A Narrative Theological Survey of the Sixty-Six Books<\/i><\/p>\n
He Is the Theme: The Christ-Centered Architecture of Holy Scripture<\/em><\/p>\n \u2022 \u2022 \u2022<\/span><\/p>\n Two men walked west from Jerusalem on the first Easter afternoon, and they walked in the wrong direction for the right reason. Their hope had died three days earlier on a Roman cross, and now they were going home. A stranger fell in beside them. He listened to their grief. Then He did something that has determined the shape of Christian biblical interpretation ever since: He opened the Old Testament and showed them Himself in it.<\/p>\n And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Luke 24:27 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Notice what Luke reports. Not some of the Scriptures. Not the obviously messianic Scriptures. All of them. Moses and all the Prophets, the whole sweep of the Hebrew canon, read as a single sustained testimony to one Person. Later that same evening, appearing to the gathered disciples in Jerusalem, He said the same thing again with even greater precision, naming the threefold division of the Hebrew Bible and claiming every part of it as being about Him.<\/p>\n Everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Luke 24:44 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is the charter of Christ-centered biblical interpretation, and it did not originate with the church fathers, or with the medieval allegorists, or with the Reformers, or with modern biblical theology. It originated with Jesus of Nazareth on the day He rose from the dead. Every attempt to read the Bible as a book about Jesus is either faithful to this claim or it is not; but the claim itself is His, and no reader who takes His authority seriously is free to ignore it.<\/p>\n Jesus made the same argument in a more confrontational setting during His public ministry. Speaking to religious leaders who prided themselves on their command of the sacred text, He identified the fatal flaw in their scholarship. They had mastered the words and missed the Word.<\/p>\n You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 John 5:39 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The verb translated bear witness is a legal term. The Scriptures are testifying. They are giving evidence in a court. And the subject of their testimony, from the first chapter of Genesis to the last chapter of Revelation, is Jesus Christ. As one widely consulted apologetics resource states the matter with admirable economy:<\/p>\n Jesus is the theme of the Bible.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 GotQuestions.org, “Is Jesus in every book of the Bible?”<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The purpose of the essay before you is to test that claim book by book, sixty-six times, without exception and without special pleading. What follows is not a devotional garland strung together from pious associations. It is an argument. The argument is that the unity of the Christian Bible is not a literary accident, not a canonical construction imposed after the fact by an institutional church, and not a pious fiction maintained by selective reading. The unity is Christological. It exists because one divine Author superintended sixty-six documents, written across roughly fifteen centuries by some forty human authors on three continents in three languages, and made them converge on a single Person whose historical appearance was still centuries in the future when most of them were composed.<\/p>\n That convergence is, by any honest accounting, the central literary and historical marvel of the Bible. Books written by shepherds, kings, fishermen, physicians, tax collectors, prophets, priests, and a Pharisee turned apostle; books composed in palaces, in prisons, in exile, in wilderness encampments, and on Aegean islands; books belonging to genres as diverse as legal code, national chronicle, erotic poetry, apocalyptic vision, personal correspondence, and courtroom lament, all of them bending toward the same figure. A modern Bible-study platform summarizes the phenomenon compactly, noting that of the sixty-six books written by roughly forty authors across fifteen centuries,<\/p>\n one Person walks through every one of them.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Scripture Spheres, “Jesus in Every Book of the Bible”<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u2022 \u2022 \u2022<\/span><\/p>\n Scholarly integrity requires an admission at the outset. The enterprise of finding Christ in every book of Scripture has, throughout church history, been done both very well and very badly. It has produced Augustine’s luminous exposition of the Psalms, and it has produced allegorical excesses in which every detail of the tabernacle furniture and every color of thread in the priestly garment was assigned a Christological referent on no authority but the interpreter’s imagination. The discipline is only as sound as its controls. Four controls govern the readings offered in this essay.<\/p>\n Some texts predict the Messiah explicitly and in terms that require no interpretive ingenuity whatsoever. Micah names the village. Isaiah names the manner of the birth and the manner of the death. Zechariah names the price of the betrayal and the piercing of the hands. Daniel names, in the judgment of many interpreters, something very close to the year. These are not typological readings; they are predictions, and their fulfillment is a matter of historical record.