"Jesus is the lens. He is the prism. It is through the context and perspective of The Way and Truth that we must view ALL scripture. If something doesn't jive with Jesus' perfect Example, Message, Ministry, Life, or Teachings, then it isn't Jesus who must change, it is our interpretation of the thing that diverges from Him."
The following gems are taken from a collection of social media posts by Richard Murray:
Did God “REALLY" tell Moses to “surely stone” a poor man to death JUST for picking up sticks on the Sabbath?
Of course not. If our mind’s eye can’t envision Jesus ever commanding such a killing act, then we mustn’t envision the Father or Spirit ever commanding it either.
Jesus is the ONLY full, final, and authoritative revelation of the nature and character of God the Father. So, if we CANNOT perceive with our Spirit-quickened consciences Jesus acting as a killer or destroyer, then we can't see God the Father or God the Spirit as a killer or destroyer either, even if the Old Testament’s "dead letter" says otherwise.
So, let’s take a look at the Numbers 15 passage:
"32 And while the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man that gathered sticks upon the sabbath day.
33 And they that found him gathering sticks brought him unto Moses and Aaron, and unto all the congregation.
34 And they put him in ward, because it was not declared what should be done to him.
35 And the Lord said unto Moses, The man shall be surely put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp.
36 And all the congregation brought him without the camp, and stoned him with stones, and he died; as the Lord commanded Moses."
This above passage quotes God as directly commanding Moses to "surely put this man to death" for merely picking up sticks on the Sabbath. The Holy Spirit within me (and many others) doesn't bear witness that Jesus (who is the same God yesterday, today and forever) would EVER give such a command.
In fact, in John 8, Jesus PREVENTED the stoning of the woman caught in adultery. This despite the fact the same law literally demanded her death as it did the Sabbath breaker (Leviticus 20:10). Jesus revealed Himself to us as our rescuer from Satanic stonings, not their cause. Rest assured Satan (regardless of whether we view the devil as a dark angel or rather as a dark dynamic) supports each and every stoning of each and every sinner. Jesus does not.
Now, did the stoning in this passage literally happen? I have no problem saying it did. BUT, are we legalistically bound to its “by the letter" literal description of the event? Moses certainly "thought" he was hearing "God" say to "surely kill" the man who merely picked up sticks. But, did he hear the Lord accurately, or was something distorting Moses' understanding of the divine will?
If Moses erroneously thought, as Jewish theology tells us, that Satan was God's "angry voice," God’s official and obedient minister of wrath, “the left hand of God” in other words, who is merely and obediently carrying out the Father's directives, something WE now know to be wrong, then how might that affect our interpretation of this passage?
The Old Testament on at least one occasion uses the two terms “the anger of the Lord” and the “the provocation of Satan” interchangeably (see 2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles 21:1). This passage contains the clarion clue which unlocks the drastically different cosmologies of the Old and New Testaments.
In the Old Testament, God and Satan are presented as two cooperating facets of the same being. Only in the New Testament do the images of Satan and God become fully sundered, separated, and disjointed from each other. Simply put, the natures and motives of God and Satan became uncoupled and antagonistic. Jesus came to fully differentiate the images of God and Satan.
This is what Jesus meant when He declared that He “saw Satan fall from Heaven.” Jesus was describing His prophetic perception that all satanic qualities, which had been wrongly attributed and wrathfully projected onto His Father by human error, were now falling away from the heavenly image of God.
So, here is the interpretive key. When Moses quoted God, Moses wrongly included in his functional definition of God BOTH Yahweh AND Satan. So, if Satan was wrathfully speaking this to Moses' heart, Moses would have attributed it as coming from God. And Moses would have been wrong.
We now know from the upgraded teachings of the New Testament that the oppressions sinners sometimes reap in the wake of their sins come NOT from “the anger of God” but rather from “the provocations of Satan.” This difference makes all the difference. When Paul exhorts us in Ephesians “to give no place to the devil,” this is the very dark and destructive dynamic against which he is warning us.
So what do we do with these types of passages? Simply put, we have to let the Holy Spirit redivide the Old Testament passage to comport with the character of Jesus. If Jesus were physically standing by Moses that day, would He have just stood there and said "Go ahead Moses, surely kill him." Or, would Jesus have done the same thing He did for the woman caught in adultery, the same thing He does for us today--- saved him, not condemned him, then exhorted him to go forth and sin no more. I think the answer is pretty clear.
