"You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me."
— John 5:39 (NASB)

The Old and New Testaments together form a single, unified witness to Jesus Christ. The Old Testament prefigures Him through types, prophecies, and promises; the New Testament records their fulfillment in His person and work. Jesus Himself insisted that the whole of the Hebrew Scriptures — the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms — testified about Him, and that a search of the Scriptures which fails to arrive at Him has missed their entire point.

On the Road to Emmaus

Luke 24:27

Walking with two disciples on the road to Emmaus after His resurrection, Jesus "explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures," beginning with Moses and all the Prophets. Later, back in Jerusalem, He repeats and expands this claim to the wider group of disciples:

Luke 24:44

"Now He said to them, 'These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.'"

Jesus names three categories — the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms — which together comprise the entire Hebrew canon as it was structured in first-century Judaism (the Tanakh: Torah, Nevi'im, Ketuvim — "the Psalms" standing for the Writings, of which it is the first and largest book). In effect, Jesus tells His disciples that the whole of what we call the Old Testament is fundamentally about Him. The little word "must" is δεῖ (dei, Strong's G1163) — divine necessity, "it is necessary" (BDAG, 3rd ed., s.v. "δεῖ," 1) — Luke's characteristic term for what God's plan requires (cf. Luke 24:26, "Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?"). Fulfillment was never contingency management; it was the outworking of a script written in advance. Luke adds that Jesus "opened their minds to understand the Scriptures" (Luke 24:45) — διανοίγω (dianoigō, G1272, "to open completely") — the same verb used of the Emmaus disciples' eyes (v. 31) and Lydia's heart (Acts 16:14): recognizing Christ in Scripture is both a matter of textual evidence and of God-given sight. Joel Green notes that in this scene Luke establishes the hermeneutic of the entire early church: Scripture is read rightly only when read with reference to God's purpose realized in Jesus ^[1].

Philip's Testimony to Nathanael

John 1:45

"Philip found Nathanael and said to him, 'We have found Him of whom Moses in the Law, and also the Prophets, wrote — Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.'"

Philip's spontaneous testimony echoes Jesus' own later claim in Luke 24 — the earliest disciples already understood, even before the resurrection, that the promised fulfillment of "Moses" and "the Prophets" was Jesus of Nazareth.

Searching Scripture, Missing Its Point

John 5:39–40

"You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me; and you are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life."

The verb "search" is ἐραυνάω (eraunaō, Strong's G2045, "to examine carefully, investigate"; BDAG, s.v. "ἐραυνάω") — the technical diligence of rabbinic exegesis; these were professionals, not casual readers. Jesus confronts religious leaders who diligently studied Scripture yet failed to recognize what it was actually pointing to. He sharpens the charge two verses later: "For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me" (John 5:46) — making Moses himself a witness for the prosecution. Their error was not a lack of scriptural knowledge but a failure to let that knowledge lead them to Him — they searched the Scriptures believing that the act of study itself conferred eternal life, when the Scriptures exist precisely to testify about the One in whom life is found. This is a caution for every generation of Bible students: exhaustive knowledge of biblical content is not equivalent to knowing Christ, and can even become a substitute for coming to Him if the Scriptures are read as an end in themselves rather than as a witness to their subject.

How the Old Testament Speaks of Christ: Prophecy, Type, and Presence

The Old Testament testifies to Jesus in at least three distinguishable modes:

Direct prophecy — explicit predictions fulfilled in Him: born of a virgin (Isaiah 7:14), in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2), pierced for transgressions (Isaiah 53:5), His resurrection (Psalm 16:10, applied by Peter in Acts 2:25–31). for the full treatment.

Typology — persons, events, and institutions divinely designed to prefigure Him. The word is Paul's own: the things that happened to Israel "happened as examples (τύπος, typos, Strong's G5179 — 'pattern, model, type'; BDAG, s.v. "τύπος," 6)" (1 Corinthians 10:6, 11). Jesus and the apostles read the Passover lamb (Exodus 12; 1 Corinthians 5:7, "Christ our Passover"), the bronze serpent (Numbers 21:8–9; John 3:14–15), the manna (Exodus 16; John 6:32–35), the rock in the wilderness (1 Corinthians 10:4 — "the rock was Christ"), Jonah's three days (Matthew 12:40), and the entire priesthood and sacrificial system (Hebrews 8:5; 10:1 — "a shadow of the good things to come") as advance sketches of Christ. Typology is not allegorical free-play; the New Testament itself identifies the correspondences.

Pre-incarnate presence — passages where the Son Himself appears within Old Testament history: the Angel of the LORD who speaks as God and receives worship (Genesis 22:11–18; Exodus 3:2–6; Judges 13:17–22), the "LORD" whom Isaiah saw enthroned — which John flatly identifies as Jesus' glory (Isaiah 6:1–5; John 12:41). This line of evidence is developed at length, and a scholarly defense of the approach is available in The Real Presence of the Son Before Christ: Revisiting an Old Approach to Old Testament Christology.

The Eternal Covenant to Which Scripture Points

Hebrews 13:20–21

"Now the God of peace, who brought up from the dead the great Shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the eternal covenant, even Jesus our Lord, equip you in every good thing to do His will, working in us that which is pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen."

The "eternal covenant" here is the substance of what the Scriptures, in their unified sweep, point toward: God's plan of redemption for His creation accomplished through Jesus Christ. The passage's closing emphasis — that believers are equipped to do God's will, not their own — underscores that the purpose of engaging Scripture is transformation into conformity with God's will as revealed in Christ, not mere accumulation of religious information.

Conclusion

Scripture's purpose is not merely academic, literary, or even devotional in an abstract sense — it exists "to make [believers] wise unto salvation through faith in Christ Jesus" (cf. 2 Timothy 3:15). The early church, as recorded throughout Acts, consistently used the Old Testament Scriptures to demonstrate that Jesus was the fulfillment of ancient prophecy. While Scripture also serves broader purposes — guiding believers in doctrine, ethics, and spiritual maturity — its central storyline, from Genesis to Revelation, converges on the person and work of Jesus Christ.