How Were Old Testament People Saved?

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jun 4, 1914

How Were Old Testament People Saved?

To this question, raised by one of its readers, the Sunday School Times of April 9 gives the following excellent reply:—

The “necessary plan” is Christ; it has been Christ, and Christ only, since the days of Eden. Adam needed Christ, and was saved by Christ, just as much as Simon Peter needed Christ and was saved by Christ. It is not apparent just what passage in the Bible the Illinois reader has in mind when he suggests that the Old Testament saints went to heaven “without the necessary plan;” for the teaching of the Bible is that their only entrance into heaven was through Christ their Saviour, even though they did not know the historic Jesus as we know him. Paul, as a Jew, wrote that the fathers of the Jewish brethren of his generation, or the Old Testament saints, “drank of a spiritual rock that followed them: and the rock was Christ.” Again he wrote, “By the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.” “But now apart from the law a righteousness of God hath been manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ unto all them that believe; for there is no distinction; for all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God.”

The Old Testament blood sacrifices pointed forward to the final and eternal atonement made by the sacrifice of Christ. Those who offered animal sacrifices to God, in the spirit of faith in him as their forgiving Saviour-God, looked forward to Jesus as their Saviour even though they knew this not. “The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” is Jesus; and his foreordained and foreknown death opened the gates of heaven, and was the way of life, to every believing sinner since the foundation of the world.

Our God is almighty; and our almighty God works in accordance with laws of his own ordaining. If he has ordained and decreed that the only way of life for sinning men is by the pathway of the freely accepted death of his own Son, this does not lessen the omnipotence of God, but it does heighten for us the wonders of his love. God evidently laid upon himself the necessity of a plan which should reveal to us his love, and which should accomplish for us the supreme desire of his love, as no other plan could have done. That plan is our marvelous Saviour Christ. Blessed be his name forever and forever.