What we think about as The Christmas Story can sometimes seem like such a small part of Scripture, but that’s not the case. All of Scripture is about Christmas in one way or another. Without the birth of our Savior, we wouldn’t have the New Testament, and without Jesus, we wouldn’t care about the Old Testament.

When Jesus came, the Old Testament Scriptures were already telling the story of creation, the story of how God selected a people and grew them into a nation, and that God was going to do something for all nations through that one nation. The Scriptures already told how they became captives in Egypt that were led to freedom by Moses, that they became a kingdom, then a divided kingdom, then a conquered people, and then a scattered diaspora. Throughout all that time, the people were struggling with their devotion to God.

That was the Scripture that Jesus read. That was the Scripture Jesus loved and believed. Those Scriptures told the story where a remnant of people faithfully expected a Messiah, a Savior, a champion to come and save all the nations of the world.

Jesus stepped into a pre-existing narrative. He came into the world in the middle of Jewish history, a Jewish heritage with Jewish values, traditions, culture, and religion. When He showed up, there were already the books of Moses, the books of history, the books of poetry, and the major and minor prophets that make up the Old Testament.

The first followers of Jesus were Jewish, like He was. They had been raised their entire life with the books of Genesis through Malachi. They had been taught a very particular way to read, interpret, and apply these Hebrew Scriptures.

When Jesus was raised from the dead, however, those ways had to change. Because of the empty tomb, His followers began to radically reinterpret the Old Testament. Peter said, “But this is how God fulfilled what he foretold through all the prophets, saying that his Messiah would suffer” (Acts 3:18 NIV). He went on, “Beginning with Samuel, all the prophets who have spoken have foretold these days” (Acts 3:24 NIV). Every prophet from Samuel all the way through Malachi had been speaking about Jesus. No one had ever seen the Old Testament that way before. They hadn’t fully known how to read it, because they were reading it before Jesus’ resurrection.

The apostle Paul preached the same way, as Luke records in Acts. The New Testament hadn’t been written yet, so Paul had to leverage the Old Testament text to make a case for Jesus being the Messiah. It was a big deal, because it meant that the Jewish scriptures weren’t about the Jewish people, their history, and their customs as much as it was about this one man, a Jewish carpenter.

Even Jesus himself believed that the Old Testament pointed to Him, from Abel (in the Book of Genesis) to Zachariah (in the Book of Malachi). After the resurrection, Jesus encountered two disciples on the road to Emmaus. They were heartbroken because they believed Jesus was dead. They didn’t recognize Him at first, so Jesus said, “‘How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?’” (Luke 24:25-26 NIV) In other words, "You all should have seen this coming. This has been part of the story the whole time!” Jesus “explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself”(Luke 24:27 NIV).

If you put your faith in Jesus, you can put your faith in the Scriptures that He believed in, which were written about Him both before and after His life on Earth. If you put your faith in Jesus, you will have the framework you need to read the whole of the Bible.

Jesus is what weaves the overarching story of the Bible together, what makes both the Old Testament and the New Testament matter to us today. Jesus was with God in the beginning, Jesus is how God showed us His love for us, and Jesus is how God pursues a relationship with us even today.

God gave us His creation to reveal Himself to us. God gave us the Scriptures to reveal Himself to us. But most important of all, God gave us Jesus to reveal to us what God is like. As Jesus said, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9 NIV). If you want to know what God feels about you, look at Jesus. If you want to know how much God loves you, look at Jesus. If you want to know how much God wants to have a relationship with you, look at Jesus. This season, hold that close to your heart. God put things in motion hundreds of years ago so He can have a relationship with you today.