To use a metaphor, we are not only inspecting each tree in the forest (the reductionist approach) but also stepping away from the trees to view the entire landscape at high altitude, making note of how each tree connects with the others in an ecosystem (the holistic approach).42 And further, we reveal how we see that forest as nourishing, creative, life-giving, revelatory, and beautiful.
To put it another way, the Bible contains its own hermeneutic.43 As usual, Augustine has put it best: “In the Old Testament, the New is concealed; in the New, the Old is revealed.”44 This being so, the Holy Spirit often had an intention in Scripture that went beyond its authors’ present knowledge.45
Understanding the author’s intent in a given portion of Scripture is certainly part of the task of biblical interpretation. But it’s not the whole task. As you read this book, this fact will become abundantly clear. The Second Testament authors “remain true to the main intention” of the First Testament authors.46 But they go beyond that intention to the Spirit-inspired meaning found in Christ.47
In our theographical snapshots, we will be employing the same method of interpretation that the Second Testament writers used in their interpretation of the First Testament—a method given to them by Jesus Himself. This method of interpretation safeguards us from entertaining subjective, fanciful, and forced allegorical interpretations on the one hand48 and completely missing Christ in the sacred Text on the other.49
Again, the Scriptures are not a library of disjointed, independent, inspired books. The First and Second Testaments are not two separate books bound together between a single cover. Rather, they are a unified canon. All the books of that canon contribute to the plotline of God’s covenantal relationship with humanity through Jesus. You can think of the First and Second Testaments as act 1 and act 2 of the same drama. Each book, therefore, must be understood and interpreted within the framework of the greater whole.50
Jesus Christ is the glue that binds both Testaments together. As Brevard Childs says, “The completely New of the gospel is formulated in terms of the Old. Herein lies the deep mystery surrounding the two testaments. Separate and yet undivided, two voices yet the sound is similar, an Old Word pointing to the New, yet the New is only known in the Old.”51
That said, it’s a profound mistake to detach Scripture—both First and Second Testaments—from Christ.52 The Bible has no real meaning unless it is grounded in Christ.53 The beauty of Scripture for followers of Jesus is to reveal Christ.
THE WITNESS OF THE SECOND
TESTAMENT AUTHORS
Here are just a few samples of how the authors of the Second Testament read the First Testament in the light of Christ:
Matthew quoted Hosea about a prophecy concerning Israel: “Out of Egypt I called My Son.”54 But Matthew located its fulfillment in Jesus. He drew similar connections throughout his gospel.55
John informed us that Philip declared Jesus to be the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets: “We have found Him of whom Moses in the law, and also the prophets, wrote—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.”56
John applied words from Isaiah to Jesus, equating Christ with “the arm of the Lord.”57 John’s gospel is full of references showing how Jesus fulfills the images and events of the First Testament and of the Jewish messianic expectation.58
According to Paul, one cannot understand the First Testament except in Christ. Jesus is the key that unlocks its meaning.59 Three quick examples:
1. Paul stated that Adam is an image, or a model, of Jesus.60
2. Paul argued that Israel’s festivals and food laws are embodied in Christ. They are mere shadows that point to Jesus, the reality.61
3. Paul said the rock that followed Israel represents Christ.62
Paul’s epistles are rife with these kinds of connections.
The writer of Hebrews took a promise that God gave to King David and applied it to Jesus.63 He also stated that the Law foreshadowed what was in the new covenant: namely, Jesus Christ.64 This is a major theme throughout the book of Hebrews.
According to Peter, the prophets spoke of the sufferings and glories of Christ in ways that they themselves didn’t fully understand.65 Peter applied the words of Isaiah about a stone lying in Zion to Jesus.66
In like manner, the church fathers, the Reformers, and countless theologians and scholars of the past and present all testify to this same understanding of the First Testament. With a united voice, they declared that Jesus is the interpretative key of the Bible. (In the appendix, we give a sampling of these post-apostolic witnesses.)
To put it in a sentence:
In Jesus the promise is confirmed, the covenant is renewed, the prophecies are fulfilled, the law is vindicated, salvation is brought near, sacred history has reached its climax, the perfect sacrifice has been offered and accepted, the high priest over the household of God has taken his seat at God’s right hand, the Prophet like Moses has been raised up, the Son of David reigns, the kingdom of God has been inaugurated, the Son of Man has received dominion from the Ancient of Days, the Servant of the Lord, having been smitten to death for his people’s transgression and borne the sin of many, has accomplished the divine purpose, has seen light after the travail of his soul, and is now exalted and extolled and made very high.67
Many who have rightly taught that Jesus is the hermeneutical key to the Bible have failed to look at all Scripture through the lens of Christ. What we will demonstrate in this book is that everything in the Bible points to Jesus—either His person, His work, or His character.
When we fail to see the entire Bible christologically and theographically, the door is opened for the Bible to take on a raft of contradictory interpretations. We believe, therefore, that failure to read the Bible christologically is the cause for the countless divisions among Christians. The internal unity of the Bible is its witness to Jesus. He is the Canon within the canon.
