40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 40 Minutes in the Old Testament: Episode 1

Episode Date: January 21, 2015

An introduction to the podcast and the Old Testament.

you are listening to a podcast produced and distributed by christholdfast.com please visit christholdfast.com for additional resources this is 40 minutes in the old testament Well, thank you for carving out 40 minutes out of your schedule to give the inaugural episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament a listen. This is a podcast that we hope it will challenge the way that you think about the Old Testament, that you read the Old Testament. And Chad Bird is going to be doing most of the work here, So I'm just facilitating along with Brandon.

If any of you guys listened to the Christ Whole Fastcast last week, then you know who we are. And if you didn't, you can go listen to that and find out who we are. But more importantly, Chad, who are you? That's a good question. I guess like anybody else, I've got several hats that I wear, several vocations that God has called me to. First of all, I'm a husband and a father. And I live in San Antonio, Texas, where I work and where I attend Crown of Life Lutheran Church. I've got a bit of a history with the Old Testament.

I've taught Old Testament at a seminary before in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I've served as a pastor. And so I've spent some time over the years teaching in and really living in the Old Testament. So I'm looking forward to this chance to talk to all of you and hear back from you about the Old Testament and in particular how a Christian reads the Old Testament, because ultimately that's really what we want this to be about. It's 40 minutes in the Old Testament, but it's really 40 minutes in the Old Testament as a Christian because there is certainly a distinctly Christian way of reading the Old Testament Scriptures. So that's what we're all about.

That's a little bit about who I am and looking forward to delving into the Scriptures that testify about our Lord. yeah and if and if people do want to contact um us yeah you can uh email us at uh christ hold fast at gmail.com and you can send all the emails there you have uh questions or anything we might do some of that um if questions roll in about anything that we talk about we might be able to to hit some of those on the the next shows so if you want to get a hold of us you can do that or you can go to the website christ hold fast.com and you can go to the contact us page there and a voicemail line there you can do that or you you can leave an email through the through the website as well so chad how are we going to where are we going to be starting i think a good starting point

is uh simply to talk about our our approach to the old testament in general and what kinds of questions that we that we ask of the old testament it seems to me that among christian churches there's various ways that people view the Old Testament as a whole. Some people view it as almost like a sort of desert, if you will. If you're traveling through the desert, there's a whole lot of sand and a lot of rocks, not a whole lot of life. But on occasion, you'll come across an oasis here and there. But if you have this view of the Old Testament,

Really what you're looking for is maybe an occasional prophecy of the Messiah, maybe a Psalm 23 kind of text that offers a vision of hope and God's grace. But by and large, this particular view of the Old Testament sees it as a desert with not a whole lot of life, not a lot of hope there. Instead, a whole lot of law, a lot of threats. There's another approach, which I think is actually much more common and unfortunately a pretty dangerous approach to the Old Testament. And it's to view it as sort of something like a moral gymnasium, if you will. It's where you go to get your spiritual muscles in shape. It's like you follow around these saints of the Old Testament.

but maybe it's Noah, maybe it's David, maybe it's Joshua, Daniel, whoever it might be. And the goal in looking at these men, the goal in hearing the stories about them, is to see how you can be like them. So they're held up as models of good behavior. You can strive to be like Daniel and pray faithfully as he did, suffer faithfully as he did. You can strive to be like David and whatever Goliaths are in your life to slay them. All of which really boils down to kind of a moralistic approach to the Old Testament. It's the approach that I grew up with.

I went to Sunday school every Sunday. And the lessons that were taught to me over the years were basically that the Old Testament is full of stories that tell me the good I'm supposed to do and the bad I'm supposed to avoid. Now, when you read the Old Testament like that, it becomes nothing more than kind of a collection of biblical Aesop fables, if you will. Nothing more than examples that are put forward that are supposed to guide our moral behavior. And the ultimate problem with that approach to the Old Testament is the same problem that folks have when they approach the New Testament that way. If you're asking always, what does this tell me that I'm supposed to do or what I'm supposed to avoid, you're approaching the Old Testament with a law-centered mentality. And that law-centered mentality can lead to a couple of very, very dangerous errors.

