JY: Welcome to GearTalk. Jason DeRouchie and Tom Kelby go through ten reasons the Old Testament is important for Christians. This is the second part of a three-part series on biblical interpretation—a podcast on biblical theology.

JD: Welcome back, friends. Tom and I are eager to be with you today.

TK: That is totally true. We’ve been working through microphone issues, but we were so eager, we fought through it.

JD: We did. We have a goal today of giving you 10 reasons why the Old Testament is important for Christians. Biblical interpretation is our general topic over these three podcasts. We’re in the second one of three and we want to talk about why Christians should engage the initial three-fourths of our Bible. Why should we do that? We have 10 reasons and 30 minutes, so we’re going to jump right in. Tom, give us reason one.

TK: Reason one is this: the Old Testament was Jesus’s only Bible, and it makes up 75.55% of our Christian Scripture. This all came from something you have written. If I break it down into two parts: the Old Testament was Jesus’s only Bible. He did not have a New Testament—it was being written after his time. So when he refers to Scripture, this is what he’s referring to. If someone said “Hey, take out your Bible,” he would have taken out that 75.55%, if he actually had one he could carry around like that. I like that you called it Christian Scripture. It’s not something different. We can think, “Well, it talks about old things and the old things have passed away. We are in a new covenant. Therefore, the old is gone,” and that’s just not a helpful way to think about what we have here. This really was Jesus’s—and we could add the apostles’—only Bible. Looking at my Bible right now, it opens up a world of three quarters of the writings I would have no access to if I said I’m only going to be in the New Testament.

JD: That’s huge. That’s huge. So it was Jesus’s only Scriptures—three-fourths of the Bible. That’s number one. Number two: the Old Testament influences our understanding of key biblical teachings. Take out the Old Testament and we lose the clearest expression of creation. Or think about Isaiah 53, the most articulate understanding of what we would call substitutionary atonement, where God chooses to not kill the sinner, but to kill a substitute in our stead, and Jesus lifted up and exalted in that way. I think of Isaiah 40—the incomparability of the Lord, that there is no God like him. Isaiah 40, more than any other place in all of Scripture, unpacks that for us.

We need the Old Testament to understand these key issues, but there’s even more substantive things, like the problem for which Jesus is the solution. If we take away the whole saga of Adam, the fall, the curse—we lose the context for which Jesus came in to fix those problems. The Old Testament is just so foundational for understanding rightly who we are in God’s world. There are so many key doctrines, key teachings that we would not understand fully what they’re all about had we not had the Old Testament.

And then I think of the way that the New Testament talks. John the Baptist says, “Look at my cousin Jesus, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Or just after that, when Jesus calls himself the temple. We just wouldn’t have categories for Jesus being the lamb, Jesus being the temple, were it not for the Old Testament text. So there’s a reason why we have the Old Testament—it provides a key understanding for major biblical teachings.

TK: I think about the last podcast we had—or a couple ago—we had Patrick Schreiner on talking about Matthew, and he talked about these “shadow stories,” which would almost be like a movie screen playing behind the actor. So if Jesus is doing and saying things, behind him there’s this thing rolling in the background, this movie scene playing of, for instance, David. But if we take the Old Testament away, we don’t see that and we don’t understand that Jesus is, in his life, escalating what we saw in David or in Abraham or in Moses. We would miss all of that.

JD: You got it. You got it. How about number three, Tom?

TK: number three: We meet the same God in both testaments. This is really important. I think people can have an idea—very wrong, but the idea could be stated something like this: The God in the Old Testament was a God of anger and wrath; the God of the New Testament is a God of grace. It’s a complete misunderstanding of both testaments, actually. God doesn’t change—it’s part of what we learn about him in his very nature. But if you study both Testaments, you realize that we find wrath outlined in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. And we find law, for instance, in the Old Testament and in the New Testament.

So if somebody would say, “Well, law was in the Old Testament, and therefore God was associated with that then, but he’s not anymore,” I’d have to say that’s a misreading of what the text is saying. We meet the very same God in both testaments. Now we have to wrestle hard then—okay, how does this work as I understand the Scriptures? But to understand that the Father I meet in the New Testament didn’t suddenly become kind and loving at that time period—he’s always been what he is. And things like the idea of hell—that’s not an Old Testament idea. In fact, more than anybody else, Jesus talks about hell. And that somehow needs to fit into my theology.

