JY: Welcome to GearTalk, a podcast on biblical theology. We’re doing something a little different today. We’re using, with permission, an interview complete with the ads from another podcast. Recently, Dr. Jared Bumpers from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary interviewed Jason DeRouchie for the podcast Preaching and Preachers. Preaching and Preachers is a podcast connected to Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri. We thought the helpful questions Dr. Bumpers asked demanded thoughtful answers from Jason that would greatly benefit our listeners. That’s why we asked permission to replay the interview in its entirety. This interview originally appeared as podcast numbers 317 and 320 on Preaching and Preachers. In the podcast, you’ll hear Dr. Bumpers refer to Jason’s newest book, Delighting in the Old Testament Through Christ and For Christ. We’ve put a link to the book in the show notes.

JB: Welcome to Preaching and Preachers, a weekly podcast devoted to those who preach and to the task of preaching itself. I’m your host, Jared Bumpers, Assistant Professor of Preaching and Evangelism at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Today, I want to welcome Jason DeRouchie to the podcast. Jason is research professor of Old Testament and biblical theology here at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He’s married to his wife Teresa. They have six children. He’s authored numerous books. He serves here cheerfully and joyfully as a dear friend, and I’m excited to welcome him to Preaching and Preachers.

JD: So glad to be here, Jared. Delight.

JB: Yes, I’m excited, and speaking of delight, we’re going to talk about Delighting in the Old Testament, a book that you have published and I think is so helpful, so excited to have you join us.

JD: Thank you.

JB: Well, first, before we jump into the content there, I’d love for you just to give us an update on your life, ministry, family. You’re serving here at Midwestern, but you’re involved in a lot of other ministries internationally and locally. And so I would love to just hear a brief update on life and family.

JD: It’s a joy to be a part of the Midwestern community. And we truly as a family feel supported and upheld by what God is doing, by the administration, by the other faculty, just a joy to be a partner on this team. We are in our sixth year at Midwestern Seminary and our 20th year of academic ministry. God brought us here in 2019, and what we didn’t expect to happen in him bringing us here was that we would be church planting. And that’s one of the newest things. We met over the summer with a growing core six different times. And two weeks ago, two Sundays ago, we had our first launching worship service on a Sunday morning. So, Sovereign Joy Baptist Church in Liberty, Missouri. And that is a big part of our lives and it thrills us. Another aspect is our ministry internationally, as you said. I serve as a content developer and global trainer with Hands to the Plow Ministries, a small mission organization that is committed to offering biblical training to church leaders while remembering the poor. And so we’re focused on biblical training, both in our writing and in our teaching. And so one of the great privileges is getting to lead students year after year over to Ethiopia, which is where my principal focus is. And that’s a key part, a joy. The Lord is letting me write. And in the last year and a half, our two oldest daughters have given us three grandkids. And that is a big part of our lives, such a joy to have these precious, precious children in our family. So we celebrate all of our kids, and those three grandkids are pretty, pretty special.

JB: And that’s great. And I’m appreciative of all that you’re doing here at Midwestern, but it’s just encouraging to see. And I think you see it across our faculty, but guys that love the classroom and love academics and love teaching and training the next generation, but also love the local church. And so hearing about you planting a church and having served as an elder previously, just your heart for the church, heart for Jesus, heart for the Old Testament, heart for students. And I’m so thankful that you’re here and excited about our conversation.

JD: Thank you.

JB: But let’s talk a little about your interest in the Old Testament in general. You teach Old Testament and biblical theology. And I’d love to hear how you became interested in studying the Old Testament and then also how you became interested in studying the Old Testament in light of Jesus Christ.