<\/p>\n Some persons, institutions, and events in the Old Testament are identified by the New Testament writers, or by Jesus Himself, as patterns pointing forward to Christ. Jesus explicitly compares Himself to the bronze serpent (John 3:14) and to Jonah in the fish (Matthew 12:40). Paul explicitly calls Christ our Passover lamb (1 Corinthians 5:7) and identifies the rock in the wilderness with Christ (1 Corinthians 10:4). Hebrews explicitly presents Melchizedek, the high priesthood, the tabernacle, and the sacrificial system as shadows of which Christ is the substance. Where the New Testament authorizes a type, the interpreter is not speculating. He is following an inspired lead.<\/p>\n A number of Old Testament passages record appearances of a divine figure who both is and is not identified with Yahweh: the Angel of the LORD who accepts worship, the Commander of the LORD’s army before Jericho, the fourth figure in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace. The traditional Christian reading, held from the earliest patristic period, understands these as pre-incarnate appearances of the Son. A pastor writing in the Calvary Chapel tradition frames the category well, observing that the verses gathered in such surveys<\/p>\n are either direct Messianic prophecies or Christophanies.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Andy Deane, Calvary Chapel, “The Best Verse About Jesus from Each Old Testament Book”<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Finally, some books contribute to the portrait not by prediction or type but by exposing a need that only Christ can satisfy, or by advancing a promise that only Christ can fulfill. Judges does not predict Jesus; it demonstrates with brutal repetition that human deliverers always fail, and thereby creates the vacuum that the true Deliverer fills. Ecclesiastes does not typify Jesus; it dismantles every substitute for Him. This is the most restrained of the four categories and the one most in need of discipline, but it is legitimate, and Jesus Himself appears to have used it on the Emmaus road when He expounded all the Scriptures rather than merely the predictive ones.<\/p>\n Where this essay makes a claim, it will be clear which of these four warrants is being invoked. Where the connection is suggestive rather than demonstrative, that will be stated. A Christ-centered reading of Scripture that overstates its case does no service to Christ, who is Truth, and whose testimony needs no embroidery.<\/p>\n \u2022 \u2022 \u2022<\/span><\/p>\n The Pentateuch establishes the vocabulary of redemption. Every category the New Testament will later apply to Jesus’ sacrifice, priesthood, mediation, covenant, deliverance, and atonement is defined here first. Without these five books, the cross is an execution; with them, it is the fulfillment of a fifteen-century argument.<\/p>\n Genesis opens with a Word that creates and closes with a coffin in Egypt, and between those two poles it plants the seed of every promise the rest of Scripture will cultivate. Within three chapters of the creation account, humanity has fallen, and God speaks the first gospel promise directly to the serpent. Theologians have called this verse the protoevangelium, the gospel before the Gospels. It announces that a descendant of the woman will suffer a wound and deal a fatal one.<\/p>\n He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Genesis 3:15 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The remainder of Genesis narrows the field of that promised Seed with a precision that would be pointless if the promise were not real. From all humanity to Shem, from Shem to Abraham, from Abraham to Isaac rather than Ishmael, from Isaac to Jacob rather than Esau, from Jacob’s twelve sons to Judah, and from Judah to a coming ruler whose arrival will command the obedience of the peoples.<\/p>\n The scepter shall not depart from Judah . . . until tribute comes to him.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Genesis 49:10 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Along the way Genesis supplies the two most arresting foreshadowings in the book. Melchizedek, king of Salem and priest of God Most High, appears without genealogy, blesses Abraham, and vanishes; Hebrews will build an entire argument for Christ’s superior priesthood on that silence. And on Mount Moriah a father walks up a hill with his beloved son, who carries the wood for his own sacrifice, and a substitute dies in his place. Isaac carries the wood; Jesus carries the cross. Abraham receives his son back, in a figure, from the dead.<\/p>\n God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Genesis 22:8 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Paul reads the Abrahamic promise Christologically and insists that the grammar of Genesis is deliberate. The promised offspring is singular, and its name is Christ (Galatians 3:16). The apostolic conviction was not that the church had found a clever way to read Genesis, but that Genesis had always been about Him.<\/p>\n Exodus is the Old Testament’s foundational act of redemption, and every element of it is later applied to Christ. A people enslaved and unable to free themselves. A mediator raised up and rejected by his own before he is accepted. A lamb without blemish, chosen on the tenth day and killed on the fourteenth, whose blood applied to the doorframe turns aside the destroyer. A deliverance accomplished by substitutionary death, not by human striving.<\/p>\n The blood shall be a sign for you . . . and when I see the blood, I will pass over you.