" The Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tent of meeting, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they had come out of the land of Egypt, saying"
Numbers 1:1
A word or two must be said to put the book of Numbers in its proper setting. The Bible is one book, and its theme is one. There is an underlying unity in it, from Genesis through to Revelation, and we do not understand any particular book until we see it in relation to the whole. Artists are said to know the kind of frame to put their pictures in, and only a particular setting will bring out their hidden beauties and suggestions. This is true also in relation to the Scriptures. It is not possible to study Numbers 'in vacuo'. We need to see where it belongs, and how it is placed in the over-all picture. Christ once said to the Pharisees, 'Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life'. Then He added, 'They are they, which testify of Me'. Until we grasp this key, we shall never understand the Scriptures aright; the story of Christ begins long before Bethlehem. He is the eternal Son of the Father, the Second Per- son of the Trinity, and belief in the Trinity commits us to the truth that He operated in history before His Incarnation. This is the point of Paul's words, about 'the Rock which followed them, and that Rock was Christ'. Christ was there with the children of Israel in the wilderness, the unseen Presence that guided and directed them in all their way.
The Old Testament, then, is about Christ - we do not mean by this the abstruse and improbable allegorising of certain passages or texts, but in the broad sweep of the story from beginning to end. The Old Testament is the history of the 'promised seed' (Genesis 15:5), the seed of Abraham who was to become the Redeemer of the world. Significantly, Matthew be- gins his gospel with the words 'Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham'. This serves to gather together the whole story of the Scriptures from Genesis through to the New Testament, into one underlying basic theme, with Jesus Christ at its centre. Until we grasp this we will understand neither the book of Numbers nor any other book of the Old Testament as we are meant to.