JD: Yeah, and those are two different stages in my journey. So, first semester of my master’s work at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in a theology of the Pentateuch class, and never in all of my life had anyone ever opened up the Bible week after week after week from Genesis to Revelation. And it was in that class that I was awakened to see the beauty of the gospel from the initial three-fourths of the Bible. And this professor was just guiding us week after week to magnify Christ. With that, I had an advisor who was saying, you’ve got to choose whether you’re going to go Old or New Testament by the second semester of your MDiv. And there was pressure there. But at that time, I wouldn’t say it’s the same now. At that time, the general pattern for me was that my Old Testament professors seemed to know their New Testament more than the New Testament professors seemed to know their Old. And early on, I wanted to be a whole Bible guy who was able to work out the whole counsel of God, his purposes from creation all the way to consummation, from Genesis to Revelation. And it was those two influences, the class that I was in and this deep desire to be a whole Bible guy, that really pushed me into the Old Testament, recognizing that I knew a lot of stories, a lot of events and people, but I didn’t know how they all fit together. And so it was at that time that I began to study the biblical covenants, how they progress and integrate, and began to wrestle. And I think it’s a whole life journey for those who are engaged in the study of the Word to know how everything fits together. And God confirmed during my master’s work that I was capable of doing higher level study. And yet I was always committed to the church. Initially, as a small group leader during my master’s studies, and then we prayed, would he let us pastor during my PhD studies? And he opened that door. And then that deep-seated commitment to the church-that what I am doing is for the sake of God’s people. And I want to be able to tie that connection. I want to see how what I’m writing and what I’m teaching is truly serving the hearts of God’s saints, moving them to greater maturity in godliness, to see the glory of God.

And then what happened was I went on to, after my PhD, move up to Minnesota and had a meeting with John Piper and Justin Taylor, a single meeting during a single summer. And the trajectory of our lives changed because they heard a lot about God’s glory. And Justin just directly said to me, looking me in the eyes, “I hear very little about Jesus.” And God used that single statement to awaken my soul to see a need that I was missing, cherishing a big God and the glory of God. But recognizing that Paul said the very gospel of God that was promised beforehand by the prophets concerned the Son. That the Old Testament prophets were already promising the good news that you and I and all the people in the New Testament church get to enjoy. And I began to see in the years that followed the beauty and the bigness of Jesus in the eyes of the Old Testament authors themselves, that they were hoping for someone. ‘Abraham saw my day,’ Jesus said. ‘He rejoiced and was glad.’ And I recognized, I had never seen rightly that Abraham had seen Jesus’ day, that Jesus can say in John 5, ‘Moses wrote about me.’ And then it was pushing me to say, where did he write about him? Where do I see him rightly? And over the last 20 years of growth, that’s been a consuming desire of my life to know how to, in my own ministry and in the ministry of those that I’m training, men and women of the Word, to faithfully magnify the greatness of Jesus from the initial three-fourths of the Bible. And that’s a key impetus of what gave rise to this book in Delighting in the Old Testament.

JB: Yeah, I love your passion, love your energy for the Old Testament, for Jesus in the Old Testament. And one of the things that you do in your book here is you talk about how to read the Old Testament in light of Christ. But before we get to the how question, you’re touching on this. When I asked kind of two why questions here, the first one is relating to the Old Testament itself. You’re hinting at this, but the Old Testament itself you argue in your book gives us reasons to read it in a forward-looking way. The Old Testament authors are themselves looking forward or anticipating promises that are coming. So do you mind maybe pick up a passage or two and walk us through how the Old Testament anticipates the coming of Christ?

JD: I had written my original dissertation when I did my PhD on the book of Deuteronomy. And one of the verses that had never hit me like it had hit me during that time was Deuteronomy 29:4 where Moses says to the people, this is after 40 years of pastoring them in the wilderness and they’ve been hard-hearted. In chapter 9 he actually says, ‘You’ve been rebellious from the day that I knew you.’ And that’s his audience. And it says in Deuteronomy 29:4, ‘God has not given you eyes to see, ears to hear, or a heart to know me.’ But just a few chapters earlier in chapter 18, he had said that God would raise up a prophet like Moses and the people would listen to him. And then in Deuteronomy 30 verse 8, after the exile, in the same time that God is working new hearts, circumcising hearts, removing all the ugliness and all that identifies with the nations and making these people love God with all, it says, ‘You will turn to the Lord and you will hear his voice.’ Well, in Romans 2, Paul says that day of heart circumcision when the Spirit would work in the hearts and enable love, that’s happening today in the church. And what was intriguing there in that verse is that in Moses’ day they couldn’t hear him. But the day would come when they would be able to hear the voice of the Lord. And then Moses adds in Deuteronomy 30 verse 8, ‘In that day you will heed, keep all the commandments that I am commanding you today.’ So in the day of heart circumcision, Moses’ words in Deuteronomy would matter. His law would matter. The Old Testament law would matter to what we now understand is the age of the Messiah, the age of Christians. The prophet like Moses has come and he has proclaimed truth and Moses still matters, but as we will see later, only in light of how Jesus fulfills that law.

