Hope of the Prophets: the Divine Missions and the Literal Sense of the Old Testament

During the Christmas season, we celebrate the arrival of what all previous history had been marching toward: the incarnation of the Son of God. We reflect on the Gospel narratives of Christ’s humble birth in Bethlehem and the magi’s journey to bring gifts to the King of kings. We look back on the fulfillment of God’s promises to provide a Deliverer, the Seed of the woman, who will bear the sins of many.

But for millennia, the faith of God’s people was not one that looked back or reflected like ours; it was one that strained forward in earnest expectation for the arrival of the hope of the prophets, David’s Son and David’s Lord. In Luke 10:23–24, Jesus declares privately to his disciples, “Blessed are the eyes which see the things you see, for I say to you, that many prophets and kings wished to see the things which you see, and did not see them, and to hear the things which you hear, and did not hear them.”^[1] The prophets and kings of old, like Isaiah and David, did indeed anticipate and write concerning Christ the Lord and his work (cf. John 12:41; Acts 2:29–31). In the context of Luke 10, Jesus clarifies the content of the great things which these prophets and kings longed to see and hear, things revealed “to infants.” He says, “All things have been handed over to Me by My Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him” (Luke 10:22). What the prophets and kings longed to see and hear was the full revelation of the Triune God and his saving purposes which only the incarnation of the Son could bring, for no one “has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him” (John 1:18; cf. Matt. 13:10–17).

[1] Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture citations will be drawn from the NASB 1995.

So how do we reconcile the biblical truths that the prophetic authors of the Old Testament genuinely foretold that which we read in the New Testament, and that only the Son can reveal the fullness of the saving knowledge of the Triune God? I believe the answer is two-fold: 1) the communicative intent of the Old Testament human authors involved an expectation of greater, eschatological revelation of what they foretold and further illumination of their own inspired writings. And 2) God’s full intention in these prophetic writings, which is only unveiled through the sending of the Son and the Spirit (i.e., the divine missions) coheres with this limited human intention to produce one literal sense through which we fully see Christ in the Old Testament.^[2]

[2] Much of the material here is directly drawn with permission from my forthcoming article, “‘And Now The Lord God Has Sent Me and His Spirit’: The Divine Missions, the Literal Sense, and Reading the Old Testament,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 68.4.

The key to a right understanding of this issue is a proper grasp on the significance of the sending of the Son and the Spirit in the Triune God’s economy of salvation and revelation. Thus, I will start here and then move to a brief discussion of this asymmetrical but unified divine and human authorial intent for a theologically rich, literal-sense reading of the Old Testament.

The Divine Missions

The divine missions (from the Latin: mittere, “to send”) are the redemptive and revelatory sending of the Son and the Holy Spirit into the world. The mission of the Son is his coming into the world through the incarnation to reveal his Father to the people he redeems (John 1:18; 6:38–39; 12:44; etc.),^[3] and the Spirit is sent at Pentecost to bear witness to the Son, to convict the world, and to be the Comforter who brings the abode of the Father and the Son into the hearts of the saints (John 14:16–20, 26; 15:26; etc.).

[3] The following is a list of the times John’s Gospel alone speaks of the Son as sent from the Father: John 4:34; 5:23, 30, 37; 6:38, 44; 7:16, 18, 28, 33; 8:16, 18, 26, 29; 9:4; 12:44, 49; 13:16, 20; 14:24; 15:21; 16:5; 20:21.

The missions are inherently revelatory because, as Thomas Aquinas rightly notes, the sending of a divine person reveals “the relation of the one sent to the sender.”^[4] In other words, that the Father sent the Son reveals the Son’s eternal relation to the Father, namely, eternal generation or begottenness. The sending of the Spirit from the Father and the Son reveals that the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds or is ‘breathed’ from the Father and the Son. Augustine insightfully stated that “just as being born means for the Son his being from the Father, so his being sent means his being known to be from him. And just as for the Holy Spirit his being the gift of God means his proceeding from the Father, so his being sent means his being known to proceed from him.”^[5] The missions are extensions of the divine life into the created world, thus revealing the eternal relations of origin in the one God without indicating any inferiority of the sent persons. Thus, while the one God has always been Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, he did not fully reveal himself as such until the revelatory missions of the Son and the Spirit. Much more could be said on this matter, but it suffices for our purposes to state that the divine missions are the visible sending of the Son and the Spirit into the world to reveal the triune God and to bring eternal life to God’s people.^[6]

