CHAPTER 1CHAPTER 1

IN DEFENSE OF THE OLD TESTAMENTIN DEFENSE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

The Old Testament proclaims God’s mighty acts of redemption. These acts reach a climax in the New Testament when God sends his Son. Redemptive history is the mighty river that runs from the old covenant to the new and holds the two together.

—SIDNEY GREIDANUS¹

THE BIBLE’S OVERARCHING THEME

Many of the world’s religions and secular philosophies seek to discover the existence and nature of God by either philosophical ruminations or experiential exercises. Christianity is different—it dispenses with the guesswork. It holds that God reveals Himself through general (e.g., nature) and special (e.g., Scripture) revelation, and that He revealed Himself in person in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them,” writes the Apostle Paul. “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse” (Romans 1:19–20). The writer of Hebrews says, “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways. But in these last days he has spoken to us by His Son, Whom He appointed heir of all things, and through Whom He made the universe” (1:1–2). Moreover, during His earthly ministry Jesus told us and showed us exactly Who He is, declaring, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). He asked, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?” (John 14:9).

Thus, while many other religions involve the formulation of man’s ideas about the existence and attributes of their gods, Christianity teaches that the God of the Bible has made Himself known to man through creation, by His direct communication and interactions with man through His chosen people, and by becoming man Himself during the incarnation, all as recorded in Scripture.

Let’s not, then, be misled into believing the Bible is merely a written record of man’s search for God. To the contrary, as some Christian sages have noted, it is a record of God’s search for man: a chronicling of God’s revelation of Himself to human beings. As Ambrose, Bishop of Milan in the fourth century, observed, “As in paradise, God walks in the Holy Scriptures seeking man.”² Martin Luther personalized a similar sentiment: “The Bible is alive, it speaks to me; it has feet, it runs after me; it has hands, it lays hold on me.”³ Our omniscient God, of course, always knows where we are, but He wants a relationship with us and seeks us out, and through Scripture He opens the door for us to a relationship with Him.⁴

The Bible is more than just a collection of moral stories with colorful characters from whose experiences we can learn and grow. In Jesus on Trial I discussed the Bible’s unity—its remarkable cohesiveness despite containing sixty-six books written by some forty authors over 1,500 years in three different languages, various literary styles, and diverse geographical settings. There is unity between the books of each Testament and between the books of the Old Testament and the New. There is unity in their structure, their history, their prophecies, their moral messages, the theological lessons they communicate, their revelation of God’s unchanging character and divine attributes, and more.

Biblical theologians⁵ acknowledge these different types of unity, but apparently no clear consensus has emerged as to what central idea unites the Old and New Testaments.⁶ In my view, however, the overarching theme of the Bible is crystal clear: from first to last, it is Jesus Christ. Though the Bible comprises many diverse books with different stories, it is ultimately one story of God’s redemptive plan for man, whom He created purposely in His image, for His glory, and for a personal relationship with Himself. The thirty-nine books of the Old Testament are united by a common thread centered on God’s promise to redeem mankind, and this thread continues through the New Testament, where that promise is fulfilled and questions are answered. In fact, salvation is exactly what Paul says is the purpose of the Bible. In writing the last letter of his life before his execution, Paul reminds Timothy “how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15). Since Jesus accomplishes salvation, He’s the theme of the entire Bible.

Understanding the Bible’s unity couldn’t be more important, yet some Christians regularly read portions of the Bible throughout their entire lifetimes without grasping the book as a whole. This is not to imply you must read the Bible from cover to cover to benefit from it—in fact, you can open the Bible to any page and profit by whatever portion you read. But your experience with God’s Word will be greatly enhanced if you understand clearly how the Bible’s individual books come together to form one dazzling, integrated work.

