The Things Concerning Himself: The Twelve, and the Whole

Scripture: Luke 24:13–49 (with Malachi 4:2 and John 1:14)

Before this final session, read Luke 24:13–49: the walk to Emmaus on the evening of the resurrection, where the risen Lord Jesus, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, interpreted to them the things written about himself in all the scriptures, and the burning hearts of the two who heard Him; and the upper room, where He opened the disciples’ minds so they could understand the scriptures, saying that everything written about Him in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled. Read it slowly, as the key that unlocks not only this volume but the whole series. Then, if you are able, look back over the road we have walked (the seed of the woman in Genesis, the prayers of Christ and His Church in the Psalms, the suffering Servant in Isaiah, and the chorus of the Twelve) and ask how the whole of the Old Testament has been, from first to last, the things concerning Himself.

Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things written about himself in all the scriptures.
(Luke 24:27)

The Stranger on the Road

On the evening of the first Easter, two disciples walked the road from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus, and their hearts were broken. They had hoped (But we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel), and the hope had died on a cross three days before. As they walked, talking over the ruin of everything, a stranger fell in beside them and asked what they were discussing; and they marveled that anyone could be so out of touch as not to know what had happened. They did not know that the stranger was the risen Lord Jesus Himself, for their eyes were kept from recognizing Him. And what He did next is the charter of this whole series. He did not first show them His hands and His feet; He did not first prove the resurrection by sight. He took them to the Scriptures. You foolish people … how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Wasn’t it necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and enter into his glory? Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things written about himself in all the scriptures (Luke 24:25–27). The older English Bibles put that last phrase the things concerning himself, and from those words this whole series takes its name; the NET keeps the very word a few verses earlier, on the disciples’ own lips, when they tell the stranger of the things concerning Jesus the Nazarene (24:19).

Notice the strangeness of their despair: these were not pagans ignorant of the Scriptures, but Jews who had the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms, who had heard them read in the synagogue all their lives. They had the very texts that spoke of a suffering Messiah, and still their hope had collapsed at the cross, because they had read those texts without seeing the One they concerned. We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel: they had wanted a Messiah of triumph, and a crucified Messiah seemed to them the death of the hope, when in truth it was its fulfillment. This is why the risen Lord calls them slow of heart to believe all that the prophets had spoken; they had believed the prophets’ words of glory and skipped the prophets’ words of suffering. It is possible to know the Scriptures and miss their subject entirely; the letter can be familiar while the Christ in it goes unseen. What the disciples needed was not new information but opened eyes, and that is what the risen Lord gives, then and now.

Think of what that walk must have been: the risen Lord Jesus, on the very day of His rising, walking a country road and opening the Old Testament to two heartbroken men, showing them Himself on page after page, in Moses and in the prophets, in all the Scriptures, the things concerning Himself. We are not told which texts He opened, and perhaps it is better so, for it means the whole of it was His subject, not a handful of proof-texts but the entire sweep. And the effect was unmistakable: Didn’t our hearts burn within us while he was speaking with us on the road, while he was explaining the scriptures to us? (24:32). This is the warrant for everything we have done across four volumes. We have not been imposing Christ on the Old Testament from outside; we have been doing, however haltingly, what the risen Lord Jesus Himself did on the Emmaus road: reading the Old Testament as what He said it is, the things concerning Himself. And we have learned, with the two disciples, that hearts burn when the Scriptures are opened to show forth Christ.

And there is a beautiful sequel to the walk. When they reached the village, the disciples urged the still-unrecognized Lord to stay; and as He took His place at their table and took the bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them, their eyes were opened and they recognized him. Then he vanished out of their sight (24:31). He was recognized, as they later told the others, when he broke the bread (24:35), in the very moment after He had opened the Scriptures to them on the road. The Church has long heard in this pattern an echo of her own life, and read canonically it fittingly directs us there: the Lord Jesus is made known to His people where the Scriptures are opened to show forth Christ and where, in His Supper, the bread is broken and He gives His own body and blood. In the Word and in the Sacrament, the two tables, the risen Lord still meets and feeds His own. The disciples ran back to Jerusalem that very hour, the seven dark miles undone by joy, and found the eleven already saying, The Lord has really risen (24:34). Hearts that had been cold and slow were set ablaze; and the fire was kindled by the opening of the Scriptures concerning Himself.

