The OT is not a complete revelation, but it is vital to understand what God wants us to understand. It DOES teach faith in the correct God. Everything that was revealed was in God's own time and by His design. You can't throw out the OT because it's not the NT. Billions of people don't believe in the NT so does that mean we should throw that out too? :)
Given that Muslims and Jews use the OT as well, we must be on the same sheet of music? Yet, two out of three OT readers reject Christ! If Christ is "all over" the OT, as you say, they sure missed Him!
It DOES teach faith in the correct God.
I guess then Christians, Muslims and Jews all believe the same thing...I don't think so.
Only somthing vague and incomplete would lead people to such different conclusions.
You can't throw out the OT because it's not the NT.
I never advocated that. I am just saying that its value is different from the Gospels. The OT puts things in perspective, how this whole religious thing developed, what the early (pre-Law) patriarchs believed, what the prophets wrote after the Law, how the Jews abandoned God on so many occasions, how they came back to Him after the Babylonian/Persian domination, how the Jews became messianic people, how they formed different messianic doctrines (Sadducees, Samaritans, Essenes, Pharisees, etc.) and political parties around them, etc. It tells us that Satan was not a "bad" angel, but a loyal servant of God in Judaism, the heavnely prosecutor general, the accuser, etc.
The OT also gives us examples of people realizing that repentance is the only way to God, and the repentant speak of God in terms as we know Christ, a loving, merciful God, so there is foreshadowing, announcing, that we can come to God but only in repenatnce, and not just by following the law, as the parable in the NT reminds us with the Pahrisee and the atx collector in the synagoue.
The Gospels reveal God that we can grasp and see. It is more than God who covered Himself with flesh; it's something completely unexpected, unprecedented: it is God actually becoming flesh, lowering Himself, out of love for mankind, to our level and suffering and dying for our sins.
The truths of the Gospels, as a narrative of Jesus' ministry, holds true withor without the OT. Otherwise, Christ's work is insufficient. The Gospels by themsleves are sufficient for Christianity, but the other books in the NT and those in the OT put it in perspective.