My primary goal with this book is to demonstrate how the entire Bible, not just the New Testament, centers on Jesus Christ, our Savior. Of course, few would doubt the Christ-centeredness of the New Testament. But it might strike some as counterintuitive to consider the Old Testament as being about Christ as well, albeit in a different sense. “Our Lord Jesus Christ is the key to the Bible, and it is impossible to understand the Old Testament apart from Him,” explains Dr. Warren Wiersbe. “The experiences of the Jewish nation in the Old Testament are links in the chain that leads to His birth at Bethlehem.” According to Wiersbe, there are numerous people, events, and symbols in the Old Testament that foreshadow Jesus Christ. “Look for Christ,” he says, “and the Old Testament will become a new book to you.”⁷

Counterintuitive or not, the notion that the Old Testament is centered on Jesus Christ is not something I made up or an idea that Christians and biblical scholars fashioned to support their belief system. In John 5:39 Jesus Himself exclaims, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.” Don’t pass over this lightly. Jesus is saying that His followers diligently studied the Old Testament (the New Testament hadn’t been written yet) to find the key to eternal life, and the entire time they were missing what was right in front of their faces: He is the Key Who unlocks the treasures of the Old Testament, the Person to Whom the Old Testament points. He is Life and life eternal.

A few verses later, Jesus says, “For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe in me?” (John 5:46–47). Moreover, the New Testament Book of Hebrews attributes the words of Psalms 40:6–8 to Christ: “When Christ came into the world, he said . . . ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of me in the scroll of the book’” (10:7). This passage validates that psalm as an Old Testament prophecy promising that Christ, in His incarnation, would come to accomplish what the Old Testament animal sacrifices could not—the full forgiveness of sin for believers in Him. Through the Book of Hebrews, then, Christ directly affirms that He is the core of salvation history.

But the most exciting quote of all is the one that inspired the title for this book. On the day Jesus rises from the dead He appears before two men headed to the village of Emmaus, some seven miles from Jerusalem. They are unaware of Jesus’ identity and are talking about His crucifixion, death, and empty tomb while expressing disappointment that He had not redeemed Israel. Jesus quickly sets them straight, assuring them He is the promised Messiah Whose suffering and death is a necessary part of God’s salvation plan. At that point, to their amazement, He illuminates the Scriptures for them, showing how they point to Him: “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27).

Once this sinks in, their understanding is complete. Now, at last, they grasp the dominant theme of the Scriptures they had been reading for years: Jesus Christ. “They said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?’” (Luke 24:32). Shortly after that encounter, Jesus appears to His disciples and similarly enlightens them, declaring, “‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem’” (Luke 24:44–47).

There are many different ways that Christ is revealed in the Old Testament, including by His titles; His work as creator; His role as the sustainer of God’s creation; His appearances (known as “Christophanies”); the “types” and “portraits” of persons, institutions, events, and ceremonies pointing to Him; the Old Testament offices of prophet, priest, and king that prefigure His perfect work to come; God’s promises, especially His major covenants that find their ultimate fulfillment in Him; and the many messianic prophecies.⁸

THE OLD TESTAMENT: A DELIBERATELY INCOMPLETE BOOK

Admittedly, the Old Testament overwhelms even some Christians, but I think that is partially because they don’t see its big picture. Failing to understand how it can possibly be relevant to their lives or to the overall Christian story, they wonder, Christ came to save us from our sins, didn’t He, and isn’t it enough that the New Testament fully lays out the Gospel and gives us all the instruction we need on how to be saved?

By ignoring the Old Testament, however, Christians deprive themselves of deep and rich insights. A full understanding of the New Testament requires knowledge of the Old, which is, after all, the only Bible Jesus and the apostles had. Many Christians are familiar with Old Testament stories such as Noah and the ark, Moses and the Red Sea, and Jonah and the great fish, but have a vague impression of the Old Testament as being fragmented. The only remedy for this is to familiarize oneself with the Old Testament and learn how the two Testaments interrelate.

The New Testament does not begin from scratch—it builds on the Old. The Testaments are parts of a two-act play. “The New Testament presupposes the Old at every point, so much so that one can say that the New Testament is largely meaningless apart from its Old Testament orientation,” writes Old Testament scholar Eugene Merrill. “The life, ministry, and teachings of Jesus as well as apostolic preaching and pronouncements betray on every hand their indebtedness to the Old Testament.”⁹

The Old Testament prepares our hearts for the revelations of the New Testament. In fact, New Testament writers themselves believed that the Old Testament is foundational to the New, as evidenced by their voluminous quotes from and allusions to the Old Testament. Depending on how liberally you define “quotations,” some say there are at least 295 New Testament quotations from the Old Testament, which occupy 352 verses.¹⁰ If you add the New Testament’s clear allusions to the Old Testament, the numbers grow substantially, with some maintaining that more than 10 percent of the New Testament text comprises citations or direct allusions to the Old Testament.¹¹ The Book of Revelation alone has some 331 allusions to the Old Testament.¹²

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes, “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures” (15:3–4). When Paul refers to “Scriptures” he means the Old Testament. Paul knows that our understanding of the Gospel won’t be complete if we believe Christianity came out of nowhere; it was a consummation of what had been promised in the Old Testament. Indeed, Paul says in the Book of Galatians, “The law was our guardian until Christ came” (3:24).

