Christ is risen!
You search the Scriptures, 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)
Christ is quite clear that the Old Testament is really about Him. Not just the prophecies, but the entirety of the Jewish Scriptures, the Tanakh. Jesus says that Moses, who Jewish tradition claimed to be the author of the Torah, was actuallly writing about the Christ. In making this claim Jesus tells us Christians how we are to read the Old Testament (see also Luke 24:27, 44; John 1:45; Galatians 3:8; Romans 16:26). The Old Testament leads us to Christ, not to an understanding of ancient history. Those who wish to use the Old Testament to teach history or science are misusing those Scriptures. The spiritual nature of the Scriptures requires us to look beyond history in order to see the eternal Christ. The Scriptures help us to see Christ the Logos of God by making Him visible before His incarnation so that we can recognize the incarnate God in Christ.
Archimandrite Aimilianos writes about the spiritual nature and message of the Scriptures:
Spiritual books, and especially Holy Scripture, provide us with spiritual experiences. How? The spiritual book you read is the word of God, it is what God has said. If you’re sitting there reading, and happen to hear a voice you recognize, you say: I know that person. The voice reveals the person. Where God’s voice is, there is God, hidden within the voice. The spiritual book, in other words, is a mystery, a sacrament, a sign which conceals the presence of God himself.
This is why an ecclesiastical writer said once that the words and lines of Holy Scripture are the garments of Christ. Just as I am covered by my clothing, so to do the pages of spiritual books cover Christ himself. (THE CHURCH AT PRAYER, p 112)
The ancient Jewish scholar Philo highlights an oddity in one verse of the Jewish scriptures. Exodus 20:18 reads: “Now when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled, and they stood far off.” Philo notes the odd phrasing in which the people saw the sound of the trumpet – they were in fact seeing the sound of God speaking. Philo writes: “All the people ‘saw the voice’ … for the voice of men is thought to be audible, but the voice of God is truly visible. How so? Because whatever God says is not words but works, whose judges are the eyes before the ears.” (quoted in Eugen Pentiuc’s HEARING THE SCRIPTURES, p 150). God’s voice, His Word, is a spiritual voice that makes things visible. The incarnation of the Word makes God’s Word visible to us and fully reveals what the Old Testament could only prefigure or reveal in shadows. With the incarnation of God in Christ we see what the Old Testament was talking about!
Fraternized 