Easter 2026: An Old Testament Gospel

Intro

Well today is Easter and as is somehow almost always the case my Sunday to preach falls on a holiday Sunday and so we are going to take a bit of a break here and rather than doing the second sermon on the creation of Eve and the propose and responsibility that we find given to women in scripture we are going to take some time this week to simply consider the gospel and more specifically the gospel as it comes to us in the Old Testament. As followrs of the Lord Jesus Christ, as men and women who have been redeemed by His once and for all sacraice there at the cross, that sacrafice that we set aside this weekend in particular to remember, as recipiants of this great salvation, it is incumbant upon us for several reasons to have a good understanding of the gsopel. The primary reason that this is important is that we are saved through the good news of the gospel and so we must know the gospel to be saved by the gospel. Putting faith in a false gospel has no power to save. This is one of the reasons why we spend a significant ammount of time in our membership interviews for the church discussing the propsective members understanding of the gospel. Fortiunatlly you dont have to be able to articulat the theological truths of the gospel with the precision and mastry of a PHD theologian and there are often times where we ask some clarifying questions to draw out ansewrs but it is important that we as Elders and then you as a body welcome into the fellowship of the church those who have made a cedible profession of faith and for a profession to be credible it must be accompanied in some measure by an inderstanding of the centeral elements of the gospel and how it is that the Gospel saves sinners.

And so this is what I would like us to do today as we remember Easter and as we think of what our Lord did for us there at the cross and the wonderful truth that He rose again, defeating death and conquirng the grave on the third day, as we reember and rejoice in these things this morning it is an apt opportunity to hold before our minds the gospel to which the death, burial, and ressurection of Christ is central so that we can together praise God for the manifold wisdom in this glorious way that He has chosen to save sinners like us.

Now as it seems to be my lot to be the preacher of the Old Testament I thouht it would be an interesdting and hopefullly edifying idea to take time this morning and to see how this gospel of salvation from sin through the Lord Jesus Christ is revealed in the pages of this testament. We know ofcourse that we can see the gospel clearly presented in the New Testament and most notablly in the book of Romans which is the magnum opus of Gosple expositions in the New Testament. However, the goepel didnt just pop up out of thin air. From the earliest pages of scripture we see this good news begin to be foretold and expounded right up until that moment when Christ comes and gives His lie as that sacrafice that would open wide the way back into the presence of God for all those who would enter by His name and through His blood.

Now, I will also note as we start that the verses are many, and we arent going to get anywhere close to covering all of the ways that we see the gospel fortold and foreshadowed in the Old Testament so I may miss the particular verse you were thinking of. My goal this mornign will be to take each of the elements that are central to the simple message of the gospel and then see one or two texts that reveal and expound upon those elemens here in the writings of that covenant that was put in place to guard and guide God’s people untill our Lord would come.

So before we go any farther lets take a moment to pray and then dive in this morning.

PRAY

Now though we are going to spend our time this morning in the Old Testament we are going to start in the New. Jake read us that well known story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Now there is must that we could stop and see in that story but I want us to hone in there on verse 27.

Luke 24:27 ESV

And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.

I have always loved this pasage. We live in a day when the Old Testament has fallen on hard time. Just last week I was encouraging some folks in how important the Old Testamwnt is and how it is especially important for young people to be grounded in what the Old Testament says, that way is at stake is the very gospel of Jesus Christ. We live in a day when celebraty preachers talk of unhitching the gospel from the Old TEstament, these men say that dragging the Old Testament along with the gospel really only puts undue stumbling blocks in the way of a new believers faith or in the way of a lost person coming to the faith. However, this one verse ought to strike an absolute death blow to this rediculous and wicked reasoning.

These men are distraught, they have seen the Messiah they followed crucified and burried in a tomb. The One who they thought would bring salvaton to Israel is dead and dead in one of the most unimaginable ways possible. “We had hoped that he would redeem Israel,” they say. But somethign wierd has happened, the tomb was empty, the women said, Angles told them the Lord was alive, even some of our number went and found it just like the women said but they didnt see him.

These guys are confused and dont seem to know what to make of the situation and Jesus sort of lets them have it!

Luke 24:25–26 ESV

And he said to them, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?”

