Signposts to Jesus

Not too long ago at my youth group, we were asked to write on a piece of paper what the Bible meant to us. On my piece of paper, I wrote that the Bible is a "good story".

I wrote this because, not only is the Bible made up of the stories of God's people, but that good stories have twists and turns, and different parts fit together and are linked in ways that the reader doesn't realise until the end.

In many ways, the Bible can be like this. There are many times when you read the Bible and see a part that connects to an earlier part, but I certainly don't have time to go through all of them right now (not that I know all of them, but you get my point). Instead, I'm going to focus on two parts of the Old Testament that point directly to Jesus.

The first of these is in Leviticus. Leviticus is less of a story and more of a long list of rules and regulations, almost like a legal agreement between God and the Israelites. There are occasionally bits of story, but mostly it's these rules for how the Israelites should live. The start of Leviticus is mainly about how to make offerings to God, and there are lots of different offerings that the Israelites make. One of which is called the wave offering. The wave offering is pretty self-explanatory: it's when the sacrifice is waved before the alter. However, the wave offering would have to be waved from left to right, and then up and down - in the sign of the cross. This part of Leviticus which is so easily skipped over, directly points to Jesus and his ultimate sacrifice in the New Testament.

The second part of the Old Testament which I'm going to talk about is directly mentioned in the New Testament to show how it is connected with Jesus. In Numbers 21:4-9, the Israelites complain in the desert, and God punishes them by sending poisonous snakes among them. When they realise that they have sinned, they ask Moses to pray to the LORD in order to save them from the snakes. God tells Moses to make a bronze snake and put it on a pole, so that anyone who looks at the snake will be healed. Later in John 3:14-15, Jesus explains how He is like the bronze snake, so that whoever looks at Him will be healed from sin.

These are just two examples of how events and passages in the Old Testament are signposts to Jesus in the New Testament, but they show how the stories of the Bible are all interconnected.

However, there is one difference between the Bible being a good story, and anything else being a good story. That is, any other good story has finished. The story of Bible will never be added to in that extra stuff will be placed inside it, but it carries on with each and every one of us. And if the stories in the Bible are signposts to Jesus, then how is our story being a signpost to Jesus?