“Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.” -John 5:39
Here Jesus gives us a crucial tool for understanding the Old Testament. In John 5 Jesus speaking to a crowd of malignant Pharisees, Jesus clarifies that the passages of scripture in what we consider the “old testament” pertaining to eternal life (salvation) are passages that prophecy of him. The Pharisees believed that they were justified by being “Abraham’s seed” and by keeping the law of Moses. It was blood and sweat that justified them in their own eyes, not faith and hope in the Lord.
The New Testament tells us to “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” Jesus is telling the Pharisees that they failed to rightly divide the word of truth.
As it says in 2nd Timothy: “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” (2nd Timothy 3:16). All scripture is profitable, but not all scripture is instructing the reader on how to be saved. This is true for both Old and New Testaments. One can read through the Old Testament and conclude that salvation was by works if one is unskillful in scripture. But doing so now, after Jesus just told us in John that the Old Testament passages that refer to eternal life refer to him would be silly.
Therefore if one is to understand salvation in the Old Testament you would look at passages like Genesis 15:6, Exodus 15:17, Psalm 16:9-10, Job 19:25-27, Psalm 19:14, Psalm 55:16, Isaiah 53:5 to name just a few.
The only difference in terms of salvation in the New Testament is that now it is the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ that constitutes the faith in God that will be counted for righteousness. But salvation has always been a matter of calling upon the name of the Lord in faith and believing what God has revealed to us about himself.
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