Proclaimer Blog
Christ in the Old Testament (again)
It’s been really useful to have Richard Pratt with us this last week. His sense of humour is so dry he’s almost an honorary Brit! He gave us three excellent sessions on Joshua for which the video will be available shortly. There were, as you might expect, some insights along the way – not least some of the richness with which he encouraged us to think about how we preach Christ from the Old Testament.
I found his teaching helpful because as I think about Christ in the Old Testament, I tend to think functionally: themes, types, trajectories, texts and so on. That’s a valid approach. But Richard’s reminder was that there are temporal ways to think about Christ in the Old Testament too.
The Old Testament, he argued, anticipates Christ in three ‘eras’ (though that is my terminology not his). It looks forward to his inaugural work; his present work; and his future work.
In other words, Christ is foreshadowed in what he has already done, in what, by his Spirit, he is presently doing and in what he will one day do. These three time periods (done, doing, will do) are constantly in view in the Old Testament. You can’t do all of these lines all the time, but these different lines of development give you rich seams with which to preach Christ and what it means to be in him.