Jesus Through the Old Testament

transform your Bible understanding

Graeme Goldsworthy

• Publisher: BRF
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780857466990
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In this engaging book, Graeme Goldsworthy reflects with clarity and practical insight on reading and using the Old Testament. By showing us how Jesus is central to the Old Testament's message, he encourages us to reinstate it as essential and transformative to our lives, churches and mission in today's world. The author asks important questions: Where is Jesus in the whole biblical storyline? How does the kingdom of God relate to him? In what way is he central to the divine revelation? This is a must-read for those who wish to transform their biblical understanding.

Contents

Foreword

Part 1 Where’s Jesus?

1 Is the Old Testament a Christian book?

2 Getting started: looking at the big picture

3 The storyline of the Bible

4 The kingdom of God as a unifying theme

5 The shape of progressive revelation

Part 2 Working with the texts

6 Some key events in biblical revelation

7 Finding Christ in Genesis

8 Finding Christ in Israel’s history

9 Finding Christ in wisdom and psalms

10 Finding Christ in the prophetic books

11 Jesus Christ the fulfiller

12 D.I.Y.

Notes

About the author

These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.

Colossians 2:17

Foreword

I am so deeply grateful that I grew up going to Sunday school where I learned the stories of the Old Testament. I’m grateful that I was in Vacation Bible School every summer where we did things like make salt maps of the promised land and built the walls of Jericho out of Popsicle sticks. I am grateful for all of the history and doctrine I learned in my college Bible classes, for the personal challenges I got from reading Christian books over the years and for the expectation that God would speak to me and change me through his word that developed in the years I spent in an intensive weekly Bible study as an adult.

But as grateful as I am for all of those things, I realise that all of this immersion in the Bible left me with little to no understanding of how the Bible fits together as one story of God’s outworking of his plan to redeem all things through Christ. I didn’t know how to relate the curse and the promise given in Genesis 3 with everything that followed it. I couldn’t have traced the story of Israel’s exodus, entering the land, taking possession of the land, being exiled from the land and returning to the land. I couldn’t have explained how the kingdom of Israel in the Old Testament relates to the kingdom Jesus announced at his coming. I looked at Old Testament characters as examples to follow or eschew and never imagined that Christ was prefigured in some of them. I simply avoided the Old Testament prophets because they were unintelligible and, in my mind, not anything I could apply to my real life in the here and now.

Fortunately, the day came when I began to be introduced to the way of grasping the larger story and the themes of the Bible as is introduced and explained in this book. When I discovered the teaching of Graeme Goldsworthy, the puzzle pieces began to fall into place. The Bible began to make sense to me in a new and profound way. More than that, Christ became more precious to me. Seeing who he is, and what he accomplished in his first coming, through the various angles of the Old Testament, added texture and colour.

How I wish I’d had a book like Jesus through the Old Testament long ago. I envy all who will become more thoroughly grounded in the contents, structure and meaning of the Bible much earlier than I was, through the pages of this book. As you work your way through it, you will be equipped to recognise important themes that run from beginning to end in the Bible. You’ll see how the Old Testament points to a righteous life and the need for someone to provide it for us. Rather than approaching the Bible as a handbook for life, or as merely a source of inspiration, you’ll become oriented to look for the progression of the kingdom of God as well as grasp the implications for living now as a glad subject of King Jesus.

If you have spent a lifetime in the Bible, but recognise there are still gaps in your understanding, this book will help to close some of those gaps. And if you are new to the Bible, this book will ground you in the basics so that your foundations will be firm and strong in the truth of God’s revelation of himself and his plans and purposes in this world.

There could be no better guide than Graeme Goldsworthy for the pathway toward a firmer grasp on God’s word. My prayer for you as you begin this book is that you will grow to love Christ more as you see him through all of the scriptures as a result of your study through this book.

Nancy Guthrie

Part 1

Where’s Jesus?

1

Is the Old Testament a Christian book?

Where’s Wally? is the first of a series of books by Martin Handford that most people will be familiar with.1 In looking at a series of pictures, the trick is to spot the man in the red and white striped shirt and beanie amidst the most complicated and detailed mass of very small figures drawn with great care and precision. Looking for Jesus in the Old Testament is something like looking for Wally, only more complex. Wally can be found; he is there. But in the Old Testament, Jesus is not actually there in person as the Jesus we meet in the four Gospels.

Jesus of Nazareth comes along only after the Old Testament age finishes. So, if Jesus is there we need to understand how he is there. Before we even begin the search, there are many who would pose the question: ‘Is the Old Testament really a Christian book?’ You might be tempted to answer with a firm ‘No’ on the grounds that Jesus of Nazareth is nowhere mentioned by name in it. Others might reject it because it seems to focus on a very different religion from the Christianity we know. You may even regard Israel’s religion as directly opposing the faith of the New Testament. One could easily feel that reading the Old Testament is rather like hitting your head against a brick wall; it feels good only when you stop. Bearing in mind that the Old Testament takes up about the first three-quarters of our Bible, dismissing it as irrelevant would save us a lot of time and effort.

What does the New Testament say about the matter?

But, of course, there is no way we can simply ignore the Old Testament; not when we start to read the New Testament and discover that the Old Testament, usually referred to as ‘the scriptures’, was the only Bible possessed and regularly used by Jesus and his apostles. Not only that, but they were consistent in the way they kept referring to the Old Testament as a book about Jesus. Consider, for example, the different ways the four Gospels begin their Jesus-narratives by referring to some link with significant people or events in the Old Testament:

The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

Matthew 1:1

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in Isa...

Table of contents

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