One is people get the idea that they can actually keep the law. And so they become like the Pharisees. The other, which I think is much more common today, is that people realize they can't do it, and they fall into despair. They try and fail and try and fail and try and fail once more. And some of them even give up on Christianity altogether because they realize that ultimately they can't keep the laws, they can't live up to this holiness that God requires. So the Old Testament becomes for them really nothing more than a condemning collection of stories because they can never live up to these requirements. So those are just a couple of ways of approaching the Old Testament, whether it's to see it as a desert with just a few oases scattered here and there,

or as a moral gymnasium where you go to work out by emulating the lives of the Old Testament saints. But I would argue that both of these approaches are not only wrong and dangerous, but they're certainly just completely contrary to the way that Christ himself presents the scriptures. Over and over, when Jesus is teaching his disciples, when he's talking to the crowds, when he is discussing the scriptures, which for him were the Old Testament, for Jesus and for the early church, the Bible, their Bible was what we call the Old Testament. But for them, the scriptures consisted of the law and the prophets and the Psalms. When Jesus talks about the scriptures, he always presents these scriptures as the testimony concerning himself.

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, you think of the disciples who were on the road to Emmaus, probably the most well-known example. it's the day of our Lord's resurrection he appears to them on the road and begins talking with them about why they're downcast and they describe to him what had just happened in Jerusalem

and Jesus tells them they're slow of heart to believe in all the prophets have spoken notice the word all there, all that the prophets have spoken and so he begins with Moses and then proceeds to

all the prophets to describe the things that are written about himself. So we have in our Lord's own example, when he talks about the Old Testament, he's using it to teach people about who he is. He says elsewhere in the Gospel of John that these scriptures testify of me. So So, to kind of bring this back around to our approach to the Old Testament, it seems to me that if we're faithful to Christ and faithful to the gospel, then the question that we really should be asking of every single Old Testament chapter, all the stories, all the Psalms, all the Proverbs, all the prophecies, is one overarching question.

And that question is this. How, in these words, is Christ talking to us about himself? If that's a question that's driving our reading of the Old Testament, then we're starting out in the right direction, and chances are we're going to end up where Christ wants us to be. because these are the testimonies of himself in many and various ways. But they all point in one way or another to who he is and to what he's done for us. So page after page in the Old Testament, what you're hearing in various kinds of ways is a testimony of who our Lord is, the grace that he brings to us. Really, the gospel itself is presented as something that has saturated Moses and the Psalms and the Prophets. Yeah, one of the things I think that you see over and over again, at least I did and do, is one of those approaches that you were talking about.

When you preach the Old Testament, talking about the gymnasium approach, there's this real temptation to just allegorize everything in the Old Testament. so every story you have, you make an allegory out of it. Um, and so if, if God is telling Noah to do this impossible thing, that seems ridiculous, which is build an arc, then you have to figure out what the big, huge, impossible thing God wants you to do is. And you just need to have faith. Like Noah had faith. Uh, it doesn't matter if everyone's mocking you and just, just believe God. And, and we look, when we approach it that way, we miss Christ in that story,

which is everywhere in that story um and instead we we're we make that a picture that we've out a story that we've allegorized and then inserted ourselves into and made the arc whatever thing we're facing and noah us and and all of that kind of stuff um and yeah and i think that the problem with that is there a it puts a burden on you that god hasn't put on you um that you're placing on yourself or that a pastor is placing on you um and then b you miss the gospel entirely which is obviously very well maybe not obviously that depends on maybe not obviously maybe that's why we're doing this but but i assure you that the gospel is present in that text big time yeah i i fully agree and and uh something else that came to mind when you were when you were talking is that

one of the one of the benefits of this particular approach to the old testament is that it cannot but enrich our understanding of the New Testament. I've often said that, really, the New Testament is the inspired commentary on the Old Testament. So it is the testimony of the evangelists and the apostles to the fact that the scriptures, that is the Old Testament, have been fulfilled in Christ. So if there is a New Testament, the New Testament is Jesus. It's not really a book. But Christ is the New Testament. He is the new covenant.

