Why? The full revelation was a gradual process that ended with Christ. Which is why I am not surprised that so many Eastern Churches rejected the Book of Revelation, a kind of Christian "latter-day-saints" phenomenon, and why it had to be included into the canon by bargaining, in exchange for the Book of Hebrews.
I've already quoted from homilies by +John Chrysostom that show Christ as the "Lion of Judah" and the "Lamb of God"
There is no direct quote in the OT that expresses that. You will find hints which can be interpreted many ways (i.e Deut 18: 15) “A Prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren like unto me, unto Him shall ye hearken,” which is anything but vague vis a vis who this prophet will be, let alone a prophet who is none other than God Himself.
In addition, here are some considerations from +John of Damascus on baptism and the Sabbath.
All these texts are collages of various bits and pieces, cherry-picked to suit the author's purpose. My point is that there is nothing in the Old Testament that explicitly hints at what the Gospels tell us. All of this is simply retro-engineering after the fact, and it may very well be that what the prophets saw was Christ in their minds but couldn't express it fully, nor did anyone see it at the time when they were written.
The same kind of implicit "prophesy" is seen in Nostradamus. All of it is 20/20 vision after the fact, but no one was predicting Hitler using Nostradamus until Hitler came, or even while he was in power because there is really nothing explicit in Nostradamus' writings; all of it has to be "extrapolated" after the fact.
This type of 'fuzziness' naturally creates varieties of opinions, as some people read into the verses what they want and what they are already predisposed to find. My point is that it all defaults to implication and never to something explicit.
Of course, in retro-vision and with the help of cherry-picked lines, one can construct just about anything. And people have. Sometimes, even the verses were changed (i.e. the"variants") in order to make their job complete!
The west is missing the point: being a Christian is not memorizing the infallible bible but a way of life, and that way of life is found in the Church. We are told that Christ came to fulfill the law and the prophets and that the law and the prophets are love. If God is love then if you can't find love and mercy in what we do, it's not from God.
That is the one thing we can be sure of when we speak of God, because mercy is not found anywhere in nature. We humans are capable of it, but we must learn it from others. It doesn't come to us naturally. Then, if it isn't found in rocks, and plants and animals and even in natural man, perhaps it is not of this world.
“... and it may very well be that what the prophets saw was Christ in their minds but couldn’t express it fully, nor did anyone see it at the time when they were written.”
I believe that is precisely one of the points of +Athanasius the Great in “On the Incarnation”. And its an important point. It can, and is, argued that the pre-figurings of Christ and the Trinity and Panagia which the Fathers and the writers of the NT found in the OT were not there for the OT people, but rather for the generations of the Incarnation and post Incarnation to establish Who Christ is. The thinking is that these pre-figurings are meaningless in a Christian context, without the reality of the Incarnation.
You are of course correct that there is nothing in the OT which explicitly points to the Christ of the NT, but that does not necessarily mean that the pre-figurings found by the Fathers were “retro-engineering”. Perhaps it does, but if the Incarnation is the once for all miracle we believe it is, then that reality could very well lead men to an understanding of scripture which was denied to earlier people.
“The west is missing the point: being a Christian is not memorizing the infallible bible but a way of life, and that way of life is found in the Church.”
Exactly right, because the created purpose of man is to attain theosis, to become like Christ. You mentioned earlier that even the concept of sin is different in the East from the West. As you know, the Greek word for sin is “amartia”. That’s the word the NT uses and it means “to miss the mark” or “to be off the mark”. The mark is Christ. Is this what the West believes? No, not even close. So, what are we taught? Well, as +Symeon the New Theologian says:
“In the future life the Christian is not examined if he has renounced the whole world for Christ’s love, or if he has distributed his riches to the poor or if he fasted or kept vigil or prayed, or if he wept and lamented for his sins, or if he has done any other good in this life, but he is examined attentively if he has any similitude with Christ, as a son does with his father.”
And we learn this leading a Christian life during which we die to the self, our lives being hidden in Christ. We lead that life in The Church as liturgical people.