Do Christians really need to read the Old Testament? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.
Imagine that you go into a movie such as Avengers, the one that came out not too long ago. When you walk in, you get to the part where you see all of the Avengers fighting off the alien invaders in New York. Now you could sit down at this point and quite likely figure out who the bad guys are and who the good guys are and a general idea of why the good guys are fighting the battle and still enjoy the movie. You would also see afterwards a spoiler of what’s to come in a sequel. Yet would anyone say you have really taken into account the whole film?
Too many Christians do the same thing with Christianity. We turn quickly to the New Testament and we see the story of Jesus and we gather quickly that Jesus is the hero of the story and the devil is the villain and sin is the problem and we get in the apocalyptic parts of the New Testament the hints of what is to come.
Now you will be a Christian if you do just this. If all you have is the New Testament, you can get the message of salvation, but you will miss so much more. You will not understand the world Jesus came into, you will not understand the back story, and you will not understand why Jesus is the solution to the problem.
How do you get that information? You read the Old Testament and we Christians need to read it and really think about it. For instance, what role does Abraham play? We look at a passage like Romans 4 and say “Abraham is an example.” Not at all. Abraham is not listed as the way we ought to live, although we certainly should follow his footsteps of faithfulness. Abraham is more the prototype. How is it that we are justified? We look at how Abraham was.
There is no one else that could have been used in Romans 4 but Abraham and the only way you understand that is if you know your Old Testament. How will the promise to Abraham come about? What is it that God is seeking to do by calling out Abraham? Does the story of Israel play any role in the New Testament?
Is Israel just this failed experiment and God moved on past it? When we say Jesus is the Messiah, does that really matter? Paul and the other NT writers certainly thought it was important to say Jesus is the Messiah. Why? Does it really make a difference if you know what the prophets said or what the history of Israel is?
If you go to the book of Revelation, it certainly does. Revelation is a book in the Bible that rarely rarely quotes the OT, which is a shock for such a long book. Yet Revelation assumes you have a thorough thorough knowledge of the OT. Remember that in the days of Jesus, most people had the OT well-grounded in memory and would recognize allusions constantly. In fact, the early church that read Paul’s epistles would have as well, and these would be churches that included Gentiles. Already, Paul was quoting the OT to them knowing they would find it authoritative.
In fact, one of the first major heresies was that of Marcion who sought to remove the OT God from the message of Jesus. Now we today will not say what Marcion said or do what he did. (Although some internet atheists would make the same claims about God in the OT) Still, we behave the way that he did by cutting the NT away from the OT.
I simply urge you to really think about the OT and make sure you read it like you read the NT. It is just as much Scripture as the NT is and essential for your understanding of the gospel. I’ve found lately at night that in going to sleep I will think about the OT and try to understand it for itself. I don’t mean just “What does this mean about Jesus?” I want to know first “What does this mean?” If I had been an Israelite living in the time of Moses as he was writing, what would Genesis mean to me?
We often look at the gospels and realize some writers chose to include some things and others chose to not include some things. Moses and the other biblical writers would have done the same thing. Moses surely had much information he did not include. Why did he choose to write what he wrote? What purpose was there in the story that Moses wanted the children of Israel to get? We can afterwards then ask, “And what did the divine author intend for us?”
If you want to understand the fullness of the Scriptures, you must understand the Old Testament and treasure it like the Scripture that it is. If you don’t, you can still have salvation, but you’ll be missing the deepest truths that can come from the knowledge of who Jesus is based on the story that came before Him and a deeper knowledge of what is to lie ahead in our own future.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
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