How Can Christians Claim Old Testament Promises as Their Own?

Growing in Holiness

This is an important question, because promises are the very means for helping us to persevere in suffering and to grow in holiness. What we hope for tomorrow changes who we are today. If we truly believe that the pure in heart will see God, that’s going to influence what we look at and what we touch, because we want to see God.

What we’re hoping for tomorrow changes who we are today. Three-fourths of our Bible is Old Testament, so how do all those promises relate to us, especially when they were given to a different people in a different time under different covenants? The New Testament authors would model for us that all those Old Testament promises matter.

Indeed, Paul could say in 2 Corinthians 1:20 that all the promises are yes in Christ. But only in Christ, meaning that I can’t go to promises made to Israel and simply claim them for my own apart from Jesus. But Jesus is the ultimate king of Israel. He’s the ultimate human. That is, he’s not the first Adam, but he’s the last Adam. And every one of the promises that were made in that previous era become ours—every one of them—through Jesus.

And so the Christian needs to wrestle with what it looks like today when every spiritual blessing, says Peter, has been secured for us in our identification with Christ. Part of the purpose of this book is to try to help Christians understand how all those promises, reaching back all the way to Genesis in the initial three-fourths of our Bible, become ours—but only through Jesus.

Jason S. DeRouchie is the author of Delighting in the Old Testament: Through Christ and for Christ.

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