CHAPTER TWO

A PARTICULAR HISTORY

Not everyone who reads the Bible regards it as one whole. Some ignore the Old Testament. Toward the close of the second century, the followers of a man named Marcion rejected the Old Testament, even though the Old Testament was the Bible of Jesus and the apostles. No Christian today says exactly what Marcion said, but the effect is the same: we may mine it for good stories about Joseph, David, or Moses. We look for good examples of bravery or devotion for our children to emulate. But on the whole, we ignore it. Is it just laziness?

If you are a Christian, you surely know of God’s wonderful revelation of himself in Christ as recorded in the New Testament. Yet if you ignore the Old Testament, you ignore the basis and foundation of the New. The context for understanding the person and work of Christ is the Old Testament. God’s work of creation, humanity’s rebellion against him, sin’s consequence in death, God’s election of a particular people, his revelation of sin through the law, the history of his people, his work among other peoples—I could go on and on—all these form the setting for Christ’s coming. Christ came in history at a particular point in the storyline. So the parables taught by Jesus often refer back to the storyline begun in Genesis. His verbal battles with the Pharisees are rooted in differences over the meaning of the law. And the Epistles build upon the Old Testament again and again. Understanding God’s purpose in history, understanding the storyline, requires us to begin at the beginning. If we can better understand the Old Testament, we will have gone a long way toward better understanding the New Testament and, therefore, better understanding Jesus Christ, Christianity, God, and ourselves.

Over this chapter and the next two, we will consider what God teaches us through the Old Testament. First, we will consider a particular history. Second, we will consider God’s passion for holiness. Third, we will observe the Old Testament’s promise of hope.

In this chapter, we start with a particular history.

The Story

The Old Testament text begins, not surprisingly, on page 1 of your Bible: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). That is where the storyline of a particular history begins. The Bible is not only a book of wise religious counsel and theological propositions, though it has both. It is a story, a real story set in real history. It is a historical saga—an epic. And the story in the Old Testament is amazing!

In this very first verse, the story begins with the greatest event in world history. You have nothing, and then all of a sudden you have something.

But keep reading; there is more! You have inanimate creation, and then all of a sudden you have life.

You have creatures, and then you have man made in God’s image.

You have the garden of Eden, and then you have the fall.

And all this occurs in the first three chapters of the Bible. Some people have called the third chapter of Genesis, where Adam and Eve sin in the garden, the most important chapter for understanding the whole Bible. Cut out Genesis 3, and the rest of the Bible would be meaningless.

After Adam and Eve’s sin, Cain kills his brother Abel. Humankind further degenerates for a number of generations. And God finally judges the world with a flood, saving just one righteous man—Noah—and his family.

The generations following Noah fare no better. Humankind rebels at the Tower of Babel; this time God disperses everyone over the face of the earth.

A new beginning is then promised as God shows his faithfulness to another particular person, Abraham, and his family. After a brief period of prosperity, Abraham’s descendents, now called Israel, fall into slavery in Egypt.

Then the exodus occurs, in which Moses leads the people out of Egypt. God gives Israel the law. The people enter the Promised Land. They are ruled by a series of judges for a short time. A kingdom is established, with kings David and David’s son Solomon representing the pinnacle. Solomon builds the temple, which houses the ark of the covenant and functions as the center of Israel’s worship of Yahweh.

Shortly after Solomon’s death, the kingdom divides between Israel and Judah—the northern and southern kingdoms. Idolatry grows in Israel until the Assyrians destroy the northern kingdom. Judah then deteriorates until it is destroyed by Babylon. Survivors are carried off to exile in Babylon, where they remain for seventy years.

A remnant then returns to Jerusalem and rebuilds the temple, yet Israel never regains the glory it knew under David and Solomon. And that is the whole history of the Old Testament!

The Books

If you turn to the table of contents in your Bible, you can see that this storyline is not recounted in just one book but in thirty-nine smaller books. These books, which together make up the Old Testament, are quite different from one another. Genesis through Deuteronomy, the first five books, is called the Pentateuch or the five books of the Law. Following these five are twelve books called the Histories—Joshua through Esther. Taken together, these seventeen books chronicle the narrative from creation to the exiles’ return, and they conclude about four hundred years before Christ. All seventeen books, one after the other, are fairly chronological.

The five books that follow the historical narrative books in your table of contents—Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon—focus on some of the more personal experiences of the people of God. These books are largely collections taken from throughout this Old Testament period of wisdom literature, devotional poems, and ceremonial literature from the temple.

Following Song of Solomon, you will see in the table of contents a series of seventeen books, beginning with Isaiah and ending with Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament. These are the Prophets. If the first seventeen books follow Israel’s history, and the middle group describes individual experiences within that history, this last group provides God’s own commentary on the history. The books of prophecy are, as it were, God’s authoritative editorials.

The Revelation

So the Old Testament as a whole provides one very clear and concrete revelation of God to his people, given through a variety of authors and genres over a long stretch of time. And through that revelation it gives us a particular history.

What a tremendous way God has chosen to reveal himself to us! If you have ever been in a position to hire someone, you know what it is like to get a one-page résumé that attempts to sum up an individual. And you know how unsatisfying a one-page summary is for knowing an individual and making an important decision. Meeting and interacting with someone in person is much more revealing. Well, in the Old Testament, God provides us far more than a flat résumé. He gives us an account of how he worked with his people over the ages. We see how he treated them. We see how they responded to him. We see what he is like. And that brings us to the second thing for us to notice about the Old Testament if we want to understand the message of the Bible, which we turn to in the next chapter.