JD: So good.

TK: So that third thought is: the very same God in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. And that helps me even as I approach a book and I say, “I don’t know what to do with this,” but knowing, “Okay, this is the New Testament God right here that I’m reading about. For instance, in the book of Judges,” it helps me wrestle well with Scripture, I would say.

JD: So good. number four: the Old Testament announces the very good news we enjoy. The gospel means good news. It’s the truth that through Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, God reigns over all and saves and satisfies sinners who believe. That is the gospel, and what I’m declaring here is that the Old Testament is the first place that promised that gospel.

Think about how Romans 1 opens. Paul says he’s “a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, called to proclaim the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through the prophets in the sacred writings concerning his Son.” So it’s a gospel that comes from God, that was proclaimed by the Old Testament prophets in the sacred writings—that’s in the Old Testament. The gospel concerning the Son of God, Jesus, was promised first. It’s fulfilled in the New Testament, but it was promised by those prophets like Isaiah.

I think about Isaiah declaring, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news”—Isaiah 52. Or Isaiah 61 that Jesus quoted in Luke chapter 4 to kick off his ministry: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he’s anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” This is the good news of the Kingdom—that the reigning God saves and satisfies sinners who believe through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. The good news was already preached in the Old Testament.

TK: And Peter says this—we talked about it in a previous podcast—but First Peter 1:10, he says, “Concerning this salvation…”

JD: That’s the good news—salvation. Yep.

TK: The salvation we have—the prophets, they were speaking about that very good news.

JD: That’s exactly right. You think about Paul in Galatians 3, who said that Scripture testifies that the gospel was preached to Abraham beforehand when it was written, “Through you shall all the nations of the Earth be blessed.” The gospel was preached to Abraham, and so if we want to be gospel-oriented people, we should be Christians who celebrate the Old Testament. number five.

TK: Both the old and new covenants call us to love and clarify what love looks like. We can have an idea, and the idea would be the old covenant was just about laws and the new covenant is about love and kindness or something else, we might say. And the idea is no, both are covenants of love. In fact, Moses said that the people were to love the Lord your God with all their heart, with all their soul, and with all their strength. That is what, in the Old Testament, people were being called to. Jesus summed up the law—the call to love your neighbor as you love yourself—this was found in the Old Testament.

So we will get there in a podcast—we have to figure out what to do with Old Testament laws now that Christ has come, he has died, we are part of a new covenant. What do I do with these old covenant laws? But realizing this: the old covenant, just like the new covenant, called us to love. And the apostles in the New Testament are actually applying those texts to believers today, expecting we will see them as authoritative in some way.

JD: So good. Love is what God called his people to do. All the other commandments simply clarify how to do it. What does love look like? It looks like all those other commandments, and we see in both the old and new covenants this call to love. So good. Number six.

TK: That… Hang on one second. I think that helps me at times—and this goes back to our previous podcast—but when I don’t understand something and I just think, “Well, that’s just a weird random command, it didn’t really matter.” Like a command about mildew, for instance—something like that. And realize no, it did matter. And somehow love is baked into that command. I just don’t understand it, maybe.

JD: That’s good. And then we have to wrestle to consider how this is related to love of neighbor. I think of Paul in Romans 13:8—“Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another, for he who has loved his neighbor has fulfilled the law. Don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t murder, or any other commandment is summed up in this: love your neighbor as you love yourself.” So love does no wrong to the neighbor, and therefore love fulfills the law. Paul says any other commandment is summed up in this: love your neighbor. So yeah, it’s worth considering how this mildew statement relates to love, and we’ll consider those things on future podcasts.

TK: Right.

JD: Number six. Jesus didn’t come to set aside the Old Testament, but to fulfill it. I’m thinking here about his words in Matthew 5:17. He says, “Don’t think that I’ve come to abolish the law or the prophets.” That’s a summary for his entire Old Testament. “I didn’t come to abolish the Old Testament. I came to fulfill the Old Testament. For truly, I say, until heaven and Earth pass away”—okay, and I’m sitting here in my office right now, looking up at a beautiful blue sky and recognizing it’s not gone yet—“until heaven and Earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law until all is accomplished.”