Reading Scripture through a christological and theographical lens is more radical a move than we might think at first blush. In our observation, it’s rarely practiced today—even among those who claim to uphold the centrality of Christ. It’s one thing to profess to read the Scripture christologically or to agree with it in principle. But it’s quite another to actually practice it.
Many Christians read the Bible with modern or postmodern optics, then clip on “Christocentrism” sunglasses. But reading Scripture through a christological lens changes the way we see and approach the entire Bible, as well as how we regard and handle biblical doctrine.68 It also prevents us from making the common mistake of missing the drama for the details. Reading Scripture christologically turns Bible reading from two dimensions into 3-D. It transforms it from black-and-white into high-definition Technicolor. We are confident that as you read this book, you will better understand what we mean.
TOWARD A TRUE RED-LETER BIBLE
Many Christians grew up reading red-letter editions of the Second Testament. Those are the Bibles wherein the words of Jesus are printed in red. Now imagine a First Testament where every reference, every prophecy, every shadow, every image, and every allusion to Christ appeared in red. If such a red-letter First Testament existed, it would glow in the dark. And if Jesus is YHWH,69 as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, N. T. Wright, Scot McKnight, Richard Bauckham, and others have argued, then it could light up a living room.70
As you read this book, we want you to remember the image of a red-letter Bible in which all the letters are red. The reason is because the story of Scripture is the story of Jesus. All of it, therefore, should appear in red.71
In this connection, the Bible was written in a narrative arc that ends where it began. In other words, biblical logic defies logic. The Bible was written in a circle.
For the Western mind, this is hard to hear. As the old joke goes, two Christians were once talking about their pastors. The first one bragged, “My pastor’s good at foreign languages—he uses Greek a lot.” The second one said, “My pastor’s good at geometry—he talks in circles a lot.” T
o say that someone “talks in circles” is not a compliment. Yet recent anthropological study and literary scholarship have revealed that when the spoken word became the written word, when bards turned into scribes, the resulting texts were written in a lost art of symmetry and elegance that is now called “ring composition.”72 Not just the Hebrew Bible, but ancient literature in India, Homer’s narratives in Greece, as well as texts found in such disparate places as Egypt, China, Indonesia, and Russia, were written in nonlinear configurations where the chapters of the story are connected not sequentially but synoptically. It’s not a “story-line” but a “story-circle,” where the plot relates to what is across the circle from it, not what is before or after it.
The three main features of ring composition are (1) parallelism, (2) chiasmus, and (3) latch. We are most familiar with parallelism, where each section mirrors what is across the circle and is often marked by parallel alliteration and resonance. Chiasmus is the turning point, that place in the narrative arc when a climax of meaning drives a loop back, dividing the circle into halves and overlaying one half on top of the other. The latch is the journey home, back to where you started, that closes the circle, not so much with a conclusion, as with an arrival home, but at a higher level of integration and increased awareness that is transformative and enchanting.
When humans started writing, why did they write in rings? Because that’s how the brain is hardwired. The brain works through symmetry, balanced proportions, corresponding repetition, and parallelisms, just like ring composition. Furthermore, ring compositions are shaped not like straight lines or sine curves but like a torus (think spiral donut), the universal form of self-organizing, self-regulating, self-organizing systems. One more thing: our ancestors wrote stories as the universe moved, not in linear progression but in circles. A story that doesn’t build step-by-step, chapter by chapter, book by book, but reaches a climax by syntactical rules that form relationships between parallel rungs of the text, appears odd to people used to linear storytelling.
Ring composition forces one to slow down and pay attention to the details while never losing sight of the whole. It is natural, then, that the most relational book ever written should be written in this relational and beautiful symmetry. And our theography will attempt to draw attention to those rings.
THREE KEY POINTS
In closing, we want to leave you with three key points about this book.
First, this book is primarily written for a Christian audience. Thus, when we use the words “we” and “us,” we are referring either to ourselves (the authors) or to all followers of Jesus—what the Second Testament calls disciples of Jesus—those who trust in and share in the life of Christ.
There is a sign as you enter the Louvre Museum: “You do not judge the paintings; they judge you.” Part of the difference between a biography and a theography is that you move away from a critical stance and reposition yourself to be critiqued by the truthfulness and authority of the entire biblical canon. This repositioning also involves trusting the historical authenticity of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Gospels, the Epistles, and Revelation as they present the story of Jesus.73
“All Scripture is given by inspiration of God” (or more poetically, “God-breathed”74) is the famous phrasing of 2 Timothy 3:16. This mixture of terms is not found in any previously composed biblical text. Paul coined a new term to convey how important it is to comprehend the authoritative nature of all the Hebrew Scriptures and to contend that they all interpret and illumine the gospel of Jesus Christ.75
Consequently, the Bible is an organic, living document. As with every living organism, everything is connected to everything else. You can start anywhere and get everywhere. Each verse is a doorway or dormer that can lead into other venues that have their own portals into God’s presence. The whole Bible is a beautiful, intricately woven tapestry—or in digital terms, a measureless interconnected network—where unexpected similarities, surprising parallels, and profound paradoxes can be found. It was this kind of intimacy with the Bible that Jesus the Jew manifested in almost everything that proceeded out of His mouth.
