CHAPTER EIGHT

IS THE OLD TESTAMENT REALLY
WORTH READING?

I confess that I spend a good deal of time in bookstores. One of the trends I have noticed in secular bookstores over the last few years is to stock more and more religious books. Of course, the stores often classify them under “spirituality.” Still, in this growing section you can browse through offerings on angels, warm thoughts, Ancient Eastern texts, the maxims of management gurus, and on and on in endless variety. Many of these books sell surprisingly well, too.

What do you think people are looking for in this blossoming spiritual book market? Guidance? Hope? Whatever the answer is, my guess is that comparatively few people would turn to the Old Testament.

You remember the Old Testament: “In the beginning” and all that! These words not only open the Bible, but they are probably the most famous words in the Old Testament, and perhaps one of the most well-known phrases in the English language.

Problems with the Old Testament

Yet it must be said that the majesty of this opening line has not endeared the Old Testament to many people. Many Christians and non-Christians alike consider the Old Testament too long and tedious, too obscure and cryptic. Besides, wasn’t the Old Testament superseded by the New Testament? Studying the Old Testament compared to studying the New, some might think, would be like eating a fish with bones when you could have the boneless fillet, or like watching the big game from bad seats with a blocked view when you could be standing on the field.

Other people’s problems with the Old Testament run a bit deeper. They will point to its frenzied prophets, its animal sacrifices, and its seemingly archaic laws and pejoratively label the whole thing as “primitive” or “crude.” And, given that multiculturalism is the preeminent virtue of our own day, one could hardly find a book more out of step with the times than the Old Testament. One might say that it represents one of the worst displays of ethnocentrism in history.

Isn’t this the book of the angry God who kills a man for trying to steady a decorated box, who sends bears to kill children for being disrespectful to their elders, who silences grumblers with deadly serpents simply for their grumbling?¹ Isn’t this the book with divinely ordained threats and floods and hailstorms and fire and brimstone?

The wrath ascribed to God in this book does not make him seem grand or powerful to many people today. In fact, such wrath can tempt the most pious among us to regard him as arbitrary and cruel: a god who causes us not to worship, but to worry; an object not for admiration, but for abhorrence; the supreme embodiment not of beauty, but of ugliness. Well, now, we have gone and said it. And in a Christian book! I have heard people say such things in other places. So we might as well be honest in a Christian book that this is what many people think of the Old Testament.

Not New Problems

Such ideas are not new, of course. People have been embarrassed by the Old Testament throughout the history of the church. Toward the close of the second century, a man named Marcion and his followers broke off relations with other Christians. They rejected the entire Old Testament because its God seemed too cruel, wrathful, and inconsistent with the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. Of course, the Old Testament was the Bible of Jesus of Nazareth! (Marcion also accepted only the Gospel of Luke and ten of Paul’s epistles from the New Testament.)

Though the church quickly and universally rejected Mar-cion’s radical surgery of the Bible, the Old Testament has too often suffered a similar fate in our own circles of evangelical Christians. We don’t make theological statements about it, but the effect is the same. Maybe we mine it for some good stories about Joseph, David, Moses, and Elijah. We may quote a couple of psalms, memorize several of the proverbs, and commend most of the Ten Commandments. But on the whole, we simply ignore it.

Our Plan for Understanding the Old Testament

Well, before we make the sweeping decision to omit such a large part of the Bible, I suggest that we should increase our understanding of what the Old Testament contains. And just as I did in our prior study over the whole Bible, I would like to summarize the Old Testament for you under three headings: first, a particular history; second, a passion for holiness; and third, a promise of hope.

I cannot deal with all the questions you might have about the Old Testament, but I can help with the framework, which we’ll do over the next three chapters. Some people have summed up the message of the Old Testament as “God’s people in God’s place under God’s rule.” In a sense, that’s similar to what I am suggesting. I would sum up the message of the Old Testament with the phrase “promises made.” The promises God made in the Old Testament have been kept in the New, particularly in Jesus Christ.

As I said, the basic outline of the next three chapters will remain the same, and so some of the material you’ve already read will be repeated here. But most of it will be new since our goal is to drill deeper. What’s our goal? I am convinced that if we can better understand the Old Testament, it will go a long way toward helping us understand the New Testament, which means we will better understand Christ, Christianity, God, and ourselves.

¹ Num. 21:4–9; 2 Sam. 6:6-9; 2 Kings 2:23–25.