Relevance of the Old Testament to Christians Part 5 By Graeme Goldsworthy  2004-09-01

Well, ladies and gentlemen, it's a great delight to see you all here tonight, and even to see
some young people here, I hope that they won't get too bored with me drowning on.
I might help them sleep a bit, but it's going to be quite a challenge to sort of try and
span the age group that we've got here tonight.
When Greg Lee asked me to do this public lecture, it was his suggestion to give it
the title that it's got, taken from 1 Peter, verse 12 there, about even angels long to
look into this, and that passage that was read to us then is one which is as good as
any to introduce the whole notion that the Old Testament belongs to Christians.
I think most Christians realize that, and most Christians understand that the Bible
consists of both Old and New Testament, and somehow, just somehow, the Old Testament is
relevant to us, but how it is relevant to us is for many people a problem, and I want
to talk a little bit about that tonight and hopefully with the aid of a few diagrams which
again, hopefully, those of you further towards the back will be able to see, because these
ones I've prepared ages ago for different contexts, and yeah, we'll see how we go.
But hopefully we'll be able to together come to a better understanding of what it means
for the Old Testament to be designated as a book about Christ and a book for Christians.
So I believe you've got an outline with you, and there are four main points there.
We have difficulties with the Old Testament.
The New Testament tells us that the Old Testament is for us.
Thirdly, that we can try to understand the connection between the two, and fourthly,
that the Old Testament is a book about Christ, and we'll just work our way through that and
see how we go.
I first started teaching the Old Testament in earnest without wanting to.
It was when I was finishing as a student at Moore College, and a few of us were doing
a degree course from England as well, and the principal asked me to stay on as a sort
of a junior tutor.
I was very young and very green, and the people who worked these things out said, well, get
Goldie to do some lectures for the first year on the prophecy of Joel, I think it was.
Suddenly I found myself having to ask, what can you say to students about the prophet
Joel, which will help them in gospel ministry?
I think it was there that I really had to start in earnest to think through some of
the issues as to how the Old Testament can be relevant to Christians.
I'd been brought up in an evangelical church, and I had had the usual kind of sermons, and
I'd read some books about the Old Testament and this sort of thing, but none of them I
think really satisfied me that we were getting to grips with what the Bible was all about,
and getting to grips with the fact that the New Testament constantly spoke about Jesus
Christ in Old Testament terms, and of course when you go back to it, in the time of the
New Testament, the time of Jesus and the apostles, there was no New Testament, and yet Jesus
says the scriptures are about him, the apostles preached Jesus from the scriptures.
So in our first point here, I've said we had difficulties with the Old Testament. Now I've
done up and down the country over the years, different kinds of teaching segments, I've
done teaching segments, the scripture union on leaders training days on putting it all
together, how the Old Testament is relevant to Christians, I've done it at the Tambourine
Youth Convention in Brisbane, and in various places, and I've often asked people to nominate
what are the main problems they have with the Old Testament. I've stopped doing it now
because I know the answers. I could nominate the five or six ones that came up every time,
apart from when it's so big and cumbersome and I don't know how to handle it type of
thing, but things like, I don't know what to do with the law and how it fits in with
the gospel. I don't know what to do about the whole question of the interpretation of
the fulfillment of prophecy and where that comes into the scheme of things, and there
are a few like that including things like the moral problems in the Old Testament, you
know, the slaughter of the Canaanites, things that we really would like to read over very
quickly and kind of wish they weren't there. Those are some of the main ones, but overall
it is of course basically the question of how can we say that the Old Testament is Christian
scripture, and it's been handled in various ways, but if you go back into the history
of this right down through the ages, it's been an area that has provided controversy,
it has provided difficulty, it's provided even the sort of the groundwork for heresies
to emerge in the Christian church as to what you do with the Old Testament. So I've nominated
a few things about it. It after all takes up about three quarters of the bulk of the
Bible, and we as Christians don't simply believe that it's important because when we buy a Bible
it's there. The British and Foreign Bible Society decided they're going to put the Jewish
scriptures in with ours, or something like that. And this three quarters of the Bible
is pretty heavy going, especially if you start at the beginning and try to work your way
through. So I'm suggesting that one problem we really have to face as Christians is how
you reconcile two things. That the New Testament indicates that Jesus is the only way of salvation,
that he is the way, the truth and the life, there's no other name given under heaven whereby
we must be saved and so on and so forth. You could quote a multitude of texts from the
New Testament and say Jesus is the way, and not only the way, he's the only way. And the
other thing that we have to try to reconcile with that is the Old Testament is part of
this Bible, as I said it's the bulk of it, but Jesus isn't there. Jesus isn't in the
Old Testament. So what do we do with it? Now I know what a lot of people do with it and
you've probably experienced it too and maybe all of us here have done this and maybe some
of us are still doing it. That is we use the Old Testament as a kind of, almost like a
lucky dip of stories and events and things which we read about people who believed in
God and there's a problem too because when you're looking at the great heroes of the
Old Testament and they talk about God we sort of have in the back of our mind or maybe in
the front of our minds that the God they're talking about is the God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ. But you still can't avoid the impression that when you look at the way
the people of the Old Testament functioned as believers in this God that their religion
is very different from ours, is it not? And so you've got this problem of how you read
around those differences and are able to somehow rescue something for ourselves. You
add to that that the culture of the Old Testament world is even more remote from us from the
culture of the New Testament if for no other reason than it is a culture that doesn't talk
about Jesus. Whereas when you come to Paul and the apostles and so on at least they're
talking about Jesus even if they dress funny and we can handle that much better than people
who dress funny and don't talk about Jesus, right? So it is very remote from us in those
ways and therefore we're left very often wondering and perhaps saying something like I really
cannot work out the connection between Israel's faith and my own. Now I want to start by suggesting
that there are simple ways of trying to get the thing together. I'm a great believer in
helping people get the big picture and at the same time as I is getting the big picture
reminding us all that we never forget that there is a lot of diversity in the big picture
and a lot of detail that we must not just skate over but at least start to get the big
picture, start to get a feeling for it. I've often used the old shapes, I've got a book at
home that came out fairly early in the piece on the building of the Sydney Opera House.