End Times Revelation through the Prophetic Scriptures

These biblical truths about the revelatory significance of the divine missions correspond to what we see in Romans 16:25–26, Paul’s concluding doxology, wherein he states,

Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the proclamation about Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery kept silent for long ages but now revealed and made known through the prophetic Scriptures, according to the command of the eternal God to advance the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles—to the only wise God through Jesus Christ—to him be the glory forever! Amen. (CSB)

A couple key insights from this passage need to be mentioned here.

First, although central to the idea of “mystery” is the full inclusion of believing Gentiles to the eschatological inheritance of God’s people,^[7] the “mystery” now revealed also is a Trinitarian and Christological mystery. This gospel proclamation is the message which God “promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures—concerning his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord” and the “Spirit of holiness” (Rom. 1:2–4, emphasis added). Remember, as we saw in our discussion of the missions of the Son and the Spirit, the full knowledge of the Triune God only comes through the sending of the Son and the Spirit. The inclusion of the Gentiles only occurs because of Spirit-wrought union with the true Israel, the God-man, the only-begotten Son of God made flesh, sent from the Father.

[7] For a book helpful on the New Testament use of mystērion, see G.K. Beale and Benjamin L. Gladd’s Hidden but Now Revealed: A Biblical Theology of Mystery (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2014). Though the structure of their book primarily follows the NT books’ contextual use of mystērion, it gives prominent featuring of the Old Testament texts and themes which demonstrate that the Old Testament’s prospective focus inherently anticipated greater revelation to come, even greater illumination of the Old Testament itself.

Second, this gospel mystery which was concealed or “kept silent” for long ages has now been revealed and made known through the prophetic Scriptures, the Old Testament. As we saw above, the authors of the Old Testament did indeed knowingly bear witness to the eschatological work of God in the Messiah (cf. John 12:41; Acts 2:29–31). Yet, full understanding of the gospel realities of which they testified awaited illumination by the revelation which came through the sending of the Son and the Spirit, which was deposited to the apostles. Some of the very things the prophets spoke and wrote of possessed meaning still yet to be illuminated, meaning which the prophets could not have been fully privy to, given their place in God’s economy of revelation and salvation.

We must realize, however, that the prophets of old knew that some elements of their writings possessed meaning which awaited further illumination, and they expected, searched, and longed for this coming illumination when God’s saving work and revelation fully arrived. This may be illustrated briefly from Jeremiah.

In Jeremiah 23:1–8, the Lord tells of his rejection of Israel’s wicked leaders (shepherds) and foretells of the future coming of the “righteous Branch” from David who will reign as king. During his days, the salvation of the Lord will come, “and this is His name by which He will be called, ‘The LORD our righteousness.’” This prophecy of God’s future work through this mysterious Branch is further developed in Jeremiah 30. The Lord tells Jeremiah, “‘Write all the words which I have spoken to you in a book. For behold, days are coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when I will restore the fortunes of My people Israel and Judah’” (Jer. 30:2–3a). The Lord will reverse the exile and raise up “David their king” (Jer. 30:8–9). “Their prince shall be one of themselves; their ruler shall come out from their midst; I will make him draw near, and he shall approach me, for who would dare of himself to approach me? declares the LORD” (Jer. 30:21, ESV). The Lord then tells of his coming wrath which “will not turn back until he has executed and accomplished the intentions of his mind. In the latter days you will understand this” (Jer. 30:24–31:1, ESV, emphasis added). The time in which this full understanding of Jeremiah’s oracle will come is “the latter days” (bə’aḥărîṯ hayyāmîm), a phrase consistently used to refer to the eschatological time when God will work his salvation.^[8] Further, the “you” who will understand is a reference “to the restored new covenant community in the latter days,” given the context of the new covenant which will arrive when God works this salvation and judgment (Jer. 31:1, 27–40; 32:37–40).^[9]