Pastor Ray Stedman confesses that he had read the New Testament’s Book of Romans for years and had even taught it, but never fully appreciated it until he better understood the Old Testament background underlying Paul’s arguments in that book. “I never grasped with real understanding the truth it contains,” recounts Stedman. “I never let its mighty, liberating power come through to my own heart and experience until I had lived for a while out in the wilderness on the back side of the desert with the children of Israel, and had felt the burning desert heat—the barren, fruitless, defeated life they experienced. When I had been there too, and had seen how God delivered them, then I was able for the first time to understand what God is trying to tell us in Romans.”¹³

Likewise Puritan Minister Stephen Charnock writes, “The Old Testament was writ to give credit to the New, when it should be manifested in the world. It must be read by us to give strength to our faith, and establish us in the doctrine of Christianity. How many view it as a bare story, an almanac out of date, and regard it as a dry bone, without sucking from it the evangelical marrow! Christ is, in Genesis, Abraham’s seed; in David’s Psalms and the prophets, the Messiah and Redeemer of the world.”¹⁴

Nevertheless, many Christians are understandably intimidated by the Old Testament, with its bouts of extreme violence, its seemingly endless genealogies, and its arcane names and places. But we should not be discouraged because rich rewards await those who study it diligently, knowing it is every bit as divinely inspired as the New Testament. Theologian Vern Poythress admits that when he was a young Christian certain parts of the Old Testament were difficult for him. After reading through the entire Bible as a teenager, he was unable to respond to an older Christian woman who asked him how he made it through the Book of Leviticus, which many readers find painfully dry. He did not learn the answer until years later, when he grasped the significance of the Emmaus road story. It dawned on Poythress that when Jesus opened the Scriptures to two of His disciples that day, He not only walked them through the Old Testament witness to Himself, but also summarized its essence. “The whole Old Testament,” explains Poythress, “finds its focus in Jesus Christ, His death, and His resurrection.”¹⁵

Nor does the New Testament supersede the Old, though the Old Testament’s ceremonial laws have been set aside and its sacrificial system, as the Book of Hebrews describes, has given way.¹⁶ “The New Testament and the gospel never claim to have superseded the Old Testament in terms of its canonical status,” Eugene Merrill explains, “Over and over again . . . it is cited as the Word of God. . . . It has lost nothing of its magisterial character for the Christian believer.”¹⁷ After all, Jesus told us in no uncertain terms that He came not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it (Matt. 5:17), and fulfilling the Law is a far cry from superseding it.

We must distinguish between the Old Testament and the New Testament on the one hand, and the Old Covenant and the New Covenant on the other. The Old Testament is a literary document that includes a written record of redemptive history. It provides a historical account of the legal contract God entered into with the Israelites at Mt. Sinai, which formed the basis of God’s relationship to the nation of Israel. This contract is called the Old Covenant. The New Testament is also a literary document that includes the history of the early Christian Church. It records, among other things, the institution of a new contract between God and His people, which benefits all mankind. This contract is called the New Covenant and its mediator is Jesus Christ.¹⁸ The New Covenant supersedes the Old Covenant, as we’ll examine more closely in Chapter 5, but that doesn’t mean the New Testament supersedes the Old Testament, and we should be mindful of this distinction.

The writer of Hebrews tells us, “In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away” (8:13). This does not mean the major provisions of the Law God provided to Moses—the Ten Commandments—are less than perfectly holy. Nine of them (all except the command to keep the Sabbath) are restated in the New Testament, though sometimes with different promises attached and different penalties specified for disobedience.¹⁹ But the fact that Jesus fulfilled the Law means, by definition, that He didn’t negate it. To the contrary, Jesus affirmed the Law’s moral teachings and rebuked the Pharisees for effectively nullifying those lessons and subordinating them to their traditions.²⁰

And of course there’s a simpler argument: if the Old Testament were no longer relevant to Christians, it would not be part of our Bible—but it most emphatically is.