We read that these travelers were diciples of Jesus though atleast one of them is named, Cleopas, and he is not one of the 12 but they are members of the group that has been following Jesus and thus likely would have heard many of the things that He had been teaching, especially those things concering his soon to come death in Jerusalem at the hands of the Jewsih leadrers and just like the disciples they seem to have missed the point entierly. In a question that rings with the rebuke of Peter In Matthew 16 when Peter tries to rebuke Jesus for talking about His coming death, when He tells Peter to “Get behind me Satan” Jesus here tells these men “Was it not nessisary that the Christ, that the Messiah, shiuld siffer these things?”

Now one might think that what would follow would be Jesus reminding these disciples of His own words right! Wouldnt that be natural, afterall Christ had taught these very people so much about why he had come and what was going to happen, why not just literally explain it to them in His own words! That is what the unhitch folks would like to have happened. But thats not what happened! We read again:

Luke 24:27 ESV

And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.

Now we could make the case that the scriptures are the words of God and that Moses and the prophets spoke and wrote the words of God and that Jesus is God and so, well ,He really is using His words here to explain to these men all of these things concerning Himself. We could do that but that isn’t the point, the point is that when presented with the very first opportunity on this side of the cross to explain to someone the reason for the cross and the nature of His death and resurrection our Lord intentionally chose to begin that explanation with Moses and the Prophets and then use the rest of scripture, read there, the rest of the Old Testament text, the Jewish scriptures, to explain to these disciples the things that had happened, the things abut Himself. Jesus Himself went to the Old Testament to make the first explanation of the Good News about Himself, the first explanation of the Gospel after He died and rose. Man, how I wish we had what He said. However, it is probably not recorded for us perhaps because if it was we might limit our explanations from the Old Testament to only those things that Jesus made mention of, since we don’t know what those were though we are given a wonderful task of searching these very same Scriptures for these very same things and seeking to understand them that we might understand the gospel and the work of Christ there on the cross and as He rose from the tomb on the third day!

And so lets take some time now to see the esential elements of the Gospel, the esential elements of this good news about what Christ has acomplished, lets see that as it is brought to us through the pages of the scriptures that Jesus would have shared with these disciles on the Road there to Emmaus.

God

The first element of the gospel is God. We must understand that God is the center of the gospel message. Modern/western christianity has done everything it can to twist the gospel and make it all about us, all about humanity. The center of the gospel though is not humanity but rather God. The Gospel starts with God and is centered on God throughout.

And so here we need to understand that the Gospel starts in the same place that our time in Genesis started, there in the beginning. There before there was anything that was created there we read in Genesis 1:1, in the beginning God created. We see that when the story opens God is allready there, has always been there, eternally existant and then we see that God created, all that exists in this world, in the universe, all that exists owes its existence to God. As we saw when we cnsidered the nature of God as revealed to us here in Genesis 1 this means that God is a totally unique and separate being from anything in His creation.

2 Samuel 7:22 tells us:

2 Samuel 7:22 ESV

Therefore you are great, O Lord God. For there is none like you, and there is no God besides you…

Or as God Himself tells us through the Prophet Isaiha in Isaiah 46:9

Isaiah 46:9 ESV

…I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me,

We also need to see though that God is holy and that His creation was good and that He is the one who sets the standard and makes the laws that govern all that exists within His creation, in other words God sets the laws everywhere and for everything and everyone.

We can se this goodness of creation throughout Genesis 1 as each completed creation act is marked with the declarative statement “it was good.” We can then see that God is the standard setter, the law maker in Genesis 2:16 and 17 when after creating man He enters into a covenant with the man and gives the man a law that must be obeyed. As the catechism says, “He entered into a covenant of life with him upon the condition of perfect obedience.” And so mankind owes to God their obedience as their creatr and the rightful ruler of all things.

However, as we learned during our time in the 10 Commandments with Jake and recently again as we preached through these passages here in Genesis we understand that it was not just this one positive law but that God has woven His morla law a law that flows from His perfectly holy nature into the very fabric of this creation and so all men owe obedience to God and His moral law.

The Fall

It is only now at this point that we, that is mankind, truly enters the story. You see the word gospel means good news and we must understand that the thing that makes the gospel “Good news” is that there is bad news and that bad news is what comes to us next as we consider what the gospel is.

In Genesis 3 we aread about the fall of man into sin. We understand that Adam and Eve broke God’s law, the disobeyed His command and sought to usurp Him and set themselves in His place as the ones who had the right to make the laws in creation or atleast the ones who had the right to make the laws for themselves. Satan decieved Eve and her husband Adam takes the fruit from her and in direct disobedience to that law of that covenant of life he eats it and the world is plunged into darkness. We read at the end of Genesis 3 about God’s cursing of the man and the woman, His cursing of the serpant and the ground and of all of the good things that He has placed in the wonderful creation.

