The Artist Hand

Sometimes we can miss the richness of the Old Testament.
The book is packed full of wonder and mind-boggling mystery.
Man’s sin separated us from God and there was no possible way for humanity to reach up to heaven to fix the relationship that was broken in the garden of Eden.
God has to take the first steps in repairing this broken relationship, so God begins revealing his plan and revealing himself by choosing the Patriarchs, Abraham, Issac, and Jacob.
God’s whole story of redemption and revealing himself is told in the lives of the Patriarchs.

Metaphors and Analogies

The church in the New Testament is called the new Jerusalem, the bride of Christ, the body of Christ, God’s temple. Jesus himself is called a Bridegroom, The Rock, The Light of the world, and the Bread of life.
God loves to use metaphors and analogies because they bring us to a deeper understanding of his plan and his character.
Throughout the whole Old Testament, God is a real fan of these metaphors, similes, and analogies and He uses them often. In fact, he depends on these to reveal himself in ways that are staggering.
How does the most powerful mysterious being in all the universe reveal himself to lowly creation?
Jesus used parables as a figure of speech to hide ideas and also to present deeper truth.

God The Father And Abraham

Abraham is the Father of the faith, the first Patriarch.
God promised Abraham that he would have a son. When Abraham was old the promised son (Issac) was born. Abraham was 100 years old when the promise was fulfilled.
The long wait for this promise to be fulfilled was certainly a test of Abrahams’s faith, but there was a point to this long delay.
It’s an analogy of the long-awaited Messiah, the extensive time span would not transpire until Abraham was old. A long time transpired before Abraham saw the birth of the second Patriarch, Issac.
God used this delay to show us that when Christ was sent that too would be a long time span before it was fulfilled. Abraham became the analogy for God (The Father) sending his own Son into the world and it would be a long time before that came into fruition.

God asked Abraham to offer up his son (Issac) as a sacrifice. God was showing us a glimpse of himself and what his plan in the distant future would entail- a long-awaited promise, a long-awaited Son, being offered up.
God used Abraham as an analogy of himself with his plan in the distant future and that plan was to offer up his only begotten son as a sacrifice.
God called Abraham to acts that foreshadowed the behavior of God himself.
Abraham became the analogy of God the Father, and God used him for the purpose to bring about his plan.

God the Father is the author of Abraham’s faith, revealing himself through Abraham the first Patriarch of the faith, Abraham beautifully illustrates The Father in the Patriarchs foreshadowed.

God The Son And Isaac

Issac is the second Patriarch of the Faith. He was conceived in Abraham’s old age, which was a miraculous birth.
Issac was a son of promise being offered as a sacrifice and God provided a ram in place of Issac.
God is giving us an analogy of a future fulfillment as to his plan and God’s willingness to offer up his own dear Son.

God the Son is the author of Isaac’s faith, revealing himself as the promised Son through Isaac as the one who would be born into the world and be offered up as a sacrifice to bridge the relationship between God and fallen humanity.
God the Son is the author of Issac’s faith, revealing himself through Issac the second Patriarch of the faith.
Issac beautifully illustrates The Son in the Patriarchs foreshadowed.

God The Holy Spirit And Jacob

Jacob loved Rachel and worked 7 years to receive his bride.
The morning after the consummation of the marriage Jacob realizes that he married Leah, Laban’s oldest daughter.
Leah was not sought after, she was not in Jacob’s plan, she was not desired by Jacob.

Rachel was the beloved bride Jacob desired, and he had to agree to work another 7 years to pay for her.

It is easy to read the stories of the Old Testament and not see the parallels of events that have occurred in our past, because most of the details at this point are in our past, but in Jacob’s life and what occurred was a future fulfillment that shaped a nation and described what would occur in the future.

God reveals himself in the Patriarch of the faith, he is the third person (Holy Spirit) in the Patriarchs foreshadowed.
Because Jacob is revealing the third person in the trinity then things about his life will line up with his experience, or at least will help us to understand deeper truths and more about the plan God had and what was fulfilled.
Gaining Leah’s as a bride was not a mistake although in Jacobs’s mind it was certainly a disaster, being human and God working through his life revealed a plan that only God himself could bring to pass.
This bride was not in Jacob’s plan but was in God’s plan the whole time because Leah is a type of the gentile church. Jacob receives a bride he was not working for but received anyway, Leah was very fruitful and bears many children.
Rachel is Jacob’s beloved and she is barren for many years.

This story occurred in the life of Jesus.
He came to his own and his own received him not. John 1:11
There is a timeline in this story of when he acquires Leah-Gentile church and when he fulfills her week and then receives his beloved Rachel ( Israel)

It literally takes 14 years for Jacob to pay for his precious bride, showing that it would take a bit longer for Jesus to acquire his own beloved. (Israel)
The lives of people are not ongoing, and people die and the foreshadowing of events drops off and is picked up again in the lives of the next generation with further detailed events unfolding that give us a broader picture of the story that is given to us in layers, forming an overview of what will transpire.
The Old Testament is foretelling a story and it comes into focus in the New Testament of Jesus being sent to Israel as a nation, being rejected by his own, and receiving a bride he was not desiring, who is fruitful.
If this were the only detail in the lives of Biblical characters one could say it is just a nice coincidence, but the overview story continues on in vivid detail making it an extreme impossibility.

The Master’s hand weaves his magnificent brilliance through the pages like a tapestry.
This is often difficult to grasp looking through a glass darkly at this tapestry that God has woven within the Old Testament.
The rich detail is woven in shocking detail that paints a literal Masterpiece.
There are key details given to us in the scriptures that seemingly go nowhere, stories that leave us confused as to why they were recorded in the first place. Almost with no rhyme or reason to them but truly these have some staggering points.

This is an internal witness of the truth of the Bible. These stories were written thousands of years apart and there’s absolutely no way possible these precise details would be made up out of a human mind.
These things are mind-boggling. Only a super-intellect guided the authors in fashioning this script and documenting the history.
For those who would ridicule and mock the scriptures claiming these men were backward sheepherders, fishermen, and uneducated,- the accusation destroys the credibility of the accuser.
These men who recorded history created a masterpiece of brilliance, not found anywhere in the world.