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Exodus 12:13 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n John the Baptist’s identification of Jesus draws directly on this imagery, and Paul makes the equation explicit without argument, as though it required none: Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed (1 Corinthians 5:7). The timing of the crucifixion is not incidental. Jesus died during the Passover feast, at the hour the lambs were being slain in the temple courts, and John notes that not one of His bones was broken, precisely as the Passover regulation required (John 19:36; Exodus 12:46).<\/p>\n Nor does the typology stop at the lamb. The manna that fell each morning, the rock struck at Horeb that poured out water, the pillar of cloud and fire that led the people, and the tabernacle with its altar, laver, lampstand, showbread, veil, and mercy seat, all of these are taken up by the New Testament and applied to Jesus. He is the bread from heaven (John 6:32-35). He is the smitten rock (1 Corinthians 10:4). He is the true tabernacle, God pitching His tent among men (John 1:14).<\/p>\n Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 John 1:29 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Leviticus is the book modern readers abandon, and it is precisely the book that makes the cross intelligible. Its subject is the problem of how a holy God can be approached by an unholy people, and its answer is: only through blood, and only through a mediator. Five offerings, an ordained priesthood, an annual Day of Atonement, and a scapegoat bearing sin into the wilderness. Every one of these institutions is a rehearsal.<\/p>\n For the life of the flesh is in the blood . . . it is the blood that makes atonement.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Leviticus 17:11 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The high priest entering the Most Holy Place once a year, and only with blood, and only after sacrificing first for his own sin, is the pattern that Hebrews takes up and transforms. Christ entered once, not annually. He entered with His own blood, not another’s. He had no sin of His own requiring a preliminary sacrifice. And the veil that barred the way was torn from top to bottom at the moment of His death, which is God’s own commentary on what had just been accomplished.<\/p>\n We have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Hebrews 4:14 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Day of Atonement ritual in Leviticus 16 requires two goats, and the reason has troubled interpreters who have missed the point. One goat dies, satisfying justice; the other is driven into the wilderness bearing the confessed sins of the people, portraying removal. Both are necessary because atonement involves both propitiation and expiation, both the satisfaction of wrath and the carrying away of guilt. Christ accomplishes both in a single act.<\/p>\n Numbers records a generation dying in a wilderness because of unbelief, and in the middle of that grim chronicle stands one of the most explicitly authorized types in all of Scripture. Bitten by venomous serpents sent in judgment, the people are given a strange remedy: a bronze serpent raised on a pole, with healing promised to anyone who simply looks.<\/p>\n Everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Numbers 21:8 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Jesus applied this to Himself in conversation with Nicodemus, and the application is the interpreter’s warrant. The comparison is startling in its implications. The image lifted up was the image of the curse itself, the very thing that was killing them, and this is precisely Paul’s point when he writes that Christ became a curse for us (Galatians 3:13). Salvation comes not by effort, ritual, or worthiness, but by a look of faith directed at the One lifted up.<\/p>\n So must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 John 3:14-15 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Numbers also preserves the oracles of Balaam, a mercenary prophet compelled by God to bless where he had been hired to curse. From his mouth comes a prophecy of a star rising from Jacob and a scepter from Israel (Numbers 24:17), language that reverberates through the messianic expectation and surfaces again in Revelation, where Jesus calls Himself the bright morning star.<\/p>\n Deuteronomy is Moses preaching to a generation that will enter the land he cannot. In the middle of that farewell address, he makes a promise that Israel never forgot and never saw fulfilled in any subsequent prophet: God will raise up a prophet like Moses, and the people are commanded to listen to him.<\/p>\n The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you . . . it is to him you shall listen.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Deuteronomy 18:15 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The expectation created by this text was still alive in the first century. When the crowds saw Jesus multiply loaves in a wilderness, exactly as Moses had seen bread given in a wilderness, they drew the obvious conclusion and said so aloud (John 6:14). Peter, preaching in Solomon’s portico, applied the Deuteronomy text to Jesus directly and without qualification (Acts 3:22).<\/p>\n The parallels are extensive and deliberate. Both were preserved as infants from a tyrant’s slaughter of male children. Both came out of Egypt. Both fasted forty days on a mountain. Both mediated a covenant, gave law, fed a multitude in a wilderness, and interceded for a rebellious people at personal cost. But Deuteronomy also supplies the darkest and most necessary type of all. The law pronounces a curse on anyone hanged on a tree, and Paul cites that specific verse to explain what happened at Golgotha.