Christ Before Bethlehem
The Son was not absent from the old covenant
On the evening of the resurrection, two disciples walked the road to Emmaus with a stranger who turned out to be the risen Lord, and "beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself" (Luke 24:27). Not a few scattered predictions. All the scriptures. The apostles took Him at His word and read Him backward into the whole Old Testament, and they found Him there in two ways: foreshadowed in a hundred pictures, and, in certain places, actually present and acting. This page is about the second kind, the places where the Son Himself appears before the manger.
It is a different thing from the shadows and types (the Passover lamb, Isaac bound, Joseph sold, the bronze serpent, Jonah), which point forward to Him. Here He is not pictured; He is on the page.
1 · The Rock that followed them
Paul says it as plainly as it can be said. Looking back on Israel in the wilderness, drinking from the rock Moses struck, he writes that "they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ" (1 Corinthians 10:4). Not a symbol of Christ, in Paul's grammar; that Rock was Christ. The One who watered them in the desert was the Son.
2 · The Angel of the LORD
All through the Old Testament there appears a figure called "the angel of the LORD" who does what no created angel may do: He speaks as God, is named God, and accepts worship. To Hagar, alone in the wilderness, He speaks, and she "called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me" (Genesis 16:13). At the bush, "the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a flame of fire" (Exodus 3:2), and a breath later that same voice says, "I AM THAT I AM" (Exodus 3:14). On the mountain He stays Abraham's hand and says, "thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me" (Genesis 22:12) — the sacrifice was to Him. To Manoah He will not give His name, "seeing it is secret" (Judges 13:18, the word is elsewhere translated wonderful), and Manoah concludes, "We shall surely die, because we have seen God" (Judges 13:22).
"He who appeared to Abraham under the oak in Mamre is God, sent with the two angels in His company to judge Sodom by Another who remains ever in the supercelestial places… There is, and that there is said to be, another God and Lord subject to the Maker of all things; who is also called an Angel, because He announces to men whatsoever the Maker of all things… wishes to announce to them."
Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 56By the middle of the second century, long before the creeds were written down, the church already read the Angel of the LORD as the Son: the One who can be seen and heard and can stand on the earth, sent from the Father who cannot. The Old Testament was never a book about an absent God. It was the Son, walking with His people before He was born of Mary.
3 · The captain of the LORD's host
On the eve of Jericho, Joshua meets "a man… with his sword drawn in his hand," and asks whose side He is on. The answer is not "yours": "as captain of the host of the LORD am I now come" (Joshua 5:14). Joshua falls on his face and worships, and the Captain does not stop him, as a true angel would (compare Revelation 19:10). Instead He says, "Loose thy shoe from off thy foot; for the place whereon thou standest is holy" (Joshua 5:15) — the very words spoken at the burning bush. The same holy presence stands before Joshua.
4 · The fourth man in the fire
Three men are thrown bound into the furnace, and the king, looking in, leaps up astonished: "Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God" (Daniel 3:25). Whatever Nebuchadnezzar understood by it, the church has long seen the Son in the fire with His own, which is exactly where He has always been.
5 · Melchizedek
A king-priest meets Abraham, blesses him, and receives his tithe, then vanishes from the story. Hebrews lingers on him: "Without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually" (Hebrews 7:3). Whether Melchizedek was an appearance of the Son or a portrait deliberately drawn to look like Him, Scripture itself reads him as a likeness of Christ, the priest whose office never ends.
6 · Jacob, face to face
Jacob wrestles all night with a Man he cannot overpower and will not release, and in the morning he names the place: "I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved" (Genesis 32:30). A man held God, and lived.
7 · The glory Isaiah saw
Isaiah, in the temple, "saw also the LORD sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up" and cried, "mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts" (Isaiah 6:1, 6:5). Centuries later John tells us whose throne that was: "These things said Esaias, when he saw his glory, and spake of him" (John 12:41) — and the "him" is Christ. The enthroned LORD of Isaiah's vision was the Son in His glory.
None of this is a fringe reading. It is the oldest reading there is. Justin Martyr argued it to a rabbi in the second century; Irenaeus, a generation later, found "the Son of God… implanted everywhere" in the writings of Moses (Against Heresies, IV.10.1). And it rests on Christ's own claim. When the Pharisees scoffed that He was not yet fifty, He answered, "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58), taking up the very name from the bush. He was not saying He had been planned. He was saying He had been there.
So the Old Testament is not the record of a God who waited in heaven until the manger. It is the Son, already coming after His people, already speaking, already saving, already standing in the fire beside them. The whole Bible is one story, and He is on every page of it.
Scripture quotations from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub. Justin Martyr quoted verbatim from the Dialogue with Trypho (Ante-Nicene Fathers, public domain); the Irenaeus reference is to Against Heresies IV.10.1. The reading of the Angel of the LORD and these appearances as the pre-incarnate Son is the ancient and broad Christian tradition; some hold the Angel to be a created messenger, and the page presents the older reading the apostles and Fathers followed. See also The Word Made Flesh, the same Son now come in the flesh, and The Sayings of God.