There are multiple trucks literally filled with people who are laughably more qualified than myself to speak on the subject of Jesus in the OT . . . but I think that was understood long ago. Some I have been most helped by: The Ancient Love Song, The Unfolding Mystery: Discovering Christ in the Old Testament, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, The Meaning of the Pentateuch.
Are we supposed to play hide and go seek with Jesus as we read the OT? Is He everywhere and we just have to find Him? After all it is HE who said the Law and prophets spoke of Himself. In thinking about this we will look at some other general OT issues in passing.
Is our sequence of OT books the best? Most have never thought about the question and with good reason, its order has been the way it currently is for quite some time. What if there was a way to read the OT that might benefit us a little more, might give just a smidge more clarity or aide to our understanding. Currently we break the OT into the Law, History, Poetry, Major then Minor Prophets and, for the most part, they are lumped together categorically. This is very minor but in one way the OT is organized (Tanakh) Chronicles does not come right after Samuel and Kings--as we noted last time it was written well after the two; the love story of Ruth, making a more logical and manifested form, follows the intimate love of Song of Songs; Ecclesiastes, the existential, candid look at the sadness and core of life precedes the book of Lamentations which woefully recalls terrifying historical events with little hope, save for chapter 3—what’s the purpose of life; and this way ends with Ezra, Nehemiah, and then Chronicles, the point at which Israel is gathered back together and growing again. The final books build anticipation, desire, longing for a good king who will finally right the Nation. What does this have to do with our topic: the OT, by presenting human failure and incompleteness time after time over hundreds of years builds a groaning for the Messiah, for Christ Jesus to tear on the scene and make all things right. *
A big question when looking at the OT and Jesus must boil down to, what were the intentions of the people writing the OT at the time they were writing it? Thousands of years ago the stories of God’s interaction with people were told orally, by mouth. These were written down at some point. This means that these things are very old and the audience, then, was just as old. When we tell a story to a child we should emphasize certain things because stories convey, stories teach. Just the same with stories way back in days prior to almost everything we would recognize as culture: they told stories to relay history and ideas in a certain way, with intention.
For one, they were not a scientific based society; what I mean by this is that precision was not such a big deal as it is nowadays. So when you read Numbers or stories about how one army came out to fight another and it was like 10,000 million on one side and 1,000,000 on another we should not go, ah, someone was there counting, rather we should think, man, one army had a huge personnel advantage over the other army. It is simply saying there was a definite underdog. So we cannot get hung up on the numbers, take yourself out of the Western Scientific precision mode and throw a bone; different cultures speak in differing ways, they convey ideas differently from how we do and that is okay. It is not dishonesty, just different. (though some numbers obviously have symbolic meaning, we’re not talking about those here)
Secondly, as was mentioned last time, they and we write with certain bents and emphases (remember how Samuel and Chronicles differed?). Galileo is quoted as saying, “The Bible shows the way to get to Heaven, not the way the heavens go.” What he is saying is precisely my point: we should not look at Genesis, the first book in the OT, as some kind of proof or in depth description of what all took place at creation, instead we should draw that God spoke it all into existence and made it good. So we have to be careful in how we read the Bible because it is easy to interject our ideas based on our conclusions and understandings literally thousands of years after things were written. It is arrogant to conclude so and so must have been saying this BECAUSE we now know x and y. We must be careful because we know the OT was inspired by God but it does not mean it has to be neat and nice and always conform nicely to our present way of understanding.
Third, for the most part, the audience of the OT writers were people living at the time it was spoken. Peter Enns makes an intriguing point that in Deuteronomy 5.7 it reads “You shall have no other god’s before me.” He compares this to later writings such as Isaiah 45.5 that says, “I am the LORD, and there are no other, besides me there is no God . . .” Did you catch that? In the first part God seems to be acknowledging there are other gods and in Isaiah He does not. Dr. Enns suggests that in a way of speaking to the people so they understand he changes over time, not the reality of what He is saying to Israel but in the way they’ll best understand. He argues that at the time of Deuteronomy the wandering Israelites were very much poly-theistic—they believed in many gods—so god spoke to them in that way: “there are others but I’m supreme.” But over time, through circumstance God showed them that there were no other gods besides Him and thus He spoke more candidly to Israel in Isaiah about His supremacy: “categorically I am alone, none even comes close!” We see then that we cannot wear, entirely, our same thinking caps when reading the OT, it is very different.