The Chorus of the Twelve

Gather, first, what this last volume has shown us: the Christ of the Twelve, who are not twelve scattered pamphlets of doom but one scroll, one chorus, singing in twelve voices the one song of the coming Redeemer. Hosea showed us the LORD’s wounded, faithful hesed for a harlot bride, and the Son called out of Egypt, and the ransom from the power of the grave (Hosea 13:14, which the NET renders as a threatening question, but which the Hebrew also allows as promise, and which the apostle hears as the LORD’s triumph over death in Christ’s resurrection, 1 Corinthians 15:54–57). Joel showed us the Spirit poured out on all kinds of people, and everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will be delivered (Joel 2:32). Amos showed us the fallen booth of David raised again, and the Gentiles gathered in under it. Obadiah showed us that the LORD will reign as King (Obadiah 21); and Jonah, swallowed and delivered alive on the third day, gave the very sign the Lord Jesus claimed for His own death and rising, and showed God’s mercy reaching the Gentile city.

It is worth pausing to say plainly what this volume has tried to prove: that the Twelve are called minor only for their brevity, never for any smallness in their witness to Christ. They have been the neglected corner of the Old Testament, mined for an isolated verse here and there, or taught as a grim catalog of judgment, or quarried by the end-times systems for charts and timetables, and so their gospel has gone largely unheard. But set them end to end, as we have done, and they are a sustained and glorious testimony to the coming Redeemer, as full of Christ as any part of Scripture. The shortest of them is not thin in Christ; Obadiah’s single chapter ends with the LORD reigning as King, and Haggai’s few pages hold the shaking of the nations, their treasures brought in, and the future splendor of the temple. The brevity is only of length. In Christ there is nothing minor about the Minor Prophets; they are a chorus no smaller in its song than the great prophets beside them.

Micah showed us Bethlehem Ephrathah, and the King whose origins are in the distant past (Micah 5:2). The Hebrew is literally from days of old, even from days of eternity; its range reaches back to the ancient past and can reach farther still, and the New Testament confesses plainly what those words point toward: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was fully God (John 1:1); before Abraham came into existence, I am! (John 8:58). And Micah showed us the God who forgives sin and will hurl our sins into the depths of the sea (7:19). Nahum showed us the herald running on the mountains with news of deliverance. Habakkuk gave us the verse of the Reformation: the person of integrity will live because of his faithfulness (Habakkuk 2:4). The Hebrew word there, ’emunah, is steadfast reliance, the faith that holds on to the promise; and the apostle, citing it, makes it the charter of justification: The righteous by faith will live (Romans 1:17). Such faith earns nothing by its fidelity; it receives the righteousness God gives and reckons to the sinner for Christ’s sake. Zephaniah showed us the LORD in the midst of His redeemed, rejoicing over them with singing: he shouts for joy over you (Zephaniah 3:17). Haggai showed us the nations shaken and bringing their treasures, and the LORD filling His house with glory (Haggai 2:7), a glory the Lord Jesus brought when He came to that temple in person. Zechariah, the most Christological of the Twelve, showed us the Branch, signified by the royal crown set on the high priest’s head, King and Priest in one (Zechariah 6:11–13); the humble King riding on a donkey; the thirty pieces of silver weighed out and thrown to the potter; the pierced One they would look to and mourn; and the stricken Shepherd whose sheep were scattered. And Malachi, last of all, showed us the messenger of the covenant suddenly coming to His temple, and the sun of righteousness rising with healing wings. Twelve voices; one song; the things concerning Himself.

The Day on Two Horizons

And one great theme bound the twelve voices together from beginning to end: the day of the LORD. It sounded through nearly every one of them, and it was always double-edged: terror for the impenitent and salvation for the remnant, the day burning like a furnace and the dawn of the sun with healing wings, the same coming that is darkness to one and light to another. The prophets saw that Day on more than one horizon. There was a near horizon, the historical judgments that fell in their own centuries (the Assyrian flood, the Babylonian exile, the fall of Nineveh), each of them a small day of the LORD, a foreshadowing in history of the great Day to come.

