Jesus in the Old Testament?

By Kate Webb, who is a Mars Hill member & Jesus seeker. [We also think she is one smart cookie and we are glad she she shared her personal study and insight here with us.]

The law is hard to grasp.  It is weird, boring, hard to read, hard to understand and easy to skip over. But Jesus says that all the Scriptures testify to him (Luke 24:27, John 5:39).  So what can the law reveal to us about Jesus?

Looking at one example, the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, chapter 21:22-23 says,

“And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you shall hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God. You shall not defile your land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance.”

To give some general context to this passage, Deuteronomy is the fifth and final book of the Pentateuch; the five books penned by Moses, which also make up the first five books of our Bible. Deuteronomy means “second law,” and in this book Moses reiterates the law and gives his farewell and final exhortation to obey God as Israel stops on the bank of the Jordan right before crossing into the Promised Land, where Moses will not go with them.

The literal meaning of the verse has to do with the details of capital punishment. The Israelites didn’t hang people by the neck until dead as a means of execution. Rather the Israelites used stoning (throwing rocks at somebody until dead) as their primary means of execution. However, after stoning they might hang the corpse up on display as a public spectacle and warning to others against committing that crime. Common practice in other cultures would be to leave the body up for days, weeks, or even until it rotted away.

In requiring that the body be buried the same day, God sets His people apart. He prevents his people from bearing a grudge and in essence commands them to forgive and be merciful, giving even the worst criminals the honor of burial rather than leaving them up where they are accursed of God. In a very practical way, God is also preventing them from defiling the Promised Land with the stench of a bunch of rotten dead bodies, which were considered unclean under the law (Num 5:2).

Aside from keeping the Promised Land clean and the Israelites merciful, in this verse on the nitty-gritty of the Israelite penal code God actually reveals to us something about Christ and the crucifixion. The Hebrew word for hanged (transliterated Talah) does not just mean “dangle from a cord,” but also to hang up or to hang up for display. The Hebrew word used for tree, (“ets) also has several meanings. The meanings for this word include tree, wood, lumber, stock, plank, and pieces of wood. Ancient Hebrews back in Moses’ day would not have had a word for “giant Roman cross bar” or “crucifix,” since such a thing didn’t exist at the time. As Christ was nailed to the cross, he did more than just hang from a piece of wood until he died. In Galatians 3:13, 14 the Apostle Paul quotes Deuteronomy 21:23 saying “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’ so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.”

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law not just by removing it, not even by dying, but by becoming a curse for us. Furthermore, Jesus was not simply killed and then cursed by God, as would have been the case if they had hung him up on display after some other means of execution. Jesus was hung on the tree (cross) while still alive and endured the most horrific death possible in order to become a literal living curse, so that we might receive the Spirit and the gift of Christ’s righteousness. John 18:31 infers that the Jews would have loved to kill Jesus by their own means without waiting for a Roman crucifixion, but the Roman law prohibited them from doing so; Jesus knew he had to die on a cross, because John 18:32 says “This was to fulfill the word that Jesus had spoken to show by what kind of death he was going to die.”

“A hanged man is cursed by God.” The Hebrew word used for cursed means vilification or execration - hate coupled with disgust. Christ literally disgusted God the Father, and God hated him while he was on the cross. It was our sin that he bore that made God hate Jesus. God should have hated and been disgusted by us. We should have been the cursed upon the tree. How much more powerful is it that the living and innocent Jesus, God’s own son, became a curse in order to save us, rather than his empty body? We know from the empty tomb that the power of Christ does not lie in his body. From this we can also further understand what Paul means when he writes in 2 Corinthians 5:21 “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Christ took the hate and disgust that our sin gives God and took it upon himself on the cross, not because he died, which was the penalty for that sin (Gen 2:17, Rom 6:23), but because he actually hung on the cross.

Examining Christ’s death on the cross in light of Deuteronomy 21:22,23 gives a bit of insight into why God may have chosen a cross over all the other painful ways to die, and it also gives a prophetic meaning to the law. In Matthew 5:17 Jesus says, “Do not think I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.” It is easier to understand what it means to fulfill a prophecy than to fulfill a law. Christ’s crucifixion was in accordance with the law and in fact fulfilled it. The law is a command to act in a certain way, but the law is in and of itself a prophecy of Christ’s sacrifice.