Tim Gray - Sacraments in Scripture: Salvation History Made Present

The sacraments are what God had in mind for you and me in the beginning, when He made the heavens and the earth. The sacraments are what He brought about, little by little, all through the Old and New Testaments.

This may come as a surprise to many readers. Though we Catholics love and revere the sacraments, too often we treat them as something the Church teased out of a smattering of New Testament proof-texts. That notion, however, is precisely backwards. It would be more accurate to say that the Bible is what Gods people teased out of a providential plan in which Gods New Covenant sacraments were already present in mystery (to steal a phrase from the Church Fathers) from the first moments of the Old Covenant.

There is a unity to the two Testaments of the Bible; and the whole of the Bible is inseparably united with the small details of the Churchs life today.

Jesus Himself read the Old Testament this way. He referred to Jonah (Mt. 12:39), Solomon (Mt. 12:42), the Temple (Jn. 2:19), and the brazen serpent (Jn. 3:14) as signs pointing to His own life, death, and Resurrection. Toward the end of Lukes Gospel, Jesus took Moses and all the prophets and interpreted to [His disciples] in all the scriptures the things concerning himself (Lk. 24:27). Saint Paul followed His Master in this reading of the Hebrew Scriptures (cf. Rom. 5:14, Gal. 4:24), as did Saint Peter (cf. 1 Pet. 3:20-21). Saint Augustine summed up this interpretive method in a single phrase: The New Testament is concealed in the Old, and the Old is revealed in the New.