Another text that stood out in Isaiah chapter 29, which Paul quotes in Romans 11, it says, ‘The Lord gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that would not see, ears that would not hear down to this day.’ That’s Romans 11 verse 8. And he’s quoting Deuteronomy 29 verses 9 and 10. And then it says, for those people in Isaiah’s audience, the words that he was writing in the scroll were like words that he would give to someone who can read and they would say, ‘Open the scroll, I can’t read it.’ Isaiah’s scroll was like a closed scroll to them. But then just a few verses later in verse 18, it says, ‘The day is coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘When people will read the words in a book and the eyes of the blind will see.’ Then in Isaiah chapter 30, just the very next chapter, it says, ‘Write these words in the book as a witness for the future.’ And I began to recognize God has this framework. The prophets were understanding that they were writing not principally for their own generation, which was a hardhearted, spiritually disabled people, but that their words would matter most in a future day. A day associated with the coming Messiah, the new Moses. And in that day, they would be able to understand what was actually given in the Old Testament text itself. We could look at many others, but those are two different passages that are forward-looking as you pointed out.

Calling the reader to recognize that understanding of the Old Testament itself will come in a future day, a day that you and I are now getting to enjoy. That this is the day that the Old Testament was written for.

JB: Yeah, and I appreciated when I read your book, one of the things that I appreciated and you’re touching on it here is the fact that it’s not just like the New Testament authors will look back at the Old Testament and they’re doing something that the Old Testament authors would be uncomfortable with. The Old Testament authors themselves, and you talk about Isaiah, you reference Daniel and the words are written in Daniel that are sealed up, that are also forward pointing that will benefit a later future audience. The Old Testament prophets, they often understood more than we give them credit for. And one of the places you go when you talk about the New Testament is 1 Peter 1, verses 10 through 12. So I’d love to kind of turn the corner here. How does the New Testament reinforce what the Old Testament is teaching about these promises and their writings that aren’t just directly related to stubborn, stiff-necked, hardhearted Israel, but also to the people of God in the present day?

JD: Right, it continues to baffle me how many folks go to 1 Peter 1:10 through 12 and see in it prophets that didn’t understand. And I think it’s the actual opposite, and Peter is actually in his books, he’s citing the Old Testament over and over again showing this is exactly what they were pointing to, the fulfillment in the church age. But in that text in Peter, it says concerning the salvation that you and I are getting to enjoy, those Old Testament prophets were speaking about the grace that is ours. And then it says how they arrived there to talk so clearly about the coming of Christ and the works that he would produce. It says they were searching and inquiring carefully, inquiring to know what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was foretelling when he spoke of the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. It was revealed to those Old Testament prophets that they were serving not themselves, but you. So Peter says it right up clearly that the Old Testament prophets recognized they were ultimately not serving themselves, they were serving a future audience who would rightly understand their words. But it also says that these brothers were not only receiving visions and dreams, they were searching and inquiring carefully, and I ask where were they doing that? I think Isaiah was reading Moses. Moses was considering what God had testified to Abraham. They were searching and inquiring to know something about who Jesus was and when Jesus would come. This is a text that suggests these people knew something about God. So we do see the texts where you have ‘many prophets and righteous men longed to see what you see but couldn’t see it. They longed to hear what you hear but didn’t hear it,’ Matthew 13. But the point there that I want to draw out first is: they saw something. They longed for something that was in their soul and yet they weren’t living in the day when the Messiah was coming. They longed to be in the day when the Messiah would come but they didn’t get to do it, or Hebrews chapter 11 when it says ‘all of these died in faith not having received the things promised but having seen them and greeted them from afar.’ So you’re right, it’s often the case that we minimize what these Old Testament authors knew. It suggests to me they knew a lot but the fact that we’re living in the days when Jesus has appeared that for us, his coming and his saving work is past tense. It’s something that we can stand upon. It puts us in a position that’s different than the Old Testament authors themselves. But the point is still clear that ‘The gospel of God was promised beforehand through the prophets in the sacred writings concerning the Son,’ Romans 1:1-3. The very good news that you and I enjoy, a good news that finds its source in God that concerns the Son was promised in those Old Testament texts. They saw something we’re getting to enjoy the fulfillment of.