The Holy Spirit is the key. Always remember, 2 Corinthians 3:6 says we are "ABLE minsters of the New Covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit, for the letter kills but the Spirit gives life."
The upgraded picture of God Jesus ushered in reveals the divine nature as a life-giver, NOT a life-taker. Jesus never commanded stonings. Jesus’ steadfast posture in the Gospels was against stonings, not for them.
Jesus’ mindset was to defuse stonings, not accuse them.
Jesus spoke for God.
Jesus spoke from God.
Jesus spoke as God.
Let’s track with Jesus’ love here by renouncing physical, mental, emotional, and verbal stonings of all kinds:
—social (and social media) stonings
—cultural stonings
—theological stonings
—racial stonings
—gender based stonings.
We mustn’t let ourselves be recruited into others’ hate-fests. Hive-minded hate is humanity’s worst moment.
Our words can be rocks.
Our thoughts can be rocks.
Out tones can be rocks.
Our emotions can be rocks.
Let’s disarm ourselves with the kindness and love of Christ. Instead of hastily and hatefully hurling jagged epithets at others for “picking up sticks,” let’s instead focus on “laying down rocks”.
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Only Jesus is INERRANT and INFALLIBLE. Humanity… not so much.
So, if Jesus' indwelling Spirit is NOT the one translating ALL the meanings of the Scriptures:
--their tones,
--their truths,
--their allegories,
--their symbols,
--their occasional misrepresentations about God's nature,
—their occasional distortions due to the human writers’ own wrath being projected onto God,
--their beauties,
--their mysteries,
--their frustrations,
--their exceeding great and precious promises,
THEN your reading of them is not infallible and inerrant.
BUT, if as you sit and contemplate your Bible open on the table before you, and JESUS is the ONE spiritually leaning over your shoulder, vibrantly speaking into your thoughts, His right hand tenderly patting your back while His left hand points out certain passages He wants to explain and exhort you from, while patiently redirecting you away from other passages which aren’t profitable for you right now in your walk, then you are truly blessed.
THAT is as infallible and inerrant as it gets-- the Lord of Love and Light explaining the truth of Jesus in ALL Scripture. He did it for the Emmaus disciples and He will do it for us.
“And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.... They said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?’....Then Jesus said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be realized.’” - Luke 24:27, 32, 44.
Jesus allegorized the Scriptures to these two highly blessed disciples. And their hearts burned within them as they finally understood the true import of the Old Testament. It takes God to explain God! It takes Spiritual Jesus to explain Scriptural Jesus. Only He is inerrant and infallible. "Hear Him!" Mark 9:7.
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Houston, we have a hermeneutical problem here.
Either God both commanded and caused all the Old Testament atrocities Moses and the other Old Testament saints attributed to Him (including mass rape, genocide and infanticide)..... or He didn't.
I unapologetically propose that He didn't. Here is why. If Jesus would NEVER have commanded or caused these atrocities, then so too the Father would NEVER have caused or commanded either.
Let's not simply ignore these Old Testament passages, such as the ones referred to above. They are faith-killers. We can either reinterpret them allegorically, or we can continue to read them literally. Or we can do both.
If we interpret them on a literal level, the answer is simple. The Old Testament saints had an undifferentiated view of God which still contained satanic qualities, cruel qualities which Jesus later saw drop from heaven when He saw His disciples curing and caring rather than condemning and killing. Because of their hyper-sovereign view of God, the Old Testament saints wrongly believed that Satan was God's left hand of wrath, His angry voice, His minister of wrath, His obedient enforcing angel just dutifully carrying out His orders. They confused "the anger of God" as "the destructions of Satan." This caused them to join satanic qualities to the hip of their image of God. Judaism still today retains this view of GOD and Satan. This applies regardless of whether we chose to see Satan as a dark angelic “who” or a dark dynamical “what.”
This exact dynamic occurred in an Old Testament event recorded BOTH in 2 Samuel 24:1 and I Chronicles 21:1, where 70,000 Israelites die because of David's sin in numbering Israel. In the Samuel version of events, "the wrath of the Lord" caused David to sin. But, the Chronicles version claims that "Satan provoked David" to sin. We know that the Chronicles passage better aligns with what Jesus taught us about Satan as the author and finisher of our sin (John 8:44; 1 John 3:8). Thus, here we redivide the literal, "BY THE LETTER," reading of Samuel in favor of a higher spiritual reading. The point is that if Scripture ever mistakenly calls "Satan's destructions" the "wrath of God," then we are compelled to correct and clarify the passage under the authority of 2 Corinthians 3:4-6.