Thus, we see Jeremiah writing down his oracles with a view toward an eschatological illumination of the very things written by the prophet himself. This is similar to Daniel’s experience of his eschatological vision in Daniel 12:1–13. Daniel is bewildered at the mysterious vision, saying “As for me, I heard but could not understand; so I said, ‘My lord, what will be the outcome of these events?’” (Dan. 12:8). But notice the angel’s reply: “‘Go your way, Daniel, for these words are concealed and sealed up until the end time.’” (Dan. 12:9, emphasis added; cf. Dan. 12:13).^[10] The prophets followed in the footsteps of Moses who, as the author of Hebrews tells us, “was faithful in all God’s house as a servant, to testify to the things that were to be spoken later” (Heb. 3:5, ESV). “Christ,” however, “is faithful over God’s house as a son,” the Son through whom God “has spoken to us” in “these last days” (Heb. 3:6a; 1:2).

[10] See DeRouchie, Delighting in the Old Testament, 48–50.

I believe these kinds of Old Testament texts are examples of what the apostle Peter had in mind when he asserted, “As to this salvation, the prophets who prophesied of the grace that would come to you made careful searches and inquiries, seeking to know what person or time the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating as He predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories to follow. It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves, but you, in these things which now have been announced to you through those who preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven—things into which angels long to look” (1 Pet. 1:10–12).

The Puritan John Owen (1616–1683), who possessed a firm grasp of the Old Testament’s Christological frame of reference and the importance of the literal sense of Scripture, wrote the following worthwhile statement about this reality which will lead us into our discussion of the literal sense and reading the Old Testament today:

[The Holy Ghost] did not, indeed, so enlighten and raise [the prophetic authors’] minds as to give them a distinct understanding and full comprehension of all the things themselves that were declared unto them; there was more in their inspirations than they could search to the bottom of. Hence, although the prophets under the Old Testament were made use of to communicate the clearest revelations and predictions concerning Jesus Christ, yet in the knowledge and understanding of the meaning of them they were all inferior to John Baptist, as he was in this matter to the meanest believer, or “least in the kingdom of heaven.” Therefore, for their own illumination and edification did they diligently inquire, by the ordinary means of prayer and meditation, into the meaning of the Spirit of God in those prophecies which themselves received by extraordinary revelation, 1 Pet. i. 10, 11.^[11]

[11] John Owen, Pneumatologia, in The Works of John Owen, ed. by William H. Goold (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), 3:132, emphasis added.

The Literal Sense and Asymmetrical Authorial Intention

Drawing these various threads together, the whole of the canon of Scripture presses us to affirm that while the Old Testament authors genuinely and knowingly wrote of God’s work through the coming Messiah in the last days, they also knew that their writings possessed meaning which went beyond what they themselves could fully grasp. This illumination could only come from revelatory “sendings” of the only begotten Son and of the Holy Spirit. The Son by whom the Father has given his final word commissioned his apostles to be “stewards of the mysteries of God” (1 Cor. 4:1), and they were active instruments by which the Spirit of Christ gave the new covenant era teaching to God’s people. The completed New Testament canon is the textual “last days” revelation of the saving work of the Triune God, accomplished by the missions of the Son and the Spirit. With the light provided from this living and active textual deposit of inspired New Covenant teaching from Christ by the Spirit, we see now the fullness of what the Old Testament authors dimly foresaw.

Both this Old Testament mystery’s initial, partial hiddenness, and subsequent, full revelation in Christ and by the Spirit coheres within a properly defined literal sense of the Old Testament. Although it is historically a much debated and diversely defined notion, I believe the literal sense of a communication is best understood as “the sum total of those illocutionary acts [i.e., the speaker’s communicative intention, whether to promise, or warn, or assert, etc.] performed by the author intentionally and with self-awareness”^[12] or, more simply, “that which the writer himself intends by his words.”^[13] Additionally, in his work, Is There a Meaning in This Text?, Vanhoozer significantly notes that the literal sense of a communication can involve an intentional open-endedness. He states, “What this means is that the literal sense—the sense of the literary act—may, at times, be indeterminate or open-ended. However—and this is crucial—the indeterminacy we are considering is intended; moreover, it is a definite feature of the meaning of the text.”^[14]

