The Old Testament reminds me of a poem – with its grand and epic stories of miracles and exoduses, its strange metaphors of blood and lambs and sacrifice. All grand shadows that stir hearts with story and make us wonder at their foreign yet familiar nature. But however grand they may be, the shadows, the images, as in poetry, only seek to describe something greater. A metaphor without a backing is no metaphor at all. So this poem of holiness, of sovereignty, of atonement gathers in culmination, in climax, at the cross where Christ came and died with a crown of thorns. The temple curtain tore, the image was no longer needed for its object had come.