There is both comfort and urgency in living between the two horizons of the Day. The comfort is that the delay of the final Day is not the absence of God but the patience of God; the long interval in which we live is the year of the Lord’s favor, the open season of mercy, in which the fountain still stands unstopped and the Sun still shines with healing for any who will come. Every day the great Day tarries is another day the door of grace stands open. But there is urgency in it too, for the same Day that dawns as healing will at the last burn like a furnace, and the interval will not last forever. The prophets never let the comfort dull the urgency: now, while it is still the year of the Lord’s favor, while the Sun is still risen in mercy and the Day has not yet broken in judgment, is the time to turn, to look to the Pierced One, to wash in the open fountain. The patience of God is real, but it is not endless; the Day is coming, and the wise flee now to the One in whom that Day is healing and not fire.

And there was a far horizon, the final Day, the consummation, and that Day, the prophets could not have fully known, would itself break in two. For the day of the LORD is fulfilled in the two comings of Christ. He came the first time in mercy, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:19), the Sun rising with healing, gathering His remnant, bearing the curse, opening the fountain for sin; and He will come the second time in judgment, in the day of vengeance, when the arrogant will be chaff and the Day will burn like a furnace. We live now in the strange and gracious interval between the two horizons of that one Day: after the dawn of mercy and before the noon of judgment, in the long year of the Lord’s favor in which the fountain still stands open and the Sun still shines with healing. The day of the LORD that thundered through the Twelve is the day of the Lord Jesus, already dawned and not yet fully come.

The Seed of the Woman

But this volume is not only the close of the Twelve; it is the close of the whole series, and so we lift our eyes now from the Twelve to the whole Old Testament we have walked these four volumes. Go back to the very beginning, to Genesis, the book of first promises, where every later seed was first planted. There, in the hour of the first sin, before a single sacrifice had been offered or a single law given, God spoke the first gospel into the dark: her offspring will attack your head, and you will attack her offspring’s heel (Genesis 3:15). The NET says offspring; the older word is seed, and Paul makes much of its singular when he shows that the promised Seed is one, Christ (Galatians 3:16). The whole of Scripture is the slow unfolding of that one promise: the long search for the woman’s seed who would undo the ruin of the garden, and the wound He would take in the undoing.

That first promise in the garden is rightly called the protoevangelium, the first gospel, and it repays a long look, for it sets the pattern of everything that follows. God speaks it not to the man and the woman directly but to the serpent, as a sentence of doom upon the tempter: that the woman’s seed would strike his head. In the very hour of the catastrophe, before the guilty pair are even sent from the garden, God plants a promise of rescue: that from the woman would come One who would undo what had just been done, and break the head of the enemy who had ruined them. And the promise is shadowed already with its cost: the serpent would strike the heel of the woman’s seed even as that seed struck his head. The same Hebrew verb stands in both halves of the sentence, but a blow to the head is fatal, and a blow to the heel is not. Here, in germ, is the whole gospel: a Deliverer born of the woman, a mortal wound dealt to the enemy, and a wounding suffered in the dealing of it, the crushed head and the wounded heel, the victory and the cross, foretold in a single sentence at the dawn of human history.

And the seeds multiply through Genesis. The promise that in Abraham’s seed all the families of the earth would be blessed: a promise the apostle says was proclaimed as the gospel in advance, and fulfilled in the one Seed, Christ. The scepter that would not depart from Judah until he comes to whom it belongs (Genesis 49:10). The only son carried up Mount Moriah and laid on the wood, and the ram caught in the thicket, the substitute God provided in the son’s place. Joseph, sold by his brothers for silver, cast into a pit, and raised to a throne from which he saved the very brothers who had betrayed him, saying, As for you, you meant to harm me, but God intended it for a good purpose (Genesis 50:20). Even Melchizedek, the priest-king of Salem who blessed Abraham, was a shadow of the Priest-King to come. Genesis sowed the seeds; the rest of the Scriptures are the harvest; and the Seed of the woman, promised in the garden, is the Lord Jesus.

And from that first seed the line is traced, with deliberate care, all through Genesis. The seed runs through Seth and not Cain, through Noah who found favor in the LORD’s sight, through Shem, through Abraham called out of Ur, through Isaac the child of promise and not Ishmael, through Jacob and not Esau, through Judah from whom the scepter would not depart. A scarlet thread of promise is drawn from the garden through the generations, narrowing steadily toward the One who would come; and at every link, grace chooses, grace preserves, grace carries the promise forward over every human failure. Genesis is the seedbed of the whole Bible, and almost every great theme the later Scriptures unfold (promise and covenant, election and substitution, the suffering and exalted deliverer, the gathering of the nations) is already there in seed. To read Genesis rightly is to watch the long story of redemption set in motion, and to see, from its very first pages, that it was always moving toward Him.

