JY: Welcome to GearTalk, a podcast on biblical theology. Today’s podcast is the counterpart to last week’s podcast, where we talked about the New Testament’s perspective on the Old Testament’s audience and comprehension. Today, Tom and Jason talk about the Old Testament’s perspective on the Old Testament, specifically what can we learn from Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel? What did they say about the audience in their day, and what did they know about those who would hear in the future? This subject really highlights the importance of the Old Testament for new covenant believers. You’ll find a whole chapter on this topic in Jason’s new book, “Delighting in the Old Testament through Christ and for Christ.” We’ll put a link to the book in our show notes.

TK: Hey Jason, are you ready to go through what we’re going to do today?

JD: I am, Tom. Good to be back with GearTalk.

TK: Love it. Last time we were together, we were looking at a book that just came out actually a couple weeks ago, Delighting in the Old Testament through Christ and for Christ you wrote it. And we looked at a chapter on New Testament perspective on the Old Testament. So what did the New Testament authors say about these writings? And that was chapter one in your book, and chapter two flips it. You actually mentioned… So if you want to just remind us, why did you put the New Testament perspective first? Because it seems like you would start with the Old Testament authors’ perspective.

JD: That’s right. We’re talking about the Old Testament’s audience and comprehension. Who actually was the Old Testament written for and who in that Old Testament age actually understood what was written? Those are the questions we’re asking. I originally had the Old Testament perspective on that question first, that was chapter one, but then there was someone outside that read it and they said most of the church is most familiar with the New Testament, so he encouraged me to start the book where people were. And so that’s what we did.

Even in the last podcast, just reflecting on how did the New Testament authors perceive who the original Old Testament audience was and when you listen to the New Testament authors, do they understand the level of comprehension that the prophets had in the Old Testament, that their contemporaries had in the Old Testament. So we looked at it from the New Testament perspective and now we’re asking the question: is there any evidence in the Old Testament to affirm what the New Testament authors were declaring?

We saw that the New Testament, Paul in Romans 15:4, said everything that was written in the former days was written for our instruction. We saw 2 Timothy 3:16 and 17, that all Scripture is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, and that Scripture principally would have been the Old Testament and Paul’s writing to a Christian pastor, Timothy, urging him to preach the word, preach your Bible, which was significantly the Old Testament.

TK: Right. So saying it’s about righteousness, yet we’re talking about lots of chapters that talk about the old covenant law. So somehow Paul is saying that’s about righteousness.

JD: That’s right, that Christians can actually learn how to follow God rightly from the initial three-fourths of the Christian scripture. We looked at 1 Peter 1:12. It was revealed to those very Old Testament prophets who were, according to Peter, writing about the saving grace that is ours today. It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves, but you. That is, the church today was being served by the Old Testament Prophets, and they knew when they were writing that it was principally not for their generations, but for a future generation that’s now associated with Messiah Jesus.

TK: We made the point last week that it just shows up frequently in commentaries or things like that, where people will say, “What this meant to the original audience was…” and that thought that the New Testament writers are saying a whole chunk of the people could not understand and would not understand God’s Word. So even that framework I might have like, “What did the first hearers think about it?” Well, there was a whole chunk that wouldn’t have understood it and wouldn’t have liked it.

JD: That’s right. So what I’d like to do this podcast is actually go back to some of those Old Testament texts and show that that was true. Show both that the original contemporaries of the prophets were spiritually disabled and that the prophets did not think that they were going to hear, listen, or heed. But the prophets did recognize that their writings would matter for future generations, that the prophets understood what they were writing, at least most of what they were writing. And that they were convinced that when God brought in the new covenantal remnant, the new people, that is, the transformed people of God, with some from every tongue and tribe and people and nation, when the Messiah would gather in his global international community, then all of a sudden the books of the Old Testament would matter. That the majority now of the covenant community, indeed the covenant community as a whole, would embrace what the Old Testament prophets had said about the Messiah, about the character of God, about the reality of holiness, about the seriousness of sin. The community would finally repent, no longer have stubborn hearts but soft hearts, and that their lives would be filled with the Spirit’s presence, and that they would embrace the Word of God. That’s what we want to look at today.

