It is an unfortunate fact that the church today often gives the Old Testament second-rate status. This ought not be, and, to borrow a phrase, “from the beginning, it was not so.” First century Christians lived with the expectation of the fulfillment of Old Testament prophesies. Many of those prophesies, they knew, had already been fulfilled in Christ; others were yet to come. The Old Testament, they knew, was the story of the Christ.
That the Old Testament prophecies were ‘mysteries’ whose solution awaited their fulfilment in the New Testament age was axiomatic in the early church. Occasionally the word ‘mystery’ itself is used in this sense . . . ‘To you’, says Jesus to his disciples, ‘the mystery of the kingdom of God has been given, but to outsiders all these things come as riddles, so that they see without perceiving, and hear without understanding; other wise they would turn back and receive forgiveness’ (Mark 4:11f.).
In the Pauline writings one aspect of the gospel—the manner and purpose of its communication to the Gentile world—is treated as a ‘mystery . . . which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to Christ’s holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit’ (Eph. 3:4f.). That the Gentiles would place their hope on the Son of David and rejoice in the God of Israel was affirmed in the Old Testament, as Paul emphasizes in a series of quotations in Romans 15:9–12, but how this prospect would be realized and what its implications would be could not be appreciated until the Gentile mission was launched in the apostolic age.
The individual New Testament writers have their distinctive interpretive methods. Matthew records how this or that incident in the life of Jesus took place ‘in order that it might be fulfilled which was spoken through the prophet’ (Matt. 1:23, etc.). Paul sees the partial and temporary setting aside of Israel as clearly stated in the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms as he finds the ingathering of the Gentiles adumbrated there. The writer to the Hebrews sees the priestly and sacrificial order of Israel as an earthly ‘copy’ (ineffective in itself) of the heavenly reality which was perfected by the work of Christ. John the evangelist portrays Jesus as giving substance to a number of Old Testament motifs—the word, the glory, the tabernacle; the bread of life, the water of life, the light of life. In the Apocalypse may be seen what has been called ‘a rebirth of images’ from the Old Testament and other ancient lore, some of which might have been thought unadaptable to a Christian purpose, yet all pressed into service to depict the triumph of Christ. However differently the interpretative tradition is developed by those writers, the core of the tradition is common to all: Jesus is the central subject of the Old Testament revelation; it is to him that witness is borne throughout.
—F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (InterVarsity Press, 1988), 59–60.
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