Then He said to them, “These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me.” And He opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures. Then He said to them, “Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.” (Luke 24:44–47, NKJV)
These words of Jesus are beloved by every pastor who desires to preach, and by every Christian who longs to hear, Jesus Christ and him crucified proclaimed from all of Scripture. They tell us that we do not have to wait until we arrive in the pages of the New Testament to read about Jesus Christ, for his person and work are foretold in the words of the Old.
Furthermore, we do not have to force Jesus into the Old Testament in some sort of unnatural way, because he is already there, waiting to be expounded. “You search the Scriptures,” Jesus says in another place, “for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me. … For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote about Me” (John 5:39, 46).
When Luke tells us that Jesus “opened the understanding” of the apostles “that they might comprehend the Scriptures,” it is obvious that he was giving them the illumination of the Holy Spirit (cf. John 20:22) so that they could discern his presence “in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms.” These three categories are a kind of verbal shorthand for the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament canon.
Jesus is not claiming to be present in every single verse or chapter of the OT writings, but that he is prophesied, foreshadowed, or appears in Christophanies (i.e., preincarnate appearances of Christ) in every genre of OT literature. But pastors will never preach Christ from the OT if they do not know that they are supposed to be looking for him, nor if they do not know how to find him there.
Therefore, gospel ministers must be equipped with a God- and Christ-centered hermeneutic and homiletic, for failing to find and expound Jesus Christ and him crucified from all the Bible is something less than Christian preaching. In fact, such preaching is nothing more than works-righteousness moralism.
But there is a vital phrase that is often overlooked in Luke 24:46–47. Let’s look at these verses again: “Then He said to them, ‘Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.'”
Did you notice that Jesus says three specific things were foretold in the OT and therefore had to be fulfilled? First, that the Promised Messiah would suffer and die for the sins of others. Second, that the Messiah would rise again bodily from the dead.
But do not miss the third thing Jesus says was prophesied in the OT: that the necessity of repentance and the hope of forgiveness would be preached in the Messiah’s name to every nation under heaven.1 In other words, the cause of world missions, the spread of the gospel among all nations, was also foretold “in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms.”
Not only is Jesus Christ crucified, risen, and coming again spoken of in every genre of the OT, but so too is the fact that Jesus Christ and him crucified would be proclaimed to every tribe, tongue, people, and nation.
The implications of what Jesus is saying here are huge. There are many wonderful things pastors can do to put missions into the blood of their respective congregations. The various missionaries endorsed and supported by a local church ought to be publicly prayed for with great frequency.
Mission tables and displays can be set up inside church meeting houses to keep Christ’s global cause before God’s people. Annual mission conferences can serve as helpful reminders of the needs of unreached language and people groups.
But perhaps the most important thing pastors can do is to constantly preach the cause of world missions from all of Scripture. This will put missions into their congregation’s blood more than anything else.
I am not certain, but I suspect that the average churchgoer probably thinks that Jesus hastily tacked on the entire missionary enterprise just before he ascended to heaven when he gave the Great Commission to his apostles in Matthew 28:18–20. But the truth is that the cause of missions began in eternity past when God chose his elect out of every tribe, tongue, people, and nation (Eph. 1:3–12; Rev. 5:9–10).
And this purpose begins to make itself known in the opening pages of Genesis and gains momentum with every successive book until it comes to its final consummation in the last chapters of Revelation. In other words, the Bible is a mission book from cover to cover.
But Christians will never discern, nor will pastors ever preach, world missions from every genre of OT literature if they do not know that they are supposed to be looking for it. We must recover not only a Christ-centered, but also a missions-centered hermeneutic and homiletic.
But once we are made aware, we do not have to force missions into the OT. It is already there, waiting to be discovered in the Law of Moses, in the Prophets, and in the Psalms. May the Holy Spirit give us all the eyes to see it.
1 In the original Greek the perfect tense verb γέγραπται (“it has been written”) and the imperfect ἔδει (“it was necessary”) serve as the two matrix verbs of the sentence. The infinitives παθεῖν (“to suffer”), ἀναστῆναι (“to rise”), and κηρυχθῆναι (“to be preached”) are all infinitives of purpose (or result) linked together in an unbroken chain by the repeated conjunction καὶ.