The Prayer Book of Christ

From Genesis we came, in the second volume, to the Psalms, and there we learned to call the Psalter the prayer book of Christ and His Church. The Psalms are not merely ancient Hebrew poetry. But we must say carefully in what sense they are His, for the Psalter is His in more than one way. Some psalms speak directly or prophetically of the suffering and exalted Messiah; in others David, or Israel, or the faithful remnant is the first speaker, praying out of real troubles in real history. Christ gathers all of them up: He identifies Himself with His people, He fulfills the Psalter, He prayed its words in the days of His flesh, and He prays in and through His body, the Church, still; and His Church prays the Psalms in Him. When He hung upon the cross, it was the twenty-second Psalm He cried: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Matthew 27:46), a psalm that goes on to describe, a thousand years before the event, the bones pulled out of joint, the parched mouth, the enemies closing in, the garments divided and the dice rolled for them, the staring crowd. (Where older translations read they pierced my hands and my feet in 22:16, the NET reads like a lion they pin my hands and feet; the standard Hebrew text has like a lion, while the ancient Greek translation and at least one Dead Sea manuscript read a verb meaning dug or pierced. Either way, the hands and feet of the forsaken one are in his enemies’ grip, and the Gospels show us whose hands and feet they were.) It was the sixteenth Psalm that promised that God would not abandon His faithful one to the grave, the resurrection sung in advance; Peter preached it at Pentecost as David’s prophecy of Christ’s rising: you will not leave my soul in Hades, nor permit your Holy One to experience decay (Acts 2:27; the NET renders the psalm’s own Hebrew to see the Pit, Psalm 16:10).

Luther loved the Psalter above almost any book, and called it a little Bible, in which the whole of Scripture is gathered up in short compass. And with the Church before him (Augustine had taught the Church to hear in the Psalms the voice of the whole Christ, Head and body), Luther heard Christ speaking in the Psalms: the praises and laments and longings of the Messiah, into which the Church is drawn to pray along with her Head. This is why some of the Psalms can say things too high and too deep for any mere man: when the psalmist speaks of being forsaken and then vindicated, of going down to the dust of death and not seeing decay, of a throne at God’s right hand, he is giving voice, by the Spirit, to the Christ who would one day fulfill these very words in His own flesh. Yet we must not flatten the Psalter’s many voices into one. The penitential psalms belong first to sinners, and we must not put them in Christ’s mouth as confessions of His own sin, for He had none. What He does with them is better: He who knew no sin was made sin for us, bore the very sins those psalms confess, and answers the penitent’s cry with His absolution. To pray the Psalter, then, is never to pray alone; it is to put our voices inside the prayer of Christ and His Church, and to find that He has already carried our sharpest griefs and sung our highest joys before us, and intercedes for us still as our great High Priest.

It was the hundred and tenth Psalm, the psalm the New Testament quotes and echoes more than any other, that seated Him at the LORD’s right hand and named Him an eternal priest after the pattern of Melchizedek (110:4). It was the second Psalm that called Him the Son (You are my son! This very day I have become your father!, 2:7), the King installed on Zion, God’s holy hill; and the hundred and eighteenth that named Him the stone which the builders discarded, which has become the cornerstone (118:22). The Psalms gave us the inner life of the Christ (His trust, His anguish, His thanksgiving, His triumph), the very heart of the Redeemer turned, as it were, inside out and set to music; and they gave the Church her own prayers, to be prayed in Him and with Him. To pray the Psalms is to pray with the Lord Jesus, in the words He made His own.

And this is an immense comfort in the life of prayer. There are seasons when the heart is too full or too broken to find its own words: when grief has struck us dumb, or guilt has stopped our mouths, or joy overflows beyond speech. The Psalter is God’s gift for exactly those seasons: a treasury of prayers He has put into our mouths, words for every condition of the soul, from the depths of From the deep water I cry out to you, O LORD (130:1) to the heights of Praise the LORD, O my soul! (103:1). And because these words were prayed by Christ, and are prayed in Christ, we never pray them as orphans. When we pray a psalm of lament, we are praying words the suffering Servant made His own; when we pray a psalm of trust, we lean on the trust He perfected; when we pray a psalm of confession, we bring our sin to the One who bore it. The believer who has no words of his own may borrow the words the Spirit gave to Christ’s Church, and find that in borrowing them he is praying with Christ, carried up to the Father in the name of the Son who is always heard.

