The Gospel is a story. It is a story about Jesus. To appreciate what the New Testament says about the Gospel, we’ve got to understand the back story, the ways that God shaped things to prepare the way for Jesus.

In Genesis 3:15, in the middle of cursing humanity and the whole earth with them, God slips in a promise: someone was going to come who would crush God and man’s enemy, someone born of a woman, meaning, a human.

For the rest of the Old Testament people are looking for this person. Different men and women rise up in the strength of the Lord and deliver God’s people from their enemies…for a time. But the Old Testament also shows that in every case, these hopefuls fall short of truly delivering God’s people and destroying God’s enemies. They’re sinners too and they need to be saved. So the pages turn and we all hold our breaths.

We wait and watch God’s people: Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Gideon, Samuel, Saul, David, Solomon, Elijah, Elisha, Daniel. But each person makes poor decisions and tries to cover them up like the weak, sinful men they are. And we watch as this supposedly special nation all but tears itself to pieces just trying to live together. And we think: There’s no hope.

The Old Testament chronicles this group of families, the tribes of Israel, and how they are always on the verge of falling apart, but God is always stepping in at just the right time, either providing a deliverer or just straight deliverance.

And we watch as God directs them to build a Temple where they can meet with Him. We can’t get to God, but He will come to us. And when He comes to us, we need to be cleansed. So they set up these elaborate cleansing rituals that symbolize the dirtiness and shame that all of us live with all the time because of our sins and because of other people’s sins against us. They learn that they need to be washed before they meet with God.

And they learn that the dirtiness goes deeper than their skin. The center of the Temple’s activities was the hundreds, even thousands, of animal sacrifices done every day. Why kill all these animals? Sin. We learn that we can’t make up with God like we make up with each other: “Hey, man, you alright?” “Yeah.” “Look, my bad, alright?” “Alright.” “Cool.” “Cool.” No. Blood had to be shed. Animal blood couldn’t take away human sin, however much they might have wished it. Instead, it was a constant reminder of the seriousness of their sin and pointed to the need for someone’s blood to be shed to pay for it.

And we watch Priests and Prophets and Kings come and go, all appointed by God, all performing their duties with varying degrees of success, all tainted by their sin, all trapped in the curse. Priests who stood between God and the rest of the people showed us that we need an Arbitrator, a Mediator. We can’t deal directly with God because of our sins. Prophets carried God’s words to the people. God has something to say to us. He is not silent. But few people liked what they had to say. And Kings tried to follow the creation-mandate to rule under God as God’s vice-regent. Sure they had authority; but they were answerable to God. And whenever that got fuzzy, terrible things began to happen. We need a King who is God, so we can eliminate the middle man.

We learn a few things from the Old Testament: 1) God wants us to come back to Him. He did not leave us alone. He’s made a way. He’s set up a meeting place. He’s appointed go-betweens. He’s called prophets and given them a message: return. 2) Anything that God does that involves a fallen human being is going to fail. Nothing works in the OT. It all seems short, stunted. It fails. It fails because we’ve failed, because we’re fallen.

So, if God wants to help us, and He does, He’s going to have to do it Himself. So He did. Enter Jesus.