And what we call the New Testament, this collection of writings, is the inspired testimony of the Spirit to the fact that he is, in fact, the Christ that God promised to send and has sent. So when we're reading the New Testament, if we're reading it as someone who has made the Old Testament his or her own, So if we've put ourselves into the Old Testament and the Old Testament into us, then when we approach the New Testament to read it or to teach it or to preach on it, bringing this Old Testament life with us is going to open our eyes to the richness that's in the New Testament as well. I'll just say it a different way. The more you know the Old Testament, the better you're going to preach the gospel, the better you'll understand the gospel. Because apart from the Old Testament, the New Testament really, I mean, you might understand the truth, but you're not going to get the whole truth.

You're going to only have part of really the fullness that God wants to reveal. Just a quick example of that. But what is the – what you might think of as the kind of the foundational confession for the Christian? It's real simple. Jesus Christ is Lord. Okay? We've all heard that. Jesus Christ is Lord.

Well, if you unpack that basic Christian confession, you really can't understand the full truth of what's being confessed there apart from the Old Testament. Just take it word by word. Jesus Christ is Lord. Okay, Jesus. Well, what is that? Well, it's a name. It's a Greek name. But it's based upon the Old Testament name of Joshua, or Yehoshua, which means Yahweh is salvation.

You can't really understand the name Jesus apart from its Old Testament counterpart in Joshua. Well, who is Joshua? Well, he is God's man appointed to lead the Israelites across the Jordan River into the Promised Land. well that does nothing but give us an even richer understanding of who Jesus is then Jesus is the new Joshua who is baptized in the Jordan River in order to inaugurate our salvation

and to bring us finally into the promised land of heaven itself so to understand the name Jesus you need to understand the name Joshua but to understand Joshua of course you have to be someone who is approaching it from the Old Testament And then, of course, Christ. So Jesus Christ is Lord. Well, what does Christ mean?

Well, it's a Greek word, but of course it's based upon the Old Testament designation for the anointed one, the Mashiach, or the Messiah. So you can't understand Christ apart from Messiah. Well, who is the Messiah? Well, he is certainly the one whom God appointed, whom God anointed to come and be our Savior. But you had Messiahs in the Old Testament. That is, you had anointed ones. You had kings who were anointed. You had priests who were anointed.

So who is Christ as the Messiah? He is the one who is the greater priest, the greater king, anointed by God to bring about our salvation. So Jesus Joshua, Christ Messiah. But this Jesus Christ is Lord. Well, what does that mean? Well, for an Israelite, if you hear the word Lord, you're immediately going to think of who the Lord is. That is Yahweh. Yahweh, the one who is, as he said to Moses in Exodus 3, I am who I am.

And so we confess you are who you are. So just think about that. Think of the ramifications of that. Simple confession. Jesus Christ is Lord. Really, it's what we're saying is Joshua, Messiah, is Yahweh. He is the one who comes as the new Joshua, who is the new priest, the new king, to lead us into the promised land. And the one doing this is none other than Yahweh enfleshed, Yahweh incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth.

I'm pumped up. I'm ready to go now. Brandon, are you ready? I am ready, yeah. Yeah, so one thought that came to mind was, you know, as I grew up a Christian, I was practically born into the Christian faith. Anyway, I grew up in the church all my life, and I'd always hear that Jesus was the fulfillment, that Jesus had come and he had fulfilled something,

but we never traced it back really, and maybe it was my fault. I may have not been listening carefully enough. But maybe if we'd had a little more instruction in showing us how Christ was the fulfillment and what he was the fulfillment of, it would have helped me understand the glorious mission that he was on and what he's done for us. Is that what we're going to learn a little about as we're going through this? Yeah, that's certainly one of the key things we want to talk about is, you know, really, why are we Christians? Well, we're Christians because Christ is the Messiah. But if that is our confession, then really we're saying that he is the one that was promised in the Old Testament. He's the one who's come to fulfill this.