When you open the front cover, the you know sort of glued to the board of the front cover
and then there's the flyleaf, is this it's all sort of white with grey lines going like this.
Without showing people what the book is I say, I hold that and say now who can tell me what that
is, it's just grey, you know white page with grey lines going like this and you get all kinds of suggestions.
And then I open up to a page inside which is taken from across Farm Cove at Mrs Macquarie's chair
which has a beautiful sort of side on view of the whole Opera House with the Harvard Bridge in the background.
Everybody immediately gets it straight away, what they were looking at before was a close up of the
ceramic tiles on the roof of the Sydney Opera House. Now I use that as an illustration for the way we deal with things.
When we were living in Sydney, if somebody came and visited us and said show me around the place, show me the Opera House,
I would not drive them down at bed at night and sort of you know rush them up the front stairs and inside
and say have a look at this and show them some minor detail inside in the structure of the building.
I would stick them on the Manly Ferry or go over to Mrs Macquarie's chair and give them the big view.
And I have found myself that one of the first things I did, and maybe this is just the way my mind works,
I remember the first four years ago I was in Chicago or at Wheaton just out of Chicago
and the first thing I asked my host and hostess for was a map. If I want to get a feel for where I'm at
fits in to the whole picture of things. And that's an analogy I think that applies to the way we deal with the Bible.
So often we sort of pick up a snippet of info here and another bit here and another bit there
but we don't really know how they all fit together. So I want to suggest to you that there are very simple ways
of starting the process. This is only starting the process. And one is to recognize that
the Bible presents a timeline even if you couldn't with a simple timeline like that sort of say
well we can fit the books for the Bible in and the various characters and the historical events in this sequence
I haven't got that far yet but yeah it's okay the Bible begins with creation and it ends with the new creation
the new heavens and the new earth in Revelation 21 and 22. Somewhere in between that
and it doesn't necessarily have to be half way is the coming of Jesus and his life, death and resurrection
and so you've got a whole series of events in the Old Testament building towards the time when Jesus comes
and you've got a number of events in the New Testament after Jesus and then the actual historical events
of the New Testament come to an end but the New Testament looks forwards right through our present time
into the future to sometime when Jesus will return and you will have the consternation of all things
So there you have a very simple way of putting it. Now what I want to put to you is that one of our problems is
that say we took a text, any text in the Old Testament and it's back there
say one of the narratives about Elijah the prophet
and here we are somewhere between the first coming of Jesus and the second coming of Jesus
and we want to relate what we read about Elijah the prophet there
to us here in the beginning of the 21st century. How do you do it?
