OLD TESTAMENT GRACE
“Incline your ear, O Lord, and answer me,
for I am poor and needy.
Preserve my life, for I am godly;
save your servant who trusts in you – you are my God.
Be gracious to me, O Lord,
for to you do I cry all the day.
Gladden the soul of your servant,
for to you, O Lord, do I lift up my soul.
For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving,
abounding in steadfast love to all who call upon you.
Give ear, O Lord, to my prayer;
listen to my plea for grace.
In the day of my trouble I call upon you,
for you answer me.”
Psalm 86:1-7
I was asked a very good question by a student in our youth group this past week, “How did people in the Old Testament come to salvation?”
The answer is that they came to salvation in the same way we do – by the grace of God alone, through faith alone. The major difference relates to the forward-looking nature of their faith. A God-fearing person in the Old Testament was looking forward to the salvation of God yet to be accomplished in a Messiah to come. Each believing person recognized their sin in the same way we must now, and every believing person called out to God for forgiveness. The basis for their hope of forgiveness was not their own good works, or religious rites and rituals, but the grace of God toward them. Old Testament believers did not know the name of Jesus or have an understanding of the cross that we have now. However, they did have a symbolic picture of the cross in the sacrificial system of the Old Testament temple and were reminded of the grace of God to forgive sins by every prophet the Lord sent to them.
The Old Testament system of sacrifices was instituted by God from the earliest chapters of the Bible. We see Abel in Genesis 4 bringing before God the acceptable sacrifice of a lamb. This basic sacrifice is expanded into an entire system of sacrificial worship revolving around the Tabernacle (movable) and later the Temple (permanent). These sacrifices for sin all revolved around one life substituted for another, the life of the animal for the life of the sinner. The person was guilty because they knew the rebellion of their heart before God, but the animal is innocent because they have no moral sense before God. But all these sacrifices are symbolic and inadequate. No lamb or ram can truly stand in the place of a sinful person before a holy God. Each sacrifice pointed symbolically in faith to the final and perfectly sufficient substitution of Jesus our Savior.
Generation after generation looked in faith for the Messiah to come. Countless Old Testament believers prayed the prayer of Psalm 86 – “save your servant who trusts in you … be gracious to me, O Lord.” This went on until faith was nearly lost and encrusted over by tradition – 400 years of silence with no word from the Lord between the time of Malachi and John the Baptist. Yet the Lord is faithful and will fulfill His purposes in His own time. In the fullness of time, John the Baptist was sent as the final prophet to proclaim the coming of the Messiah, to make straight the way of the Lord. John finally proclaimed the words awaited for thousands of years, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world!” (John 1:29) It is for the sake of Jesus that sins are forgiven, whether that faith was forward looking (Old Testament) or is backward looking (New Testament). However, let us be quick to remember that our faith today is still a forward-looking faith. Though we look back to the cross, we still look forward in hopeful expectation to the second coming of Christ. Though the day is dark and much has been lost, know that the purposes of God remain and will be accomplished in His own time. On a day already appointed, Jesus will come again, “with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God” (1 Thessalonians 4:15-18 / 2 Thessalonians 1:5-12).
For other passages in the Old Testament that speak to the grace of God in saving sinners see: Numbers 14:18-19 / Deuteronomy 4:31 / 2 Kings 22 / Nehemiah 9:17 / Joel 2 / Jonah 4:2 / Micah 7:18-20.
Praise the Lord for His salvation given to us by grace alone through faith alone,
Pastor Vic
It’s important to ask questions you may have about the Bible and Christianity. I will be hosting a question-and-answer session at 12:30pm, May 21 at the church. If you would like to submit a question beforehand, you can write it down and put it in the offering box near the main entrance or email your question to, info@redeemerVA.org. See you there!