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The Son of God is just as active and present in the Old Testament as he is in the New Testament. Genesis through Malachi was not the "waiting room" for Christ. From the very beginning, he is there. John makes that clear in the opening of his Gospel, "In the beginning was the Word..." (1:1). From the opening word of the Bible, he is there. That Word made his Father known, for "no one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known" (1:18). In one of the chapters we read today in Bible in One Year, Paul says that Christ was with the Israelites in the wilderness years. He writes, "We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did and were destroyed by serpents" (1 Cor. 10:9). Modern translations often have a footnote beside "Christ" that says, "some manuscripts read 'the Lord.'" But as NT scholar, Bruce Metzger, writes in A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, the reading of "Christ" in this verse is "attested by the oldest Greek manuscript (𝔓46) as well as by a wide diversity of early patristic and versional witnesses." In Numbers 21:5, when the Israelites "spoke against God and against Moses," the God against whom they spoke was Christ. They put Christ, who is God, to the test. The result? Fiery serpents bit the people, and many died until Moses raised the bronze serpent and set it on a pole. This act foreshadowed the crucifixion, as John 3:14 declares: "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life." Christ was therefore present in two ways in Numbers 21: 1) As the God against whom Israel spoke 2) Foreshadowed in the bronze serpent Numbers 21 thus preaches the full divinity of Jesus and shows typologically his crucifixion sacrifice. From beginning to end, the Bible is the story of Jesus.