Now what I think often happens
and you can see from the top of this next segment
that I don't think this is the right way to go. What I think often happens is
people start there, they read up on Elijah and they see there are a number of things there
that I can learn that are good and maybe a few things I need to avoid
because Elijah wasn't perfect and so we leap from Elijah
over to where we are and we forget
that the big picture of the Bible presents a structure
and sometimes I use the illustration of the
street directory or the Rephotex as Queenslanders call it
and if you want to get from point A to point B but point B
is on a different page to point A then you have to work out how
the second page links with the first page and you may have to go through
several pages as you map your way across so that you can get
from point A to point B. You can't simply open up
page 29 in your Gregory street directory and
nominate where you are and then turn to page 36
and think that you're going to get there if you don't know what's in between
so all I'm saying here is we ought to recognize
that in between Elijah and us there is something that the
Bible I think makes reasonably clear. I say
reasonably clear because I think any of us are capable of understanding
the basics without too much trouble
so what I would prefer to see us doing is something like this
and that is if we start with Elijah
and we're here we recognize that the Old Testament
has a structure and we can follow that structure from Elijah
through to the end of the Old Testament and we realize that even though
there is some 400 year odd gap in between the two testaments
that the story is picked up and carried on
when you come to the beginning of the New Testament in such a way
that it tells us how we can relate to the key character
of the New Testament in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus
so if I can get from here to here and I know how to get from here
I've got the road through from here to here
that basically is what I'm on about. Now the question is how do we discern
that structure and follow it and that of course is
in one sense the $64,000 question
but I'm suggesting to you that if you start getting the big picture
then you can build on the basics
you can get the skeleton and you can start sticking in the details
and you can work on that for the rest of your life
as I was telling the group this morning
there are some details in the Old Testament that I really
haven't got the urge or the patience to try to
learn. Now we always used to talk about the student
who was answering his Old Testament exam at the theological college
and the paper came back to the lecturer and here in this question
I do not know the answer to this question so here instead is a list of the kings of Israel
I thought that was a very
enterprising student because I couldn't give you a list of the kings of Israel to save my life
I really couldn't. I can tell you some of the main ones
I can tell you some of the main kings of Judah
but I know where to find them if I want them
and what I can tell you is how the whole
process of history in Israel develops, unfolds
and what the main events are and who some of the key characters are
and how that moves towards the end of the Old Testament and leaves us hanging
waiting for something to resolve all the tensions that have been created
and how in the New Testament all these matters are picked up and the tension
is seen to be relieved in the personal work of Jesus of Nazareth
So
the second main point that we are looking at here is that the Old Testament
tells us that the Old Testament, the greater the New Testament tells us that the Old Testament
is about us and one of the key passages that I
often use in this is Luke 24 where after the resurrection
Jesus meets the two disciples who are heading home
on the road to Emmaus. They are utterly demoralised, disillusioned because
the one that they had been following and they thought would redeem Israel
had been quite frankly silly enough to get himself
into trouble with the authorities and actually put to death. End of story they
thought. And there they are heading back, tails between their legs
totally pressed for them and this stranger, they didn't recognise
him, falls into them asking what it's all about and after they've discussed a bit he gets
stuck into them. Fools! Slow at heart to believe all
that the prophets have spoken. Ought not the Christ to have suffered
and then entered into his glory and then
Luke tells us in Luke 24 verse 27
that beginning with Moses and all the prophets he interprets to them
the things about himself in all the scriptures and
what of course most of you will know straight away is that when the
New Testament talks about the scriptures it's talking about the Old Testament
because there was no New Testament at that stage. It hadn't been formed
and so Jesus interprets
to the disciples who have missed the point of his
coming, have missed the point of his suffering
have so missed the point that they're not even expecting
his resurrection and he puts them
into the picture. How? By showing them how the Old Testament
is about him.
And then later on he appears to the larger group in Jerusalem
and he says in verse 44
these are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you that everything written about me
and the law of Moses, the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled
and then he opened their minds to understand what? The Old Testament.
Now here is Jesus appearing
after the most significant event in the whole
train of events of what we call salvation history
mainly the resurrection of Jesus. Now what does he do? He gives
a Sunday school lesson on the Old Testament. Now I think that speaks volumes
not only that, he says that the whole of the Old Testament is about
him. That speaks volumes and
I've heard it said and I've said this myself, wouldn't it be nice
if we knew what it was that Jesus told them
on the road to Emmaus and here later on back in Jerusalem.
That would have saved us from all the arguments and the discussions about how the
Old Testament is about Jesus. I thought
about that for a bit and then I came to the conclusion that Luke has told us
he saved it up for volume 2 of his Gospel which is
the Acts of the Apostles and he weaves it into the way
the Apostles preached the Gospel from the Old Testament.
So I believe that what Luke has done has
prepared us at the end of his Gospel for the apostolic preaching
that it is that the preaching of the Gospel is preaching
of the Old Testament.
So Jesus says it's about him. There are other passages that we look at today
in the earlier group from
John 5 for instance where Jesus is in dispute with some of the Jews
and he says in John 5.39, you search the Scriptures
that is the Old Testament, here you are, pious Jews, you're reading your
Old Testament flat out. Why? Because you think that in them you have
eternal life and it is they that testify of me.
Yet you refuse to come
to me that you might have life.
It's not just that there is something to be discovered
in the Old Testament about Jesus, it's that it is, according to Jesus
it ought to be so plain
that the fact that they do not find Jesus in it is more expressive
of sinful refusal
to accept God's word. You refuse to come to me that you might
have life. He's not just saying oh poor saps you ought to go back to
Sunday school. He's really getting stuck into them
in this course. And then a bit later on he says
do not think that I will accuse you before the Father, your accuser is Moses.
If you believed Moses you would believe me
because what? He wrote about me.
What's Jesus saying? Jesus
is saying the Pentateuch, the books of Moses, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers,
Deuteronomy are books about him, about Jesus.
And you say well
I have read through those books but I didn't discover Jesus there.
And so that raises the question of how they are about him.
So that's the first thing under this point that Jesus said they're about him.
