Old Testament Prophecies Fulfilled in Christ
Editor’s note: this is a guest post written by Christian Felix, winner of Iron Viz 2020 and author of visualpathos.com. The project below was created in collaboration with Kevin Flerlage, a Tableau Zen Master and co-creator of flerlagetwins.com. Visit this post for details on their collaboration and build process.
Throughout scripture and redemptive history we see God in His sovereignty choose to open up people’s hearts and minds to grasp the fullness of His glory. Perhaps no instance is more illustrative of that than on the road to Emmaus when Christ chooses to open up the eyes of his disciples.
Amid their despondency, the risen Christ reveals himself to them, but he doesn’t stop there. It’s not enough for them to see and experience Jesus, the resurrected Lord. Christ wants to ensure they know that everything they thought they knew—about religion, the Prophets, and the law—find their fulfillment in Him.
And he said to them, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.– Luke 24:25-27
The Road to Emmaus was a game-changer for the disciples just as it is for us.
It transformed the disciples from weary and burdened saints to disciple-makers, church planters, and heroes of the faith. For us, as we begin to see the entirety of scripture as really all about Jesus, then we begin to comprehend the grandness and magnificence of God’s plan for the ages, and our eyes are opened to seeing glimpses of His Son & His Kingdom throughout scripture. We see echoes of it in Exodus. Foreshadows of his Kingdom throughout the historical texts and prophets, and Types of a greater one to come throughout the stories of the Old Testament.
The purpose of this visualization is really to capture a very minuscule part of the magnificence that the disciples must have experienced on the Road to Emmaus. It maps 44 Old Testament Prophecies about Christ to their New Testament fulfillment. The prophecies are grouped by the designers (myself and Kevin Flerlage) into several categories (Prophecies regarding His Ancestry, His Birth, His Life & Ministry, His Death, and His Reign) to provide additional context and organization to the viz. Clicking on one of the lines in the visualization will provide you with the Old Testament and New Testament Bible passages.
And lastly, the cross is arranged as the centerpiece and backdrop of it all, because…
True Christian preaching must center on the cross of Jesus Christ. The cross is the central doctrine of the holy scriptures. All other revealed truths either find their fulfillment in the cross or are necessarily founded upon it. Therefore, no doctrine of Scripture may faithfully be set before men unless it is displayed in its relationship to the cross. The one who is called to preach, therefore, must preach Christ because there is no other message from God.– Thomas F. Jones on “Preaching the Cross of Christ”
I hope you enjoy this visualization, and you can click here to view an interactive version on Tableau Public.