The exact same thing that frequently went on with Moses (and the other OT saints) goes on with us today— they (and we) strike the rock of revelation with wrath instead of speaking to it in love. And in so doing they (and we) fail to sanctify the Lord’s nature/name. They (and we) project our own inner carnal anger (which is always being provoked, augmented, and enflamed by Satanic suggestion) onto the divine impulses they (and we) have been receiving.
The result? A distorted and bipolar message which misrepresented and maligned the divine nature.
I love and appreciate Moses. But Moses had serious issues. If we don't recognize his issues, we will likely duplicate them in ourselves. And that's the last thing God wants for us.
One issue was that Moses had an anger problem. Another issue was that Moses had a developmental limitation which hindered and, on occasion, distorted his perception of God.
Exodus 33:18-23 tells us Moses could not get a 360 degree view of God's goodness. When Moses attempted to see the Lord's goodness, he could only see it from behind and at an angled distance. Why? What was the issue here? If we only see someone’s character from behind and at a distance, it can be rightly questioned how well we really know that person.
Again, the problem with Moses is that he did not have a full frontal view of God's goodness revealed only in Jesus Christ, so he could not process and manifest the true nature of God accurately and without distortion. Moses would often fill in the gaps of what he didn't know about God's nature with his own wrath and suppositions.
Moses lacked Christ's indwelling righteousness and thus lacked the developmental ability to perceive God in pure form. Moses may have been the meekest man in the land in his own righteousness, but that was still woefully inadequate to accurately carry and convey the righteousness which is of Jesus. Here is the reason. Moses had a huge ANGER problem (Numbers 20:1-12; Exodus 2:11-14), which ultimately poisoned his ability to faithfully translate God's character to the people.
In fact, Moses was not allowed to enter the Promised Land because of this very reason---he angrily misrepresented the nature of God. Numbers 20:1-12 tells the story. Sadly, Moses can do no wrong in many’s eyes, even if Scripture notoriously declares it. Moses’ accuracy, according to some literalists, must NEVER be questioned, not even by Jesus. So when Jesus tells the disciples that Jesus, not Moses or Elijah, is the one they are to “hear,” literalists have no explanation other than just to ignore the implications of that passage altogether. I really attempt to explain every passage literalists raise to me, but they don’t return the courtesy and leave my cited passages largely unaddressed.
Paul tells us the Old Testament gives us negative examples NOT to follow. Literalist’s, by contrast, see all OT passages as examples TO follow. And that is where we differ.
Here is the key passage on Moses’ developmental issues. God instructed Moses in Numbers 20 to speak to a desert rock, supernaturally commanding it to gush out water for His parched people. What a miracle of love God sought to display for His people!
But Moses then wrongly mixed God's word with his own frustration and anger at the people. Instead of speaking to the rock, Moses violently struck the rock with his rod, thus giving the people the impression that God Himself was angry and disgusted with them. The water did gush, but in a spirit of terror rather than the spirit of awe and love God intended. No wonder the people so feared God's temper and wrath.
Makes you wonder how many other times what Moses shared as the word of God was partially tinged with his own wrath. This sin can't be overemphasized for it is what kept Moses OUT OF THE PROMISED LAND INHERITANCE. "And the Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron, BECAUSE YE BELIEVED ME NOT, TO SANCTIFY ME IN THE EYES OF THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL, therefore YE SHALL NOT BRING THIS CONGREGATION INTO THE LAND WHICH I HAVE GIVEN THEM." Numbers 20:12.
The early church caught on to this dynamic quickly and knew these brutal OT passages could not possibly be accurate in what they were describing both as coming from the Lord’s mouth and from His causative hand. They knew if Jesus never talked this way, then neither could the Godhead speak and act this way in the Old Testament. The early church fathers acted decisively in reinterpreting all these brutal OT Bible passages which on their surface attributed satanic qualities to God's causative hand or commanding voice. Consider these following quotes by the fathers.
