Who Did The Old Testament Saints Believe in?

The Old Testament saints were saved by faith. So were the New Testament saints. It's tempting to read that as two different religions stitched together, law in the Old, faith in the New, but Scripture doesn't support that division. It's one covenant of grace, unfolding in two administrations.

The faith is the same, the Mediator is the same, the righteousness credited is the same. What changes is the clarity of revelation, not the substance of what was believed.

Faith in Scripture is never faith in an abstraction. It's always faith in the God who has spoken and promised, and that promise has content from the earliest pages.

Genesis 3:15 is the first gospel word spoken to fallen humanity, a seed who will crush the serpent's head. That's not vague theism. It's a specific redemptive hope aimed at a person and a work still to come.

Abraham didn't believe in providence in general. He believed a specific promise from a specific God about a specific offspring (Gen 12:1-3; 15:1-6).

Paul treats that faith as functionally identical to gospel faith, and in Galatians 3:8 he says outright that the gospel was preached beforehand to Abraham: "In you shall all the nations be blessed." Paul is calling Genesis 12 gospel.

This isn't a New Testament idea retrofitted onto the Old. Jesus makes the claim himself, more than once.

In John 5:39-46 he tells the Jews that the Scriptures bear witness about him, and that Moses wrote of him.

In John 8:56 he says Abraham saw his day and rejoiced.

On the Emmaus road in Luke 24:25-27, he rebukes the disciples for being slow to believe the prophets, then walks them through all the Scriptures, starting with Moses, showing them what was written concerning himself.

If Christ says the Old Testament testifies to him, then Old Testament saints who trusted that revelation, however dimly, were trusting a revelation whose true content was Christ. They didn't always see that with full clarity, and Peter tells us why.

1 Peter 1:10-12 is the clearest text on this point. The prophets inquired and searched carefully concerning the grace that would come, searching what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted Christ's sufferings and the glories to follow.

Peter states plainly that the Spirit of Christ was already at work in the Old Testament prophets, and that they were prophesying about a grace whose fulfillment lay ahead of them.

That's Old Testament revelation with Christ as its actual content, even where the prophets themselves lacked full clarity on how or when it would come to pass.

The sacrificial system worked the same way. The lamb, the blood, the mercy seat, the scapegoat, none of it saved anyone by its own mechanics.

Hebrews 10:1-4 says the law had only a shadow of the good things to come, and that the blood of bulls and goats can never take away sins.

The Old Testament believer offering a sacrifice in faith wasn't trusting the animal. He was trusting the God who instituted the sacrifice as a promise, a picture of a substitute yet to come.

Hebrews 9:15 makes the mechanism explicit, calling Christ's death a redemption of the transgressions committed under the first covenant.

The transaction runs backward as well as forward. The Old Testament sacrifices were valid only because Christ's actual death stood behind them.

Hebrews 11 is the capstone. Every figure commended in that chapter is commended for faith, not works, not law-keeping. Verse 13 says they didn't receive the promises but saw them from afar and greeted them. Verses 39-40 close the chapter with the point sharpened: none of them received what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, so that apart from us they should not be made perfect.

Their faith was incomplete in what it could see, but it was aimed at the same reality that New Testament faith now sees fulfilled.

So the dividing line isn't "Old Testament faith in God, New Testament faith in Christ." The dividing line is progressive revelation of the same Redeemer.

Old Testament saints looked forward through promise, type, and prophecy. New Testament saints look back at fulfilled history. Same faith, same righteousness credited, same Mediator.