17. Chapter 3: The Message of the Cross in the Old Testament
The Message of the Cross in the Old Testament
Chapter 3
There seems to be today a disposition on the part of many to emphasize the New Testament to the neglect of the Old Testament, and almost to cut out the Old Testament as having no practical bearing on the life of the present. In the British Navy every rope has in it a red cord, and let that rope be cut as it may be, and be found where it may be, the little red cord proclaims it to be the property of the British Navy. God has a scarlet thread that runs from Genesis to Revelation uniting those sixty-six books in one perfect whole and preventing any separation between the Old and the New Testaments, and that thread is the sacrifice of His Son on the tree.
Take anyone of those sixty-six books and you will not fail to find the message of the cross, and that scarlet thread not only proves the divine authority of the book, but it shows the necessity for these two books, these two testaments for the elucidation and the interpretation the one of the other. The more you read the Bible the more you will see that the great central truth of it is Calvary. It is the foundation of God’s plan for the redemption of the universe. It is the ground of all God’s purpose with His Church. It is the cause of all God’s blessings to mankind. As an illustration of the message of the cross in the Old Testament, I confine myself to the writings of Moses, and we shall find in the Pentateuch the story of the cross in embryo. All that the death of the Lord Jesus Christ means, and that takes in practically the whole teaching of the New Testament, is foreshadowed in these first five books of the Bible. Of course there is a gradual unfolding of the meaning and power of the death of Christ through History, the Psalms, and Prophecy until He appears who is crucified for our sins. Paul carries the revelation a step further and shows us inEphesians 1:10that the headship of the Lord Jesus Christ over the universe is the deliberate purpose of God, and in Colossians 1:20that Christ on the cross is the point of reconciliation between God and those who have been separated from Him by sin; and so the revelation is carried on until finally, in Revelation 22:2we see the family of the man who in the dawn of the world’s history was driven from the garden gathered again around the tree of life, and the leaves of it are for the healing of the nations. In the Pentateuch we have the cross in germ. It was the thought in God’s mind before the foundations of the world were laid, in order to answer the challenge of Satan and to meet the urgent need of His creatures for redemption; therefore the cross and what it stands for is an Old Testament as well as a New Testament doctrine, and you cannot read the roll-call of the heroes of the Christian faith in Hebrews 11 without seeing that it was the power of the crossto be, the power of the Lamb to come, which made them what they were, giants of faith and giants of patience.