JB: Yeah, that’s great. And I’ve always heard or I’ve heard multiple times people go to First Peter and say, ‘Hey, the prophets, they were searching. They didn’t know, they lacked knowledge,’ and they just kind of skip over “It was revealed to them that they weren’t writing for themselves. They were writing for your sake on whom the end of the ages has come.” And so I think you nailed that passage and all the other passages you cite in support of that. And then you kind of turn the corner and say, okay, this is true. Then Christ helps us as new covenant believers read the Old Testament rightly. You talk about I think 2 Corinthians 3, the veil being removed and you talk about Christ being light and lens. And I love those metaphors. Do you mind unpacking those for the guys that are listening, preaching from the Old Testament? How does Christ serve as light and then lens?

JD: Yes, these two metaphors grew out of my wrestling with the text. By light, I’m talking about ‘the light of the Gospel of the glory of God has been shown to us in the face of Christ.’ It’s a light that has enlightened a darkened heart. And what I note in the book is that Abraham had this light. Moses had this light. That is, they were spiritual people who were able to understand spiritual revelation. There I’m alluding to 1 Corinthians 2 where Paul says that ‘we impart to you spiritual truths to spiritual people. The natural person doesn’t accept the things of the Spirit of God for they are folly to him. He’s not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.’ So my point here is to say, no one will understand the Scriptures rightly unless they are believers. That they have faith in the promised offspring. And I believe Abraham in Genesis 15 had that faith. He was able to see what you and I are able to see. Yet while he had light, that is, the darkness of his heart had been overcome by the light of the good news. While he had light, he didn’t have a lens. And by lens, what I’m talking about is something that only those living on the other side of the cross, when all of the promises have found fulfillment, when the types have reached anti-type, when the shadows have been overcome by substance, seeing the substance, the substance that fills the form that was shaped in the Old Testament through various patterns of events and persons and things. Now that we see the one to whom all those were pointing, we see better than Abraham and Moses and David and Isaiah ever saw. They knew, I believe, that they were seeing the Christ. They knew something about his coming. How much they knew at times may have been more like an acorn versus an oak tree. We’re able to see the entire oak tree. But now that we’ve seen the coming, what the Exodus ultimately pointed to, we’ve seen the ultimate temple. We’ve seen the true lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, all of a sudden, all kinds of persons and events and objects in the Old Testament, become more clear. We actually can understand them better because we see the end. So I compare it to the way that a double narrative works in story writing. Like a mystery is called a double narrative such that when you get to the end of the mystery and you see who done it, all of a sudden, the second level of the narrative has become absolutely clear in a way it wasn’t the entire time you read it the first time. So you can never go back and reread the narrative, that mystery, in the same way. And I’m proposing that the mysterion, the mystery of the gospel that Paul talks about is somewhat like that. Where it was in Paul’s words in Romans 16, there all along. And yet it was being held, here’s Paul’s words, ‘to him who was able to strengthen you according to my gospel, according to the preaching of Jesus Christ.’ So he defines the nature of his gospel. It’s a preaching related to Jesus Christ. ‘According to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages, but has now been disclosed,’ and then he says, ‘through the prophetic writings is made known to all nations.’ Those prophetic writings, those are the same prophetic writings that he spoke about in Romans 1:1-3 where the gospel was promised. It’s as if that the furniture hasn’t changed. It’s just that the lights have gone on. And now we also are able to see the interrelationship of all the patterns and the persons and the events in ways that we never could. I also give this example. It’s like in the Old Testament, we begin to see patterns. There’s a two followed by a four. And then the question is, well, what comes next? And it could be six, could be an eight. It could be a six or an eight. And the New Testament not only gives the answer, a six or an eight, but in doing so, it provides the algorithm. That is, it shows us how all those different events and persons and powers and players were all working together to culminate in the person of Christ. That God’s—that all of history finds its climax in Jesus, that the prophecies themselves are foretelling things about Jesus, that Jesus stands as the end or goal of the old covenant law and that all those promises find their yes in Christ. He is the culminating one. And because of that, his resurrection from the dead provides a lens that at one level influences and informs all of our reading of what precedes. It’s not changing it. It’s that now we see the end of the story and we’re seeing—able to see things now that we could have never seen before in our darkened state and without the right lens of Jesus as the one. So when Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus, he never read his Bible the same way. Yet so many preachers, so many Old Testament professors want to propose that we are to approach the Old Testament as if Jesus hasn’t come. And I think Paul would say, have none of that. Jesus has come. He’s the end of the story and now we have the right lens for interpreting everything that has always been there in its fullness.