When we interpret Scripture, we are not simply interpreting documents as dead objects, as we would analyze the rings in tree stumps. We are engaged in a transaction with a divine book that was coauthored by humans and a divine person who still lives and speaks. Interpreting Scripture, then, is not simply a scientific, secular enterprise. It requires spiritual insight. It mandates a divine imagination. For this reason Paul argued that the “natural man” cannot comprehend the things of the Spirit.76
Jesus is the Logos.77 He is the Word, or the self-utterance, of God. So when God speaks, it is Christ who is being spoken about. When God breathes, it is Christ who is being imparted. The Spirit is God’s breath (the words “Spirit” and “breath” are the same in both Hebrew and Greek). The Second Testament tells us clearly that the Holy Spirit’s job is to reveal, magnify, and glorify Christ. Thus, because the Bible is inspired, it all speaks of Jesus.
Again, Jesus Christ is the subject of all Scripture. He is the main character of the story. The plot revolves around Him, and the images of Christ are what make the story sing the song of truth. The real and total meaning of Scripture, therefore, is found in Jesus Christ—His person, His mission, and His work. He is the fulfillment of the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings.
Regardless of whether you prefer to view the Second Testament references to Christ as allusions, applications, types, signs, allegories, shadows, figures, extended meanings,78 or the literal meaning of the text, Jesus Christ is the focus of the entire Bible—both First and Second Testaments. This point will become obvious as we move forward in telling the Jesus story.
Second, when we get to chapter 4, we will begin recounting the story of Jesus from His birth in Bethlehem until His second coming. The chronology we will follow is found in Robert Mounce’s classic Jesus, In His Own Words—a chronological blending of the four Gospels.79 We have been amazed at how many problematic passages in the Gospels suddenly become clear when read in chronological sequence.80
As we recount Jesus’ life on earth, we will be weaving into it references, images, prophecies, and events from the First Testament to show the unity of Scripture as it concerns Jesus. We hope this effort will bring the First Testament alive for you in fresh ways. Our purpose is to connect the dots of the First Testament to the Second, highlighting the Bible’s unified storyline. Among other things, you will discover that the entire story of Israel in the First Testament repeats itself in the life of Christ in the Second Testament. And it does so in almost every detail.81 In this regard, Jesus not only fulfills the First Testament narrative but also reenacts, relives, and replays it. This is one of the most fascinating aspects of the Bible.
At times we will quote the authors of the Second Testament in their use of the First Testament to shed light on the Jesus story. Other times we will simply make references to the First Testament without any such quotations. The reason for this is that not all references and allusions to Jesus in the First Testament are mentioned in the Second Testament. To quote Edmund Clowney (former president of Westminster Theological Seminary), “To conclude that we can never see a type where the New Testament does not identify it is to confess hermeneutical bankruptcy.”82 Yet by following the same line of interpretation that the First Testament authors consistently used in their reading of the Hebrew Scriptures, we can discover Jesus Christ afresh all throughout the Bible.
Note that if we unveiled all the references, allusions, prophecies, and foreshadowings of Jesus present in the First Testament, this book would be thousands of pages.83 We are forced to be highly selective in which ones we choose to highlight. Nonetheless, we hope you will pick up the pattern of interpretation we are using so that you may take it from here and find Jesus throughout the rest of the First Testament yourself.
In a world and a church that has lost the plot of the story and the cantus firmus of the music, we need to reclaim the Bibl
e as a whole narrative telling one fluid, coherent story—the Jesus story. After all, the origin of the word gospel is Godspell, or the “story of God.”
Third, we are not writing this book for scholars but for the general Christian population. At the same time, we have provided endnotes for the benefit of scholars, academicians, and curious minds who wish to see the sources that have influenced some of our conclusions and to delve deeper into them.
One of our favorite metaphors for reframing how people see the Bible is to approach it as a movie.84 But not any simple, straightforward movie—one filled with flashbacks, interweaving relationships and plotlines, metaphors and narratives, multiple voices, and circles of meaning, an organic and rich symmetry of dynamic signs, a story that reveals the truth of Jesus Christ in freshness, surround sound, and living color. As with any great story, there are characters, sequence, conflict, climax, and resolution. Unlike any other story, however, this is a never-ending story. This story invites you to become part of it with its main character, who wants to merge His story with yours.
So sit back, relax, and enjoy the story. Stay in your seat. Sit at its feet. Don’t try to figure everything out or get everything right. Just let the story unfold. Let the Bible tell its own story to you. Trust the Jesus story as it moves from Genesis to Revelation. And see if the Holy Spirit doesn’t open your eyes to see the greatness of Christ anew and afresh.
May your heart burn within you while reading it as it has ours while writing it.
—Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola
CHAPTER 1
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Christ Before Time
Jesus Page 2