“Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures.” (Luke 24:27)
In John 5:46, Jesus chided the Jewish leaders, “For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote of Me.” Really? Moses wrote about…Jesus? Well, Jesus said that he did. That statement triggers the questions of ‘how‘ and ‘where‘?
Jesus revealed at least two Old Testament events to be prophetic pictures of Him. In John 3:14, He told Nicodemus: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” The other is in Matthew 12:40: “As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”
In Acts 18:28, we find that Apollos, an Alexandrian Jew, “powerfully refuted the Jews in public, demonstrating by the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ.” Which Scriptures is he referring to? The Old Testament. There wasn’t yet a ‘New Testament’. As is usual with Bible prophecy, the foretold event is often not perfectly clear until it happens. It wasn’t until Jesus lived here and did what He did that many Old Testament places, people, and events were revealed to be prophetic types of Him. These were the proofs used to convince the skeptic that Jesus was who He claimed to be.
The Old Testament spoke literally about some things about Christ that would confirm His identity. Among these were His healings (Isaiah 29:18; 35:5), raising the dead (Isaiah 26:19), and preaching the ‘good news’ to the poor (Isaiah 61:1). These works carried such weight that Jesus told the leaders, if they couldn’t believe what He said about Himself, then they should believe what He did.
His miracles and healing works were testimony that He was sent from Heaven by God the Father (John 10:38). Other clear predictions were that the Messiah would be descended from Israel’s son, Judah, and that He would be born in Bethlehem. Jesus fulfilled both.
Yes, some Messianic prophecies were easy to discern and understand, but many were not. Again, they were hidden in symbols. Jesus made this clear in the two examples cited earlier. It remains for us to search and examine the Scriptures to see what they said, but did not explain, about Him. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection would do that. As Romans 15:4 tells us, “For whatever was written in earlier times was written for our instruction, so that through perseverance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.”