It is interesting though that we dont read of the proper name of what this thing is that has plunged the word into this darkness untill the followg chapter. There we read of Cain and Able a story that is likely familliar to most here and there in verse 6 and 7 God speaks to Cain who is angry with his brother because God has accepted Abel’s sacrafice and not his own.

Genesis 4:6–7 ESV

The Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, and you must rule over it.”

Sin is crouching at the door. This is what has been brought into the world through Adam’s disobedience. Sin! Paul sums up the effects of sin in the world for us in the book of Romans where in Romans 3:23 he says:

Romans 3:23 ESV

for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,

But even here Paul is leaning on Old Testament passages to build this case, passages like Psalm 14:1-3

Psalm 14:1–3 ESV

The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is none who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man, to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God. They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one.

All of mankind is under the curse of sin. Genesis 4 is written specifically to show how quickly sin has brought its devastating effect into the world. Cain’s murder of Able wasn't the second sin, we dont know how much time passed from Genesis 3 and the fall to Genesis 4 and the story of Cain and Able but it is significant that in the span of a chapter we go from the first breaking of God’s law in the garden to the first murder and it is here that this thing is named, sin, this sin that came into the world through Adam’s disobedience has lead mankind to the point of murder.

However we need to back up to Genesis 3 and see also the immediate result of sin, we have just seen that it has spread to all of Adam’s descendants and that is certainly quickly showed just how wicked it can become as it escelated to mrder in just a generation however in Genesis 3 we see the immediate results of sin. God had promised that if Adam broke the covenant and ate of the fruit that he would surely die. This death as Paul tells us is most notable as bein dead in our trespasses and sins, a spiritual death that now seperates all of sinful humanity from the grace and goodness of God. This ofcourse leads to physical death as Adam is removed from access to the tree of life but its end is eternal death, that man will be eternally seperated from the grace and goodness of God. This all is pictured for us as Adam and Eve are driven from the garden and an angle with a flaming sword is placed there to guard the way that accesses this source of life. Mankind is cut off from God.

It is here again that we must see that God, even here, is at the center! Adam sinned, we as his ofspring are born into sin, we are all sinners and we all sin, we all deserve the just punishment due to that sin. But the central element in our being sinners is the One whom we have sinned against. This is what makes sin so serious and such an insurmountable obstacle and why it must lead to death. Our offense is against a perfectly holy and righteus and just God! Once that stain of sin entered into us there is no way that we can be clean and thus there is no way for us to enter God’s presence, no way for us to get back into God’s good graces, again, as Paul summed it up for us, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God!”

In proverbs we find the damning retorical question. Proverbs 20 verse 9 asks:

Proverbs 20:9 ESV

Who can say, “I have made my heart pure; I am clean from my sin”?

Its a retorical question, the answer is no one!

JI Packer says it well:

“There is a pitfall here. Everybody’s life includes things that cause dissatisfaction and shame. Everyone has a bad conscience about some things in his past, matters in which he has fallen short of the standard that he set for himself or that was expected of him by others. The danger is that in our evangelism we should content ourselves with evoking thoughts of these things and making people feel uncomfortable about them, and then depicting Christ as the One who saves us from these elements of ourselves, without even raising the question of our relationship with God. But this is just the question that has to be raised when we speak about sin. For the very idea of sin in the Bible is of an offence against God that disrupts a man’s relationship with God. Unless we see our shortcomings in the light of the Law and holiness of God, we do not see them as sin at all. For sin is not a social concept; it is a theological concept. Though sin is committed by man, and many sins are against society, sin cannot be defined in terms of either man or society. We never know what sin really is until we have learned to think of it in terms of God and to measure it, not by human standards, but by the yardstick of His total demand on our lives.”

This is the bad news, the stark reality of sin! This is who we all are before we are brought by grace to Christ! We are creatures who fall utterly short of the standard of perfection demanded by the holiness and righteousness of God and in and of ourselves there is not a hope to be found in all of the world. Thus any effort to explain the gloruous truth of the gospel must reckon faithfully with this holiness and righteousness of our Creator and with the dread offense that our sin is against him and bring us to the end of ourselves, the end of our many claims of self-righteousness to the brink of despair. It is here, at the end of ourselves and our self justification in the terrifying light of God’s complete and utter holines that the glorious grace of the gospel illuminates the darkness that has enveloped us.