The Servant Despised and Exalted

From the Psalms we came, in the third volume, to Isaiah, so full of Christ that it has long been called the fifth gospel. Isaiah saw the child who would be called Immanuel, God with us, as Matthew hears the promise: Look! The virgin will conceive and bear a son, and they will call him Emmanuel (Matthew 1:23). He saw the child born and the son given, who shoulders the responsibility of rule, whose names are Extraordinary Strategist (in the older translations, Wonderful, Counselor), Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6); he saw the shoot growing out of Jesse’s root stock, on whom the LORD’s Spirit would rest. And then, in those Servant Songs that are the summit of the Old Testament, Isaiah saw the suffering Servant: despised and rejected, one who experienced pain and was acquainted with illness, wounded because of our rebellious deeds and crushed because of our sins, on whom the LORD caused the sin of us all to fall, who willingly submitted to death and was numbered with the rebels, and lifted up the sin of many.

The fifty-third chapter of Isaiah is the high summit of the whole Old Testament, the place where the cross stands out most clearly seven centuries before it was raised. It is the gospel before the Gospels. The Servant had no stately form or majesty that might catch our attention; He was despised and rejected by people, one who experienced pain and was acquainted with illness; people hid their faces from Him. And then the heart of it, the great exchange laid bare: He was wounded because of our rebellious deeds, crushed because of our sins; he endured punishment that made us well; because of his wounds we have been healed (53:5). Mark the pronouns: our rebellious deeds, our sins, us made well, we healed. All of us had wandered off like sheep; each of us had strayed off on his own path, but the LORD caused the sin of all of us to attack him (53:6). The Hebrew verb means to make something strike or fall upon someone; the older translations said the LORD laid on him the iniquity of us all. There is the substitution, plain and unmistakable: our sin made to fall upon Him, His wounds our healing. Like a lamb led to the slaughtering block He did not even open His mouth; He was cut off from the land of the living, wounded because of the rebellion of His own people, and He lifted up the sin of many. No clearer preaching of the atoning cross exists anywhere in the Old Testament.

No prophet drew the cross so clearly seven centuries before it stood. And yet Isaiah held the suffering and the glory together, for the same Servant who was led like a lamb to the slaughtering block would see descendants, enjoy long life, and divide the spoils of victory with the powerful; the same One who read in the Nazareth synagogue that the Spirit of the Lord had anointed Him to proclaim good news and the year of the Lord’s favor was the One whose suffering Isaiah had already sung. Despised and exalted, the suffering Servant and the reigning King: Isaiah held both in one hand, and both are the Lord Jesus. The third volume found Him on nearly every page of the prophet who saw Him most clearly of all.

What is most remarkable in Isaiah is that he never lets the suffering have the last word. The same chapter that numbers the Servant with the rebels and lays Him in the grave goes on to promise that He will see descendants and enjoy long life, that having suffered He will be satisfied, and that He will divide the spoils of victory with the powerful. The humiliation and the exaltation are bound together in one breath, the cross and the crown in a single vision. This is the very pattern the risen Lord pressed upon the disciples on the road: Wasn’t it necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and enter into his glory? (Luke 24:26). The suffering was not the failure of the plan but the road to the glory; the Servant was exalted because He was first abased, lifted high because He had first been brought low. And the pattern Isaiah saw in the Head is the pattern of the body too: the Church follows her Servant-King through suffering into glory, through the cross to the crown, knowing that the path of abasement is, in the strange economy of God, the only road that finally rises.

All the Scriptures

And so the four volumes are gathered into one testimony. On the Emmaus road the risen Lord Jesus interpreted the things written about himself in all the scriptures; and that same evening, in the upper room, He named the law, the prophets, and the psalms (the psalms standing, as many read it, for the whole third division of the Hebrew Bible) and claimed them all: everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled (Luke 24:44). The law of Moses: and we found Him there, the Seed of the woman, the offered son, the Passover lamb. The prophets: and we found Him there, in Isaiah’s pierced Servant and in the chorus of the Twelve. The psalms: and we found Him there, praying His Passion and singing His triumph. There is no part of the Old Testament that is not, in the end, about Him; the testimony about Jesus is the very spirit of prophecy.