<\/p>\n Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Deuteronomy 21:23; Galatians 3:13 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u2022 \u2022 \u2022<\/span><\/p>\n From Joshua to Esther, the Bible tells the story of a nation given a land, a throne, and a temple, and losing all three. The historical books are indispensable to Christology for a reason that is easy to miss: they establish, through eight centuries of documented failure, that no human leader, however anointed, can be the promised one. They are the case for the prosecution against every human substitute, and the case is airtight.<\/p>\n Joshua bears the same name as Jesus. Yehoshua, shortened to Yeshua, rendered in Greek as Iesous, is the name the angel gave to Mary’s son because he will save his people from their sins. The man who leads Israel into the inheritance is named Salvation, and the correspondence is not accidental; Hebrews builds on it directly, arguing that the rest Joshua gave was incomplete and that a greater rest remains (Hebrews 4:8-9).<\/p>\n But the most arresting Christological moment in the book occurs before a single wall falls. Joshua encounters a man with a drawn sword outside Jericho and asks whose side he is on. The answer refuses the question, and then the figure accepts worship, something no angel in Scripture permits.<\/p>\n No; but I am the commander of the army of the LORD. Now I have come.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Joshua 5:14 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Joshua falls on his face and is told to remove his sandals because the ground is holy, the same command given to Moses at the burning bush. The traditional Christian reading identifies this Commander as the pre-incarnate Son, and the figure reappears in Revelation, leading the armies of heaven on a white horse.<\/p>\n Rahab’s scarlet cord in the window, marking a house that judgment will pass over, is a small and often-noted echo of the Passover blood, and Rahab herself, a Canaanite prostitute, appears in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus.<\/p>\n Judges is the most depressing book in the Old Testament, and its despair is theologically productive. Seven times the cycle repeats: the people sin, God gives them into the hand of an oppressor, they cry out, God raises a deliverer, there is peace, and then the deliverer dies and the whole thing begins again, worse than before. The book ends with civil war, mass atrocity, and the refrain that everyone did what was right in his own eyes.<\/p>\n In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Judges 21:25 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The judges themselves are a catalog of compromised saviors: a left-handed assassin, a reluctant farmer, the son of a prostitute who sacrifices his own daughter, a Nazirite undone by lust. Each delivers partially and temporarily. None delivers finally. The cumulative effect of the book is to make the reader ache for a Deliverer who will not die, will not compromise, and will not need to be replaced.<\/p>\n Within the book, the Angel of the LORD appears repeatedly to Gideon and to the parents of Samson, speaking as God, accepting sacrifice, and declaring His name to be wonderful, the same word Isaiah will use of the coming child (Judges 13:18; Isaiah 9:6). The permanent Deliverer the book longs for is already visiting it.<\/p>\n Ruth is four chapters long, set during the era of the judges, and it introduces one of the richest redemptive categories in Scripture. The goel, the kinsman-redeemer, was a near relative with the legal right and the voluntary willingness to buy back a family member’s forfeited inheritance, to purchase a relative out of slavery, and to raise up offspring to preserve a dead man’s name. The office required three things: he must be a near relative, he must be able to pay, and he must be willing.<\/p>\n I will redeem you . . . as the LORD lives.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Ruth 3:13 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Boaz meets all three qualifications, and a nearer kinsman refuses the role because it would jeopardize his own inheritance. That refusal is the hinge of the story, and it illuminates the incarnation: Christ became a near relative by taking flesh (Hebrews 2:14-17); He was able to pay because He was sinless; and He was willing when no one compelled Him.<\/p>\n The genealogy that closes the book is not an appendix. It runs from Perez to Boaz to Obed to Jesse to David, and Matthew picks it up and carries it to Jesus. A Moabite widow, a foreigner excluded by law from the assembly of the LORD, becomes the great-grandmother of David and an ancestor of the Messiah. The redemption of one destitute woman turns out to have been a link in the redemption of the world.<\/p>\n First Samuel is the story of a nation demanding a king like the other nations and getting exactly what it asked for. Saul is tall, impressive, and hollow. The book’s theological center is God’s rejection of appearance in favor of the heart, and His choice of a shepherd boy whom even his own father did not think worth summoning.<\/p>\n The LORD sees not as man sees . . . but the LORD looks on the heart.