Nevertheless, the New Testament forms “the last and most definitive word of God,” as Hans K. LaRondelle and Jon Paulien maintain.²¹ As such, we interpret the Old Testament in light of the revelations from the New. This adage, attributed to St. Augustine, is instructive: “The New Testament is in the Old concealed; the Old is by the New revealed.”²² Elsewhere, he affirms, “What is concealed in [the books of the Old Testament] under the veil of earthly promises is clearly revealed in the preaching of the New Testament.”²³

The point is that we are introduced to “shadows” and “types” in the Old Testament, whose meaning becomes markedly clearer to us in the New Testament revelations. The writer of Hebrews, while explaining the insufficiency of sacrifices under the Old Covenant, argues, “For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near” (10:1). Referring to legal restrictions on food and drink in Old Testament times, Paul likewise notes, “These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ” (Col. 2:17).

We should read the Old Testament and the New as an indivisible unit with the same God present in both works.²⁴ Whereas students of the Hebrew Scriptures in Old Testament times read those Scriptures before Christ’s incarnation and before the New Testament writers interpreted those Scriptures, we read them today with the benefit of hindsight and the illumination provided by the New Testament. So while Christians strive to read the Old Testament in its historical context—from the perspective of the Old Testament Jews who wrote it—we also benefit from the further revelations and perspective that Christ provides as the final Interpreter of Scripture, and as provided by the New Testament writers through the Holy Spirit.²⁵ Vern Poythress acknowledges we should try to understand the Old Testament within its own historical environment, explaining that “God intended it to be heard and understood by the Israelites who had recently been redeemed from Egypt.”²⁶ But he notes that we also must read it from our own vantage point, understanding that the New Testament completes the story God began to communicate in the Old Testament.²⁷

“The Old Testament is deliberately an incomplete book,” writes Ray Stedman. “It never was intended by God to be His last word to the human race.”²⁸ By itself it is a book of unexplained sacrifices, unfulfilled prophecies, and unsatisfied longings. But the second you open the New Testament you read, “A record of the Genealogy of Jesus Christ.” He is the one Who fulfills the prophecy, the one Who explains the sacrifice, the one Who satisfies the longings. Yet we cannot fully appreciate this until we have first been awakened by what the Old Testament has to say.²⁹ As Australian Anglican theologian Graeme Goldsworthy insists, “We can no more make sense of an Old Testament narrative isolated from the Christ who provides its meaning than we could make sense of one scene from a drama isolated from the climax and denouement.”³⁰

OUR UNCHANGING GOD

Another source of confusion is the mistaken idea that the God of the Old Testament is different in character from the God of the New. To believe that you would have to assume either that two different gods dominated the two periods, that God somehow evolved into a kinder and gentler Jesus Christ, or that the Old Testament is not God’s inspired Word but just a book of allegories, beautiful poems, wisdom literature, and ancient stories unmoored from actual history.

Yet the Bible is clear throughout that God is unchanging and that He is one God, not two. The God Who speaks and reveals Himself to us in the Old Testament is the same God Who does so in the New. As God Himself assures us, “For I the Lord do not change” (Mal. 3:6), and as the prophet Balaam relates, “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind” (Num. 23:19).³¹ Similarly James confirms, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17).

Mark Dever argues that it would be easy to go through both Testaments piece by piece and show that God is the same throughout. But he maintains there is a more compelling way. All you need to do is consider Old Testament history, which demonstrates God’s patience and loving forbearance toward mankind made in His image—and mankind in turn repeatedly rejecting Him. In fact, God’s mercy is one reason Old Testament history extends over so many years. According to the Apostle Peter, “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).

