Bible Reading Plans
- Plan One: New Testament Only
- Plan Two: New Testament + Psalms
- Plan Three: New Testament + History
- Plan Four: The Entire Bible – Year 1 of 3, Year 2 of 3, Year 3 of 3
Don’t know which plan? Go to A Christ-Centered Bible Reading Plan: Quick Start.
Extras
Verse of the Day, Audio Capsule, and Video Minute
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(Book Installment)
The Biblical Case for
Finding Jesus in the Old Testament
Chapter 1: The Subject of This Book (continued)
Jesus Originated Finding Jesus in the Old Testament
Luke 24 is not the only place in the Bible that Jesus spoke this way about Himself and the Old Testament. (Of course, the term “Old Testament” wasn’t used in His day. Rather, He and His fellow Jews spoke of “the Scriptures,” or “the Law and the Prophets,” or “Moses and the Prophets,” or “the Prophets,” and so on.)
At the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said this:
Matt 5:17 “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.
Jesus saw His biography in the Old Testament – a biography written in advance for Him to follow.
Israel’s Messiah had been prophesied in the Old Testament…in many different ways and by many different titles. So varied were these references that Jews found it hard to agree on the meaning of all these passages. They found it particularly difficult to reconcile the prophecies of suffering with the prophecies of glory – so much so, that many people thought the prophecies were referring to two different people. But as you saw in Luke 24, Jesus explained in straightforward terms that the sufferings came first, during His earthly life. Then, after His crucifixion and death, came the glory – beginning with His resurrection from the dead on the third day.
Another occasion when Jesus talked about the Old Testament’s witness to Him was a direct response to His opponents. They were publicly accusing Him of making Himself equal with God. Near the end of a long reply to them, He said:
John 5:39 “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me;
John 5:40 and you are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life.
The kind of men to whom Jesus was speaking were more familiar with the content of the New Testament than anyone else in Israel was…and, for that matter, the world. And yet they were unwilling to acknowledge that the life Jesus was living in their presence was a life prophesied in the Scriptures they treasured. They didn’t lack documentation – they lacked the will to accept it as true even when what it documented was standing right in front of them.
Jesus went on to be even more explicit with them:
John 5:44 “How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and you do not seek the glory that is from the one and only God?
John 5:45 “Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father; the one who accuses you is Moses, in whom you have set your hope.
John 5:46 “For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me.
John 5:47 “But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?”
Moses had written the first five books of the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Jesus was telling His opponents that in those five books, they could find Moses’ testimony about Him. We can, too. But we have to have a willingness to live with the consequences of finding Him or else we’ll remain as blind as those men were.
So, where did the New Testament authors get the idea that Jesus could be found in the Old Testament? From Jesus. Let’s see what they did with that idea.
The Duty of a Man 