"And so, since these things cannot without horrible sacrilege be literally understood of him who is declared by the authority of Holy Scripture to be invisible, ineffable, incomprehensible, simple, and uncomposite, the disturbance of anger (not to mention wrath) cannot be attributed to that immutable nature without monstrous blasphemy." John Cassian, Institutes 8:4.
So, on a literal level, the church fathers knew these passages misrepresented God’s nature as revealed in Jesus and thus were not to be so read. There had to be a deeper level of allegorical meaning which would make these passages beneficial to New Covenant believers. Simply put, the dead letter reading of these passages was simply unacceptable.
By contrast, if we reinterpret these passages allegorically, we will see that this is how the early church fathers would have read this passage, not literally but allegorically. They knew that the only thing God destroys are evil notions, not evil nations. The only babies who are bashed by the divine Spirit are our own childish thoughts and infantile ideas, not living children themselves. Our own inner images of evil may be impaled by God's Spirit, but no men made in the image of God would ever be so treated. The only things God Spirit would ravish and impregnate would be mental and spiritual strongholds within us which have impoverished us because they lack the the seed-life of Christ.
Much of what Satan did and said in the Old Testament is recorded as coming from Yahweh. Isaiah, for instance, quotes God, in the first person no less, as confessing to causing and commanding the rape of all Babylonian women, the bashing to death of all Babylonian infants against the rocks, and the “merciless” impaling of all Babylonian male children. This is Satanic activity in and every age. The Lord changes not.
What is troubling is that many literalist’s have previously told me they don’t believe God caused or commanded rape, despite the fact that Isaiah quotes God in the first person as confessing to causing exactly THAT atrocity. So they are willing to say that the passage by Isaiah (certainly a OT figure of similar stature to Moses) commanding rape is not from the Lord. But, in an entirely inconsistent take, Vance is totally willing to accept that God’s confession in the same Isaiah passage to causing and commanding the infanticidal bashing of Babylonian babies heads against the rocks and the mass impaling of Babylonian children without mercy— IS perfectly acceptable and is at God’s hand. So many seem to arbitrarily accept some OT Scripture quoting God in the first person while rejecting others— as he sees fit. Vance knows he can’t coherently preach a rapist God, so he simply edits it out of the Bible as not of God. So to see him attack my hermeneutic, one which the early fathers richly used, because I dare challenge Moses when he attributes satanic qualities to God is a little disingenuous. He does the exact same thing with Isaiah. The rape and infanticide passage from Isaiah is quoted and exegeted in the below links.
I’m sure we would never use this passage tell our kids JESUS is a child killing rapist. Even Vance agree with that, at least the rapist part. We intuitively know it’s not true. There was confusion in the Old Testament which saw them wrongly believe Satan (and his destructive and deceptive nature) were part of God’s nature. Satan was seen as God’s left hand of destruction, God’s angry voice, God’s minister of wrath, an obedient servant angel just following God’s orders.
Jesus came in the New Testament and corrected this error by showing Satan as a cosmic rebel acting off the grid and without divine sanction. Jesus NEVER used the Law to kill or rape anybody. Satan is the source of Moses’ anger and his subsequent and ongoing failure to sanctify the name/nature of God. So serious was this sin that it kept Moses from entering the promised land. Once we insert the proper role of Satan back into the Old Testament narratives, we see his activity often described as “the wrath of Yahweh.”
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"Jesus saw Satan fall like lightning from Heaven...
Or, put another way, Jesus saw the dark nature, attributes, and energies attributed to Satan drop away from our heavenly image of God.
When His 70 joyful disciples returned after having healed and blessed so many as they declared the kingdom of Heaven was now here, the people saw...for the first time...the pure...the unadulterated...the Satan-free...image of the Heavenly Abba.
The people SAW.
They saw a love divine without condition, reservation or limit.
They saw God as a rescuing healer, not a cruel afflicter.
They saw God as a subject of our awe, not our terror.
They saw Satan was the Old Testament oppressor, not Abba. Abba was richly in the Old Testament, but only as the Father of light, love and all blessing, in whom there is no darkness, variableness, or shadow of turning.
Jesus knew that wondrous day that Satan's nature had been completely severed and separated from Abba's nature. Satan's attributes of wrath, cruelty, vengeance, oppression, and condemnation had forever been cut, culled away and discarded as heavenly virtues.
Satan fell from Heaven's image that day. And he is still falling..."
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Those who say we are not to allegorize the Old Testament “missed the memo” from the New Testament which says that is exactly what we ARE to do— allegorize the Old Testament with the love and light of Christ.
