The Breakthrough That Helped Me Understand the Old Testament

Outdated Testomony Interpretation

I’ve usually had an uneasy relationship with the Outdated Testomony. I’ve beloved it for its wild poetry and complicated narrative. I’ve striven to see it because it got here to Israel and was acquired in unfolding splendor. And so, all through a lot of my Christian life up to now, whereas I’ve been capable of see the Outdated Testomony as God’s phrase to Israel and as a densely woven set of storylines and actions that discover decision within the New, I’ve had issue transferring again from the New Testomony to the Outdated.

After I noticed the New Testomony’s use of Outdated Testomony passages, I turned confused. I held the apostles’ interpretations at arm’s size as a result of it appeared that they had been seeing what was not there. I knew the apostles couldn’t be unsuitable of their impressed writing, so for years I attributed this seemingly artistic strand of interpretation to their function as prophets. Matthew was proper to say that Jesus’s flight to Egypt and return as a toddler fulfilled the phrases of Hosea (Matt. 2:15, Hos. 11:1), however there’s no manner we may have recognized that. God allow them to see what we in any other case couldn’t. We should always not go one letter past what they stated and noticed anew. How may we?

I had thought my downside was strictly with the New Testomony and its methods of studying. In fact, I didn’t but perceive the Outdated Testomony for what it actually was. I had not but discovered to learn the books of the previous covenant as Christian Scripture.

As I studied the ebook of Hebrews for my doctorate, I used to be confronted many times with the writer’s manner of deciphering the Outdated Testomony Scriptures. Maybe greater than another ebook within the New Testomony, Hebrews represents a protracted and cautious engagement with the phrases of the Outdated Testomony. Each declare about Jesus, each argument in regards to the tasks of the viewers, and each assertion in regards to the new actuality that has come after Jesus’s life, demise, resurrection, and ascension is grounded in what God stated within the Outdated Testomony. Nothing is offered as an innovation, however slightly the writer repeatedly claims to be deciphering God’s phrase.

He may even see issues that others had not seen earlier than, however he isn’t studying them into the passages. Additional, he expects his viewers (and God expects us) to agree not simply along with his conclusions, however along with his interpretations. Meaning in Psalm 2, we now have the Father talking to the Son (Heb. 1:5). In Psalm 45 and Psalm 102, we now have what God says in regards to the Son (Heb. 1:8-12). In Psalm 22, we now have Jesus’s personal phrases (Heb. 2:12). This isn’t a declare to prophetic new info, however slightly, beneath the steering of the Holy Spirit, the writer of the Hebrews is studying the Outdated Testomony and seeing what is de facto there. And the extra we take note of how and what he does, the extra we see that he’s paying shut and cautious consideration to the precise phrases of the passage. He’s deciphering and exhibiting us the way to interpret.

That’s, he reveals to us each the way to learn the Outdated Testomony and what the Outdated Testomony actually is: God’s phrase, written for us. The one God who spoke to the fathers by way of the prophets has spoken to us in his Son (Heb. 1:1-2). However we see that speech to us within the very phrases of Scripture, each Outdated and New.

And as soon as I noticed this in Hebrews, I noticed it in all places.

God’s Phrase for Us

Paul tells us that the occasions of the Exodus passed off “as examples for us” (1 Cor. 10:6), and that they “had been written down” by Moses, so a few years in the past, “for our instruction, on whom the top of the ages had come” (1 Cor. 10:11).

Did you catch that? Why did God have Moses write the Pentateuch? One reply, and one which is most related for us, is that Moses wrote the Pentateuch to instruct Christians, we who dwell on the finish of the ages between the primary and second comings of Christ. This, Paul says, is what this stuff had been written down for.

God spoke within the Outdated Testomony, sure, and in that historic speech, God nonetheless speaks.

Equally, in a well known passage, on the highway to Emmaus, Jesus speaks to the 2 disciples on the highway and “starting with Moses and all of the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all of the Scriptures the issues regarding himself” (Luke 24:27). Now, whereas this doesn’t say that each verse of each passage is about Jesus, it does say that “in all of the Scriptures”, that’s, in each ebook, there are issues about Jesus for us to search out. These items are already there, and if we interpret because the resurrected Jesus taught his disciples to interpret, we’ll see them there.

In his earthly ministry, Jesus additionally taught and assumed {that a} proper studying of the Outdated Testomony would lead one not solely to a obscure understanding that Jesus would come however slightly to an correct information of him. When confronting some Jewish leaders, he boldly advised them, “You search the Scriptures since you suppose that in them you’ve everlasting life, and it’s they that bear witness about me” (John 5:39). Or once more, when talking of his nearing betrayal, demise, and resurrection, he requested in Jerusalem, “Have you ever not learn this Scripture: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has change into the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it’s marvelous in our eyes’?” (Mark 12:10–11).

Discover once more the exact wording: “Have you ever not learn this Scripture?” He assumes that they need to find out about him, about his rejection by males however approval by God, from having learn Psalm 118.

It isn’t simply that the Outdated Testomony traditionally led to the New Testomony as a type of prelude, however slightly that the one God who speaks in each Testaments supposed them to belong endlessly to the church as a single physique of Scripture. That’s, whereas it is crucial—essential even—to learn the Outdated Testomony as that which went earlier than the approaching of Christ and his gospel in all its historic rootedness as God interacted with Israel, it’s simply as essential to learn it alongside the New Testomony as God’s current phrase to the church. God spoke within the Outdated Testomony, sure, and in that historic speech, God nonetheless speaks.

That’s basically what the New Testomony authors knew; and that’s the key to seeing, as they did, the many-splendored revelation of God in Christ that reverberates by way of each web page of Scripture, Outdated and New.

The entire Bible is the phrase of God for us. All of it speaks of Christ. All of it speaks to us as a result of in it God has spoken to us.

Daniel Stevens is the writer of ​​Songs of the Son: Reading the Psalms with the Author of Hebrews.

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