So let’s finish what we started in my previous post.

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Epiphany.

That’s a big word. How about “an a-ha moment?”

Whatever you call it, that’s what I experienced the day it dawned on me that the Old Testament was all about Jesus.

All of the old stories were no longer just allegorical tales about good people. Those stories became signposts, markers that point to Jerusalem, Good Friday, and Resurrection Sunday, more than 2,000 years ago.

And how anyone could miss those signs is beyond my understanding.

That’s why the verses in Luke 24:18-35 speak to me so strongly. As I imagined in my previous post, Christ himself taught Cleopas and his fellow traveler (I imagined that other traveler to be his wife) just how the Old Testament spoke of Him.

I would love to have been a fly on the back of their donkey, just to hear how Jesus chose to highlight his appearances in the Old Testament.

Did He discuss how the Ark was a picture of God’s saving grace, and thereby a picture of Jesus, when God saved Noah and his family from the flood?

Did he talk about when, in the form of Melchizedek the preist, he met Abraham and blessed him? After all, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, before Abraham was, I AM.” (John 8:58)

Or later, when Abraham came within a knife blade’s width of sacrificing his son – surely that was a clear picture of God’s intent with Jesus?

Maybe Jesus talked about wrestling Jacob before touching his hip?

Did Jesus describe the parallels between His death, burial and resurrection and Joseph’s descending into the pit of an Egyptian dungeon and left for dead, only to rise again to save his people?

What about Jonah’s three days in the belly of the whale, dead to the world in the middle of the sea, before returning to life on the beaches of Ninevah and saving the people there?

And then there are the prophecies. David, in Psalm 22, graphically described the crucifixion, including Christ’s torment, exhaustion, and the piercing of his hands and feet. Isaiah 53 echoes David, prophesying that Jesus would be “pierced for our transgressions,” but that those wounds would heal us.  All of these descriptions were written many hundreds of years before crucifixion was even conceived as a form of capital punishment.

Did Jesus mention that to Cleopas?

After all, it was a six-mile hike from Jerusalem to Emmaus. Maybe Jesus had time to discuss all of them. And maybe more – there are many more references in the Old Testament to go with the few mentioned here.

Whatever Jesus discussed with them, it was enough to cause their hearts to burn within them.

Just as my heart did for me, when God dropped the scales from my eyes. Then, the Old and New Testaments stopped being two separate collections of stories, and became a single story with only one hero – Jesus Christ.

Happy Resurrection Day. He is risen!