The second thing to note is that when the apostles
after the day of Pentecost and the Spirit is poured out upon them, when they get out and
start to preach the Gospel in all its fullness, what do they do? They preach it from the
Old Testament. And you only have to look at the first
Christian sermon as Peter preaches it on the day
of Pentecost in Acts chapter 2 and how he deals with the subject
of Jesus
when he's dealt with the accusation that the
disciples or the apostles are drunk because of the way that
what they are saying is heard in all different languages. He gets on to
the preaching proper in verse 22 of Acts 2
And then he goes on to quotes from the Psalms
he gets back into the Old Testament, he then talks about David
and the things that David is talking about in the Psalms and he says of David
in verse 30
So you say what passage is he talking about? And we know it doesn't take long
to wrinkle that out that Peter is talking about the promise
made to David back in 2 Samuel 7 that one of his descendants would
always occupy the throne which God had established in Israel
And what does Peter say? The fulfillment of that
promise is the resurrection of Jesus. Paul says
a similar thing in Acts 13 where he gives a Biblical theology
big picture rundown from Abraham onwards till he comes to David
and then he jumps from David to Jesus and says of this man's posterity
that is David's posterity or descendants. He is raised up for
us the Savior. He talks about Jesus, his death
rather, his crucifixion and then he says
the climax of his sermon in Acts 13 32
We bring you the good news. We bring you the Gospel
But what God promised to our ancestors
He has filled to us their children by what? Raising
Jesus. The resurrection is the
climactic event which sums up and fulfills
all the promises which God had made to Israel in the past through the prophets
and through Moses and so on. So as you follow the
apostolic preaching through you will see they constantly use the Old Testament
as the Scriptures from which they preached Christ as
the Messiah, Jesus as the Christ if you like
The Scriptures
these Old Testament Scriptures are the only book
the only point of reference that the New Testament writers have to explain Jesus
The very fact that they refer to him as
Jesus Christos. Christos or Christ
is simply the Greek equivalent of Mashiach which is the Hebrew
for Messiah means an anointed one and so
every time you see the name Christ in the New Testament it's an Old Testament
word used to interpret who and what Jesus
is. Moving on
we see how then the New Testament writers
explain how the Old Testament Scriptures
are for us and one example you're all familiar with is of course what
Paul writes to Timothy in 2 Timothy 3.16
or 3.15. From childhood
it's your childhood you have known the Old Testament
the sacred writings which are able to
instruct you for salvation through saving Christ Jesus
so the Old Testament is able to instruct you for salvation
through saving Christ Jesus. Then he goes on all Scripture the whole Old Testament
in other words is inspired by God and is useful for teaching
for reproof, for correction and for training in righteousness so that everyone who belongs
to God may be proficient and equipped for every good work. Now
Paul is writing to Timothy a Christian about Christians
in the Christian life and what he's saying is that
you Timothy have known the Old Testament which is able to instruct you for salvation
through Christ and the whole of the Old Testament is
inspired by God and has its application its usefulness
to us for teaching, reproof, correction, righteousness
and so on that everyone who belongs to God that is through Christ
may be proficient and equipped for every good work.
Now you might begin to wonder do we ever need
a New Testament if the Old Testament has got all this stuff in it?
Well of course what we find in the New Testament is how the Old Testament is
then interpreted through the event, the person and work of
Jesus Christ. Now the sum total effect
of this and this is to sum up the second point that the New Testament tells us that the Old Testament
is for us is that Christ is the center
Christ is the meaning, Christ is the goal
of all Scripture and so therefore I believe that as Christians
we can say and we ought to say and to think
very hard about the implications of saying that the Bible
our Bible Old and New Testament is the one word
of the one God about the one way
of salvation and that one way is through the one
Savior who is Jesus of Nazareth.
So how do we understand the connection between
the two Testaments? We move on to point 3.
How do we understand the connection? Well there are many perspectives
and I don't want to be simplistic
that is I don't want to carve it down to such a sort of oversimplified
thing that it fails to alert us to the
complexity that is there. However I think most of us are aware
of the complexity. If we've ever tried to read the Old Testament or tried to read
through the Bible from cover to cover we know what complexity is there.
It's the kind of complexity that has sunk many
of valiant Christians who have decided to try and read through the Bible from cover to cover.
They get to sort of about the middle point of Leviticus and by the time they're wiping
mildew off the walls because it's unclean and things like that they say who then can be saved
and they're ready to give up and they rush to the New Testament and
you know more familiar ground is it not?
But there are many perspectives and I just you know some of them you may be familiar
people say well what you have in the Old Testament is the promise
of the Messiah and what you have in the New Testament is the fulfillment of these
promises in the coming of Jesus and I think that's perfectly valid.
There are some who look at it in terms of a
great theme which runs through. Those of you who are trained in covenant
theology will know that one of the great themes of the Bible which
runs right through is the covenant of which there are a number of different expressions
but we believe that in the end they are the one covenant.
That God covenants with his people and he is faithful to that covenant and
he all sort of works out in the end as Jesus comes to bring the fulfillment
of the covenant. So there is sort of that thematic approach.
There's the approach that I tend to say though which is often
very badly misunderstood of using typology.