The Apostle Paul LITERALLY (and ironically) told us to ALLEGORIZE, and showed us how we could ALLEGORIZE the Old Testament “letter” into the New Testament “Spirit.”
"Allegory is language that says one thing and means either something MORE than what it says or something OTHER than what it says." --- Theologian R.A. Norris, in his article on "Allegory" in THE WESTMINSTER HANDBOOK TO ORIGEN.
Allegory has been defined by Bishop Marsh, in accordance with its etymology, as "a representation of one thing which is intended to excite the representation of another thing."
So, when allegorizing the Old Testament, the "another thing" is always some aspect of Jesus and His coming kingdom. All such allegories find their rest in Christ. This is why I have coined the term "Christo-allegory" to describe the process of allegorizing Old Testament Scriptures into Christological meaning.
The very first usage by a Christian of the concept of allegory was not some New Age kook, or some modern liberal theologian (as many seem to inexplicably think).
It was the apostle Paul who first used and modeled the term in its Christian application. So, if we have a problem with Old Testament allegory, our problem is with Paul, Peter, and the early church fathers, not to mention Jesus. But let’s start with Paul’s explicit usage the term “allegory.”
“24 Now THIS (the Old Testament narrative of Sarah and Hagar) may be interpreted ALLEGORICALLY (Greek “allegoria”): these women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar.
25 Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia; she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children.
26 But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother.
27 For it is written, ‘Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear; break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor! For the children of the desolate one will be more than those of the one who has a husband.’
28 Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise.
29 But just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so also it is now.
30 But what does the Scripture say? "Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman."
31 So, brothers, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman.” - Galatians 4:24-31
We mustn’t miss the importance of what Paul did here. Nobody for a second thinks the Mosaic writer’s original intent or immediate context, when writing this narrative a thousand years earlier, meant it ever to be read as an allegory for the Old and New Covenants.
As Patristic Scholar David Bentley Hart recently said, “Really, when did Paul not allegorize the Old Testament?”
"As should be obvious, Paul frequently allegorizes Hebrew scripture; the 'spiritual reading' of scripture typical of the Church Fathers of the early centuries was not their invention, nor just something borrowed from pagan culture, but was already a widely accepted hermeneutical practice among Jewish scholars. So it is not anachronistic to read Paul here as saying that the stories he is repeating are not accurate historical accounts of actual events, but allegorical tales composed for the edification of readers..... Again, one should not assume that Paul does not mean precisely what he says, and takes the tale to be essentially (not merely secondarily) allegorical. His interpretative habits are rarely literalist.” [The New Testament: A Translation (2017), David Bentley Hart, pg. 336, 376].
I am convinced that when Peter said that some of Paul’s writings were difficult to grasp, at least one thing to which he was referring was his heavy use of allegory in updating Old Testament imagery with the better light of the New Testament.
When Paul read the Old Testament:
-- EXTERNAL circumcision became "nothing,"
-- EXTERNAL temple descriptions became entirely symbolic,
-- EXTERNAL animal sacrifices became meaningless rituals,
-- EXTERNAL narratives of Israel's journey became allegories of Christ.
Paul used Scripture to go INTERNAL:
-- INTERNAL heart-circumcision now became "everything,"
-- INTERNAL temple dynamics now say WE are the living temples of God,
-- INTERNAL sacrifices of self-will are what WE offer to God's purging fire,
-- INTERNAL human processes are now explained by reinterpreting Israel's history as allegorical archetypes of our human condition today, here, and now.
When apostle Paul cited Old Testament Scriptures, he usually expanded them to either mean something MORE or something OTHER than what they literally said.
Paul displayed this dynamic when he rescued the concept of circumcision by transfiguring it FROM an empty and meaningless external Old Testament ritual TO the New Testament reality of the internal spiritual transformation of the heart.
"Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of God." 1 Cor. 7:19.
"For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision; but faith which works by love." Gal. 5:6.
"But he is a Jew, who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God." Rom. 2:29.
Below are other New Testament passages using this same allegorical dynamic.
Galatians 4:21-31 (The "allegorical" reading of the Old Testament here is both modeled and approved by Paul, as he completely reinterprets the meaning of the story of Abraham, Isaac, Hagar and Ishmael to refer rather to the current relationship between Old and New Covenants).
