"And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself." — Luke 24:27
The Old and New Testaments are not two separate books. They are two acts of one story, with one God and one plan of redemption culminating in one Person. The OT is full of Christ — not hidden arbitrarily, but woven deliberately by the same divine Author.
Jesus's Own Claim — John 5:39 & Luke 24:27
After His resurrection, Jesus walked the road to Emmaus with two disciples who did not recognise Him. Luke 24:27 records: "And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself." He didn't say the OT pointed to Him in a few places — He said all the Scriptures bear witness to Him (John 5:39). The Emmaus disciples' hearts "burned within them" as He opened the Word. The same can happen to us as we learn to read the OT through Christ.
The "Angel of the Lord" in the OT is distinct from ordinary angels. He speaks as God, accepts worship, and forgives sin — things no created angel could do. These are widely understood as pre-incarnate appearances of the Son of God.
What Makes the Angel of the Lord Different
In Scripture, when ordinary angels appear and are worshipped, they refuse: "Don't do that! I am a fellow servant" (Rev 19:10). But the Angel of the Lord consistently accepts worship and speaks in the first person as God. He says "I am the Lord" (Judg 6:16), accepts sacrifices (Judg 13:23), and pronounces forgiveness. John 12:41 explicitly states that Isaiah "saw [Jesus's] glory" — the vision in Isaiah 6 was a vision of the pre-incarnate Son. These are not metaphors; they are actual encounters.
Hagar was a pregnant Egyptian slave, mistreated and fleeing into the desert. The Angel finds her "by a spring" — a detail full of Johannine resonance. He calls her by name, acknowledges her suffering, gives her a specific command and promise, and speaks with divine authority: "I will surely multiply your offspring." No angel has the authority to make covenants.
Hagar becomes the first person in the Bible to name God: El Roi — "the God who sees." Her question, "Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?" (16:13), indicates she understood she had encountered God Himself, not a representative. This encounter happens outside Israel's covenant line — signalling from the beginning that God's Son is present for all humanity.
When God reveals His name as "I AM WHO I AM" (Hebrew: Ehyeh asher ehyeh), He is not just giving a label — He is disclosing His essential nature. He is the self-existent, eternally present One. No other being can claim this name because no other being simply is — everything else was created. To claim "I AM" is to claim uncreated, eternal existence.
In John 8:58, when Jesus says "Before Abraham was, I AM" (ego eimi — present tense, not "I was"), He is claiming to be the burning bush presence. His opponents immediately understood and tried to stone Him for blasphemy. This is not theological inference — it is Jesus's own direct identification of Himself with the God of the Exodus.
Only God can change a person's fundamental identity. When the Angel renames Jacob "Israel" (he who strives with God), He is doing what only the Creator can do — redefining who Jacob is at the deepest level. Jesus does the same thing in the NT: He renames Simon as Peter (rock), and later He will give every believer "a new name" (Rev 2:17). Identity-naming is a divine prerogative consistently exercised by the pre-incarnate and incarnate Son.
The wrestling match is theologically rich: God condescended to wrestle with Jacob, allowing Himself to be "held" until blessing was granted. Yet with a single touch He could dislocate Jacob's hip — He was always in control. The blessing came not from Jacob's strength but from his refusal to let go. This pattern — blessing that comes through persistent, clinging faith — runs through the entire Bible and culminates in Gethsemane.
When Joshua asks "Are you for us or for our enemies?" the Commander refuses the binary: "Neither — but as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come." This is a profound theological moment. God does not join our side; we are invited to join His. The pre-incarnate Christ was not a tribal deity supporting Israel against Canaan — He was the Lord of all armies pursuing His own purposes, to which Israel was invited.
This encounter forms the theological backdrop for understanding Jesus as Lord in the NT. When Paul writes "the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh" (2 Cor 10:4) and describes the full armour of God (Eph 6), he is drawing on the same reality Joshua encountered — a divine Commander whose army fights on a different plane with different weapons for a cosmic purpose.
The vision is overwhelming in its detail: the exalted throne, the six-winged seraphim covering their faces and feet before God's holiness, the smoke filling the temple, and the ground shaking. Isaiah's immediate response is "Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips." Holiness produces undoing before it produces commission. The coal from the altar touches his lips — cleansing through fire, through the altar, through sacrifice.