That is that in the providence of God in the history in the Old Testament
certain events and certain people emerge
who are part and parcel of the
history and must always be treated as such but who foreshadow
something with greater meaning that emerges
later on when we come to the New Testament.
And you can see that in things like how the temple
and its sacrifices in the Old Testament foreshadow
the one true sacrifice of Christ who is our Passover that has been sacrificed
for us. Or you can take a theme like the Exodus and you have the Exodus out
of Egypt and then the prophet Isaiah particularly speaks about another
exodus out of Babylon which looks as if it's going to lead to the coming kingdom
of God and it doesn't and then you come to the New Testament and you find Jesus
on Mount Transfiguration in Luke's account talking with Moses and Elijah
about his exodus. It doesn't come out in the English like that
but that's the word that is used in the Greek. And the
whole notion that Jesus is the one who leads his
people in the true exodus comes out in various ways. It's seen
in the Ephesians amongst other places and the fact
that Christ is spoken of as our Passover. So there are a whole lot of different
ways of doing this but in the final analysis it's not
a question of saying oh well here's a text in the Old Testament you know let's try
this method or let's try that method or maybe this method is better for this text.
These are just different perspectives what I believe on the one
basic structure which is there.
Now I have suggested in
a good bit of the stuff that I've written
that a very useful theme because it is so all-embracing
is the theme of God's kingdom
and I believe that this is probably
as good as any way to deal with it.
That is how
is this whole notion of the kingdom of God revealed in the Bible?
First of all you have to at least get some
idea what you think the kingdom of God is and so I suggest again just be
simple about it. I often say I ask people questions
in class or in a Bible study group or something and I put a question to them
and he says oh crumbs it can't be that you know he's asking a must be a trick question
and I say look the obvious is almost always
right. What is the kingdom of God?
Well it's a kingdom that God rules and what's he ruling?
He's not ruling thin air he's ruling people as well as the world
and the history and so on and it doesn't happen in thin air it happens
somewhere and so you can come up with the idea that
the very basic essentials for the notion of the kingdom of God
is that you have God ruling his people somewhere
and so
we find the first expression of it is that it's creation. God rules over his
people in the Garden of Eden but those people happen to
rebel against God's kingship and so you have a fall
which either could mean that God would put the blue pencil through everything
and say that was no good you know let's scrunch it up and try
again or I've had this sort of creation thing we'll go back
to just being God on my own
but he didn't because we know now from the New Testament
that God's plan from all eternity was that the
goal of his creation was a redeemed people in Christ
the gospel was never an afterthought it was the forethought to creation
Colossians 1 tells you that amongst it's not a whole lot of other places
in the New Testament so we then
want to see how God does deal with the situation
of the shattering of the true relationship between God
and his created people and the world order
and we can miss out some of the details in between
one of the major characters that then emerges as a result of this is Abraham
and God gives to Abraham certain promises relating to his
seed or his descendants that they will be God's people
or some of them will and they will be a mighty nation who are
God's people and God will put his name amongst them and make them great and so on and they will dwell
in a land which is promised to them in the land of Canaan
so we move on and we find that that doesn't happen but in fact the descendants
of Abraham through Isaac and Jacob are not in Canaan at all
they're slaves in Egypt
that's a very funny thing if God really is in charge why didn't he
stop them from going down to Egypt and why didn't he make it rain in
Canaan so there was grain in Canaan and sons of Jacob didn't ever go to Egypt for a feed
and then in retrospect you can see
that what he does with Moses is that he
reveals that there is a way into the kingdom you can't get
born into the kingdom by natural birth you can't just walk into the kingdom
of God you have to be redeemed by a mighty
miraculous act of God out of slavery to
sin and death and the devil or in the case of these
out of slavery to the Egyptians and their pagan gods
so redemption is built into the historical structure of it
and then as the Old Testament develops we come to a climax
with David and also the first part of Solomon's reign where God has now
revealed as the covenant keeping Jehovah or Yahweh as it is
more correctly that the Israel of God
is now comes to be focused on as
David and his line and that the
promised land has a focal point in Jerusalem
or Zion which is the sort of poetic name of Jerusalem and
the temple which Solomon builds at its heart and in a sense that is the
climax and so in the light of that
I can understand why Matthew begins his gospel with the word
this is the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of Abraham
the son of David because they are the two key figures
at the beginning and the climax of the revealing
of the nature of the kingdom of God in Old Testament historical terms
and as the revealing of the redemptive way one gets into that kingdom
I hope I'm making sense
now we know that after Solomon the whole thing disintegrated
it began with Solomon in 1 Kings 11 when he married
foreign wives who believed in pagan gods and he built temples to their gods
and so on the whole thing disintegrates the people show themselves
to be faithless covenant breakers
and people who repudiate their privileged position
under the covenant of God and the history of Israel
leads us to the division of the kingdom you have Israel in the north
and it's destroyed a couple of hundred years later by the Assyrians
Judah in the south and it's destroyed in 586 by the Babylonians
and everything's gone, it's a total
wipeout, we say well what happened to God's promises
and it's when that process is beginning
that these guys come along, the prophets
shove that up a bit
and as I usually explain, the prophets, all the books of the prophets