JB: Even hearing you talk about the assertion that we could read the Old Testament as if Christ didn’t come. The detective analogy is an amazing analogy and even Paul’s language that you’re putting the veil back on—the veil has been removed and you’re putting it back on. The lens illustration, I think, is helpful. The things have been there. Now we can see them. Those who are optically impaired like myself appreciate that analogy. I think what you’re writing is helpful for preachers in two ways in particular, helpful for us to have a whole Bible framework that sees Christ as a culmination and climax of all of Scripture. But practically, you talk about promises in your book and you talk about Old Testament law in your book. And those are two things that I think if preachers are honest, they’re listening. How does Christ relate to those two things? And so just want to take them one at a time. We’ll talk about promises and then we’ll talk about law. You talk about Old Testament promises, particularly relating to health and wealth and prosperity, which America in many ways has exported to other countries. And so love to hear you talk about Old Testament promises. What are the dangers there and how do they find their fulfillment in Christ?

JD: Yes, this is a huge issue and it might be very natural for people to say, ‘Oh, well, we’re in the New Testament, so we’re not even going to consider Old Testament promises that were given under a different covenant and to different people.’ But we can’t get out of it that easily because the New Testament authors are drawing on Old Testament promises over and over again in the very book where 2 Corinthians 1:20 occurs where Paul says every promise is yes in Jesus. He goes on in chapter 6 at the very end of chapter 6 where he says, ‘We are the temple of the living God.’ he cites a whole host of Old Testament promises. And then at the beginning of chapter 7, he says, ‘Since we have these promises.’ And he’s just saying, as Christians, we’re claiming all these Old Testament promises, but only in and through Jesus.

Without Jesus, Paul says, there is no amen. So it is. I believe it. We can’t believe that a promise is ours apart from what Jesus supplies. He is the only means by which we get to enjoy blessing, and he is ultimately the means by which God will bring his curse, rejecting his gift at the cross as exhibit A that people are guilty and under the eternal judgment of God.

And so these promises that are yes in Jesus, one of the examples that really stuck out to me—I had never seen it until I began to study for this book—was in the book of Hebrews in chapter 13 where he simply says, he’s talking about money of all things.

And he says, “Keep your life free from the love of money, be content with what you have, for,” and then he talks about God. He has said, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” That’s a beautiful promise. All of us want to claim that very presence of God, but it’s word for word: “I will never leave you or forsake you.” And it’s a promise that was given to Joshua. What’s so striking is it’s not even given to the people at large initially; it’s given to a man as he’s getting ready to lead the conquest.

As he’s getting ready to take the people into the promised land, God says, “Joshua, be strong and courageous, keep my word, I will never leave you, I will never forsake you.” And then the writer of Hebrews, for whatever reason, somehow takes a promise that was given to a person in old covenant Israel and applies it to the church broadly. And I said, how could that be? Because you and I usually wouldn’t want—we would want to say, “Wait, keep that promise in context; that was given to a specific person under a specific covenant.” And yet I said, according to the theology of Hebrews, how does he get there? And what I believe I see in this book is Jesus is the new Joshua. Joshua led them into rest. And yet, Psalm 95, “Today, if you hear his voice, don’t harden your hearts as in the rebellion.” And the writer of Hebrews says, there’s a greater rest that was anticipated.

JB: Hebrews 3 and 4, yeah, he’s pulling, citing Psalm 95.

JD: That’s right. There’s a greater rest, and it’s Jesus who’s leading us into that. It is fascinating that Joshua’s name is Jesus. Yahweh saves. Jesus is the ultimate Joshua, but it’s not only that. Why money? And then I go back to the book of Joshua and I see the very first story of battle in the book of Joshua is Achan, who hoards money, and God treats him like a Canaanite, whereas Rahab the harlot is treated like an Israelite because she trusts in God. And this is a whole book, Hebrews, about perseverance unto rest, and Achan didn’t persevere. And yet had he recognized God is with me, he is all I need. I don’t need to take this money from Jericho. I can be content obeying the voice of God as the writer of Hebrews calls us to do. He says, “Guard your hearts lest there be an evil unbelieving heart that leads you to fall away from the living God, for you have come to share in Christ if you hold firmly to the end the confidence you had at the beginning.”

