What Is Christocentric Interpretation of Scripture?

Question 1041.

Christocentric interpretation reads the whole of Scripture, Old Testament and New, as a unified story that finds its centre and its goal in Jesus Christ. This is not a modern invention layered onto the text from outside. It is the reading strategy Jesus Himself modelled and explicitly commanded, and taking it seriously changes how the Old Testament in particular ought to be preached and understood.

I want to show where Jesus establishes this way of reading Scripture, work through what it does and does not mean in practice, and explain how it relates to, without collapsing into, the disciplines of literal interpretation and typology already covered elsewhere in this series.

Jesus on the Road to Emmaus

The clearest biblical warrant for Christocentric interpretation comes directly from the risen Christ Himself. Luke 24:27 records that, walking with two disciples on the road to Emmaus, beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. A few verses later, appearing to the wider group of disciples, He states that everything written about him in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled, in Luke 24:44, a statement that covers the entire threefold Hebrew canon. Jesus is not offering an isolated comment about one or two Messianic prophecies. He is claiming that the whole of the Old Testament, read rightly, concerns Him.

This is a remarkable claim, and it comes with the highest possible authority behind it. If the risen Christ Himself taught His disciples to read Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms as Scripture that finds its subject in Him, then Christocentric interpretation is not an optional homiletical technique some preachers favour. It is the reading strategy the text itself, on the authority of its ultimate subject, requires.

What Christocentric Interpretation Does Not Mean

Christocentric interpretation is frequently misapplied in ways worth naming clearly so they can be avoided. It does not mean every single Old Testament verse contains a hidden, direct reference to Jesus that must be extracted regardless of the text’s actual content, an approach that collapses quickly into the kind of undisciplined allegorical interpretation already addressed elsewhere in this series. It does not mean the Old Testament’s own historical meaning, addressed to its own original audience in its own historical circumstances, can be bypassed or treated as simply provisional scaffolding to be discarded once its supposedly real, Christ-centred meaning has been found.

A responsible Christocentric reading respects the plain, historical sense of each Old Testament passage on its own terms, understood first within its own historical setting, and then asks how that passage functions within the larger, unified biblical story that moves toward and is fulfilled in Christ. The two steps are not in competition. The second step depends on, rather than overriding, the first.

Several Ways the Old Testament Points to Christ

The Old Testament anticipates Christ through several distinct but related means, and Christocentric interpretation involves learning to recognise each. Direct predictive prophecy, such as Isaiah 53’s description of the suffering servant or Micah 5:2’s naming of Bethlehem as the Messiah’s birthplace, points forward explicitly. Typology, addressed more fully in relation to how we identify biblical types, uses historically real persons, events, and institutions, Adam, the Passover lamb, the tabernacle, as patterns God designed to anticipate a greater fulfilment in Christ. Covenant promises, the offspring promised to Abraham in Genesis 12, the eternal throne promised to David in 2 Samuel 7, trace an unbroken thread of divine commitment that finds its yes in Christ, according to 2 Corinthians 1:20. And the broader storyline of Scripture itself, humanity’s need for redemption established in Genesis 3, worked out through Israel’s history, points toward a redeemer the Old Testament consistently anticipates without ever fully supplying.

Christ and the Storyline of Dispensational Interpretation

Christocentric interpretation and dispensational interpretation, which I address separately in relation to what dispensational interpretation actually involves, are sometimes assumed to be in tension, since dispensationalism insists on keeping Israel and the church distinct rather than reading every Old Testament promise as directly fulfilled in the church. There is no real conflict here. Recognising Christ as the centre of Scripture’s unified story does not require collapsing every distinction the text itself maintains, including the distinction between promises made specifically to national Israel and promises fulfilled in the church. Christ is the fulfilment and goal of the entire biblical storyline, including both Israel’s specific promises, many still awaiting future literal fulfilment, and the church’s new covenant blessings secured through His finished work. A Christocentric reading and a consistently literal, dispensational reading work together rather than against each other once both are properly understood.

Why This Matters for Preaching the Old Testament

A church that neglects this reading risks treating the Old Testament primarily as a source of moral examples and cautionary tales, David as a model of courage, Daniel as a model of integrity, disconnected from the larger redemptive story those figures actually serve within Scripture’s own unified narrative. This produces a moralistic, exhausting kind of preaching that leaves a congregation perpetually trying harder to imitate biblical heroes rather than resting in the gospel those heroes and their stories were, in their own way, anticipating all along. A Christocentric reading does not eliminate legitimate moral application from Old Testament narrative. It grounds that application properly, within the larger story of God’s redemptive purpose fulfilled in Christ, rather than treating each narrative as an isolated example detached from where the whole of Scripture is actually heading.

Christ in the Psalms

The Psalms offer a particularly rich test case for Christocentric interpretation, because they operate on more than one level simultaneously without contradiction. Psalm 22 is genuinely David’s own psalm, expressing his own historical experience of anguish and vindication, and it is also, as Matthew’s Gospel makes unmistakably clear through its repeated quotation at the crucifixion, a psalm whose fullest meaning is realised in Christ’s own suffering, His cry of dereliction, the piercing of His hands and feet, the casting of lots for His garments, all described with startling precision centuries before crucifixion existed as a method of execution in Israel.

Reading such a psalm Christocentrically does not mean denying David’s own historical experience recorded in the text. It means recognising that David, as an anointed king in the messianic line, could write genuinely of his own suffering in language that the Spirit intended to find its fullest and final meaning in David’s greater Son. This layered reading, historical and messianic together rather than one replacing the other, is characteristic of how the New Testament itself actually handles the Psalms, and it offers a model for reading the rest of the Old Testament with the same combination of historical seriousness and Christocentric expectation.

It is worth stressing again that Christocentric interpretation is ultimately an act of worship as much as a technical interpretive method. Reading Scripture this way trains the heart to see the entire biblical story as fundamentally about what God has done to rescue and reconcile His people to Himself through His Son, rather than a loosely connected anthology of ancient religious material with Jesus appearing only in its final quarter. That shift in perspective changes not only how the Old Testament is preached but how it is read devotionally, turning even unfamiliar genealogies and detailed legal codes into part of a single account moving steadily and purposefully toward the person and work of Christ.

John’s Gospel makes this connection between Scripture and Christ explicit in a way worth quoting directly. Jesus tells His Jewish opponents in John 5:39 that they search the Scriptures because they think that in them they have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness about me. The claim is striking: the Hebrew Scriptures His opponents studied so diligently, believing eternal life was found through mastery of the text itself, actually testified to Him all along, a testimony they had missed precisely because they had not read those Scriptures as pointing toward their true and intended subject.

Take this approach with you into your own regular Bible reading, not only into sermon preparation, and the whole of Scripture will begin to read less like a disconnected library and more like the single, coherent account of redemption it has always actually been.

So, now what?

The next time you read an Old Testament passage, whether narrative, prophecy, or psalm, ask not only what it teaches about faithful living but how it fits within the larger story Scripture is telling, a story Jesus Himself said concerns Him from Genesis to Malachi. You will find that the Old Testament, read this way, becomes not a separate collection of ancient stories loosely connected to the New Testament, but the first half of a single, unified account of God’s redemptive purpose, a purpose that has always had Christ as its centre and its goal.

And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.

Luke 24:27, ESV