have three points, very simple
can anybody on top of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Joel and Amos
and what's it
they've all got the same three points, just they express them differently
Israel has sinned and broken the covenant, point one
God will judge you, point two, God is faithful to his side of the covenant
and he will restore a remnant of faithful people on the day of the Lord
sin, judgment, salvation
that's all, that's all they talk about
so the point is, how do they talk about it
aha, there's the crunch, I'll come back to that in a moment
when you get to the end of the Old Testament, they have come back
out of Babylon, they've had a go at rebuilding the state of Israel
and it all looks terribly flat
the temple that they rebuild is
like a little bush church
people who remember the glory of Solomon's temple wept
disappointment, the thing just didn't work
some 400 years before Christ, the historic
period recorded in the Old Testament comes to an end, a lot of other things go on
at that stage the Persians are ruling the world
soon after that Alexander the Great comes storming into Asia
from Macedon, takes over the world
in the fourth century, and so the Jews
suffer under the Hellenistic rule, the Hellenistic
Greek rulers, young men made to perform
in the early Olympic games, running naked which was an abomination
to the Jew, people forbidden to
circumcise their children, hold flesh, sacrificed on the altar of the temple
terrible persecutions and sufferings
and then in the first century, Pompey the Roman comes in
and the next thing we know the Romans are there, and that's where we pick up the story
in the New Testament, but what happens in the New Testament is
as soon as they start to tell us about Jesus
they start to tell us about Jesus in these terms, that it's not long
before we come to realize that Jesus is claiming to be the God of
Israel, and at the same time he is declared to be Israel
of Israel, the true Israel, and by virtue of being
that he is the place where God meets his people, he is the new temple
destroy this temple and in three days I'll raise it up again
how can you do that they say, took 46 years for Herod's temple to be built, how are you
going to build it up in three days, Jesus doesn't even bother to give them an answer
but John does, he inserts in parenthesis in his account
of it, he spoke of the resurrection
or the temple of his body so that after he was raised from the dead
the disciples remembered his words and believed the scriptures, believed the Old Testament
see how it just keeps on
building, that when you get to the Gospel
that Jesus is seen in those terms so that he is the
one who straddles the whole thing
he is the kingdom of God, he has come
he has come amongst us, not just as
the preacher or not just as the savior, not just is probably not a good word
but he is more than that
he is in himself the new creation
he is the reconstituted universe, he is God
man and world all together in right relationship for the first
time since Adam and Eve sinned
that is why the resurrection is seen to be the climax and the
fulfillment of all Old Testament prophecy because in the resurrection
and this is why it is so vital that Christians defend the resurrection
as a bodily resurrection, none of this always
spiritual resurrection nonsense, it doesn't matter if the bones
of Jesus are somewhere in the dust of Palestine, it does matter
Jesus came bodily as a human being
in perfect relationship to God
God and man in the one person, Jesus died bodily on the cross
Jesus rose bodily from the grave
Jesus ascended bodily into heaven and Jesus
remains bodily in heaven as a man for you
and for me, he is the guarantee that a
human being can be acceptable to God for all eternity
and he is that for you and for me because we can't do it
ourselves
well it's through Jesus that we learn more about the structure of things
that God is in fact Trinity as the little boy said if Jesus was God
who looked after things up there while he was down here, in other words the
Gospel drives us into the doctrine of the Trinity, the Gospel cannot
be the Gospel if Trinity is not the way God is
and we learn that the people of God are men and women who are
in Christ, who are united to Christ by faith and
share by faith the reality which is Christ himself
and the place where it all happens is the new creation, now the new creation
is in Christ, where Christ is there is the new creation
and when Christ returns in glory that will be manifest universally
in the new heavens and the new earth
just one other thing on that
in that particular thing, just going back a little bit to try and fill in
some of the blank spaces
this I hope
will help you
and this is what the colored diagram we just had doesn't really spell out
and that is from Abraham to Solomon
you can discern in the Old Testament certain ingredients
you might call them that go to make up the way God
the way God has revealed the kingdom and the way
into the kingdom by redemption, so you start with
you could put other things here, you could start with the election and calling
of Abraham, Abraham wasn't called because he was a good
guy, he was living in a pagan country, God called him to come out from
there and God promised him that he
would be his God, he would give him a nation from his descendants, they would dwell in
the promised land, then we saw that they had to go through an Exodus redemption
if they were going to dwell in the promised land, you can't get into heaven
without redemption, you can't get into the promised land without an Exodus
a mighty act of God, the covenant law of Sinai was to
structure the life of the people saved by grace, never, never
think of the law of Sinai as the means or the method of salvation
it was given to a people already saved as a way
of structuring their saved lives
the entry in possession, the Davidic kingship, the holy city and the temple
I think we're all fairly familiar with that, what happens
in the prophetic view of what is going to happen in the future is they take up all those
things and say now they're going to happen again, there's going to be a new
one, a new promise, God will still be with them, he will make
a new nation, he will bring them by a new Exodus
out of their exile, he will make a new covenant with them
but this time not a covenant written on blocks of stone like the covenant of Sinai
but written on their hearts, that is they will comply with the will of God
they will enter into a new land