So what’s significant here is we want to be a people who heed Jesus’s commandments, and that means we don’t set aside the Old Testament as if it’s not important, but rather celebrate how it is that Jesus fulfills the Old Testament and wrestle through with that. In Deuteronomy 30:8, right after Moses anticipates that in a future day God would alter people’s hearts—in his words, circumcise hearts so that they might love him with all their heart and with all their soul—he says in that future day, everything that I’ve just proclaimed here in Deuteronomy, you will obey. And so the question is how? What does that mean?

And I think Moses is already anticipating a prophet greater than him, but who’s not going to throw out his word, who’s going to fulfill his word. And now we are followers of that prophet greater than Moses, and we are to walk in the light of how he fulfills the Scriptures. But the key point here is just recognizing why should we take the Old Testament seriously? Because Jesus explicitly says, “I didn’t come to abolish it or set it aside. I came to fulfill it.”

TK: number seven. This—you’ve heard us talk about this so much, but simply this: Jesus said that all the Old Testament points to him. And we could find this all over the place. Do you remember when Philip finds Nathanael and he says, “We found him of whom Moses in the law and also the Prophets wrote”? So that idea that Moses was writing about the Messiah—we found him. And it makes you read Philip’s words there, but it also makes you say, “Wait a minute, I want to go back. What was Philip seeing that maybe I haven’t seen before?”

Jesus says to the Pharisees in John 5:39, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life. It’s they that bear witness about me.” The Scriptures there—“you search the Scriptures” to the people he’s talking to—there are no New Testament Scriptures at that point. So what he’s meaning is you search what we call the Old Testament Scriptures because you think that those things by themselves make you alive, and he says those things are talking about me, but you won’t come to me. And again, as a reader, I should say that’s the second time now, at least, that I’ve heard that. I want to go find out how this talks about Christ.

Luke 24—Jesus on the road to Emmaus, he opens their mind to understand how the law, the prophets, and the Psalms talk about him. We could go on and on. The idea though that I have three quarters more of the Bible than maybe I thought about my Savior—it’s a really sweet idea.

JD: This is good. number eight: New Testament authors expect us to read the Old Testament.

TK: They really do.

JD: They had their Bibles open. They are quoting or alluding to Scripture over and over again, and they’re expecting us not just to hear what they say, but to go back and say, “How does what you just quoted relate to what you’re saying now, and what was the original context?” They’re expecting us to do that kind of homework.

I think about the podcast we had with Dr. Patrick Schreiner, and he was talking about how bathed the Gospel of Matthew is in the Old Testament from the very beginning to say, “This is the book of the Genealogy of Jesus the Messiah,” or “Jesus the Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” Matthew is expecting us to know something about these figures, otherwise his point doesn’t make any sense. They’re expecting us to go back and read the story.

When Jesus is portrayed as a new Moses leading a new Israel—not 40 years in the wilderness, but 40 days in the wilderness, coming out through the waters, passing through the waters in his baptism, arriving at a mountain and now being the very voice of God, proclaiming the Word of God—we’re supposed to, like you were talking about, see shadow stories in the background of Old Testament texts.

The New Testament authors are expecting us to read the New Testament in light of the Old. I think about how especially a text like Psalm 22 is used throughout the gospel accounts as a backdrop for Jesus’s triumph through tribulation, his suffering at the cross. Beginning with Psalm 22:1, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That’s Matthew 27:46. Or Psalm 22:16 and 18, “They have pierced my hands and feet. They divide my garments among them and for my clothing they cast lots,” whereas Matthew 27:35 notes, “And when they had crucified him”—that is, by its nature, piercing his hands and his feet—“they divided his garments among them by casting lots.”