The Substitute

Here is the heart of the gospel when we have finally come to the realization that we are abject sinners and that we are indeed worthy of the just punishment that God has handed down and when we realize with the author of that proverb that we can not make ourselves clean then we realize that if thee is to be any hope it must be that God will so something to save us and indeed He has done just that.

We see the very first promise of the gospel there in Genesis 3 even in the midst of the cursing that God does there. Genesis 3:15 is called the Protoevangelium, literally the first gospel.

There we read: Genesis 3:15

Genesis 3:15 ESV

I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

God is going to provide this seed of the woman who will crush the head of the serpant, the deciever, the one who came and sought to ruin this world with sin, he will suffer defeat at the hands of a seed of the woman. Now this is just the first gospel and it doesnt flesh out much of how this is going to work but we see that God has promised a defeat to evil, Satan will one day be conqured, where it seems like he has prevaled he is now doomed for defeat. God is moving, God is doing something!

We also get a picture of what this redemption is going to look like in verse 21 where we read:

Genesis 3:21 ESV

And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.

God provides a covering for the nakedness and shame of our first parents but it is a covering of skin, in other words, some creatures has now died, has given its life so that man may be covered. Were God would have had every right to immediately claim the life of these sinners He has chosen rather to substitute the death of this animal and in grace has used the death of this animal to cover them.

This sets up a theme that is impossible to miss in the Old Testament and that is the theme of the substitute. This is just hat we needed we needed a substitute, someone who could die in our place someone who could take upon himself the death that was required of us.

There are two other key stories where we see this theme of the substitute develop clearly.

The first is the sacrafice of Isaac there in Genesis chapter 22. We find there that God, to test Abraham, told him to take Isaac the promised son and offer him on a mountaoin as a sacrafice. Famously as they are headed to the mountain Abraham and Isaac have the following exchange:

Genesis 22:7–8 ESV

And Isaac said to his father Abraham, “My father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So they went both of them together.

We then find that just as Abraham was about to plunge the knife into his son that an angle calls to him and directs him not to kill his son and we read:

Genesis 22:13 ESV

And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.

Instead of his son, this ram was offered in place of Isaac. God had provided a sacrafice so that Isaac could live. Abraham had passed the test of faith and God had shown yet again that He is a God who will provide for the sacrafice.

Jumping forward then to probably the most well known and important stories of substituationary sacrafice we come to the account of the exodus and the passover in Exodus 12.

Again, most of you are hopefully well familliar with the story but here in the last of the 10 plagues on Egypt God is sending the angle of death to take the life of every first born in Egypt. We read though in verses 3-7 that the people of Israel are commanded to take a lamb, the passover lamb and kill it and place some of its blood on the door posts and the lintle of the house in which they are staying and that when the angle of death sees the blood it will passover those houses and those firstborn shall live!

Exodus 12:13 ESV

The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt.

This passover sacrafice would become the first of many sacrafices in the ceromonial law of he covenant that God would establish with the people then at Mount Sainai on their way to the promised land. Each and every one of these sacrafices would provide a covering of blood for those for whom the sacraice had been offered and as a result of this blood we read again in the book of Romans that God was able to pass over their sins and not execute judgement upon them.

All of these sarafices then pointed directly to Christ. Jesus would come as the lamb of God, that long promised sacrafice who would die in the place of ruined sinners so that where He experience death for them they might experience life in Him! He would take their place.

This is the central element of this Gospel message, God, again its all about Him, God has provided a sacrafice and in the fullnes of time when all of this typology and shaddow had been brought to its fulfilment we find that it was the Son of God the second person of the Trinity who would come and give His life who would become that substitute who would become that sacrafice. Jesus lived a life that fully met the demands of God’s holiness and righteousness, He was as the scriptures teach a lamb without spor or blemish, He was perfect and yet He took on himself our sin and its just punishment!

Believe & Repent

We are nearly out of time for today but I want to make mention of the final element of the gospel message. The gospel is the good news of that substitutionary sacrafice of Christ on our behalf and that Good News demands a response.

As Paul tells us in his 1st letter to the Church in Corinth that this message of the gospel this message of Christ’s death on the cros in the place of sinners is folly to many, they hear it and they think it a fable or a fools tale. They, because God’s Spirit has not called them persist in their self justification and surpress what they know about God and have heard about His holiness and the demands of justice and our sinsfulness and they go on rejecting Christ.