And so we need to know the Old Testament as Christians because that is our basic confession, that Jesus is actually, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Mary, is actually this promised one. And to understand how he is, then we need to understand how he has fulfilled the prophecies that were given beforehand. But I would add to that that he is the fulfillment of the Scriptures, but he's also the fullness of the Scriptures.

That's kind of another misconception that people have, is that Jesus was sort of twiddling his thumbs in heaven at the Father's right hand, just waiting. He couldn't wait until finally he would be able to come down to earth and be born. The Old Testament is full of references of the Son of God coming down from heaven to be present with his people way before his incarnation. He appears many times as the angel of the Lord, as he does in Exodus 3. Sometimes he's simply called the man or the man of God.

or you appear as like you did in the in the glory cloud or other visible appearances of yahweh i these are all christ already dwelling with his people he's uh as one book as as one book has it by a former professor in a in a cemetery in st louis horace hummel his book was the word becoming flesh it was an old testament introduction and his focus was upon how throughout the old testament You have the word present, and it's as if he's becoming flesh because really you have him present with his people all through the Old Testament until finally the incarnation when he takes on our human nature. So he's the fulfillment of the scriptures, but he's also the fullness of the scriptures because he's always present with his people. Sweet. All right.

Well, we got – we're about halfway through, about 20 minutes in. And so in the second half of this, that was a 20-minute introduction, which I think was good. And I think that people are – hopefully they're as excited as I am. I'm pumped to do this. So we're going to be starting at the beginning. Is that right, Chad? Starting at the beginning. Is that the place to start?

Is that the best place to start? That's the place to start, yes, sir. All right. So we're going to see what we can say about Genesis 1. I don't know if we'll get through all this. I mean, we might be in Genesis 1 again next week, and that's okay. We're not on the—we don't have any deadline to get through this, so we can take our time. So first chapter of Genesis, we're not going to read all of it.

And maybe as people listen to this podcast, maybe if you kind of know where we're going to be, uh maybe familiarize yourself with with those you know with that passage beforehand um so um if wherever we leave off this week you'll know to uh you know if we're still in genesis one then pour over genesis one next week before you before you listen so what do you what do you want to say what do you want to say and talk about uh here in the first chapter of genesis or maybe you want to talk a little bit about genesis is there an is there a book introduction sort of that you have in mind uh what what is genesis yeah well genesis of course uh is uh is not only the first book of the bible but uh it it really is the foundational book of of the scriptures

for me when i read especially the first three chapters of genesis uh i i see embedded within these chapters basically the whole biblical story so everything that that tells us who god is and what his attitude toward us is who we are as his as his people and what it means to be in his image how god interacts with us how he gives his gifts to us what his goal is for us as as his children. And also added to that are our fall into sin and the impact that that has and what God promises and has done to save us from that. It's all there in the first three chapters of Genesis. And so in some ways, what you have after Genesis 3 is just kind of an elaboration on what you already have in the opening chapters. So it is the

foundation of everything that follows. Luther says somewhere that there's not a word in the New Testament that doesn't in some way build upon and look back to the Old Testament. And I would add to that that there's really not a word after Genesis 3 that does it in some way look back on and build upon

what was already there so it's a book about beginnings to be sure but it's also a book about endings because already in Genesis we have foreshadowed what we have pictured for us in Revelation

it's no coincidence that Revelation talks about a new heavens and a new earth well you can't really understand a new heavens and a new earth apart from the old heavens and in the old earth so genesis presents to us not just how everything got started but also how everything will will end and how all this is brought together in uh in the christ so i that's that's my approach to genesis uh as i said earlier

really the question that i ask over and over is is what does this tell us about about christ and who he is and what he does for us. And I think there's lots of material in Genesis 1 where we can see that. All right, well, take us there. All right, let's start actually with the opening phrase. I think that's a good jumping off point. It's going to get us started on the right foot. But it's amazing to me that really within this opening phrase,

we already have a hint, or maybe even more than a hint, an allusion, if you will, to who the Son of God is. So let me unpack that a little bit. In the beginning, in Hebrew, that's just one word, barashit. So three words in English, one word in Hebrew. When we hear in the beginning, of course, the first thing we think of is this is referring to how everything got started. This is the temporal beginning of creation. And I fully affirm that truth.

