It is remarkable that Christ and the Scriptures should have the same title given to them—“THE WORD OF GOD.” Christ—the living Word—is the one Person, and the Scriptures—the written Word—the one Book that men can, and do, attack, for Christ gives body and substance to the Book, and the Book presents Christ in type and shadow, in actual life down here, and as the Revealer of the Father, and the Giver of the Holy Ghost, and fallen man hates Christ because he hates God.
Christ, the great Theme of Scripture, can be traced in the Word of God in several ways, in connection with its several parts.
The figures of Christ are seen in the Pentateuch.
The feelings of Christ are portrayed in the Psalms.
The foretellings concerning Christ are given us in the Prophets.
The facts concerning Christ—His life, death, resurrection and ascension—are narrated in the Gospels.
The fruits of Christ, of His work and His teaching, are unfolded in the Epistles.
The fear of Christ, “the terror of the Lord,” in all its detail, ending with the great white throne, solemnizes us in the Revelation.
When the believer sees Christ portrayed in one form or another from Genesis to Revelation he finds the Bible, though composed of sixty-six books—sixty-six units—one harmonious majestic unity.
1. The FIGURES of Christ are seen in the Pentateuch.
Adam “is the figure of Him [Christ] that was to come” (Rom. 5:14).
Adam falling into a deep sleep and Eve builded of his rib is a figure of the death of Christ, and the result of it—His church, His bride: “We are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones. … This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:30,32).
The triumph of Christ over Satan is contained in germ in the words addressed by the Lord God to the serpent, when he had wrought the destruction of the fall: “It [the woman’s seed] shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise His [that is, the woman’s seed, Christ] heel” (Gen. 3:15).
Abel’s offering typified Christ: “By faith Abel offered to God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous” (Heb. 11:4). We know that righteousness can alone come through Christ, so that it is plain what Abel’s offering typified.
Noah’s ark and the waters of the flood typified baptism, as 1 Peter 3:20-21, plainly shows, and we know from Romans 6:3 we are baptized to Jesus Christ, to His death. Christ gives substance and colour to everything connected with man’s blessing.
Melchisedec was a type of Christ as plainly set forth in Hebrews.
Isaac was a type of Christ when he was offered up in intention, if not in fact, on Mount Moriah. No wonder Abraham lifted up his eyes of faith, and looking down the centuries, with prophetic intuition, called the place, “Jehovah-jireh, i.e. the Lord will provide,” and that Christ, the blessed Provision of God, could say to the scoffing scribes and Pharisees, “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day: and he saw it, and was glad” (John 8:56).
Joseph was a type of Christ. He was hated by his brethren. So was Christ. He was loved by his father. So was Christ. He was sold for twenty pieces of silver. Christ was sold for thirty pieces of silver. He went typically into death and resurrection, that is, prison and promotion, and became the one whom Pharaoh called Zaphnath-paaneah, that is, the Saviour of the World. This is what Christ will be in the day of His power and manifestation.
In Exodus we read of the passover. So we read, “Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us” (1 Cor. 5:7).
As to Leviticus, the book of Hebrews sustains the thought in a very precious way how Christ is intended to be ministered in all the typical persons and rites therein brought before us.
Moses was the Apostle of God. Aaron was the High Priest. Hebrews bids us “consider the Apostle and High Priest of our profession” (chap. 3:1). As has been said the Apostle brings God to men. The High Priest brings man to God. The Apostle brings out the calling of God at its height. The High Priest seeks to maintain the believer at the height of his calling.
And yet the Substance must ever be beyond the shadow. No shadow can fully portray the Substance.
So Moses was a servant over God’s house. Christ is a Son over His own house.
Aaron and his successors “were not suffered to continue by reason of death.” “But this Man, because He continues ever, has an unchangeable priesthood” (Heb. 7:24).
So with the offerings—the burnt-offering, the sin-offering, the peace-offering, etc. etc., all portray Christ in His atoning work in different aspects, whilst the meat-offering sets forth His devoted life. So with the tabernacle in the wilderness, the ark, the mercy-seat, the candlestick, the altar of incense, the brazen altar, the curtains of the tabernacle, etc. etc., all set forth Christ in His work and character in a very blessed way.
We can re-echo the inspired words: “And what shall I more say? for the time would fail to tell” of the thousand ways in which the Scriptures tell of Christ. We can only in the barest way skim the surface of this wondrous theme.
2. The FEELINGS of Christ are portrayed in the Psalms
It is not a little interesting that Peter tells us the prophets of old were inspired “by the Spirit of Christ which was in them when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow” (1 Peter 1:11).
How touching it is to trace all the inspired prophecies throughout the Old Testament as those of the Spirit of Christ. As if Christ’s Spirit—the Holy Spirit’s—mind were filled with the apprehension of that great event to which eternity and time moved on with solemn step, which was the theme of conversation on the Holy Mount, and shall be the song of the redeemed for eternal ages.
See it bursting forth in the very opening of Psalm 22. There is no preface, no explanation. From the heart of the Spirit, if we may so speak, the bitter cry, written down by David, to be heard in reality from the lips of great David’s greater Son on the cross of Calvary, is placed on record: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me” (v. 1). Oh! the strength of this apprehension when these words are penned fully one thousand years—ten slow, stately centuries—a millennium—before they were actually uttered in all the fathomless depths of their meaning. So throughout the Psalms again and again the feelings of Christ can be seen in all their delicate tracery. Again, time would fail me to prolong the theme.
