"And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself."
— Luke 24:27
Quick Answer
From the first promise of a seed who would crush the serpent (Genesis 3:15) to the final vision of the Lamb on the throne (Revelation 22:3), Christ is the unifying center of the whole Bible. He is foretold in prophecy, foreshadowed in types, present in redemptive events, and finally revealed in the flesh, so that the entire Scripture, in Jesus’s own words, testifies about him (Luke 24:27; John 5:39).
The Question Jesus Himself Answered
On the afternoon of his resurrection, two discouraged disciples walked the road to Emmaus, unaware that the risen Jesus himself was walking beside them. When he finally opened their understanding, he didn’t start with the empty tomb they had just heard about; he started with Moses and the Prophets, showing them how the entire sweep of the Old Testament had been speaking of him all along (Luke 24:27). If Jesus himself read the whole Bible this way, it’s worth learning to read it the same way too.
This isn’t a claim that every verse mentions Jesus by name, or that we should force artificial connections onto every passage. It’s a claim that the Bible has one overarching storyline, one central character, and one ultimate purpose: the revelation and glory of Jesus Christ.
Promised From the Very Beginning
The Bible’s Christ-centered storyline starts remarkably early. Immediately after Adam and Eve’s sin, God promises that the offspring of the woman will one day crush the serpent’s head, even as the serpent strikes his heel (Genesis 3:15). Christians have long recognized this as the first promise of the gospel, sometimes called the protoevangelium, pointing forward to Christ’s ultimate victory over sin, death, and the devil at the cross.
That promise develops steadily across the Old Testament. God tells Abraham that all nations will be blessed through his offspring (Genesis 22:18), a promise Paul explicitly identifies as fulfilled in Christ (Galatians 3:16). God promises David an eternal throne through his descendant (2 Samuel 7:12-13), a promise the angel Gabriel applies directly to Jesus at the annunciation (Luke 1:32-33).
Foreshadowed in Types and Prophesied by Name
Beyond direct promises, the Old Testament is dense with types and shadows anticipating Christ, from the Passover lamb to the tabernacle’s priesthood to the bronze serpent lifted in the wilderness (John 3:14-15). Alongside these patterns run direct, specific prophecies: Isaiah foretells a virgin-born son called Immanuel and a suffering servant pierced for our transgressions (Isaiah 7:14; 53:5); Micah names Bethlehem as the birthplace of Israel’s ruler, whose origins are from ancient times (Micah 5:2); Zechariah describes a king entering Jerusalem humbly on a donkey and being pierced (Zechariah 9:9; 12:10).
These prophecies, written centuries before Jesus’s birth by different authors in different circumstances, converge with remarkable specificity on one figure, giving powerful testimony that Scripture’s unity comes from a single divine Author working through many human hands (2 Peter 1:21).
Present Throughout the Gospels, Letters, and Revelation
The New Testament, naturally, reveals Christ most directly. The Gospels record his life, teaching, death, and resurrection in historical detail. The book of Acts shows the gospel about him spreading from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth. The epistles unpack the theological meaning of his person and work in depth—his deity, his atoning death, his justifying righteousness, his headship over the church.
Even Revelation, often treated as a book only about the end times, is centrally a book about Christ; it opens by announcing itself as ‘the revelation of Jesus Christ’ (Revelation 1:1) and closes with the Lamb reigning forever on his throne, with his servants worshiping him face to face (Revelation 22:3-4). The Bible’s very last chapters bring the storyline that began in Genesis 3 to its glorious completion.
Why Reading the Bible This Way Changes Everything
Seeing Christ throughout the whole Bible protects you from two common errors. It keeps you from reading the Old Testament as merely ancient history or a rulebook disconnected from the gospel, and it keeps you from treating the New Testament as though it appeared out of nowhere, unconnected to everything God had been doing for centuries beforehand. Instead, you begin to see one continuous story of a God who has always been moving history toward the sending of his Son.
Jesus told the religious leaders of his day that they studied the Scriptures diligently, thinking they contained eternal life, yet missed that those very Scriptures testified about him (John 5:39). Don’t make the same mistake. Read your whole Bible, Old Testament and New, expecting to meet Christ on every page, because he really is there, waiting to be found by anyone who reads with open eyes and a humble heart.
This is, in the end, a deeply practical way to read Scripture, not just an academic observation. When you open Leviticus and feel lost among ancient sacrifices, or read a psalm of lament and wonder how it applies to you, ask where Christ appears in the passage: is he prefigured, promised, or already present. That single habit of mind will do more to make your Bible reading rich, coherent, and worshipful than almost any other single tool available to you, because it reads the Bible the way its true Author always intended it to be read—as his testimony to his own beloved Son.