Christ in the Old Testament

The New Testament writers did not invent the idea that the Hebrew Scriptures pointed to a coming redeemer. They inherited it. Jesus himself, according to Luke, began with Moses and all the prophets and "expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself." The claim is breathtaking in scope: the entire Old Testament, across more than a thousand years of composition, contains a coherent thread pointing toward one figure.

What follows is not a collection of isolated proof texts, but a tracing of a cumulative pattern — following the major landmarks from Genesis to Malachi. The messianic expectation did not arrive fully formed. It grew through successive revelations: a seed, a nation, a tribe, a king, a priest, a servant, a son of man. Each stage added detail. Each narrowed the focus. And as the portrait develops, it does not simplify — it combines roles that are not easily reconciled: king and priest, sufferer and ruler, human and more than human.

The messianic thread begins not with a king or a nation, but with a curse — or rather, with a promise embedded in a curse. After the Fall, God addresses the serpent and speaks of enmity between two seeds: the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman. The woman's seed will crush the serpent's head; the serpent will bruise his heel.

This verse — traditionally called the Protoevangelium, the "first gospel" — is the earliest indication that God's response to the entry of sin and death into creation will take the form of a descendant of the woman who defeats the power of evil, though at cost to himself. The language is compressed and enigmatic, but the pattern it establishes — victory through suffering — will recur throughout the Old Testament and reach its fullest expression in the cross. Examine this claim →