JORDAN QUINLEY
Redeemer Catechism Series, Question 3
Having just affirmed that only the Bible “tells us all we need to know about God”, the Redeemer Catechism then asks what the Bible is all about. As we shall see, the answer is more specific than just teaching us about God and what duty God requires of us. The answer, it turns out, is a person.
Q3: What is the central theme of the whole Bible?
A3: The central theme of the whole Bible is Jesus Christ and God’s gracious salvation through Him and for His glory.
It should be obvious that the New Testament is about Jesus Christ and all He has done. What about the rest of the Bible? We may never read the name “Jesus Christ” in the Old Testament, which constitutes about three quarters of the Scriptures, but our Lord said that the Bible was all about Him. In one instance after his resurrection, He appeared among his disciples and said to them, “This is what I told you when I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms” (Luke 24:44). The record of this immediately follows the account of Jesus’ appearance on the Emmaus road following his death and resurrection. Here, he met two downcast disciples, and, “beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). There are more such instances too, but these will suffice.
Jesus’ claim to be the main subject of the Old Testament is fleshed out for us in the writings of the New Testament. For instance, often in Matthew, the word “fulfill” is used to speak of Jesus fulfilling some prophetic element foretold in the Old Testament. But these fulfillments are not always what we would expect. They permeate and infuse the Old Testament more pervasively than we often realize, and would not always have been clear to the original readers of those texts. Indeed, the foreshadowing may not always have been clear to the human authors of those texts, either! One classic example is Matthew’s application of Hosea 11:1 to Christ, calling Jesus’ return from Egypt a “fulfillment” of this Old Testament text that declares, “Out of Egypt I called my son.” But the verse in its original context is solely about the nation of Israel.
Another example is Paul seeing the rock, which by being smitten produced life-giving water, as a prefigurement of Christ in 1 Corinthians 10:4. Writing under inspiration of God’s Spirit, Matthew and Paul are not engaging in faulty exegesis. Rather, they see a deeper meaning, a fuller sense, to texts like these, since, as we learned from Jesus on the Emmaus road, “all the Scriptures” concern him.
“Fulfillment” of Old Testament types in the person of Jesus are, then, not always strict prophecies as we think of them (something was foretold, then it happened). There are typological and even allegorical fulfillments as well (e.g. Gal. 4:21–31).
Space does not allow me to provide an in-depth survey of all the ways in which the Old Testament was about Jesus. Christians, reading the Bible in light of the revelation given in Christ and the New Testament understand that a large variety of persons, events, institutions, and rituals in the Old Testament were pointing to Christ in one way or another. C. H. Spurgeon once preached:
Take away Christ for one moment, and I will give the Old Testament to any wise man living, and say to him, “Take this; this is a problem; go home and construct in your imagination an ideal character who shall exactly fit all that which is herein foreshadowed ; remember, he must be a prophet like unto Moses, and yet a champion like to Joshua; he must be an Aaron and a Melchisedek; he must be both David and Solomon, Noah and Jonah, Judah and Joseph. Nay, he must not only be the lamb that was slain, and the scape-goat that was not slain, the turtle-dove that was dipped in blood, and the priest who slew the bird, but he must be the altar, the tabernacle, the mercy-seat, and the shewbread.”
Our warrant for viewing the whole of Scripture as a revelation of Jesus Christ is affirmed not least by our Lord, who said to the Pharisees in John 5, “You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me,” but also on the authority of the Apostles. In Acts 17, Paul is found in the synagogue, reasoning from the Scriptures, explaining from them that Christ had to suffer and rise from the dead. How he reasons is spelled out more clearly for us in the epistles of the New Testament, where the Old Testament frequently is employed to “retroactively” illumine the work and nature of Jesus.
Finally, we can likewise say that the Bible is about God’s plan of salvation. But as that plan is brought about and executed only in and by the person of Christ, the two ideas are inextricably linked. Jesus is God’s plan of salvation. And all of this, from beginning to end, serves to magnify the Son of God. Because God has now “made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ” (Eph 1:9, 10) so we can look back on all God’s written revelation and see in it the intentional build-up to the manifestation of His gracious plan of salvation, which is effected through Christ, and glorifies Christ as the central figure in the whole scheme.
Resources for Further Study
I am indebted to Fred Zaspel’s series of articles on typology in Credo Magazine (https://credomag.com/2013/06/the-warrant-for-typological-interpretation-of-scripture-fred-zaspel/) and Mark Strauss’s article at The Bible Project (https://bibleproject.com/blog/gospel-of-matthew/) and a lecture by Andy Patton (https://darklingpsalter.substack.com/p/storyofjesus#details)
This article is the third in Jordan’s series explaining the questions and answers in the new covenant Redeemer Catechism which he has written.
- How Did God Create Humankind? - February 29, 2024
- What is God’s Work of Creation? - August 24, 2023
- What Are God’s Decrees and How Does He Carry Them Out? - June 22, 2023