Jesus said of the Scriptures, "these are they which testify of me." He told the disciples on the road to Emmaus that beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. For the early Church, the entire Hebrew Bible was read through the lens of the crucified and risen Christ — not as a violation of the texts' original meaning, but as the fulfillment that retrospectively illuminated everything that had come before.
For the contemporary preacher who takes the New Testament's witness seriously, this poses both a theological and a homiletical challenge: how do you preach the Old Testament in a way that is faithful to its Christocentric fulfillment without evacuating its original meaning, manipulating the text, or falling into a mechanical allegory that treats every narrative as a puzzle to decode?
This is one of the most important hermeneutical questions in evangelical preaching — and one that is not easily resolved with a simple formula.
The Non-Negotiable: Exegetical Integrity
Before Christ can be faithfully preached from any Old Testament text, the text must be faithfully interpreted on its own terms. The original meaning — what the text said to its original hearers, what its human author intended, what it meant within the context of the developing covenantal history — is not a stepping stone to be left behind on the way to the New Testament application. It is the foundation of everything that follows.
The preacher who rushes to Christological connection without doing the exegetical work of the text produces a reading that may be pious but is ultimately arbitrary. If any Old Testament passage can mean whatever a New Testament passage we want to connect to it says, then the Old Testament has no independent witness — it is simply a blank screen for projecting New Testament theology backward.
Do the work first. What does this text say? What is its place in the redemptive-historical narrative? What theological claims does it make? What does it demand of its original hearers? Only after these questions have been honestly engaged does the Christological movement have solid ground to stand on.
The Biblical-Theological Framework
The key to faithful Christocentric Old Testament preaching is not allegory — finding hidden spiritual meanings beneath the surface of the text — but biblical theology: tracing the development of God's redemptive purposes across the canonical history and understanding how each text relates to the whole movement.
Every Old Testament text exists at a specific point in this redemptive-historical story. The promises of Genesis 3, the Abrahamic covenant, the Mosaic law, the Davidic kingship, the prophetic announcements of return from exile — these are not independent religious ideas. They are movements in a single, coherent narrative that reaches its climax in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
When you preach an Old Testament passage, the question is not "what is the hidden Christ-symbol in this text?" but "how does this text function within the larger redemptive-historical movement that finds its fulfillment in Christ?" This is a historical and narrative question, not a symbolic one.
The Legitimate Paths
Biblical scholarship has identified several legitimate ways in which the Old Testament relates to Christ. Understanding these categories helps preachers find the appropriate path for any given text.
Direct Prophecy
Some Old Testament texts directly predict the coming of Christ and are fulfilled by him. Isaiah 53 describes a suffering servant whose bearing of others' sins and death corresponds precisely to what Jesus did on the cross. Micah 5:2 predicts the birth of the Messianic ruler in Bethlehem. These texts can and should be preached in direct Christological connection.
Typology
Types are persons, institutions, events, or objects in the Old Testament that prefigure corresponding realities in the New Testament — not by arbitrary symbolic assignment, but by structural correspondence within the redemptive-historical narrative. Adam is a type of Christ, as Paul argues in Romans 5. The Passover lamb is a type of Christ. The temple and its sacrificial system are typological of Christ's atoning work. The Davidic king is a type of the eternal king.
Typological reading is not allegorizing. It recognizes genuine structural correspondences within the single story of God's redemptive purposes. The type is genuinely what it is in its original context — the Passover is a real historical event, a real lamb, a real deliverance. But its deeper significance is disclosed when its structural correspondence to what Christ accomplishes is made visible.
Thematic Development
Many Old Testament themes — the kingdom of God, the presence of God, the covenant people, the promise of rest, the hope of resurrection — are developed across the canon and find their fullest expression in Christ. Preaching the Old Testament through these themes allows Christ to appear as the fulfillment of what the whole story was always moving toward.
Promise and Fulfillment
The covenantal structure of the Old Testament is itself Christocentric — it is a series of promises and partial fulfillments that point forward to a final fulfillment that has now arrived. Every covenant blessing, every unfulfilled hope, every promise that Israel's national history did not fully realize is an implicit pointer to the one in whom all the promises of God are "yes and amen."
Avoiding the Pitfalls
Forced Allegorizing
Not every detail of every Old Testament narrative is a Christ-symbol. The color of the curtains in the tabernacle does not require a Christological interpretation. The number of stones in David's pouch is not a theological message. Forced allegorizing produces preaching that is clever but arbitrary, and it trains congregations to read Scripture as a code to be cracked rather than a narrative to be inhabited.
Skipping the Original Meaning
The Christological connection that leaps over the text's original meaning is not actually honoring Christ. Jesus did not say the Scriptures bear witness to him by having no meaning in themselves. He said they testify to him — which implies they have a genuine witness to give, rooted in what they actually say.
Moralizing Instead of Christologizing
The common alternative to Christocentric Old Testament preaching is moralizing — treating Old Testament narratives as collections of character examples to imitate or avoid. While there is a place for moral application, it should not be the primary mode of Old Testament preaching. The story of David is not primarily about "courage like David." It is about the kind of king God was fashioning through flawed, sinful, redeemed human material — pointing forward to the one who would be the king David could never be.
The Gift to the Congregation
Congregations who are formed by faithful Christocentric Old Testament preaching develop something precious: a sense of the unity and coherence of Scripture, and a deepening wonder at the breadth of the redemptive narrative. The whole Bible becomes luminous — not just the Gospels and the Epistles, but the Psalms and the Prophets and the law and the histories, all converging on the one who said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life."
That convergence is worth every difficult exegetical step required to get there faithfully.