Dever explains that “God’s forbearance can be seen in the fact that he did not end human history right at the Fall, when he would have been just to do so. Then throughout centuries and centuries of Israel’s history, God patiently forbore with the wayward nation. Ultimately, the Old Testament presents God’s grace, love, mercy, and patience on an epic scale.”³²

ALL SCRIPTURE IS GOD-BREATHED

Christians who deny that the Old Testament is the inspired Word of God face an unsolvable problem: the New Testament writers and Jesus Himself affirm that it is God’s inspired Word. Indeed, “throughout its pages,” writes Brian H. Edwards, “the Bible never expresses one sentence or word of doubt about either its divine origin or its absolute trustworthiness; on the contrary, it constantly asserts both.”³³ Paul teaches that “all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16–17). Along the same lines Peter asserts, “Knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:20–21). And in the Book of Acts, Luke writes, “Brothers, the Scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit spoke beforehand by the mouth of David concerning Judas, who became a guide to those who arrested Jesus” (1:16).

Furthermore, consider the wording Jesus uses when declaring His intention to fulfill the Law: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (Matt. 5:17–18). Scholars agree that “the Law and the Prophets” refer to the entire Old Testament.³⁴ Jesus elsewhere affirms that “Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35), and He confirms the historical validity of specific claims of the Old Testament: God created Adam and Eve (Matt. 19:4); Cain killed Abel (Matt. 23:35); the flood destroyed the world during the time of Noah (Luke 17:27); God spoke to Moses from a burning bush (Luke 20:37); Elijah performed miracles (Luke 4:25); Jonah was inside the great fish for three days (Matt. 12:40); and Daniel prophesied truthfully and accurately (Matt. 24:15). Perhaps most interesting of all, Luke informs us that Jesus, in the synagogue of His hometown of Nazareth, establishes the program of His ministry by reading from the Book of Isaiah in chapter 61, verse 1 (Luke 4:18–19).³⁵

And it wasn’t just the New Testament writers asserting the inspiration of the Old Testament. The Old Testament Book of 2 Samuel relates that on his deathbed King David exclaimed, “The Spirit of the Lord speaks by me; his word is on my tongue” (23:2).

But in today’s postmodern age, many people ridicule the very notion that the Bible—especially the Old Testament—is the Word of God. Dr. Ravi Zacharias, one of the most brilliant Christian thinkers of our time, explains that Americans used to implicitly accept that the Bible was divinely inspired. But in the mid-nineteenth century, assaults from within the Church did severe damage to scriptural authority. Betraying its own sacred trust as steward of the Word, the clergy allowed the Bible to be reduced to mere literature. “Now, into that frame of reference,” recounts Ravi,

          the text of Scripture was brought under judgment. Suspect, and positioned as a piece of literature to be dissected and dismembered at the hands of scholars with unhidden pretexts, the Scriptures were well on their way to being dismissed as nothing more than ethnic utopianism punctuated with altruistic pronouncements. By stripping the Bible of divine authorship, liberal scholarship made it just another piece of literature, open to attack and critique. . . . It was no longer a God-authored book, but a man-concocted collection. This was no longer theology—from God to us—but anthropology—about us and our thoughts toward God. In short, the author of the Scriptures was renamed.³⁶

We mustn’t fall into that insidious trap. We shortchange ourselves and undermine a foundational aspect of our faith if we fail to fully appreciate that the Bible reveals the voice of God. As Christians we do not get to cherry-pick the Bible—it is all God’s living, breathing Word. If we are to be obedient, let alone spiritually blessed, we should discipline ourselves to mine the abundant riches of the Old Testament.

The good news is that once you get over your anxiety and dig in, you will find that reading and studying the Old Testament is immensely profitable. God continues to speak to us through the Old Testament as well as the New. Indeed, the Old Testament addresses many subjects the New Testament doesn’t discuss, and it provides practical guidelines on how we should conduct our lives.

But it’s much more than that. The New Testament is anchored in the Old; without a firm grasp of the Old Testament one cannot fully comprehend its successor. Jesus Christ wasn’t born in a vacuum. There is essential history preceding Christ’s incarnation, which includes God’s interactions with mankind.

As Dr. Wiersbe observes, “We would have no information concerning the origin of the universe, the origin of man, the beginnings of sin, the birth of the Hebrew nation, or the purposes of God for the world, were it not for the Old Testament record.” He continues, “Every New Testament doctrine can be traced back to Old Testament history. An understanding of the Old Testament record is necessary if we are to interpret the New Testament correctly.”³⁷

Having established the enduring relevance of the Old Testament, the foundational importance of the Old Testament to the New, and the interconnectedness of both Testaments, we will next examine the nature and purpose of “salvation history” and present an overview of the Old Testament historical books.