God's move with men and among men was just the indirect move in His old creation for the preparation of His direct move in His new creation for His eternal economy. This is why the church is not mentioned in the Old Testament. The church was a hidden mystery. God's eternal economy was never directly touched in the Old Testament. God's economy in the New Testament is absolutely unique. In the Old Testament, you cannot see God's move for His eternal economy directly. God did a lot indirectly to prepare for the day when He could come to do the direct work.
The New Testament opens with the genealogy of Jesus Christ in Matthew 1, and His genealogy is of forty-two generations. Each generation was a preparation for Jesus' coming. We need to consider the Old Testament as a preparation for God's move in man in the New Testament. If God had not created the heavens and the earth with billions of items, how could man exist? The heavens are for the earth, the earth is for man's existence, and man's existence in the Old Testament was for the generations to bring forth Christ. Thus, we may say that the forty-two generations in Matthew 1 represent the entire Old Testament.
Fifty-seven years ago in 1936, I wrote a book entitled Gleanings of the Genealogy of Christ, and much of what I wrote there has been included in the notes of our present Recovery Version of the New Testament. To write concerning the genealogy of Christ, you need to know the entire Old Testament. The genealogy of Christ in Matthew 1 is a brief abstract of the Old Testament, which in itself is the detailed genealogy of Christ. To understand the genealogy in Matthew, we need to trace the origin and history of every incident. We must not forget that the Old Testament was a preparation for the direct move of God in man in the New Testament.
We need to see the great significance of God's move in His incarnation (John 1:1, 14). Many of those in Christianity today do not see this significance. When they think of Christ's birth, they may think only of the manger or of the pagan things associated with the celebration of Christmas. Today's Christianity has lost the genuine essence and genuine character of God's economy. It has become absolutely an outward, formal religion. We need to abandon our traditional, unscriptural concepts to see the pure revelation of the incarnated Triune God from the Holy Scriptures.