There is a lesson here the Church has had to defend in every age, and must defend again in ours: that the Old Testament is the Christian’s book, full of Christ, and not a sub-Christian relic to be set aside. Very early, a man named Marcion tried to cut the Old Testament away from the New, claiming its God was a lesser and harsher deity than the Father of the Lord Jesus; and the Church rightly condemned him, for to lose the Old Testament is to lose the roots of the gospel and half the riches of Christ. The two Testaments are not two religions but one: promise and fulfillment, shadow and substance, the same God, the same grace, the same Christ veiled and then unveiled. The believer who neglects the Old Testament starves himself of three-quarters of his own Scriptures and of countless portraits of his Lord. The risen Lord Jesus did not treat the old books as outgrown; He opened them to show Himself in them. What was good enough for Him on the Emmaus road is good enough for His Church.

And the four commitments we set down at the beginning have held all the way through. Christ is genuinely present in the Old Testament, not merely predicted by it: the risen Lord did not say the Scriptures contained a few forecasts about Him, but that they were, in all their parts, the things concerning Himself. Law and gospel run through every book, the law that wounds and the gospel that heals, from the curse in Eden to the sun rising over Malachi. The narratives are real history, for the Lord Jesus treated them so: a real Jonah, a real Moses, a real flood. And the types are governed by the apostolic witness, never invented at our pleasure, but read where the New Testament reads them: the bronze serpent, the rock in the wilderness, the booth of David, the sign of Jonah, the pierced One. Where we have followed a picture the New Testament does not itself draw, we have tried to say so. We have tried, however imperfectly, to read the Old Testament as the risen Lord read it on the road, and to find, with the disciples, that it is full of Him.

It is worth saying, as we close, why the four guardrails have mattered so much, and what they have kept us from. Because we held that Christ is genuinely present and not merely predicted, we were kept from the moralism that turns the Old Testament into a gallery of good and bad examples, mining Abraham and David for tips on living rather than finding the gospel in them. Because we distinguished law and gospel, we were kept both from the despair that hears only command and from the cheap grace that never feels the wound the law inflicts. Because we read the narratives as real history, we were kept from dissolving the Scriptures into myth and losing the God who actually acts in time. And because we anchored our typology in the apostolic witness, we were kept from the unbridled allegory that finds whatever it likes in the text, and from the rival systems that bend the prophets to a program of earthly real estate. The guardrails are not cages; they are the banks that keep the river from spilling into swamp, so that the living water runs clear, and we find, with the disciples, that the whole of it is full of Him.

The Word Became Flesh

We end where the Old Testament ends, at the seam. Malachi laid down his pen with the promise of a messenger and a rising Sun, and then the heavens fell silent for four hundred years. The people waited in the dark, holding the promises (the Seed of the woman, the Lion of Judah, the pierced Servant, the Branch, the sun of righteousness), not knowing when or how the long-foretold One would come. And then, at last, the silence broke. A voice cried in the wilderness, the Elijah who was to come, crying with Isaiah, In the wilderness clear a way for the LORD (Isaiah 40:3). And after the voice came the One the voice announced, and the whole Old Testament drew its breath toward this: Now the Word became flesh and took up residence among us. We saw his glory … the glory of the one and only, full of grace and truth, who came from the Father (John 1:14).

The four hundred years of silence were not empty time, though they must have felt so to those who waited. The apostle tells us that when the appropriate time had come, God sent out his Son, born of a woman, born under the law (Galatians 4:4); the silence was the slow ripening of the world toward the appointed hour. Empires rose and fell, languages spread, roads were laid, the longing deepened; and all of it, unseen, was the hand of God preparing the stage for the entrance of His Son. The Old Testament had been one long Advent, the ages of yearning gathered into a single posture of waiting, the whole creation leaning forward for the woman’s seed, the Servant, the Branch, the Sun. And the waiting was not in vain. At the appointed time, into a particular village, in a particular reign, of a particular virgin, the long-promised One was born; and the silence that had hung over the world since Malachi laid down his pen was broken at last by the cry of an infant in Bethlehem.