there will be a new Davidic king, there will be a new Jerusalem, there will be a new temple
so what the prophets are saying, all that
will happen again but with this one great difference, when it happens
on the day of the Lord, it will not be
filled with all the ambiguities and the sinful vacillations
and the toing and froing of the people of this period, when this happens
when God finally acts to save his people
it will be perfect, it will be glorious, it will be forever
the Old Testament ends without
that being resolved, the Old Testament is a book without an ending
it is incomplete, you're sort of hanging over the edge and saying
where is it? And the thing that caught them
by surprise, because they had this massive
view of the day of the Lord, of the reconstruction of Jerusalem
the new temple in all its glory, new heavens and new earth
deserts blossoming like the rose
they were so filled with that vision
that they couldn't see that when a man
came walking in the dust of Palestine
that there was the new creation
that when he gave them hints and clues
heating the sick, casting out demons, filling the waves
that he was giving them the clue
that dominion could be restored to a saved people once again
the dominion that had been lost by Adam and Eve's sin
so Jesus Christ comes and fulfills all these, he is the son of Abraham and David
he is our Passover, he is the new temple, he is the new creation
we can go on adding to that list that there is not a single thing
that was hoped for in the Old Testament that doesn't have an expression
in the person and the work of Jesus of Nazareth
well let us move on then to the last point, you've been very patient
to try to tie it up then and say that
the Old Testament is a book about Christ, how is it a book about Christ?
Christ is not there in any literal sense
now what we have seen and I suppose that last sort of
table that I've just put up for you
demonstrates the
kind of connection that is there. So how are we going to describe it
and how are we going to use it?
We get some clues, lots of clues from the New Testament
and not least from the way Paul deals with it in his Colossian Epistle
in quite another context when he is dealing
with some problems in the church at Colossae
which appear to have arisen because people were laying on them all kinds
of things relating to the law of Moses on top of their faith in Jesus Christ
perhaps similar to the kind of
heresy that got him going right into the Galatians
but in chapter 2 and verse 16
he says, look don't let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink
and of observing
festivals of new moons or sabbaths
all these various ceremonial things that they've picked up out of the Old Testament law
and you as Christians and probably speaking
to mainly Gentile Christians
and here were these Judaizers who wanted to lay on them
the need to observe certain ceremonies and laws and keep
sabbaths and certain festivals. Paul says don't let them do that to you
why? Because these things are but a shadow
and the solid reality is Christ
these are only a shadow of what is to come
but the substance belongs to Christ
so what I've been trying to say to you then is what we saw in the
Old Testament were solid things that happened
down on the ground for the people of Israel and then some
fairly solidly phrased prophecies
of the future by the prophets but they are
still only shadows of the truth and the reality which is to come
this was God's way. Now all I can say
is why does God do it that way? Well I don't know why he did it that way
he did it that way and the New Testament reminds us that he did it that way
that is he gave the people of Israel
a shadow of the redemption which was to come in Christ
and in that sense it testifies to Christ and in that
sense it is perfectly valid to say in answer to the question how were the people
of Israel who were truly saved, saved? And the answer is
by faith in Christ. Now they didn't understand
that by grasping the shadows, by fulfilling the
requirements of the law of sacrifice and confessing
their sins in true repentance and coming to God through the
ministry of the sacrificing, priesthood and so on
the tabernacle and later at the temple but these things were shadows of
Jesus of Nazareth but what they did know was that God had assured
them that this was the means by which they were saved.
So when you come to the New Testament it shows us that these things in themselves
cannot save, the blood of bulls and rams cannot
deal with sins and so these things are the shadows
by which they reached out in faith and grasp
without realizing the full extent of what they were doing they grasped the reality
behind the shadow, the solid substance of it which is
Jesus Christ. So there is one way of salvation
in the Bible and that is through Christ.
Now having
said that just a couple of closing points
that I wanted to take up on this.
The first is that I don't know
whether I've totally bamboozled you but some of you might say oh yeah that's fairly simple.
It is fairly simple to draw a few
nice looking diagrams and rule your lines straight and just have a few sort of
key things. Then when you go home and get your Old Testament out and you find yourself
wrestling with Job and the Proverbs
and the laws of holiness
and cleanliness in the book of Leviticus
and so it goes on you say yeah but
it's not as straightforward as he made out. So I want to tell you
now I'm not wanting to make out that it is easy. What I
want to make out or put to you is there is a
sense in which the big picture can be put in such a way that I believe
even young children can grasp it. I have a friend in
Wheaton in Illinois who I've stayed with a couple of times
my wife and I were over there for five weeks
three years ago and she has produced amongst
other things a twelve week biblical theology for kids
a twelve week course or twelve lessons
a week for each and I think it's positively brilliant
what she has done and then she is producing a three year
syllabus on the whole Bible for family groups
based on a biblical theological structure
now I think that
what it really means let me put it this way
years ago a colleague and I were speaking at a school of theology
we were running in an Anglican church down in Sydney. We'd gone out from Brisbane
we were with these people off and on for quite some time
there was a fellow there one day came up and said
I thought the Gospel was supposed to be simple and we said yeah it is
well how come you people make it so difficult?
