inward, beyond the externals to the internals, beyond the flesh to the spirit.

God chastises His...

If you are in any doubt that the Lord chastens those whom He loves, just read the Old Testament prophets.

God preserves and comforts a remnant.

Similarly today, the believing remnant in a church or nation sometimes suffers God’s chastisement along with the rebels. However unlike the rebels, they may be given God’s promises to support and strengthen them through the difficulties.

Many suffering believers through the centuries have found incredible solace and help in the precious words of chapters like Isaiah 54 and Ezekiel 9.

God will send sa...

Promise always has the last word.

Jesus’ exodus.

Jesus’ exile.

The prophets had the task of preparing Israel for the devastation of its just exile, and of cultivating and maintaining hope for a future gracious divine restoration of the land and its Davidic king, a restoration that also would bless the world.

Jesus’ kingdom.

Jesus’ day.

These imminent divine interventions, bringing divine judgment and deliverance, were predictive of a future and final Day of the Lord, a day in which the Lord would be present to save His people and judge His enemies.51

Whatever else the prophets were about, they were about Jesus.

“We have found Him of whom Moses in the law, and also the prophets, wrote—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.”

The study of how God used pictures to teach His people is usually called typology, not a terribly familiar word for most of us. Basically it means “picture-ology.” It’s a kind of visual theology. God pictured the truth to preach the truth.

A type is a real person, place, object, or event that God ordained to act as a predictive pattern or resemblance of Jesus’ person and work, or of opposition to both.

A type is a real person, place, object, or event:

That God ordained:

To act as a predictive pattern or resemblance:

Of Jesus’ person and work: the truth in the picture is enlarged, heightened,

Or of opposition to both:

With that preliminary understanding of typology, let us now consider questions to help us identify types with confidence and interpret them in a way that unfolds their Christ-centered beauty.

We must emphasize the reality of the types

My fundamental mistake had been to take Jeremiah’s promise of a new covenant to mean that all the previous covenants had been ditched and God was starting something completely new.

rather He was going to take the old promises, the old covenant promises, and present them in a new and more valuable way.

Jesus was not saying that the old covenant promises should be junked and He was about to start over with a blank slate. He was saying that the old covenant promises were going to be presented in a new, better, and more valuable form. And He was going to do it all Himself without any contribution from us.

a divine covenant is a relationship, initiated and imposed by a superior, with life-or-death consequences.

“covenant of works then wages,”

“covenant of grace then gratitude,”

As a wise teacher, He revealed His covenant of grace bit by bit, in phases, simple truths followed by the more complex; and He did this through these Old Testament covenants.

The first thing we notice about these covenant promises is that they take place in the context of sin, emphasizing that God’s mercy, not human merit, is the bedrock foundation of His covenant dealings with humanity.

One of the essential principles revealed by these covenants is that God takes the sovereign initiative in His covenant dealings with men and women. He took the first step toward mankind in his weakness and helplessness. Indeed, He took the ultimate step of self-sacrifice.

One of the essential truths revealed by these covenants is that God requires sacrificial blood to atone for sin and that such sacrifice was at the foundation of covenant relationships. These Old Testament covenants revealed and advanced the covenant of grace, in which God not only declared the requirement of sacrifice but also provided it—indeed became it.

Here we consider the scope of the Old Testament covenants. We ask, who were the beneficiaries? Who came within the scope of these covenants? The answer, as we shall see, is that the covenants had a double scope. There were external, physical, and nonredemptive blessings for a great many, in some cases for all humanity. And there were internal, spiritual, and redemptive blessings for those who, by faith, saw through the externals of the covenants to the spiritual realities they represented.

The covenants reveal God’s wide scope in His widespread offer of covenant benefits, even though comparatively few actually use the covenant benefits in the right way—to believe in the Christ of the covenants.

At this point, you are probably asking, as I did, “If there is so much that is ‘old’ in the new covenant, what’s new? If there is so much continuity between the old and new covenants, is there any difference, any discontinuity?” And the answer is yes, there is much that is new. The new covenant exceeds the old covenant in the following ways:

But in the new covenant, there is a new international emphasis. Jesus said, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations.”

In the old administrations of the covenant of grace, Jesus and His grace were promised and pictured. In the new covenant, Jesus is fully and personally present.

The shadow reveals, but the shadow also obscures. In the new covenant, Jesus has come around the corner, and we see Him far more clearly.

However, in the new covenant all sinful and imperfect human intermediaries are swept aside, and the covenant of grace is administered directly and immediately by Jesus.

He is contrasting a new and more effective presentation of the covenant of grace with an older but less effective presentation of the same covenant of grace.49

The new covenant is more spiritual, more focused on the inward life.

The presentations of the covenant of grace through the minicovenants of the Old Testament were preparatory and temporary.

The new covenant is the final presentation of the covenant of grace in this present world.

All the Old Testament covenants consistently present a God who seeks relationship with fallen sinners. The new

covenant promises also have relationship at their very core.