Living with Mystery01 The Old Testament
click the arrow to listen
If it’s true that regular bible reading by Christians is a diminishing habit, then you can be sure that the Old Testament is hardly being read at all. I have even heard of Christians who believe that the message of the Kingdom is only found in the words of Jesus; they are nicknamed “red-letter Christians” after the fact that some bibles have the words of Jesus in red to distinguish them from the main text. The reasons for prejudice against the Old Testament are several: some parts are said to be hard to engage with; the ethics of human behaviour in the Old Testament are so different from those of the present day that they upset people; and perhaps the worst excuse – it’s boring! Well, can I assure you that none of those reasons applied to Jesus; he read and memorised the Old Testament, frequently quoting from it in His teaching.
We must remember that when the bible refers to “the scriptures”
it is referring to the Old Testament. So, going back to our first bible
reference, it says:
All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right. (2 Timothy 3:16 NLT)
All scripture here means the Old Testament, and it is inspired and useful. Now I do understand those three reasons listed above which hinder people from reading the Old Testament, but they don’t change the truth that we need to read it and that we shall miss out if we don’t! Let’s deal with each one:
It’s hard to engage with
But of course it is! It was written by people of faith who
were conscious of how God had worked in history and perhaps in their own lives.
It is a spiritual book and therefore confuses attempts to analyse it
intellectually or categorise it as a human genre. It can only be truly accessed
by people who have faith that God speaks to us through it and by those who
learn through the Holy Spirit how to access its spiritual lessons. This
is what the bible says of itself:
And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. (1 Corinthians 2:13 ESV)
Paul wrote this to emphasise the spiritual nature of God’s revelation to us. Paul was able to interpret the scriptures since only the spiritual mind will understand the wisdom they contain. It is for this reason that we must persist with bible reading and pray for the Spirit to teach us what it means. If you rely only on your own resources of mind you will find the Old Testament hard to engage with. From my experience, it gets easier as you pray and persist.
The ethics of human behaviour
The ethics we read of in the Old Testament are indeed different to
modern ones, but again, remember that Jesus, while not always endorsing the
behaviour in it, did use the Old Testament extensively in His teaching. I have
found it useful to concentrate on the big picture of God’s purposes in
which the Old Testament reveals an important part. Now the Old Testament is
based on heredity, showing that we are all descended from one man
and one woman. It culminates in Jesus, born of one woman but having no human
father. That is, the Old Testament tells the story of how Jesus came to be born
as a Jew in order to be the Messiah who rules over the Kingdom of God. It
is heredity which marks out the difference between the Old and New Testaments. The
Old Testament is full of natural heredity, chronology and genealogy. The
New Testament reveals the New Creation which is based on spiritual heredity
– that is, the story of how we can become children of God by faith. Although the
New Testament begins with the genealogy of Jesus to demonstrate His
authenticity as the Messiah, thereafter it emphasises the spiritual life of the
Kingdom of the New Creation. So, when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the Day
of Pentecost, the day the Church was born, the 120 people who received
the Spirit were largely nameless and unknown. Their names were written
in the ‘spiritual genealogy’ of the Lamb’s Book of Life and so did not
need recording on paper!
deliverance
As I mentioned in the introduction, the bible is a “warts and
all” record of the history of God at work. Just because something is recorded
in the bible does not necessarily mean the behaviour is approved. For
example, the bible does not approve of the making of the Golden Calf and the
immorality which accompanied it, but it was necessary to record it to teach
us the folly of idolatry and the prospect of judgment by God. The Old
Testament details the significant events which ensured that Christ would eventually
be born of Mary, from the tribe of Judah (that is the Jews) and
of the lineage of King David (He was the Son of David). In so many
places and incidents, the big picture reveals the stories of how all the necessary
ancestors of Jesus stayed alive.
Cain was exiled so that he would not murder Seth as he had
murdered his brother Abel. Noah was saved through the deliverance of the
Ark when building it was viewed as madness. Abraham was delivered from
those who had designs on his wife. Jacob found grace with Esau who had
every reason to hate him. Judah and his brothers were preserved when
they travelled to Egypt to avoid dying in the famine. Rahab was rescued
from the destruction of Jericho. Ruth was saved from widowhood by
meeting Boaz. King David escaped the murderous wrath of Saul. His wives
were freed from the marauding Amalekites who had taken them hostage.
King David’s lineage continued during the exile of Babylon, the persecutions
of Antiochus Epiphanes and the Roman conquest of Israel. If we keep our focus
on the big picture revealed in these stories, we can recognise why certain
things happened as they are recorded in the Old Testament.
For instance, I have heard God accused of mass genocide by
flooding the earth (I should say that I go along with the view that the Flood
was localised to the Near East and not a worldwide flood). But there was every
chance that someone like Noah would be murdered in the lawless society
in which he lived. Twentieth century history demonstrates the murderous nature
of people when there are no restraints on their visceral instincts. Some people
feel that the Amalekites got a raw deal when Saul was commanded to destroy
them. Well, he didn’t actually destroy them all and some years later, Amalekites
were kidnapping the wives and children of David. We might ask why God
allowed that to happen when they were crucial ancestors of Jesus, but I have no
answer to that question. However, I do believe that God enabled David to recover
them all safely. I liken the behaviour of the Amalekites to that of Boko Haram,
the Islamist terrorist group in Nigeria in our day, who maraud around, killing
and kidnapping people. Realistically, what is the only way they will be permanently
stopped?
justice
Ultimately, there can be no justice without there being judgment
too. The bible underlines that God alone is the final arbiter of justice
through judgment. Judging the behavioural ethics of ancient people by comparing
them with the ethics of this present society is not at all straightforward.