3. The FORETELLINGS* concerning Christ are given us in the Prophets
Does not Isaiah, the royal Prophet, the evangelical prophet, come instantly to our mind? Take chapter 7:14; “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and thou shalt call His name Immanuel.” How Matthew, the royal Evangelist, strikes the corresponding note in Matthew 1:22, when he says: “Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold, a virgin shall be with child and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call His name Immanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.” And who but Christ could answer the majestic names to be given to the child born, the son given—“Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father (lit. the Father of Eternity), the Prince of Peace.” What but prophetic inspiration could dare to ascribe such names to a child. Yet when we bow before the inscrutable mystery of the person of Him, who is God and man, yet one Person, as brought before us in the Gospels, we can understand the absolute fitness of the names. Then chapter 53. What need to dilate upon that loved and well-known chapter, which portrays so touchingly the way in which Christ would be treated by man, who hated God, for He revealed God; and by God who loved man, and sought his blessing, even through the atoning death of His well-beloved Son? No wonder when the Ethiopian eunuch read that passage, and asked Philip, “I pray thee, of whom speaks the prophet thus? of himself, or of some other man?” that “Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same scripture, and preached to him JESUS” (Acts 8:35). No wonder!
{*Of course, we do not mean exclusively, but this is characteristic of the prophets.}
Time would fail us to speak of Jeremiah, who could ask in plaintive prophecy, “Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like to my sorrow” (Lam. 1:12); or of Ezekiel, who could write, “I will set up one Shepherd over them, and He shall feed them, even my servant David” (Ezek. 34:23), clearly referring to Christ, for David, the King of Israel, had been dead over four centuries when Ezekiel wrote these words; or of Daniel, who served God from his teens to very old age, who could write, “And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for Himself” (Dan. 9:26), or in glowing prophetic language could outline the coming power and glory of Christ in this world, when he told Nebuchadnezzar, “Forasmuch as thou sawest that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it brake in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold; the great God has made known to the King what shall come to pass hereafter” (chap. 2:45) or of Hosea’s tender prophecy concerning Christ and Israel: “It shall be at that day, says the Lord, that thou shalt call me Ishi [my Husband]; and shalt call Me no more Baali [my Lord]” (Hosea 2:16); or of Micah, who could write: “But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thou- sands of Judah, yet out of thee shall He comeforth to Me that is to be Ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting” (chap. 5:2), thus indicating seven centuries before the birth of Christ where His birthplace would be, and yet affirming His present existence, which the prophet wrote as beginning from everlasting, even His deity; or of Zechariah, who could write: “And I took the thirty pieces of silver, and cast them to the potter in the house of the Lord” (chap. 11:13), fulfilled as we see Judas casting the thirty pieces of silver, awful price of his treachery, at the feet of the chief priests and elders in the temple, and their taking counsel, and buying with the price of blood the potter’s field. (See Matt. 27:3-8.)
Time fails for anything further than, as it were, to pick a pebble here and a pebble there upon the shingly strand as it stretches illimitably before our vision.
4. The FACTS concerning Christ are narrated in the Gospels
What need to say a word here? What need to bring a candle to help to illuminate the light of the midday sun? The lovely life, the wondrous death, the resurrection, the ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ—all crowd before our minds in ten thousand precious and lovely details.
What can we do, when even the beloved John, closing, as it is supposed, the canon of Scripture*, dipped his pen into the ink for the last time, and wrote: “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written” (John 21:25).
{*It is generally accepted that the Gospel of John was the last book of Scripture to be written.}
But even were the whole world an inadequate library to contain the record of the life of Christ, what wealth of detail, what exquisite touches, what fathomless depths, what unmeasured heights, are compressed within John’s twenty-one chapters alone.
5. The FRUITS of Christ, of His work and His teaching, are unfolded in the Epistles
Is the believer baptized to the death of Christ as in Romans 6:3? it is that “like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even we should also walk in newness of life” (v. 4).
Are we “dead with Christ? We believe that we shall also live with Him” (v. 8).
Have we “become dead to the law by the body of Christ”? it is that we “should be married to another [lit. be for another], even to Him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit to God” (chap. 7:4).
Are we to seek to please our neighbours to edification? it is because “even Christ pleased not Himself” (chap. 15:3).
6. The FEAR of Christ, “THE TERROR OP THE LORD,” solemnizes us in the Revelation
At this juncture in the world’s history, when Christendom has become so largely apostate, soon, alas! to be absolutely so; when the Jews are flocking back to their own land in unbelief; when the political happenings on the Continent seem to adumbrate in the near future the revival of the Roman Empire, the attention of Christians is directed to this book in a very remarkable way. Here we see judgment after judgment rolling over this world in prophetic vision—seals, trumpets, vials, the judgment of Babylon, etc., and through it all we see Christ.
No wonder John, who had sweetly pillowed his weary head on His breast in the days of His gracious sojourn upon earth, should fall at His feet as dead when He beheld Him walking in judgment amid the seven golden candlesticks.
Later, when judgment on the world, on Israel and the Gentiles, is to be carried out, who is sufficient? How majestic it sounds: “Behold, the lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof. And I beheld, and, to… a Lamb as it had been slain” (Rev. 5:5-6). Christ alone is sufficient. He will later judge the nations. He will reign through the glorious millennium. At his voice the heavens and the earth shall flee away. Before His throne—the “great white throne”—the last session of judgment shall be carried out.
How sweet when all this solemn sequence of judgment passes before us, with its thunderings and lightnings, its earthquakes and convulsions, to come to the marriage of the Lamb, and at the end of the book hear the presentations of Himself: “I Jesus have sent Mine angel to testify to you these things in the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the Bright and Morning Star” (chap. 22:16); and then the exquisite finish: “He which testifies these things says, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus” (v. 20).
Till that blissful moment, so near now, as we truly believe, “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen” (v. 21).
How true it is that Christ is the great Theme of the Scriptures. He cannot be hid from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22. May He become increasingly and adoringly precious to our hearts. Christ is ALL and in ALL.