But there's also something, if you scratch below the surface, if you look a little bit deeper into this particular word, you see something else there as well. And the way I'd approach it is, first of all, by pointing out how the way Genesis starts is echoed in the way that John's gospel starts. So in Greek, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which is called the Septuagint, begins with the phrase in arche, in the beginning. And that's exactly how John begins his gospel, in arche. He says, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. So John, in the way he starts his gospel, is already wanting us to hear who this Word is in relationship to Genesis. So we have that tie-in. But there's even more.

it's very eye-opening to read Genesis 1.1 in relationship to a section from the book of Proverbs. There's a chapter in Proverbs, chapter 8, which talks a lot about wisdom. In this particular chapter,

wisdom is personified. Wisdom is speaking as an I, so I did this and I did that. And one of the verses has a pretty remarkable description of who this wisdom is and what this wisdom was doing at the beginning. So I'm reading from Proverbs chapter 8 and looking here at verse 22. It says, this is wisdom speaking, the Lord possessed me the beginning of his way, before his works of old. From everlasting I was established, from the beginning, from the earliest times of the earth. Now what's fascinating about this is you have wisdom speaking here. And wisdom says that the Lord possessed me, the beginning of his way.

Now, the Hebrew word for beginning, reshit, which is used in this Proverbs verse, is the very same Hebrew word that's part of this opening word in Genesis 1-1. So Genesis 1-1 opens with ba-reshit, which means in the reshit, in the beginning. And then Proverbs 8, verse 22, wisdom says, the Lord possessed me, the reshit of his way, the beginning of his way. Now, if you look at these two verses together, you not only hear this same use of reshit, same use of the word beginning. But what's remarkable is who is saying that he is the beginning of the Lord's way. This wisdom that's described in Proverbs chapter 8, the church has confessed from the beginning that this wisdom who speaks is actually the wisdom from God that Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians. It's Christ himself.

So he is the wisdom of the Father who talks all throughout Proverbs 8 about he was at the Father's side. He was there before creation. He was daily rejoicing in the sons of men. But at the beginning of this discourse that wisdom has, he says that he is the reshit of God's way. now put this together what you have in Proverbs when you look at

Genesis 1 through that is really saying that in the beginning is not just a temporal beginning it's actually saying that this beginning is a personal beginning that this beginning is not just

the start of time but it is actually the one who is above time It's wisdom himself that is Christ. So if you read Genesis 1-1 from this perspective, you've already got Christ in the very first word of the Old Testament. So in the beginning means in Christ God created the heavens and the earth. And it puts us on the right track because throughout Paul's writings, he talks about how creation was made for him and through him and by him in reference to Christ. So that fits with this particular understanding of a beginning that in Christ, God made the heavens and the earth. They were always – they came into being for him and through him and in him, and in him all things hold together.

So if we start, not just Genesis, but all of the scriptures with this understanding of God working through Christ, God working in Christ to bring things into existence, then we better understand how God continues to deal with us as his creatures in and through Christ. So how is that for a way to get started? The very first word of the Bible is pointing us to Christ. mind is blown mind is blown it's amazing yeah that's that's great that's great what um you know what's the what's sort of the correlation there uh you know with with john's gospel as john as john starts off you know and he talks about in the beginning was the word and this kind of thing

and then he draws this he draws these distinctions between sort of light and darkness and uh and all this kind of stuff um and there seems to be this real as you know as we as we go through genesis one we'll see creation and god saying that what you know what he created through christ through through the word um is good um but then but then we darkened it we messed it up uh we broke it all of these all of these things and john seems to be then say like starting off on the same thing And he brings in these concepts of darkness and this kind of stuff and Christ as light as if he's come to fit – how many of you want to say this? All good things were created through Christ. There's nothing good created or that exists any other way than through this word.