The psalmist says, “All who see me mock me. They make mouths at me. They wag their heads. They declare, ‘He trusts in the Lord. Let him deliver him, let him rescue him, for he delights in him.'” And Matthew says the Jewish leaders mocked Jesus. They derided him, wagging their heads and saying, “He trusts in God, let God deliver him if he desires him.” I mean, this is just straight out of the Bible—the Old Testament text—and the New Testament authors are calling us to go back and read their Bible.

So the point here, number 8—eighth reason why Christians need to take the Old Testament seriously—is that the New Testament authors expect us to read their Bible, which was the Old Testament.

TK: It fits in with number nine. number nine: New Testament authors recognize that God gave the Old Testament for Christians. We already read it in First Peter 1. It says, “Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied concerning the grace that was to be ours searched and inquired carefully, and they were searching for what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories to come.” And then it says, “It was revealed to them they were serving not themselves, but you.”

That thought that you have a prophet—so take Hosea—and in his heart, he knows from God, “I am serving a future people living in the time of the new covenant, but what I’m writing will benefit them.” This thought that the New Testament authors are saying this, that the Old Testament was a gift for us. So this allows, for instance, Paul to say, “All Scripture is breathed out by God”—and in context, he’s talking about Old Testament Scripture—“profitable for teaching, reproof, for correction and training in righteousness.”

TK: And Paul is speaking to Timothy, but he’s speaking to churches in the New Covenant age. But he’s saying all Old Testament Scripture is given for this reason, and we would add to it New Testament.

Further comments we would give: First Corinthians 10: “Now these things happened to the Israelites as an example, but they were written down for our instruction.” Why were things that happened to Israel written down? They were written down for believers living on this side of the cross.

In Romans 15: “Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” What he’s saying is the Old Testament Scriptures should be encouraging us, giving us hope. So if I take away the Old Testament, I’m taking away encouragement and hope that I need to make it. So again, number nine: New Testament authors recognize that God gave us the Old Testament to Christians.

JD: That’s right. So we come to number 10. And it’s simply this: Paul actually commands, expects Christian preachers to proclaim, to preach from the Old Testament text. Think about Paul speaking to the Ephesian elders when he said, “I am not guilty of your blood because I have proclaimed to you the whole counsel of God.” The whole counsel of God—we’re talking about God’s purposes from Genesis to Revelation. And Paul was committed to be an Old Testament and New Testament preacher from beginning to end. And because he was, he was not guilty of the death of other people who would fail to believe. Had he not proclaimed the truth of such Scriptures, he would have been guilty of their blood.

I think of Second Timothy 3. You already mentioned this text. “All Scripture is God-breathed, useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,” and then just a few verses later, Paul commands this young preacher: “Preach the word.” And what we need to remember is that when he says “preach the word,” the Bible of the early church was the Old Testament. The New Testament was being written. So when Paul says “preach the word” to Timothy, he is principally calling Timothy as a new covenant preacher to preach the Old Testament Christian Scriptures. Preach the word, pastors. Proclaim the word, Sunday school teachers. Get into the Old Testament and shape a people who love all of God’s Word, including the initial 75.55%. Tom, closing thoughts.

TK: Closing thoughts… This is a transformation that I think happened with me as I grew more in love with the Old Testament Scriptures. I realized I primarily used them earlier in my Christian walk as a launching pad to the New Testament. So I’d see a quote in the New Testament, I’d go back and look at the quote and then just realize, “Yep, it’s there in the Psalms,” or wherever, and then go back to the New Testament. And I realized that’s not what the apostles are doing.

So, for instance, Matthew repeatedly quoting Psalm 22—he’s sending me back there because he actually wants me to stay there and listen to it. And that would be a closing thought of ten thoughts about the Old Testament. It’s this: it’s good. And it’s good not just to say, “Yep, this is a proof text for the New Testament.” It’s good on its own, as God’s Word. And so I would just say learn to enjoy the music of the Old Testament.

JD: This is good. Thanks for joining us, friends. We’ll catch you back on the next episode.

TK: All right.

JY: Thanks for joining us for GearTalk. The material talked about today is outlined in even greater depth in Jason’s book How to Understand and Apply the Old Testament. Check the show notes for a link to the book. If you have questions about biblical theology you’d like us to address on future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Also check out handstotheplow.org for resources designed to help you understand the Bible and its teachings.