As seen above, the human prophetic authors of Scripture expected greater revelation of the salvation they themselves predicted. “Carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet. 1:21) they wrote with an eschatological frame of reference, anticipating the Spirit’s full unveiling of the hidden eschatological elements they searched out (1 Pet. 1:10–12). Their intention in conveying God’s word was self-consciously open-ended toward the full revelation to come. Their communication was not meaningless or unessential for their own day, but it involved self-consciously “fore-witnessing” in a nearsighted manner to mysteries which awaited illumination and fulfillment.^[15]

To be clear, this is not to say that the human authors and the divine author possessed different referents when communicating through these words of Old Testament Scripture. Rather, they spoke of the same thing in an asymmetrical manner. Since God spoke with full knowledge of the mysteries, God’s communicative intent included the full reality which the Old Testament authors myopically strained toward. The intention and referent of the human authors was not going a different direction than the divine author’s but simply stopped short of the clarity and coherence that God’s intention included, which would be unveiled through the revelatory missions of the Son and the Spirit. Thus, once the full illumination comes, new meaning is not added to the text, but the meaning inherent in the text all along on account of this sort of special dual authorship is unveiled.

Therefore, the human authors’ communicative intentions were completely in line with and true to the divine author’s intention but not always exhaustive of the fullness of the divine author’s intended meaning. Although this asymmetrical authorial intent existed, the prophets’ intentional open-endedness toward the full revelation of God’s communicative activity makes this dual authorship produce one literal sense, fully discernible after the missions of the Son and Spirit.^[16]

[16] This literal sense may sometimes be a compound literal sense wherein types and antitypes are included (see Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, ed. James T. Dennison Jr., trans. George Musgrave [New Jersey: P&R Publishing, 1994], 1:150–152). Van Mastricht also writes “The orthodox . . . confess that this [literal] sense is sometimes composite, as occurs in figurative and typical phrases . . . Indeed, they even call the mystical senses literal when it is certainly evident that they are intended by the Holy Spirit” (Theoretical-Practical Theology, 1:169). But even when the literal sense has this compound nature, I argue that it still involves this asymmetrical authorial intentionality where the divine author spoke in fullness (seen in the canonical context ultimately) and the human author spoke with a true but limited ultimately eschatological referent, expecting further revelation to come given the subject matter of the texts.

Conclusion

Thus, through the help of the Holy Spirit, we can now clearly see in the Old Testament the glories of our Triune God and his eschatological work concerning which the prophets of old searched and inquired diligently. We see clearly that the “son” promised in Isaiah 9:6 is Son not ultimately because of Davidic kingly lineage, but because his Father is God the Father. We see clearly the Isaianic mysteries of how Yahweh—the one who measures the water in the hollows of his hand (Isa. 40:12), who can be compared to no one (Isa. 40:18), who sits above the circle of the earth (Isa. 40:22), who does not faint or grow weary (Isa. 40:28)—could be identified with, and yet somehow distinct from, this Servant who would suffer and die as an atoning sacrifice (Isa. 9:6; 52:13, cf. 6:1; 52:13–53:12) and who would have the Spirit of Yahweh poured out upon him (Isa. 42:1; 11:1–5). We understand that the literal meaning of Isaiah 45:23–24 is that the LORD to whom “every knee will bow” and in whom alone “are righteousness and strength” is specifically the Son who is high and lifted up and through whose work many will be justified (Isa. 53:11). Clear to us now is the full beauty of the literal sense of the Spirit’s mysterious words through Zechariah who writes, “I [the LORD] will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplication, so that they will look on Me whom they have pierced; and they will mourn for Him, as one who mourns for an only son, and they will weep bitterly over Him like the bitter weeping over a firstborn” (Zech. 12:10, italics added; cf. John 19:37; Rev. 1:7).

May God give us eyes to see the glory of Christ in the pages of the Old Testament both this Christmas and all our days till we see him face to face!

Of the Father’s love begotten,

Ere the worlds began to be,

He is Alpha and Omega,

He the source, the ending He,

Of the things that are, that have been,

And that future years shall see,

Evermore and evermore.

“This is he whom seers in old time

Chanted of with one accord,

Whom the voices of the prophets

Promised in their faithful word;

Now he shines, the long-expected;

Let creation praise its Lord—

[Evermore and evermore.]^[17]

[17] “Of the Father’s Love Begotten,” Hymnary.org. Accessed December 15, 2025.