However, Paul tells us that there are those who have been called and when this inward call of the Holy Spirit is met with the outward call of this mesage of the gospel we read:

English Standard Version Chapter 1

but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

How does this happen, how are we saved? Well we read in Romans 10:9-10

Romans 10:9–10 ESV

because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.

Believe! There is nothing that we do to be saved, it is God’s work in us and when we hear the gospel message we simply believe that it is true we believe in the message of the gospel, that God is holy and that we are sinners and that He provided a substitute, Jesus His own Son and that Jesus freely and willingly dies on the cross in our stead and was burried and then rose again on the third ay, that ressurection that we celebrate with joy this morning, we belive that it is His work that brings us this salvation.

There is again nothing hat we do as Paul makes clear in Ephesians 2:8-9

Ephesians 2:8–9 ESV

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

We see though that this belief and faith will have results, We read in Romans 10 lso of confessing Jesus as Lord, this means following Him. There are all sorts of fruits that will be born from the faith that God has given you but these are just that fruits of the faith and not the faith itself. It is the faith that saves, t is trusting in Christ and this finished work that brings salvation.

This is the gospel message, this is the hope that we have as a result of the ressurection of Christ, this is the reason for our celerbation and worship on this Easter Sunday, this ressurection day yes, but also on every other Sunday when we gather together in obedience to Him and worship Him for this wonderful way in which He has saved us!

Closing

I would like to close with a exerpt from DA Carson that I believe brings this all together well and hpefully is an encouragement to us whereever we are this morning in our own faith in Christ.

Carson shares this fictional story of two Jewish men having a discusion on the eve of the passover:

Picture two Jews, by the name of Smith and Brown. Remarkably Jewish names.

The day before the first Passover they’re having a little discussion in the land of Goshen, and Smith says to Brown, “Boy, are you a little nervous about what’s going to happen tonight?”

Brown says, “Well, God told us what to do through his servant Moses. You don’t have to be nervous. Haven’t you slaughtered the lamb and dobbed the two door posts with blood—put blood on the lintel? Haven’t you done that? You’re all ready and packed to go? You’re going to eat your whole Passover meal with your family?”

“Of course I’ve done that. I’m not stupid. But, it’s still pretty scary when you think of all the things that have happened around here recently. You know, flies and river turning to blood. It’s pretty awful. And now there’s a threat of the first-born being killed, you know. It’s all right for you. You’ve got three sons. I’ve only got one. And I love my Charlie, and the Angel of Death is passing through tonight. I know what God says; I put the blood there. But it’s pretty scary, I’ll be glad when this night is over.”

And the other one responds, “Bring it on. I trust the promises of God.”

That night, the angel of death swept through the land. Which one lost his son?

And the answer of course is: neither.

Because Picture two Jews, by the name of Smith and Brown. Remarkably Jewish names.

The day before the first Passover they’re having a little discussion in the land of Goshen, and Smith says to Brown, “Boy, are you a little nervous about what’s going to happen tonight?”

Brown says, “Well, God told us what to do through his servant Moses. You don’t have to be nervous. Haven’t you slaughtered the lamb and dobbed the two door posts with blood—put blood on the lintel? Haven’t you done that? You’re all ready and packed to go? You’re going to eat your whole Passover meal with your family?”

“Of course I’ve done that. I’m not stupid. But, it’s still pretty scary when you think of all the things that have happened around here recently. You know, flies and river turning to blood. It’s pretty awful. And now there’s a threat of the first-born being killed, you know. It’s all right for you. You’ve got three sons. I’ve only got one. And I love my Charlie, and the Angel of Death is passing through tonight. I know what God says; I put the blood there. But it’s pretty scary, I’ll be glad when this night is over.”

And the other one responds, “Bring it on. I trust the promises of God.”

That night, the angel of death swept through the land. Which one lost his son?

And the answer of course is: neither.

Because death doesn’t pass over them on the ground of the intensity, or the clarity, of the faith exercised. But on the ground of the blood of the lamb. That’s what silences the accuser.

There are times when your faith in the wonderful gospel message is rock solid and you feel like and maybe are even moving mountains for God, being used by God to do great and gloruous deeds for the kingdom. However, there are other times when doubt assails, questions rises, persecition, hardships , or any number of other things come that raise doubts and make faith seem distant. The wonderful truth though as we close is as Carson notes there: “death doesn’t pass over them on the ground of the intensity, or the clarity, of the faith exercised. But on the ground of the blood of the lamb.”

Trust in Christ, believe in that glorious gospel message, put faith in Him and you will be saved!