Jesus Is the Main Character of the Old Testament

You've got a Bible with a worn New Testament and a stiff Old one. The spine cracks open to John on its own. The front half is the part you skim. Genealogies you can't pronounce. Sacrifices that turn your stomach. A God who seems angrier back there. It reads like the long throat-clearing before the real thing starts in Matthew.

Drop that idea. It's costing you half your Bible.

The Old Testament isn't the boring part before Jesus. It's the story of Jesus, told before He got here. He's the main character. Not a guest who finally shows up in chapter forty. The main character, the whole way through.

I didn't decide that. He did.

He said it first

The day He rose, two men were walking to a town called Emmaus. Gutted. Sure it was over. Jesus fell in step with them and they didn't know it was Him. And instead of just holding up His hands and ending the suspense, He gave them a Bible study. "Beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures" (Luke 24:27).

Moses. The prophets. All the Scriptures. Concerning Himself. That same night He said it again to the rest of them: "all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled" (Luke 24:44).

He wasn't being poetic. He looked at the men who prided themselves on knowing the Scriptures cold and told them, "it is these that testify about Me" (John 5:39). He said Moses "wrote about Me" (John 5:46). Peter says the old prophets were straining forward to see "the sufferings of Christ and the glories to follow" (1 Peter 1:11). They were writing about a Man they'd never met.

So if you read the Old Testament and don't see Him, you're not reading it the way He read it.

Trace the line

Here's the line, once you know to look for it.

The first promise God makes after everything breaks is about a son who'll crush the thing that ruined us. "He shall bruise you on the head" (Genesis 3:15). Thousands of years before a manger, the plan is already a person. That promise narrows down to Abraham, and Paul tells you exactly who it was aimed at the whole time: "He does not say, 'And to seeds,' as referring to many, but rather to one, 'And to your seed,' that is, Christ" (Galatians 3:16).

Then watch the blood. A lamb at Passover so death passes over the house. A whole system of sacrifice, animals killed morning and evening, year after year, and none of it could actually fix a thing. So why keep doing it? Because it was a shadow of the real thing. The Law "has only a shadow of the good things to come" (Hebrews 10:1), and "the substance belongs to Christ" (Colossians 2:17). Every lamb was a finger pointing forward at the one who'd be "pierced through for our transgressions" (Isaiah 53:5).

A shadow has to be cast by a body. That body is Christ.

That's what the Old Testament is doing the entire time. It isn't a different book about a different God. It's His story, told forward.

He was already there

And He wasn't only being predicted. He was there.

Not the baby from Bethlehem crawling around the garden of Eden. Say it right. The eternal Son, the Word, was there and He was working. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). "For by Him all things were created" (Colossians 1:16). When Israel drank in the desert, Paul says a thing that should stop you cold: "and the rock was Christ" (1 Corinthians 10:4).

Jesus told the Pharisees to their faces, "before Abraham was born, I am" (John 8:58), and they reached for stones. They knew exactly what He'd just claimed. He wasn't new. He was the oldest thing there is, stepping into a story that had been His all along.

Now hear the fence

Men get this wrong in the other direction too, and it does real damage.

Being the main character doesn't mean He's hiding under every rock. Some men learn this and go hunting for Jesus in every tent peg and every red thread, until they've turned the Bible into a magic trick, and the man across the table stops trusting a word of it. That's not what the road to Emmaus says. It says "the things concerning Himself," not "everything secretly means Himself." He's where the whole road is going. He's not a code stamped on every single verse.

And He doesn't shove His Father out of the frame. Open the Old Testament and the LORD is loud. He speaks worlds into being. He cuts the covenants. He thunders on the mountain. "Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one!" (Deuteronomy 6:4). The Spirit is right there in the second verse of the whole Bible, "moving over the surface of the waters" (Genesis 1:2). One God, Father, Son, and Spirit, running the whole story. The Son is who it points to. The Trinity is who does the pointing.

So don't turn the Old Testament into a puzzle only a scholar can crack. It's still God talking to you. Read it as His word for your Monday, and read it knowing where the road ends.

Read it like He's in it

Here's the thing to walk out with.

You don't own half a Bible about rules and a second half about grace. You own one story about one Savior, and He was there long before the ink was dry on Matthew. The men who wrote Genesis and Isaiah and the Psalms were writing about Him without knowing His name.

So go back to that front half you've been skipping. Read it like He's in it. Because He is. The whole road bends toward one hill, and the Man on it was the point from the very first page.