CHAPTER ELEVEN

A PROMISE OF HOPE

The Old Testament’s picture of God is not one of grim condemnation. He is the same God we find in the New Testament. He is holy, just, and unwavering in his commitment to punish sin, but he is also a God of love, even toward his enemies.

God Commands Love

Does that surprise you? Many people are surprised when they hear that love is enjoined in the Old Testament. For instance:

• The great commandment given to Israel is, “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut. 6:5).

• The Lord commands the people to love their neighbors as themselves (Lev. 19:34). Jesus was quoting the Old Testament when he said this!

• God commands the Israelites to love foreigners because he does (Deut. 10:18–19).

• God even told the Israelites to return lost property to their enemies: “Do not gloat when your enemy falls; when he stumbles, do not let your heart rejoice” (Prov. 24:17). And, “If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink” (Prov. 25:21).

All of this is from the Old Testament, and I could go on and on! I don’t know which Old Testament you have been reading, but the real one is about love.

God Demonstrates Love

Now, this is one way we could try to demonstrate that the God of the Old Testament is the same God as the God of the New Testament—going through the text piece by piece and pointing to all the individual injunctions and examples of love. But even more convincing, I believe, is considering the whole sweep of history presented in the Old Testament, where we witness God’s patience and loving forbearance toward creatures made in his image who nevertheless reject him. Why is Old Testament history so long? “He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance,” said the apostle Peter (2 Pet. 3:9).

God’s forbearing love 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.

God has always planned and promised to reveal his glory to his people. And so he did, throughout the Old Testament.

What Is the Promise of Hope?

What then is the promise of hope God’s people can look to in the Old Testament? Clearly, their hope could not be in their own history. It was a history of repeated failure!

Nor, finally, could their hope be in the sacrificial system. As the psalmist said, “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but my ears you have pierced” (Ps. 40:6), meaning God made the psalmist his own. The authors of the Old Testament even seemed to understand what the author of Hebrews meant when he wrote:

The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming—not the realities themselves. For this reason it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship. If it could, would they not have stopped being offered? For the worshipers would have been cleansed once for all, and would no longer have felt guilty for their sins. But those sacrifices are an annual reminder of sins, because it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. (Heb. 10:1–4)

An endlessly repeated sacrifice can’t make people perfect. The blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sin. So where is there hope in all this?

Riddle Solved . . .

To find the answer, we have to return to Exodus 34 where we saw the riddle of the Old Testament. Remember, we asked, how can God both “forgive wickedness” and still “not leave the guilty unpunished”? After all, you and I both deserve God’s punishment, no matter how virtuous you might think you are for persevering through a chapter on the entire Old Testament! We all stand guilty before God. And Exodus 34 promises that God will not leave our sin unpunished. So what hope is there?

Atonement requires, we said, a substitution of suffering and death by an innocent party on behalf of the guilty party. But, we have also suggested, it takes more than the death of an animal to accomplish this. Some relationship between the victim and the guilty is required, a relationship far closer than what’s possible between us and an animal who is not made in God’s image.

The answer to the Old Testament riddle for the Israelites and for us could never be in ourselves or in a lamb. Their hope and ours has to be in the Old Testament’s promised person.

. . . In the Anointed One—the Messiah

People in Jesus’ day did not wonder whether a Messiah would come. They took it for granted that their only hope was in the specially “anointed one” of God. But when this anointed one came, his manner of coming took everyone by surprise. He—Jesus—presented himself as fulfilling not just the Old Testament promises of a kingly Messiah but also another set of promises—the promise of the Lord’s servant who would come to suffer for his people in their stead.

Jesus brought together the Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah-King and the prophecies of the Lord’s servant who would suffer for his people. Obviously, Jesus had meditated on the Old Testament deeply and knew these words from Isaiah:

Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows,

yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities;

the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.

We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way;

and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. (Isa. 53:4–6)

This promise points to the answer to the riddle of the Old Testament. This promise is the hope of the Old Testament. In fact, what the Old Testament teaches us more than anything is that this promise is our only hope at all!