So I think it plays right into the theology of Hebrews. And he’s saying, just as the people, if God was with Joshua and the people followed Joshua, then God was with them. There’s a greater Joshua who has come. And if you’re following Jesus, believe me, God is with Jesus and he’ll be with you. He’ll be with you always. Don’t get distracted and run away from Jesus by going after riches.

Keep your focus on Jesus and all of a sudden the promises of God, even one given to a specific man under a specific covenant, become yes for you and me because we are in Christ who is the ultimate Joshua.

JB: That’s a great example. The other thing that I want to talk about, and we’re getting close on time here, but I think this is important. The Old Testament law and preachers coming to an Old Testament law. And again, I’ll let you choose the example, but I’d love for you to lay out—you build a little bit on the work of Brian Rosner. You take in and modify what he’s doing. I’ll let you pick cleanness, uncleanness, skin disease. How are we to make sense of some of these Old Testament laws and how they relate to the Christian today?

Well, that’s a massive question. Sorry, I know I’m opening it up to some extent a can of worms here.

JD: It is. It is a big question, but I’ll try to be clear enough so that people might be able to even dive in further into the book if they desire. Paul says we once were under the Guardian. Indeed, we were enslaved under the Guardian in Galatians 3. That was the law covenant. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under that Guardian. We have been freed as a Christian church from being bound by Moses. Moses is no longer our direct and binding authority.

Paul can say in 1 Corinthians 9, “I am no longer under the law, though I am under the law of God and under the law of Christ.” But he’s been freed, no longer under the law of Moses. So the first principle is that believers today are not under the Old Covenant law at all. And in a direct way, Moses is not our direct authority. Jesus is our direct authority.

And yet, just as Moses was able to say in that future day of heart circumcision, all the words that I’ve commanded in this book are going to matter. And Jesus in Matthew 5 says something very similar. When he says, “I didn’t come to abolish the law and the prophets, I came to fulfill them.” And “Until heaven and earth pass away, not a single jot or tittle from the law will pass.” And then he says those who don’t, who fail to teach and to do this law are least in the kingdom of heaven. But those who teach and do this law will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. And I think he’s talking about the law of Moses. But in that text, it’s very clear, it’s the law of Moses only in light of how Jesus has fulfilled it.

And so that’s where I build this framework. If Jesus is the lens through which we gain lasting significance from Moses’s law, none of it directly binding on us, but all of it, all of it indirectly guiding us as wisdom through Jesus. Then we see that some laws get maintained without any extension, without any change. Other laws get maintained with extension. Some laws get transformed and other laws get annulled. That’s what the fulfillment Jesus brings does to the law. So all the law matters for us, but only in light of how Jesus fulfills it.

So laws that would be maintained without any extension, without any change, would be things, I believe, like laws against homosexuality, laws against murder, laws against stealing. When we look at the New Testament, we don’t see any alteration. We do have a new power because we’ve experienced pardon and we have new blood-bought promises, a power that Abraham and Ruth and Hannah didn’t enjoy in the same way. Because our power is coming from the spirit of the resurrected Christ, where he’s definitively accomplished something in history that was only hoped for in the Old Testament. And yet the law itself doesn’t seem to change.

But then we have laws that seem to alter only in not in their nature, but in the way they’re applied. So, for example, Paul can take a principle of muzzling the ox while it’s threshing. Don’t muzzle an ox while it’s threshing. It’s doing work. So it’s worthy to eat while it’s doing its work.

And Paul takes that in both 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy and applies it to the need to pay our church leaders who are investing their time. And especially to those who are preaching the Word and giving their time to that kind of preparation so that when they speak they speak the very oracles of God. Paul takes that same principle and yet extends its application in a new context.

There’s also laws that are transformed. I propose in the book Sabbath is one of these. Where Christ is the ultimate one who secures the Sabbath, he is Lord of the Sabbath. So all that was hoped for in the reconstitution of peace on a global scale that was Israel’s mission, Jesus now is the ultimate Israelite realizes it for all who are in him. And now we are reconciled with God. Right order has been reestablished for all the Christians and 24/7 we are enjoying Sabbath today.  It’s not that it’s been annulled. No, it’s that it’s being realized. It’s being fulfilled. God is now seated on the throne of our hearts and we are at peace with him and he is at peace with us. And the vision is still that there will be final Sabbath to come on a global scale.