Fourth, the Bible is incarnational, just like Jesus. I often forget that God did not have to do all this. He could have made the world and observed like the Greek gods, interjecting into events on a whim. God did not have to speak to us. Get a good image of a snooty person in your mind, this individual is high-browed, wears only the finest of cloths, is a billionaire who speaks to no one but his butler. Sadly the limo had a flat tire and for some reason this person decided to get out of the car, a smelly, dingy, and maybe dying hobo comes up asking for money. Nothing. Our nose-upper does not even acknowledge our hobo’s existence. In a sense, God could do that and it would be okay. But thankfully He decided to interject and speak to His people and not in some heavenly language but our own, our own full of bad grammar like this blog bountifully contains, language that could and would be twisted, language that is ordinary, not pompous but understandable; God spoke so that we could begin to understand who He is and who we are. This is amazing! So in this way we can compare the OT to Jesus and find the similarities: God interjected into the mess to bring mercy and grace.
Okay, so what about Jesus? Jesus is not playing hide-and-go-seek in the OT. And we should not stretch ideas and similarities and think we have found Him. He is spoken of prophetically—in the Psalms and Isaiah most abundantly but in many other books—or, as many believe, in the form of the Angel of the Lord—Jacob wrestled with him, he stood with the 3 in the furnace, he stood in the way of Balaam’s donkey, etc. So in this way we should not look to find Jesus because He is not there, He will not be until hundreds of years later.
But did Jesus not say that the Law and Prophets spoke of Him? I can tell a story about the attribute of courage without mentioning the word courage; we do not need to see Jesus to long for him. We can think simply but never simplistically about the things Jesus says. What some think of when they say that Jesus is in the OT is that there are people and events push us towards the expected Jesus, the Messiah to come. As Jesus Himself does at numerous points, he takes something from the past and compares it to Himself: Like Jonah descending for three days then being raised up so I will be buried and rise. Also, Jesus is called the second Adam, this compares Jesus to Adam in Genesis and it conveys that humanity, in Jesus Christ, has a second chance for fellowship with God. But even with the comparisons or types—those who have some attribute or action which Jesus will perfect in His existence—we can get too wrapped up in the Jesus part and fast-forward too quickly so that we lose what the point of the passage in the OT is getting at. The OT is doing a lot of things but a big thing it is doing is making us itch more and more for Jesus, it is creating the desire for the perfect One. Charles Drew, author of the helpful book The Ancient Love Song: Finding Jesus in the Old Testament, says, “Jesus Christ has to have context if he is to mean anything . . . Our God has [convinced us that we need His love] for us in the Old Testament. To be ignorant of those Scriptures is to be like the complacent husband, bored with his wife because he has never realized what life would be like without her.”
We want to get what is to be gotten from the OT but nothing more. If we can learn to approach the OT in a humble way in which we want to be informed by God’s word, patiently seeing what it is trying to do we will gain much. Is it hard? Yes. Is it boring at times? Yes. But it is also a gracious gift granted to us and there is a wonderful, joy-filled purpose in it. We see more and more WHAT Jesus’ reign would mean and imply on a sick and decadently destructive people as all humans are. In many parts of the OT it is Jesus’ absence that is to be felt, not His presence.
The Apostle Paul wanting to encourage his fellow believers in the city of Rome told them the following of the OT: “whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” The Bible, the Christian life is an ongoing wrestling match, it is a struggle; but as the Christian struggles he hopes.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_of_the_Bible
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