There’s something beautiful and faith affirming about seeing Christ, the gospel, and the whole of the Christian life, rolled out magnificently in early Old Testament texts.
That has certainly been by experience reading through Deuteronomy recently. The setting for the book is Moses and the Israelites standing on the plains of Moab waiting for their ‘Joshua/Jesus’ to take them into the Promised Land. The fact that this picture is so clear in the Old Testament, only adds to the conviction that Scripture is divinely inspired, and our Joshua will certainly take us to our Promised Land once our wilderness wanderings are done.
And Christ is everywhere, as I found in Deuteronomy 8 yesterday. God tells Moses that, after He rescued His people from the land of slavery (sin) through the blood of the Lamb (the cross), He intentionally took them into difficult wilderness territory so that he might ‘know what was in your heart’ (Deut. 8:2). God placed His people in the kind of circumstances where they had to depend on Him for everything, and He proves His faithfulness by providing water from a rock and manna from heaven.