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 1 Samuel 16:7 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The word Messiah simply means anointed one, and the anointing of David with oil by Samuel is the moment the messianic line becomes visible in history. What follows is the long period of David’s rejection: the anointed king, hunted through the wilderness, gathering to himself the distressed, the indebted, and the discontented, refusing to seize by force what God had promised to give. It is a portrait of the King in exile, and the church has always read it as such.<\/p>\n Hannah’s song in chapter two, which anticipates Mary’s Magnificat so closely that the literary dependence is unmistakable, closes with a prophecy of a king and an anointed one before Israel had either.<\/p>\n He will give strength to his king and exalt the horn of his anointed.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 1 Samuel 2:10 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The confrontation with Goliath supplies its own picture: a representative champion fights on behalf of a paralyzed people, and his victory is credited to them.<\/p>\n Second Samuel contains the covenant on which the entire messianic hope of Israel rests. David proposes to build God a house; God replies that He will build David a house, and the promise He makes exceeds anything David’s dynasty could deliver.<\/p>\n Your throne shall be established forever.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 2 Samuel 7:16 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The word forever is the problem and the promise. David’s line was interrupted at the exile and extinguished as a ruling dynasty. Either the covenant failed, or it awaited a descendant whose reign is literally unending. The New Testament opens by answering the question in its first sentence, identifying Jesus as the son of David, the son of Abraham (Matthew 1:1), and Gabriel repeats the covenant language almost verbatim to Mary (Luke 1:32-33).<\/p>\n The book also gives an unflinching account of why David could not be the promised one. Adultery, murder, and a cover-up occupy its central chapters, and the consequences unspool through the rest of the narrative. Psalm 51 comes from this wreckage. The greatest king Israel ever had is shown to be a sinner requiring atonement, which is precisely why the Son of David must be more than a son of David; Jesus pressed exactly this point on the Pharisees from Psalm 110 (Matthew 22:41-46).<\/p>\n First Kings opens in glory and closes in division. Solomon receives wisdom, builds the temple, and prays a dedication prayer of extraordinary theological depth, asking a question that hangs over the rest of the Bible until the incarnation answers it.<\/p>\n But will God indeed dwell on the earth?<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 1 Kings 8:27 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n John’s Gospel answers it: the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us. Jesus also identified Himself as greater than Solomon in wisdom (Matthew 12:42), a claim that would be intolerable arrogance from anyone else and that He made without apology.<\/p>\n Yet the same book records Solomon’s collapse into idolatry through political marriages, the fracture of the kingdom under his son, and the beginning of the northern kingdom’s descent. The wisest man who ever ruled Israel finished as a compromised idolater. Elijah, appearing in the book’s second half, becomes the pattern for the forerunner Malachi will predict and John the Baptist will fulfill.<\/p>\n Second Kings is a chronicle of decline ending in exile, with Elisha’s ministry providing its one sustained note of grace. The Elisha miracles form a remarkable anticipation of Christ’s: multiplied bread that fed a hundred with leftovers remaining (2 Kings 4:42-44), a cleansed leper, poisoned stew made wholesome, a dead boy raised, and a widow’s oil that would not run out.<\/p>\n They shall eat and have some left.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 2 Kings 4:43 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The book’s larger theological function is to demonstrate the covenant curses of Deuteronomy 28 taking effect in real history. Samaria falls in 722, Jerusalem in 586, the temple is burned, and the Davidic king is led away blinded. And yet the final paragraph of the book records that Jehoiachin, the exiled king of Judah, was released from prison and given a seat at the Babylonian king’s table. The lamp of David was not extinguished. The genealogy could continue. It is a small, deliberate ember left glowing at the end of a burned-out house.<\/p>\n Chronicles retells the same history from a priestly and post-exilic vantage point, and the difference in emphasis is the point. Written for a community returned from Babylon, wondering whether the promises still stood, Chronicles begins with nine chapters of genealogy. To a modern reader this is tedious; to the original audience it was an argument. The line had survived. The promise had a pulse.<\/p>\n I will confirm him in my house and in my kingdom forever, and his throne shall be established forever.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 1 Chronicles 17:14 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Notice the addition to the wording of 2 Samuel 7: my house and my kingdom. The Chronicler emphasizes that the Davidic throne is ultimately God’s throne, which prepares for a Messiah who is not merely David’s descendant but God’s Son. The genealogies of Matthew and Luke are the direct literary heirs of these chapters, and they exist to make the same claim: the promise held.