And then this word becomes flesh to fix what once was good that we darkened. The light has to come and fix what we've darkened, what we've damaged, what we've broken, what we've marred and fractured. Whatever other adjective you want to use. Is that part of what he's doing there? is saying this thing from the beginning, or as you say, in Christ, that this same person then is going to come and fix all good things that were created through him. Yeah, I think what John is doing in chapter 1

is presenting salvation from the perspective of creation. There's this theme that you often see throughout the Old Testament of an intimate, inextricably bound relationship between creation and redemption. These aren't two completely separate categories of divine activity, as if, well, over here God is creator, but over here God is redeemer. No, actually what redemption is, is God recreating. God is fixing creation.

That's what redemption is. But it gets even better than that because what John is telling us in chapter 1 is by using light and darkness and in the beginning and the word and all of these very Genesis kinds of images and language. He's telling us that what we have in the Word, in Christ, is not only a new creation, a fixing of the old creation, but it's a better creation, as the Church Fathers often would say, that we gain more in Christ than we lost in Adam. yeah yeah we uh yeah we so we certainly lost a lot in adam but what we have in christ is even better because not only are we restored to the original righteousness and innocence but now we have a god who is one of us who's actually become a creature while remaining creator he's bound our existence to his to his own uh our very body and blood to himself so that he's he's one of

us. So yeah, what you have in John 1 and Genesis 1, if you look at these two together, is John is telling us that Christ has come as the one who brings about a new creation in himself, because it's ultimately not just something he does, but it's who he is that's our salvation. And that's why he says that the word became flesh, because it's in this enfleshed word that we have creation restored and it's by our incorporation into him that we ourselves are restored so we are we are made part of the word made flesh so that we are we're actually bound to god himself in the flesh of christ so if we think about redemption as being recreation it's really nothing alien to god it's nothing that he hasn't already done and there's some comfort there for

us that God really knows what he's doing, and he's had a plan all from the beginning. Yeah, he's doing nothing more than what he's done from the get-go. He's always worked amongst his people by means of creation. He's not a God who simply kind of zaps us from heaven or gives us some sort of mystical experience. God's not ashamed of his creation. He made it. It's his. He never turns his back on it. In fact, even the incarnation, God becoming man,

there was nothing to blush about. God has always embraced the fact that his creation is his. It's like the ancient Gnostic heresy, which still is present in the world today in other forms. They hold that creation is the work of a lesser deity. It's beneath God. But Christians have always affirmed that creation is good. It's very good.

It's so good, in fact, that God himself became part of creation by being born as one of us. And to look at Genesis 1 from that perspective, You see already in God's creating man from the dust of the earth or a woman from the rib of man or placing man in a specific geographical location and giving him trees from which he could receive fruit and this river that flowed out of the garden. He's very concerned about giving man gifts through the things of creation. so he

God is always rooting his promises in the very stuff that we're made of and there's fantastic comfort in that because I don't have to kind of you know sit around and somehow trying to to force

away every creaturely thing about me and go inside myself to find God it's quite the opposite God works in me by coming outside of me. So where do I find him? I find him in the external word that he's given to us.

And I find him in the water in which he washes us in baptism. And I find him in the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper. He's put himself in these things of creation in order that in these things of creation, he might recreate us. So already in Genesis 1, you see God working through the stuff of creation in order to not only create people, but to continue to give them life and to bestow upon them his promises.

And you might see this throughout the Old Testament story. That's amazing, because it just makes my heart leap within me when I hear the Old Testament being explained in this way. It gives me a new perspective on it that connects it, not as something old or that was the old thing God was doing. The New Testament is where I find the new thing that God is doing. But it reconnects me back to that in a way that just overwhelms me and points me to Christ and makes me love the Old Testament

in a way that I didn't realize was possible before. it does it does give one a i think a better appreciation for the old testament that it's not old it's ever new because the god who makes all things new is still using these uh these stories these prophecies in order to speak his newness into us today well that is that we are out of time that's look at that we got through uh three words or something like that but uh next next week we'll we'll continue so i guess you guys know to read to read genesis one uh before before next week's show obviously we'll still we'll still be there you can contact uh the us by like we said dropping an email to christ hold fast at gmail.com or go to christ held fast.com and um and you can

contact us through there thanks for joining us for 40 minutes in the old testament © transcript Emily Beynon