I recently saw this title to an article and it instantly got my attention. One of the great shortcomings of the modern Evangelical church is it’s lack of focus on the Old Testament. When I ask friends and family if they have read the Old Testament, all of it, I get hemming and hawing, and excuses. I’ll hear that it’s confusing, or hard to understand, or they imply it’s not really relevant to their faith. They are wrong on all counts. This points to a massive failure on the part of leaders in the Church. Commenting on a book about the dying Old Testament, the author of the piece confirms this:
[M]ost American Christians are relatively ignorant of basic truths about the Bible, particularly the Old Testament—and that trends in sermons and worship are contributing to the problem. For the most part, the Old Testament is ignored, and even when it isn’t, only a narrow selection of familiar texts are read, sung, or taught.
Why is this such a huge deal? Because without an understanding of the Old Testament we can’t understand Jesus! Our Lord himself rebuked his disciples after the resurrection with these words from Luke 24:
25 He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! 26 Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” 27 And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.
And later in the same chapter:
44 He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.”
The Apostle Paul in referring to Scripture in his letters to Timothy is referring to our Old Testament:
Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching
and
and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
and
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,
Yet most Christians think the reading and familiarity with Old Testament is somehow an option in the Christian life. It isn’t.
Unfortunately, even the author of this piece seems to miss the ultimate significance of the Old Testament. To end the piece he states something that is no doubt true, but misses the big picture:
[I]n the end, when we make a commitment to regularly read, teach, preach, and sing the Old Testament, we’re doing more than nursing a dying language back to health. We’re also connecting personally to a living God.
While “connecting personally to a living God” is thrilling, and an obvious result of immersing ourselves in the Old Testament, even more important is the larger message of the Old Testament: the grand narrative of the history of redemption. That grand narrative is not fundamentally about our relationship to Jesus or God, but about what God has done for us in Christ. Big difference. Our relationship to and with God flows out of this narrative of a creation good, a fall into sin and rebellion against God, and redemption by grace through faith in Christ.
What we learn so graphically in the Old Testament is the nature of our sin, and the holiness and justice of God. We learn that sin is ugly, and that it must be justly punished by God. But we learn that somehow even in that punishment there is promise of God’s mercy and grace. We just don’t understand from the Old Testament alone how God will pull this off, how he can be in Paul’s words just and the justifier of many. Only in Christ does the Old Testament make sense, and only does Christ make sense in light of the Old Testament. Or in Augustine’s famous phrase, “The New (Testament) is in the Old concealed, the Old (Testament) is in the new revealed.”
We don’t connect personally to a living God through words in a book, but to Christ through the cross. Big difference. We can’t know this without words in a book, but all those words point to him!
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