How understanding the primacy of Christ in God’s creation illuminated the Bible for me
After I read Blessed John Duns Scotus’s defense of the Immaculate Conception and his writing on Jesus as the center of creation, it helped me see the Bible in an entirely new light. It seems most Christians view the Bible as a collection of books written in chronological order, starting with the Old Testament and proceeding to the New Testament. But that’s not how they should be viewed, because they were all written by the Holy Spirit, who exists outside of time and space. If that’s true, then it follows that the Bible wasn’t written intentionally in chronological order. We’ve had it upside down all along. The OT isn’t leading up to the NT, rather, the NT is the Word of God, which has always existed, and which reveals the OT, which is also the Word of God. The NT is centered on the Word of God made man, and since He represents the perfection and fullness of creation, it was through Him that everything in the OT that foreshadowed Him could be illuminated and revealed.
It’s true that in time, the OT was written before the NT, but in God’s mind, they always existed together simultaneously. Both the OT and the NT are centered on Jesus, the only difference being that the NT is explicitly centered on Him, whereas the OT is implicitly centered on Him because it was written for the Israelites, who didn’t know Him since He chose not to reveal Himself to them, or to mankind, until His incarnation. This means that we have to read the OT as if there’s a secret code underlying all of its words, and when we decipher that code, it reveals Jesus and His plan of salvation to us.
If we have the old mindset of the OT and NT merely being in chronological order, we will assume that Adam and Eve being in a garden, and Eve eating the apple from the tree prefigures Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane and dying on the cross to redeem us from their Original Sin as well as our own sins. But in reality, it’s the other way around. God created them knowing they’d sin, and all along had planned on sending His son to Earth to save us. So Jesus’s suffering in the garden and His death on a tree helps us see our fallen ancestors and their actions in a new light. Jesus’s birth was the center of creation. The creation of Adam and Eve wasn’t. We just see it that way because we view everything through the lens of time and what happened first, but God doesn’t see things that way.
Likewise, the Ark of the Covenant for the Israelites was a foreshadowing of Mary’s sinless nature and bearing of Jesus, but it was a lesser version of it. Mary was the true Ark that housed the Son of God, and that explains the existence of the Ark in the OT. The Jews didn’t have the Son of God with them, but He gave them the gift of His presence in the cloud over the Ark.
Another example is how the Church, the Bride of Christ, was created by God from Jesus’s rib, which was opened by a lance on the Cross when He was “asleep”. Eve being created from Adam’s rib prefigured this, but her creation is even more illuminated when seen in the light of the creation of the Church, which Jesus gave His life for. Again, we can see how the first creation event was a lesser version of the second, since Adam didn’t give his life for Eve to be created, and Eve wasn’t perfect, whereas we’re told that Jesus’s bride is spotless, because it’s her task to guide His followers to Heaven.
Finally, the Israelites were given bread from Heaven, known as manna, which sustained them physically on their journey to the promised land. This prefigured Jesus giving Himself completely to us in the form of the Eucharist, which was a new kind of bread that would sustain us spiritually:
“So they asked Him, “What sign then will You perform, so that we may see it and believe You? What will You do? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is My Father who gives you the true bread from heaven.…
I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that anyone may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And this bread, which I will give for the life of the world, is My flesh.”…
The manna was a shadow of the Bread that would come to give us life in abundance. Jesus’s institution of the Eucharist revealed how the manna showed God’s love for His people by giving them what they needed, even though they didn’t deserve it. But Jesus took it further than that by giving us His own body and blood, thus showing His infinite love for us. In the time when the OT was written, it simply wasn’t time for that to be revealed yet, because every single detail of God’s plan of salvation for the world was already planned in advance to be carried out in a specific way and at a specific time. We can think of the ancient Israelites as a child compared to the people who lived after them like the Greeks and the Romans. Does a father reveal everything to his infant son and try to explain complicated things to him? No, because he’s incapable of understanding such things at that age. Likewise, the ancient Israelites were at the infant state of humanity’s development, and so they weren’t capable of receiving the fullness of truth from God yet. That’s why we see Jesus tell people, including His apostles several times not to tell anyone about what they saw Him do or heard Him say. He was being obedient to His Father and following His Father’s plan. By the time Jesus came, humanity was advanced enough to finally be capable of receiving the fullness of truth that was revealed through Him.