1 Corinthians 10:1-11( Paul "allegorizes" the whole Exodus journey of Israel as a type of the Christian walk, reading it non-literally in other words).
2 Corinthians 3:6-18 (Paul here says we are to be "ministers of the New Covenant, not of the letter, for the LETTER KILLS, but of the Spirit, for the Spirit gives life," and that Moses, as a symbol of Old Testament understanding, "veiled" the true meaning of OT Scripture by reading it with blind literalism).
Hebrews 8:1-5 (The voluminous OT passages about the "tabernacle" and "priesthood" and "sacrifices" are all "shadows of heavenly things" rather than literal realities on earth).
Hebrews 10:1 (Here, we see the law itself is to be read allegorically: "the law, having a shadow of good things to come, and NOT the very image of the things").
Colossians 2:17 (The OT festivals, holy days and dietary laws are all symbolic prefigurements called "shadows" of "the body of Christ" to come, again not the literal thing itself but a prophetic allegory of the Kingdom of God).
Matthew 11:13 ("ALL the OT law and prophets prophesied until John the Baptist," the clear implication being that the OT is one big prophetic allegory of Christ to come).
Luke 11:27 ("ALL" the OT Scriptures, when properly read, speak ONLY of Christ).
Paul also transformed the Sabbath from a “letter of the law” weekly ritual to an ongoing lifestyle state of being. Heb. 4:1-11.
Paul (and Peter)both renovated Old Testament dietary laws by integrating faith and thanksgiving into the true spiritual diet. (Acts. 11:5-10; Rom. 14:1-23; 1 Tim. 4:3-4).
In 1 Cor. 14:21, Paul took an Old Testament passage which on its face had nothing to do with New Testament tongues (Is. 28:11-12), and transformed, enhanced and enriched it to make it a prophetic passage for the spiritual gift of tongues.
In Acts 2, Peter did the same thing in taking Joel 2:28-29 and excavating, renovating and elevating it to prophesy the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. It is beyond dispute that the Old Testament scholars of their day would have accused Paul and Peter (and the other New Testament writers) of butchering and misusing scriptures. They didn’t see that the Old Testament scriptures needed to be transformed, enhanced and enriched.
But, as much as Paul loved and modeled Old Testament allegory (“and really when did Paul not allegorize”— Patristic Scholar David Bentley Hart), it was Jesus who FIRST modeled the idea.
While Paul is readily seen as an allegorist, Jesus Himself is frequently overlooked in this area. In point of fact, Jesus frequently allegorized the Old Testament. Using key imagery from Old Testament passages which were ONLY seen as literal, He would then usurp their literal meaning into an allegorical application toward Himself. He referred to Himself ALLEGORICALLY as the Temple of God (John 2:19-22), the true manna from heaven (John 6:50), Jacob's supernatural ladder between heaven and earth (John 1:51), the sign of Jonah (Matthew 12:38-40), the great shepherd of Psalm 23 (John 10:11), etc.
God revealed Himself as the great "I Am" In Exodus 3 with Moses at the Burning Bush. Jesus refers to Himself as the "I Am" on at least eight separate occasions, thus now personifying the Burning Bush allegory. In each of those eight occasions, the wording in the original Greek is the same. Jesus refers to Himself not simply as "I am" but literally as "I, I Am". The phrase could be legitimately translated as "I and I alone" or "I and no one else". The words He chose are emphatic.
The Emmaus Road experience, in fact, gives us express commission to Christo-allegorize Old Testament Scripture. "And beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, He (Christ) INTERPRETED to them in ALL THE SCRIPTURES the things concerning himself....And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight. And they said one to another, Was not our heart burning within us, while he spake to us in the way, while he opened to us the scriptures?.... And he said unto them , These are the words which I spake unto you , while I was yet with you , that all things must be fulfilled , which were written in the law of Moses , and in the prophets , and in the psalms , concerning me . Then opened He their understanding , that they might understand the scriptures...." Luke 24:26-27, 31-32, 44-45.
Now, we know that Jesus is LITERALLY nowhere explicitly to be found by name in the Old Testament. But, ALLEGORICALLY, He is everywhere to be found. Jesus allegorized the Scriptures to these two highly blessed disciples. And their hearts burned within them as they finally understood the true import of the Old Testament. And so can ours as we allow the Spirit to quicken the treasure trove of allegorical/Christological subtext of Scripture.
