He was never hiding. We just were not looking.

Most of us were taught to read the Old Testament as a collection of moral stories. David and Goliath taught us courage. Joseph taught us patience. Moses taught us leadership. We extracted the lesson, closed the book, and moved on.

We missed the point entirely.

The Old Testament is not a catalogue of heroes for you to imitate. It is a portrait of a Person you are meant to behold. Every story, every law, every sacrifice, every exile and return, is the canvas. Jesus is the painting.

He Said So Himself

After the resurrection, two disciples were walking to Emmaus, confused and heartbroken. A stranger joined them. And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, Luke records, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself (Luke 24:27).

Not some of the Scriptures. All of them.

Then in John 5:39, to the Pharisees who knew the text better than most of us ever will, Jesus said plainly: you search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness about me.

The men who memorized the Torah missed Jesus in it. That should frighten us into reading more carefully.

The Shadows Had a Shape

The Old Testament is full of what theologians call types. Not metaphors loosely applied. Deliberate patterns, laid into the text by the same God who would one day fulfil them in flesh.

Abraham raises the knife over Isaac on Mount Moriah, and God provides a substitute. Centuries later, on that same mountain range, God does not stop the knife. He provides Himself.

The Passover lamb is slaughtered and its blood is painted on the doorposts so that death passes over. John the Baptist sees Jesus coming and does not say here is a good teacher. He says behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). The lamb had always been a preview.

The tabernacle, with all its elaborate detail, every curtain and basin and altar, was not an ancient architectural project. It was a picture of how a holy God dwells among an unholy people. Jesus said destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up (John 2:19). He was the tabernacle. He was the meeting place.

A.W. Pink spent years mining this in Gleanings in Genesis and across his writings on typology. His conclusion was consistent: the Old Testament scriptures are not merely predictive, they are participatory. They do not just point to Christ. They participate in revealing Him.

The Law Was Never the Solution

This is where reformed theology steadies you.

The Law was not given so Israel could achieve righteousness. Paul makes this devastatingly clear in Galatians, a book you know well. The Law was given as a tutor, a guardian to lead us to Christ (Galatians 3:24). Every sacrifice in Leviticus was not achieving atonement. It was announcing that atonement was needed and that something greater was coming. The blood of bulls and goats, Hebrews tells us plainly, can never take away sins (Hebrews 10:4).

They were not the answer. They were the ache.

Every priest who ever stood before the altar and offered blood was doing so with the quiet confession embedded in the act: this is not enough. This has to be repeated. The debt is real and we cannot pay it.

Until one priest, who was also the offering, said it is finished.

What This Does to How You Read

When you open Exodus, ask not what Moses can teach you about leadership. Ask what Moses reveals about the One who is greater than Moses, the One who leads His people not out of Egypt but out of death itself.

When you read the Psalms and David cries out My God, my God, why have you forsaken me (Psalm 22:1), do not only hear a man in distress. Hear the preview of a cry from a cross, in a darkness no one expected, where the Son of God bore the full weight of what David could only gesture toward.

John Stott, in The Cross of Christ, argues that the entire sacrificial system of the Old Testament was God's way of educating His people over centuries in the seriousness of sin and the necessity of substitution, so that when the cross came, those with eyes to see would understand what they were looking at.

The cross did not arrive without introduction. God spent fifteen hundred years preparing His people to recognise it.

Come Back to the Old Testament

Read it again. Read it slowly. Read it asking the question that Jesus himself taught us to ask: where is He in this?

He is in the water that Moses strikes from the rock. He is in the bronze serpent lifted in the wilderness. He is in the kinsman-redeemer named Boaz who restores what was lost to a foreign woman with no claim on his kindness. He is in the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 who is wounded for transgressions that are not his own.

He was never absent. He was never hidden.

We were just reading the wrong story.