Even in our world today there is behaviour which many consider unethical.
An example would be the practice of female genital mutilation which is
practised by some North African societies and even happens secretly in
the West. This practice is not condoned in the bible. In the Faroe Islands,
pilot whales are herded into narrow creeks and slaughtered by their hundreds.
Few people approve of that, yet it is their historical cultural
practice. And it is easy to see conflict in modern ethical judgments. It is
estimated that there are approximately 70 million abortions carried out
in the world each year. The women we see in the Old Testament would have been horrified
to think that mothers would willingly destroy the child they were carrying. You
may know that part of the original Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors and
originating in Ancient Greece, included this promise:
I will not give a woman a destructive pessary.
A pessary was a way to abort a foetus. This part of the Oath has been removed from that made by doctors now since it would prohibit the provision of abortion.
There is much criticism of divine ethics in the Old Testament by
those who think that God should not have judged in the way He did. But this is
God’s world, and He has the right to choose what should and should not
happen. God taught Jeremiah this using an illustration:
I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him. Then the word of the Lord came to me. He said, ‘Can I not do with you, Israel, as this potter does?’ declares the Lord. ‘Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, Israel. If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it.’ (Jeremiah 18:3-10)
Paul was totally unwilling to countenance any view which disputed God’s complete authority over the affairs of this world. He wrote:
One of you will say to me: ‘Then why does God still blame us? For who is able to resist his will?’ But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? ‘Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, “Why did you make me like this?”’ Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use? (Romans 9:19-21)
Returning to the point made in the last paragraph, people who believe in abortion describe themselves as pro-choice: my body, my choice! By the same reasoning, God is pro-choice: it is His world and therefore His choice.
gradual
Sometimes people read into the Old Testament things which aren’t
there. I have had to dispute a wrong interpretation of this Psalm which offends
some people:
Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks. (Psalm 137:8-9)
The Jews were exiled in Babylon and despairing over the destruction of their cities and society by the Babylonians. In this song they are imagining the Babylonians getting a taste of their own medicine, not by Jewish hands but by the people who eventually were to conquer Babylon in years to come. As I said, the bible does not condone everything which it records. But the history of the Old Testament was one in which warfare was a part of life. This is why those times when there was peace are so valued. There were no Police in Old Testament times to keep the law. There was not always a standing army to repel marauders or invaders. Life was sometimes “kill or be killed”. Now that the West is governed by the rule of law, such ancient mentality is beyond some people’s comprehension. Now I do not want to make a judgment on the never-ending conflict in Israel and Palestine, but it does demonstrate how visceral and murderous hatred can be when it is not controlled by the rule of law. The Old Testament is often describing that kind of situation and its consequences.
But the bible does reveal gradual and reforming change. God
has revealed Himself according to the speed with which people are able to grasp
change. God is patient with our slowness
until we can see the need to reform. Jesus introduced truth and grace,
He taught the importance of forgiveness and reconciliation. But these things
which we understand now were not easily accepted by the people of the first
century. Not only did the guardians of the religious society of His day not
understand His message, but they also killed Him because of it. They were not
able to shake off their own understanding of God and be introduced to a much
richer revelation. This is why some of the Old Testament seems steeped
in violence and why God was seen as a warrior since warfare was part and
parcel of their world and mindset. Hence the Old Testament has expressions such
as in this Psalm:
Your hand will lay hold on all your enemies; your right hand will seize your foes. When you appear for battle, you will burn them up as in a blazing furnace. The Lord will swallow them up in his wrath, and his fire will consume them. You will destroy their descendants from the earth, their posterity from mankind. Though they plot evil against you and devise wicked schemes, they cannot succeed. You will make them turn their backs when you aim at them with drawn bow. (Psalm 21:8-12)
Of course, there is a double lesson for us here. The Psalmist related to God as a warrior who fought and destroyed His enemies. But this was part of the overall divine plan: God is the great Judge who will one day judge everyone; and there will be many who will suffer the consequences of that Judgment.
It’s boring
Forgive me, but I did write this in a “tongue-in-cheek”
manner. It is something that the ten-year-olds I used to teach would sometimes
say. My answer to that statement was:
“The only thing that is boring is boredom!”
Boredom is a spiritual malaise. I can believe that boredom might be a problem for someone locked in a cell with nothing to do. But it cannot be true of free people who have access to the scriptures in their own language and very cheaply. The Christians of the first dozen or so centuries would have loved a personal copy of the scriptures. They would not believe that modern Christians can be so indifferent to God’s Word. Yes, bible study and meditation require consistency and discipleship – but one cannot make excuses to get away from that! Do pray for the Spirit to teach you; expect the scriptures to come alive the more you read them; do listen to good biblical teaching. If you would like some help with how to get started on reading the bible, then do look at the ‘Rule of Life’ tab on this website where there are suggestions to help
Jesus loved and quoted from the Old Testament. Paul relied on the Old Testament to underpin his growing understanding of God’s love, His kingdom and His revelation to the Church. Join them in their appreciation and engage with the Old Testament in the way that Jeremiah received the Word of God as I mentioned in the Introduction:
When I discovered your words, I devoured them. They are my joy and my heart’s delight. (Jeremiah 15:16 NLT)