The things concerning Himself became, at last, the story of Himself. The Seed promised in the garden was born of a woman in Bethlehem; the suffering Servant was wounded for our rebellious deeds on a Roman cross; the pierced One was pierced; the Lamb was slain; the third-day sign of Jonah was fulfilled in an empty tomb; and the sun of righteousness, as the Church has long confessed Him, rose with healing wings. Everything the four volumes traced (every seed-promise of Genesis, every prayer of the Psalms, every Servant Song of Isaiah, every voice in the chorus of the Twelve), all of it pointed forward to a Person, and now the Person had come. And here this series hands the reader across the seam. We have walked the Old Testament and found Christ on every page; now go to the Gospels and meet Him face to face, and then to the apostles’ witness, to the something better of which the New Testament series sings, the better covenant, the better promises, the better and lasting hope. The Old Testament has done its appointed work: it has told, from Genesis to Malachi, the things concerning Himself, and brought us at last to the threshold where He steps onto the page in person. Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, the whole of it was always Him.

And here our long road comes to its end, and to its true beginning. Four volumes have walked the Old Testament from the first promise in Eden to the last word before the silence, through the seed-promises of Genesis, the prayers of Christ and His Church in the Psalms, the suffering Servant of Isaiah, and the chorus of the Twelve; and on every road we have met the same Lord, veiled in shadow and type and prophecy, the things concerning Himself. Now the shadows give way to the substance. We hand the reader across the seam into the Gospels, to meet face to face the One the whole Old Testament foretold: to watch Him born, hear Him teach, see Him crucified, and find the tomb empty. And from the Gospels we point onward to the apostles’ witness, to that something better of which the companion New Testament series sings: the better covenant and better promises of Hebrews, the living hope of Peter, the love of John, the faith that works of James, the unveiled glory of the Christ whom the Old Testament had so long both concealed and revealed. The promise has become the Person; the shadow has become the Lord; and the reader who has walked this whole long road of expectation is sent on, with a fuller heart, to dwell with Him who was, from Moses to Malachi and from the garden to the empty tomb, the things concerning Himself.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection, as you close this volume and this series. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

On the Emmaus road the risen Lord Jesus, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, interpreted the things written about himself (Luke 24:27). Why does it matter that He went first to the Scriptures rather than first to the sight of His wounds? How is this the warrant for reading the whole Old Testament as concerning Christ?
The Twelve are one chorus, not twelve scraps. Which of the Christ-sightings of the Twelve (out of Egypt, the Spirit poured out, the booth of David, the sign of Jonah, Bethlehem Ephrathah, the righteous living by faith, the LORD rejoicing over His people with singing, the humble King, the thirty pieces, the pierced One, the sun of righteousness) struck you most, and why?
The day of the LORD is fulfilled in the two comings of Christ: mercy first, judgment after. What does it mean to live in the interval between the two horizons, in the year of the Lord’s favor while the fountain still stands open? How does this shape our hope and our urgency?
The risen Lord named the law, the prophets, and the psalms, and claimed them all (Luke 24:44). How have you seen Christ in each across this series: the Seed of the woman in Genesis, the prayers of Christ and His Church in the Psalms, the suffering Servant in Isaiah, the chorus of the Twelve? Where do you most want to look again?
We have tried to find Christ genuinely present, to distinguish law and gospel, to read the narratives as history, and to keep typology anchored in the apostolic witness. Why do these guardrails matter? What goes wrong when the Old Testament is read without them?
Now the Word became flesh and took up residence among us (John 1:14). The things concerning Himself became the story of Himself. As you cross from the Old Testament to the Gospels, how does having walked the long road of promise deepen your reading of the One who came?

Closing Prayer

Risen Lord Jesus, who on the road to Emmaus opened the Scriptures to two heartbroken disciples and made their hearts burn within them, open the Scriptures to us in the same way, and show us Yourself on every page. We thank You that You did not leave us to guess, but said plainly that everything written about You in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled; and we bless You that from the seed of the woman in the garden to the sun of righteousness over Malachi, the whole of the Old Testament has been, all along, the things concerning Yourself.

We praise You, O Christ, the Seed promised in Eden, the Lion of Judah, the Servant despised and exalted, the Branch, the humble King, the pierced and stricken Shepherd, the sun of righteousness risen with healing wings. We thank You that the long silence is broken, that the Word became flesh and took up residence among us, that the One so long foretold has come, has borne our curse, has risen, and reigns. As we close this long road through the law and the prophets and the psalms, carry us across the seam to meet You face to face in the Gospels, and to find in the apostles’ witness the something better You have secured for us: a better covenant, a better hope, an unshakable kingdom. Keep us in the light of Your dawn until the great Day breaks and every shadow flees away; for You are the things concerning Yourself, the substance of every promise, and the joy of all the Scriptures. To You, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, be all glory, now and forever. Amen.