We are told in the New Testament of all the prophecies which Christ fulfilled, and pastors rightly teach us God’s revelation in the Old Testament with the understanding that Christ fulfills the covenant made with Abraham and at Sinai.

However we need not play time gymnastics reading Jesus into the Old Testament, nor is it necessary to see in every Old Testament passage a cryptic reference to Jesus or the New Covenant. Rather According to Ephesians 1 and Colossians 1 Christ is God’s plan for the fulness of time to unite all things in himself through the cross.

Taking these passages in conjunction with John 1 where we are explained that the essence of Christ is God’s creating and communicative Word even before he took on flesh as the man Jesus, we see that there is not always a need to start at the cross and work back in time. Rather, wherever God’s Word is spoken, wherever we see God calling a people for himself and uniting them, wherever we see God creating or communicating, or forgiving, or interacting in any way with people, there is the Christ working to accomplish his plan for all time.

This is not to say that the cross loses any of its significance; it is the mystery of God’s plan! And it would be foolish to talk of shadows and pictures without teaching the reality that they look forward to. All these things are looking forward to the time when Jesus Christ will die and be raised, but the plan and the working out of it is always there in all time. Jesus Christ the Word is indeed all we know of God, and all that has ever been known of God.

What I propose is not that we somehow are trying to force Christ into passages where he is not, but rather that to approach Old Testament passages with the aim of finding the person of Jesus or reference to sacraments or other particular New Testament themes is to have to narrow an understanding of Jesus in not first recognizing the timeless and eternal plan of God begun in creation and continuing in all eternity to have a relationship with his people–all people–through his personal Word.