After quoting Isaiah 53 (the suffering servant) and Isaiah 6 (the throne vision), John writes: "Isaiah said this because he saw Jesus's glory and spoke about him." This is not allegory — John is saying that the divine glory Isaiah saw in the throne room was specifically the glory of the Son who would later become incarnate. The seraphim's "Holy, holy, holy" was directed at the pre-incarnate Christ.
Gideon is threshing wheat in a winepress — hiding from the Midianites in fear. The Angel's first words to him: "The Lord is with you, mighty warrior." This is not sarcasm; it is prophetic identity. God names Gideon not according to what he is but according to what God intends to make him. This pattern runs throughout Scripture — Abram becomes Abraham, Simon becomes Peter, Jacob becomes Israel. The pre-incarnate Christ specialises in calling people into their true identity.
The structure of Gideon's encounter mirrors every major divine commissioning in Scripture: appearance → fear → reassurance → commission → objection → sign. This same pattern appears in the calls of Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Mary — and it is the pre-incarnate or incarnate Christ at the centre of each one. Jesus's call of the disciples ("Follow me") compresses the same movement into two words.
Isaiah 43:2 promises: "When you pass through the fire, I will be with you; the flame shall not consume you." This promise was literally enacted in Daniel 3. The fourth figure is not a rescuer who pulls them out of the fire — He is a companion who walks with them through it. The fire does not go away. But death cannot touch those who are in the presence of the Son. This is the central comfort of Christian suffering: not that pain is removed but that Christ is in it.
Remarkably, a pagan king sees the divine nature of the fourth figure more clearly than many of God's own people recognised Jesus. The story is a foreshadowing of the Gentiles recognising the Son of God — the Roman centurion at the cross, the magi from the east, the Samaritan woman at the well. The pre-incarnate Christ was visible to those who had eyes to see, regardless of their nation or religion.
The Old Testament contains over 300 specific predictions about the Messiah — written centuries before Jesus was born and fulfilled with a precision that defies statistical probability. Here are the most important.
The Statistical Argument
Peter Stoner, in Science Speaks, calculated the probability of any one person fulfilling just eight of the messianic prophecies by chance: 1 in 10 to the power of 17 (1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000). He illustrated this by imagining covering the entire state of Texas two feet deep in silver dollars, marking one, and asking a blindfolded person to pick it first try. For 48 prophecies, the number becomes 1 in 10³. These are not coincidences — they are the fingerprint of a supernatural Author.
A "type" is a person, event, or institution in the OT that God designed to foreshadow a greater reality in Christ. Hebrews 10:1 says "the law has but a shadow of the good things to come." The shadow proves the substance is real — and the substance is always Christ.
How Paul Reads the OT — 1 Corinthians 10:11
"These things happened to them as examples (typoi — types) and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the culmination of the ages has come." Paul sees the events of Israel's history as divinely designed patterns (typoi) intended to teach the generation that would encounter their fulfilment in Christ. This is not allegorising away the literal history — it is reading the literal history at its God-intended depth.
Written around 700 BC, Isaiah 53 is the most precise description of the crucifixion and atonement ever written — nearly a millennium before it happened. It is the most quoted OT passage in the New Testament.
Who Is the Servant?
Isaiah 53 has been debated for centuries. Jewish interpretation has sometimes understood "the Servant" as corporate Israel. But Acts 8:26–35 resolves the question: when the Ethiopian eunuch asks Philip "About whom does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?", Philip "beginning with this Scripture told him the good news about Jesus." The earliest Christian interpretation, given with apostolic authority, is explicit: the Servant is Jesus. And the details make it impossible to apply to a nation rather than an individual.
The Holy Spirit is not a New Testament innovation. He was present at creation, moved through judges and kings, inspired every prophet, and made promises about a coming universal outpouring that exploded at Pentecost.
A Critical Difference Between the Testaments
In the Old Testament, the Spirit's work was selective and often temporary — He came upon specific individuals for specific tasks and could depart (as He departed from Saul, 1 Sam 16:14). The tragedy of the OT is summed up in Moses's longing: "Would that all the Lord's people were prophets, that the Lord would put his Spirit on them!" (Num 11:29). This longing became God's own promise in Joel 2: the Spirit would be poured out on all flesh. Jesus's ascension made this possible — and Pentecost fulfilled it. The Spirit now indwells every believer permanently.
Moving from the OT through to Christ — learning to read the whole Bible as one unified story with one central character.
"Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?"
— Luke 24:32