<\/p>\n Second Chronicles covers Solomon and the kings of Judah, and closes not with the fall of Jerusalem but with the decree of Cyrus authorizing the return. The Hebrew Bible ends here, and the last word of the Hebrew canon is an invitation to go up.<\/p>\n Whoever is among you of all his people, may the LORD his God be with him. Let him go up.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 2 Chronicles 36:23 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The book’s theology of the temple is Christologically loaded. When Solomon finished praying, fire fell, and the glory of the LORD filled the house so completely that the priests could not enter. That glory departed in Ezekiel’s vision and never returned to the second temple, a fact the rabbis themselves acknowledged. It returned when a carpenter from Nazareth walked into the temple courts, and the reforming kings of Judah, Hezekiah and Josiah in particular, foreshadowed the One who would cleanse His Father’s house.<\/p>\n Ezra records the return from exile and the rebuilding of the temple under Zerubbabel, followed by Ezra’s own arrival and the reformation of a community that had drifted. Ezra is introduced as a scribe skilled in the Law, and the summary of his character is one of the finest verses in the Old Testament about the handling of Scripture.<\/p>\n Ezra had set his heart to study the Law of the LORD, and to do it and to teach.<\/i><\/p>\n \u2014 Ezra 7:10 (ESV)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Study, obedience, and teaching, in that order. This is the pattern that Jesus embodied perfectly; He taught as one having authority precisely because His life and His words were one thing. Zerubbabel, the governor who rebuilt the temple, appears in both messianic genealogies and receives from Haggai a signet-ring promise that reverses the curse pronounced on his grandfather Jehoiachin (Haggai 2:23; Jeremiah 22:24-30). The line that God had seemingly severed, He deliberately restored.<\/p>\nIntroduction: The Stranger on the Road<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n
A Note on Method: How to Find Christ Without Inventing Him<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n
First: Direct Prophecy<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n
Second: Authorized Typology<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n
Third: Christophany<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n
Fourth: Canonical Trajectory<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n
Part One: The Law of Moses<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n
Genesis: The Seed of the Woman<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
For Further Study<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n
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Exodus: The Passover Lamb<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
For Further Study<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n
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Leviticus: Our Great High Priest<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
For Further Study<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n
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Numbers: The Bronze Serpent Lifted Up<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
For Further Study<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n
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Deuteronomy: The Prophet Like Moses<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
For Further Study<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n
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Part Two: The Historical Books<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n
Joshua: Captain of the LORD’s Army<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
For Further Study<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n
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Judges: The True Deliverer<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
For Further Study<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n
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Ruth: Our Kinsman Redeemer<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
For Further Study<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n
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1 Samuel: The Anointed King<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
For Further Study<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n
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2 Samuel: The Son of David<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
For Further Study<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n
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1 Kings: The Righteous King<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
For Further Study<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n
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2 Kings: The Restoring King<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
For Further Study<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n
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1 Chronicles: The Promised King<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
For Further Study<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n
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2 Chronicles: The King Who Reigns Forever<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
For Further Study<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n
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Ezra: The Faithful Scribe<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n