It appears that Jesus is giving the disciples the key to understanding the Old Testament as a whole.'10 Basically, Jesus is saying, 'I am the lens through which you must look at the Old Testament. I am the interpretive key that opens its treasure chest of meaning. If you miss how the Old Testament testifies about me, you will miss where the story of redemption is going.' This Christ-shaped (gospel-shaped) lens profoundly affects the way we go about interpreting and applying Scripture. This lens keeps our approach to Scripture 'familial' and relational because we yearn to see Jesus in its pages. We desire to learn of the one in whom 'we live and move and have our being' (Acts 17:28). And, as I mentioned earlier, it keeps as our purpose the mission of our king, to heal the brokenness of people and the world around us.
This redemptive-historical approach to Scripture in no way minimizes the importance of commands, principles, characters, and doctrine in Scripture. Rather, it puts all of them in a gospel-centered, relational framework. It highlights that the Bible is God's 'show-and-tell': his mighty acts of redemption on behalf of sinners, told for the purpose of restoring broken relationship with his image bearers.
Viewing the Bible in systematic categories may lead to overemphasizing certain passages or books and deemphasizing others based on your theological predispositions. What is the result? The Bible’s wonderfully varied terrain becomes 'flattened.' Michael Williams notes, 'The complexity and ambiguity of reality is lost in the press toward univocal neatness and rational fit, and the dynamics of events and relationships is reduced to broad generalities.
Systematic theology helps to distill the Bible’s teachings, but it does not exhaust the complexity of what God means to say to the church. In a similar way, a book report may accurately outline and summarize a book’s contents, but it is no substitute for reading the book cover to cover, pondering, relishing, and wrestling through its details.
There may indeed be a place for using characters as examples to follow or avoid—remember, the biblical writers do it too—so long as it is practiced with an awareness of the Christcentered plotline of the Bible.
Sometimes God's call is simply for our attitudes to reflect his perspective, and sometimes the call is for our attitudes and our situations to change.