How did Jesus interpret the Old Testament?

Question 1188

If we want to learn how to read the Old Testament, we could have no better teacher than the Lord Jesus himself. He was raised on the Hebrew Scriptures, he quoted them constantly, and he settled every controversy of his ministry by appeal to them. The way he handled them is not one option among many but the pattern the church is meant to follow.

Jesus interpreted the Old Testament as the true and authoritative word of God, took its history as real history, and read the whole of it as pointing forward to himself. Those convictions ran through everything he said about the Scriptures, and they shape how a faithful reader approaches the Old Testament today.

He Treated It as the Authoritative Word of God

For Jesus the Scripture settled the matter. When the devil tempted him in the wilderness he answered each assault with it is written, and the written word ended the argument. When his opponents pressed him he replied that the Scripture cannot be broken, an astonishing statement of its unbreakable authority down to its detail. He even rested an argument on the tense of a single verb and on one word, showing that he held every part of the text to be the reliable speech of God.

He never set himself above the Scripture or corrected it. When he said you have heard that it was said, but I say to you, he was not overturning the law of Moses but stripping away the false additions of the teachers and pressing the true depth of God’s command. He came, in his own words, not to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfil them, and he affirmed that not the smallest letter would pass away until all was accomplished.

He Took Its History as Real

Jesus read the Old Testament narratives as records of things that actually happened. He spoke of Adam and Eve as a real couple made male and female at the beginning, of Abel as a real man whose blood was shed, of Noah and the flood that came and took them all away, of Lot and the destruction of Sodom, of Moses and the burning bush, and of Jonah and the great fish. He did not treat these as edifying legends but as the dealings of God in history, and he based real teaching on their reality.

This matters because some today wish to keep the spiritual lessons of these accounts while letting go of the events. Jesus did no such thing. For him the sign of Jonah pointed to his own three days in the heart of the earth precisely because Jonah really spent three days in the fish. The history and the meaning stood or fell together, and he held them both.

Notice too how naturally he did this, without argument or defence, as a man speaks of things everyone present takes for granted. He did not pause to prove that Adam existed or that the flood happened, he simply built on them as the solid ground of fact. That tells us a great deal about his settled confidence in the record, and it leaves little room for the modern reader who wishes to follow Jesus while quietly setting aside the history he assumed. To sit at his feet is to share his trust in the events as well as in the lessons.

He Read It All as Pointing to Himself

The deepest feature of how Jesus read the Old Testament is that he found himself in it. To the religious leaders he said that they searched the Scriptures thinking that in them they had eternal life, and yet these were the very Scriptures that bore witness to him. He told them that if they believed Moses they would believe him, for Moses wrote about him.

After the resurrection, walking the road to Emmaus, he opened the Scriptures to two disciples, and beginning with Moses and all the Prophets he explained to them the things concerning himself in all the Scriptures. Later he told the gathered disciples that everything written about him in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms had to be fulfilled. The whole Hebrew canon, in its three divisions, was for Jesus a book about Jesus, moving toward his suffering and his glory.

He Used It to Settle Doctrine

Watch how Jesus argued and you learn how he expected the Scripture to function. When the Sadducees, who denied the resurrection, tried to trap him, he answered from the words God spoke at the burning bush, I am the God of Abraham, and pressed the present tense, that God is not the God of the dead but of the living. The whole weight of his reply rested on the precise wording of a single sentence of Moses, which tells us how high a view of the text he held.

When the Pharisees questioned him about marriage and divorce, he took them back to the creation account, to the man and woman God joined at the beginning, and drew from that history a binding standard for all time. He treated the early chapters of Genesis not as myth carrying a vague lesson but as the factual foundation on which doctrine could be built. The Lord did theology by going to what was written and reasoning from it, and that is the pattern he sets for his church.

Following His Pattern Today

Learning from the Lord, we read the Old Testament as the trustworthy word of God, every part of it carrying his authority. We take its history seriously as history, refusing the modern habit of keeping the moral while discarding the event, because the Saviour we follow did not separate them. And we read it looking for him, not by forcing his name into every verse, but by recognising that the law, the sacrifices, the kingship and the prophets were all preparing for and pointing to the One who would come.

At the same time, reading as Jesus read means honouring the literal sense and the historical setting, as he did when he answered from what was written. A dispensational and Biblicist reader holds together both truths, that the Old Testament means what it says in its own context and that it finds its goal in the Messiah. The Lord himself is the proof that those two never conflict.

So, now what?

Open the Old Testament with the confidence Jesus had in it, treating it as the authoritative and unbreakable word of God rather than a collection of ancient religious ideas to be sifted. What was good enough for the Lord to live by is good enough for you.

Take its history as he took it, real events in which the living God acted, and resist any teaching that keeps the lesson while throwing away the event. The reality and the meaning belong together.

Read it, above all, looking for the One it was written to reveal. The Scriptures that the religious experts searched in vain become living when you find in them the Jesus to whom they point.

“And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” Luke 24:27