So we were a bit rebuked by that and we went away and we talked
about it and we thought about it and we came to the conclusion that often
the difficulty is this, not so much that
the material is complicated
but that what we are asking a lot of people to do is to actually
shift their whole frame of reference from one way of
looking at the Bible to a quite different way of looking at the Bible
that is the difficult thing. It's not that it's complicated
it's just that we're creatures of habit. Somebody comes along and says
hang on have you thought about looking at it from this angle? No I've always looked at it from this
angle, I've got a nice groove worn in the seat that I see here and I've always looked at it from this angle
well maybe we need to realize that in shifting
a perspective, in going from a sort of itty bitty approach dealing with
the Old Testament characters as just giving us examples to follow and examples not to follow
and starting to think of it from another perspective
that here is a grand plan from our great God
who is revealing down through the ages the glory of
his son Jesus Christ and he does it
by making promises and by speaking his
prophetic word and by dealing with his people redemptively
in such a way that these events and people and words
foreshadow the word which comes in the flesh
the solid reality in the person of Jesus Christ
so I've put down in my notes here and I don't know whether you've got the full
outline in front of you but the principle for
interpreting the Old Testament is not something we just sort of
grab out of the air, some people say we've got to interpret things literally
well okay provided you describe what you mean by
literal and it stands up but I would say that there is a much more
important principle for the interpretation of the Old Testament and understanding
scripture as whole and that is the personal work of Jesus Christ
if you like the technical term it is a Christocentric interpretation
because that is what the New Testament does, it interprets
the Old Testament by Christ. Peter does not mind saying
that when God promised to David that his son would inhabit the throne of Jerusalem
that that is fulfilled when Jesus was raised from the tomb
at his resurrection. Paul does not mind saying that
all those promises made down through the ages from Abraham and on down through the prophets
that they were fulfilled when God raised Jesus
so Jesus is the clue to it all
my last point
how do we grow as Christians?
the way some people use the Old Testament one could be excused for thinking
there are two ways you grow as Christians, in fact Christians have two sorts of religion
one is a New Testament religion where we sort of cling by faith to Jesus
and so on and we want to become more like him
and the other is the other one where we sort of ride almost parasitically on the backs of Jews
in the Old Testament and we get all sorts of clues
and sort of hints about how to live and how not to live from people and things in the Old Testament
but they're really two different things
now I want to just conclude on this note
we know that there is only one way that a person can be saved
one name given amongst men whereby we must be saved
and that is the name of Jesus of Nazareth
he is unique and he is the only saviour
now if that is the case
how do we continue in the Christian life?
we know how we begin by putting our faith and trust in Jesus and his life, death and resurrection for us
how do we continue?
by moving off into some other principle?
no, we continue with Christ as we began with Christ
you cannot go on from the Gospel, you can only go on with the Gospel
to become more like Christ is to allow the Gospel to have greater and greater sway in the way we think and live
and we will end with Christ
so we start, we continue and we end with Christ
if that is the case and if the Old Testament is part of the means of doing this
then the Old Testament must speak to us about Christ
we don't want to get caught up in extravagant ways and just flying by intuition or something
and saying, oh here's a nice thought from the Old Testament, this is what this means to me
no, we want to allow the structure of the Bible to guide us
we want to allow the way the Bible itself deals with the structures that lead to Jesus Christ to be our guide
so that we can see how when we are dealing with somebody in the Old Testament
or some event in the Old Testament
the first question that should come to our mind when we are trying to understand it is not
what does this say about me?
but what does this say about Jesus?
how does this testify to the Christ?
because the Bible is a book not principally about you and me
it's about Christ
and the wonderful thing about the Gospel is
we ride into heaven as it were on the coattails of the Savior
it is because He made it
in His life, death and resurrection
as a person who is acceptable to the Father
that we who put our faith and trust in Him
and are as Paul puts it, are therefore united to Him and spoken of as being in Him
that we can have that perfect confidence
that we too will one day behold the Father's glory
with our Savior
will you pray with me?
Heavenly Father
we thank you for your Word
we thank you for Jesus
and we thank you for the true inspired testimony to Jesus
in the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation
Father we pray that we might learn day by day
more and more about how the whole Bible testifies to Him
because it is only as we become like Him
that we can grow and mature as Christian people
we pray for the continual guidance of your Holy Spirit
and we are reminded that Jesus said to His disciples
that the Spirit would come and not take the things that belong to Himself
but the things that belong to Jesus
that He would testify of Jesus
and so we pray that the Spirit might continue that gracious work in us
and show us Jesus Christ in all the Scriptures
and we pray this in His name for His sake
Amen