Anticipating Jesus: Finding Christ in the Old Testament
How Christophanies, Prophecies, and Types Reveal the Messiah in Scripture
Every so often I pass out index cards to the class I teach and ask them for suggestions on what they’d like to study. One of the topics they suggested was Jesus in the Old Testament. Typology is a favorite of mine, so I’m starting a series here on the topic. This will be an exercise in conciseness and will likely stretch two-minute Tuesday to three or four minutes.
Typically, we only think of Jesus as being in the gospels of the New Testament. However, there is a constant anticipation and hope of a coming Messiah in the Old Testament. When is the Messiah going to come to make all things right? Is it Moses? No, Moses points to the Messiah. Is it Joshua who leads the Israelites into the promised land? No, he points to the Messiah. Is it David? No, although the Messiah will be called the Son of David.
Jesus answers the question on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24:13-27. The two disciples He walks with are distraught about the crucifixion and what has happened since. Jesus says:
"O foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken! "Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?" Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures.
Later, when their eyes are opened and they recognize Him, He vanishes. They say, "Were not our hearts burning within us while He was speaking to us on the road, while He was explaining the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32)
Does our heart burn within us thinking of Jesus while we’re reading the Old Testament? If we’re being honest, probably not when we read Leviticus and Numbers, but even all of those laws & genealogies point to Jesus.
We see Jesus in the Old Testament in three main ways:
Christophanies
Prophecies
Types
We’ll look at examples of each of these in this series.
James Borland defines Christophany in his classic book Christ in the Old Testament as “those unsought, intermittent and temporary, visible and audible manifestations of God the Son in human form, by which God communicated something to certain conscious human beings on earth prior to the birth of Jesus Christ.” We’ll dig into that definition later in the series.
Prophecies are direct messages from God that foretell future events. In the case of Jesus, these prophecies seemed improbable, relying on countless contingencies over hundreds of years and involving people who had yet to be born. And yet, they were fulfilled exactly as predicted—in both manner and place.
Types are symbols or pictures in the Old Testament that point us to Jesus. David Murray defines types as “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.”
Types are not allegory. They are ordained by God, meaning they are not coincidence, but by divine plan. God uses them to teach us and point us to Jesus. There is a predictive pattern, which means the truth pictured in the Old Testament is fulfilled in the New Testament.
Not everything is a type. People go overboard sometimes looking for symbols. It has to meet those criteria.
Next week, we’ll dive into specific examples—so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss a post! In the meantime, if you’d like to explore this topic further, here are some great books to check out: