Does every Old Testament verse whisper Jesus?

Q: Aren’t some churches so determined to find Jesus in every breath of the Old Testament that they risk leaving God the Father behind? Have we overdone the “every story whispers his name” approach? 

This is an excellent question. I share the affection for that little line from the Jesus Storybook Bible (Zondervan). But there’s always a danger of turning a good insight into a wooden rule and, when we do that, we may flatten the scriptures instead of deepening them.

I often think back to the road to Emmaus. Jesus himself opened the scriptures for two downcast disciples and showed them “the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27, KJV). But notice that these people already knew their Bibles well. They weren’t ignorant, but they hadn’t seen the pattern. The whole story of Israel, from Moses through the prophets, was heading towards a climax. That’s quite different from saying that every individual text is a coded clue about Jesus. To treat the Bible like a giant allegory hunt is to trivialise it.

When I was a young Christian, I eagerly picked up a commentary on Leviticus. Every sacrifice, every ritual, every goat was said to be “about Jesus”. And even then, I thought: Surely there is more going on here. Leviticus is rich with themes of holiness, forgiveness, community and covenant. To collapse all that into “this = Jesus” is to miss the depth of the text.

The Old Testament is not simply a set of secret references waiting to be unveiled. It is God’s story with Israel, about creation and covenant, exile and hope. Within that story there are indeed tantalising promises and echoes of what will come. But they only take full shape when you see them in light of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

A good example is 2 Samuel 7, where God promises David that he will “raise up your offspring after you” (v12, ESV). Many in Jesus’ day took that as a promise of a future king. Only after the resurrection did the early Christians realise that it was about something even bigger – God raising up the Messiah himself.

That’s how the Old Testament works: by pointing forward in ways that are often veiled, awaiting fulfilment. But that’s not the same as saying the Ten Commandments are just an elaborate way of telling us about John 3:16, or that Proverbs loses its ethical force because Jesus has fulfilled the law (see Matthew 5:17). We still need to hear the wisdom of the Old Testament on its own terms.

Two mistakes must be avoided. One is Marcionism, the ancient temptation to dismiss the Old Testament as irrelevant. The other is what I’d call allegorical overdrive, forcing every passage to be a miniature sermon on Jesus. The right approach is to give the Old Testament its due as Israel’s story, saturated with God’s presence, promises and challenges. And then to recognise how that story reaches its climax in Jesus. Read that way, the Old Testament doesn’t just whisper his name; it prepares us for the astonishing moment when God’s promises and God’s person meet in the man, Jesus Christ.