How does Jesus’ death save people in the Old Testament?

Question 3039.

How were Old Testament believers saved, when the cross lay centuries in their future? It is one of the best questions a thoughtful reader of Scripture can ask. Abraham died roughly two thousand years before Calvary. David never heard the name Jesus. If salvation is only through Christ’s death, as the New Testament insists, how could anyone be saved before that death happened?

The short answer is glorious: Old Testament believers were saved by grace through faith, on the basis of a sacrifice that was still future to them but eternally certain to God. The cross reaches backwards as well as forwards. Let me show you how Scripture puts that together.

Saved by faith, from the very beginning

Scripture never presents two ways of salvation, works for the ancients and faith for us. Genesis 15:6 is the foundation stone: Abram ‘believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness’ (Genesis 15:6). The Hebrew verb is aman, to trust, to lean one’s whole weight upon. Abraham was counted righteous by believing God’s promise, before circumcision, before the Law, before the temple.

Paul builds his entire doctrine of justification on that verse in Romans 4, and adds David as his second witness: ‘Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin’ (Romans 4:8, quoting Psalm 32). Habakkuk 2:4 says ‘the righteous shall live by his faith.’ Hebrews 11 parades a whole gallery of Old Testament believers commended through faith. The instrument of salvation has never varied.

What the sacrifices could and could not do

But what about all those animal sacrifices? Were Old Testament believers saved by offering lambs and bulls? No, and the Old Testament itself knows it. ‘For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins’ (Hebrews 10:4). David, after his great sin, saw past the system he lived under: ‘For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it’ (Psalm 51:16).

The sacrifices were God-given pictures, not payments. They taught the principle of substitution, they covered sin ceremonially, and they pointed forward to a better sacrifice. Think of them as promissory notes: real value, but value that depended entirely on a future settlement. Every lamb slain in Israel was a sermon about the Lamb of God still to come, as I show in Why is Jesus called the Lamb of God?

The cross pays backwards: Romans 3:25

Here is the hinge text. God put Christ forward as a propitiation by His blood ‘to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins’ (Romans 3:25). Notice the phrase ‘passed over former sins.’ For centuries God had been forgiving Old Testament believers, and in one sense the outstanding account was still open. Had God simply ignored their sin? Paul’s answer is that God was waiting, in forbearance, for the cross, where every passed-over sin would be fully and finally paid.

Hebrews 9:15 says it explicitly: Christ’s death ‘redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant.’ The cross is a single historical event with eternal reach. Because the Lamb was ‘foreknown before the foundation of the world’ (1 Peter 1:20), God could righteously credit its value to Abraham, Moses and David in advance, exactly as a payment can clear debts contracted long before it is made.

What did Old Testament believers actually know?

Here dispensational care helps us. The object of saving faith has always been God and His word of promise; the content of that faith grew as revelation unfolded. Adam and Eve had the promise of a Seed who would crush the serpent (Genesis 3:15). Abraham trusted the promise of a seed and a blessing for all nations. Israel under the Law trusted the God who provided atonement through the sacrifices He appointed. None of them knew the name Jesus of Nazareth or the shape of Calvary.

So Old Testament believers were not saved by consciously trusting a crucified Messiah they had never heard of; they were saved by trusting the God who would, in the fullness of time, provide that Messiah. Jesus said Abraham ‘rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad’ (John 8:56): real anticipation, according to the light given. The distinction between Israel and the Church remains important here, and I keep those programmes distinct throughout, but salvation itself has one ground in every age. I set this out further in How were people in the Old Testament saved?

The writer to the Hebrews sums up the whole unfolding pattern in his opening breath: ‘Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son’ (Hebrews 1:1). Same God, same speech, gathering fullness. Revelation is progressive; grace is constant.

One ground, one Saviour, every age

Pull the threads together and the picture is beautifully consistent. The ground of salvation in every dispensation is the death of Christ. The means of salvation in every dispensation is faith. The object of faith in every dispensation is God as He has revealed Himself so far. What changes is the content of revelation, never the principle of grace. ‘Salvation belongs to the LORD’ (Jonah 2:9) is the confession of both Testaments.

This also settles a common worry: no one in the Old Testament was saved on credit that failed to clear. The forbearance of God was vindicated at the cross (Romans 3:26). Abraham’s righteousness, credited two millennia early, was underwritten by the same blood that underwrites yours and mine. There is one mediator between God and men (1 Timothy 2:5), and there has never been another.

Practically, this unity is why the Old Testament remains Christian Scripture rather than a superseded prologue. When you read a psalm of forgiveness or watch Abraham trust a promise against all appearances, you are watching your own salvation’s family history, people justified by the same grace, resting on the same cross, kept by the same faithful God. Paul says these things ‘were written for our instruction’ (Romans 15:4). Read them that way.

Where are they now?

Old Testament believers who died went consciously into blessing, pictured in Luke 16 as Abraham’s side, and their future is resurrection. Daniel was told that many who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake ‘to everlasting life’ (Daniel 12:2), and he himself will stand in his allotted place at the end of the days (Daniel 12:13). Job expected to see his Redeemer with his own eyes (Job 19:25). In the dispensational scheme their resurrection follows the return of Christ, distinct from the Church’s rapture and resurrection programme.

So Abraham is not a museum piece. He is a living man awaiting a body, on exactly the same ground of grace as you. Jesus silenced the Sadducees with this very point: God ‘is not God of the dead, but of the living’ (Matthew 22:32). For the wider picture see The intermediate state, death and resurrection.

Puzzles worth pausing over

Two honest questions usually follow. Was God unfair to leave Old Testament believers waiting so long, with so much less light? Hebrews answers with a lovely turn: they died without receiving the things promised, ‘since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect’ (Hebrews 11:39). The delay was not neglect but design; God was weaving their story and ours into one completed redemption. They waited for us, and heaven will be shared.

And what of those outside Israel? Scripture quietly records believers beyond the covenant nation: Melchizedek the priest of God Most High, Job in the land of Uz, Rahab of Jericho, Ruth of Moab, the sailors and the city of Nineveh repenting at Jonah’s preaching. Old Testament believers were never limited to one bloodline, because the promise to Abraham always had the nations in view (Genesis 12:3). Wherever God gave light, faith in that light saved, and every case rested on the same cross to come.

What no one was saved by, in any age, was law-keeping. Paul is emphatic: ‘by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight’ (Romans 3:20). The Law was Israel’s tutor, not Israel’s ladder. If Old Testament believers could not climb to God by works with God’s own Law in hand, no one since should imagine climbing with less.

So, now what?

Let this deepen your confidence in the unity of your Bible. From Genesis to Revelation there is one Saviour, one ground of forgiveness and one instrument of faith. The God who kept faith with Old Testament believers across twenty centuries of waiting will not fail to keep faith with you.

And let it humble you. Abraham believed with a fraction of the light you have been given. You hold the finished story in your hands. What excuse could any of us offer for trusting Him less than they did with so much more revealed?

It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

Romans 3:26 (ESV)