Another example would be what Paul does in 1 Corinthians 5 with the capital punishment text from Deuteronomy and how he uses it for excommunication in 1 Corinthians 5. He quotes from Deuteronomy 22, 21 and 22, “Purge the evil one from your midst,” which is a call to kill the violator of the covenant. But Paul transforms that in the new covenant context and views it as the ultimate end of church discipline. And you don’t kill him, but you do treat him as if he is spiritually dead and you cast out the immoral brother in the hope that his soul might be saved at the final day.

The final group is those laws that are annulled. And I’m thinking here of like Mark chapter 7 or Acts chapter 10 where we see what was once unclean is now declared clean. And why does that happen? I believe it’s because Jesus has overcome the serpent and all unclean foods, all unclean animals in some way were related to the first unclean animal in the serpent. Whether related to his predatory activity or his deceiving conniving ways or his judgment in the dust. And so I argue for that in the book.

But because Jesus has triumphed over the serpent, what it means is what was for Israel used to pursue holiness by staying away from that which was associated with the serpent, including all the offspring of the serpent, the nations. But now that that barrier has been overcome, the unclean one has been conquered. Now it’s actually bacon becomes victory food for us. Bacon becomes a testimony that Jesus has won, that the serpent is defeated, that the barrier between the unclean and the clean has been overcome and that now Christ is calling all people to himself. And so I lay out a model for appropriating Old Testament promises and Old Testament laws for believers today. That’s half the book.

JB: Yeah, I think the framework is helpful. And if you’re listening and you preach to the Old Testament, the last question I want to ask is kind of a wrap up question. But if you’re listening and you’re committed to preaching the whole counsel of God’s Word and preaching from the Old Testament.And I don’t know of a better resource to recommend than Dr. Goro’s “Delighting in the Old Testament” to help you make sense of Old Testament law and how that should be preached today in light of Christ. Well, I want to close by just asking you to exhort or challenge the pastors or aspiring pastors who are listening to preach from the Old Testament and to preach Christ from the Old Testament.

So what concluding thoughts or exhortations would you have to the brothers who are listening who feel called to pastoral ministry and called to the pulpit? Why should they preach the Old Testament and why should they preach Christ.

We’ve been talking about that in some sense for 40 minutes, but I’m asking for you to give them kind of a final pastoral charge.

JD: Timothy was raised by a Jewish mother and Jewish grandmother. We’re told that in Acts 16. And then in Second Timothy 1, they’re given names, Eunice and Lois. And then in Second Timothy 3:15, Paul says, “You know what you were raised up on, the Scriptures, the sacred writings that are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ.”

Then he says, “All Scripture is God-breathed for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness.” And just a few verses later, “Preach the Word.”

The Old Testament is an instrument of God for us to rebuke, correct, train, teach from. When the Old Testament is attached to faith in Jesus, it can be an instrument of people’s pardon and that is freedom from sin’s penalty. It can be an instrument that God can use to free them from sin’s power, make them progressively holy. And it can be an instrument to help them make it all the way to glory. I think of Paul as I’m closing here.

First Corinthians 2, verse 2, “I decided to know nothing among you but Christ and him crucified.” he, he loads 1 Corinthians both with Old Testament quotations and with all kinds of topics. He addresses lawsuits and proper moral sex and proper understanding of marriage and spiritual gifts and the Lord’s table. It’s all over the map.

He says, “I resolved to know nothing among you but Christ and him crucified.” And what I think he is saying there is that he cannot talk about Christian marriage, Christian parenting, any form of biblical counseling. He can’t talk about a doctrine of God, a right understanding of the church or missions without showing how it’s connected to the cross.

And my final word for pastors today is think about Scripture that way. Whether you’re in Genesis or whether you’re in Titus, connecting it to the Christ so that you can faithfully say “I resolved to know nothing among you but Christ and him crucified.”

JB: Amen and amen. Jason, thank you so much for joining us today.

JD: My joy.

JB: Friends, this has been an episode of Preaching and Preachers, a podcast of Midwestern Seminary that is devoted to those who preach and to the task of preaching itself. We hope you found it helpful. Thanks for listening and we hope you’ll join us again.

Thank you for being with us today and for listening to Preaching and Preachers. For more information, go to my website, Jasonkallen.com. That’s Jasonkallen.com.

JY: Thank you for joining us for GearTalk. For resources connected to biblical theology, go to handstotheplow.org and jasonderouchie.com.