TK: All right. Well, I am looking at then this chapter, “The Old Testament’s Audience and Comprehension.” And you have four Old Testament figures as examples: Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel that you picked. So I’m going to read just a short sentence or not a short sentence, about a sentence getting us in and then if we can start with Moses. And look at him. So this is what you wrote: “The seers, sages and songwriters who gave us the Old Testament testify that they were speaking and writing not merely for old covenant Saints, but also for new covenant believers, those who would enjoy relationship with God in the days of the Messiah and the new creation after Israel’s exiles.” So you’re saying there were two audiences and that they knew this?

JD: That’s right. They knew their first audience, that they were preaching to, were deaf, were blind and hard-hearted. And they also knew that a new covenant community in the days of the Messiah would rise that would be hearing, that would be seeing and soft-hearted. And they knew that their words would matter most to that group.

TK: It tells you something about the ministry of the prophets, doesn’t it? That you are ministering for decades, knowing the people for the most part are not going to hear what I’m saying.

JD: It’s absolutely amazing. If we just start with Moses, here he is. He ministers to the same people for 40 years. And the first generation that he led out of the Exodus grumbled, grumbled, doubted, didn’t believe. God said to the 10 spies and the majority of Israel that followed them, “How long will you not believe? Believe that I am big enough, that I am greater, that I am the one who is able to give you this promised land.” But they doubted, they didn’t have faith. And because of that, 38 more years, totaling 40 full years in the wilderness under judgment, and all of that generation came to an end.

God raises up a new people, and before Moses dies, he gives them the book of Deuteronomy. Yet he says, “Know this, that the Lord your God is not giving you this good land to possess because of your righteousness. For you are a stubborn people. Remember and do not forget how you provoked the Lord your God to wrath in the wilderness these last 40 years from the day you came out of the land of Egypt until you came to this place on the very banks of the Jordan River, ready to enter the promised land. You have been rebellious against the Lord.” So that’s Moses’s audience. In chapter 31, he’ll say, “I know that you are stubborn. You’ve been stubborn and rebellious since the day that I knew you. How much more after my death?” So that’s Moses’s audience that he’s talking about. This is the people that, I mean, the words he uses: they’re unrighteous, they’re stubborn, they’re rebellious.

TK: you write something, Jason, on page 39. I think a lot of people would ask or wonder about. So you write, “In Moses’s day Yahweh had not overcome the resistance of the majority’s hearts and in alignment with his sovereign purposes for salvation history, he created the old covenant to bear a ministry of death and a ministry of condemnation, so that through Christ a superior new covenant might bear a ministry of righteousness.” That idea that here you’re saying that the old covenant wasn’t intended to solve their problem.

JD: That’s right. I think of Paul in Romans 8: the law of Moses, weakened as it was by the flesh, was unable to help the people. God knows this.

TK: So when people are asking us why, and you say it in this paragraph I just read, but why would he do it if it’s not going to work?

JD: Well, think about God, who commands Pharaoh, “Let my people go.” And yet he’s the very God who promised earlier, “Go and talk to Pharaoh, but know this: I will harden Pharaoh’s heart and he will not let the people go.” Similarly, he commands Israel, “Heed me. Listen to me. Hear, O Israel. I am one. Love me with all your heart, all your soul, all your substance.” Yet the commands they could not keep. Indeed, in a text like Deuteronomy 29:4, we learn “To this day, God hasn’t given you a heart to know or eyes to see or ears to hear.” And the reality is it would take a miracle. God never overcame their hardness. And the story of salvation testifies why: Because God wanted through centuries of darkness and hard-heartedness to show how deeply all the world needed Jesus.

And when Jesus comes, the light is so bright and so piercing and so desirable. I mean, I’ve read the Old Testament so many times and it’s still easy for me to grow weary and discouraged just watching Israel, watching the prophets’ words not get listened to, and yet what it does over and over again is heighten hope for the coming one. This is Paul in Romans 9, and he’s talking about the hardness of Israel. He says, “What if God, desiring to show his wrath…” Now it is a right thing for a holy God to seek to display all that he is in his holiness. And that means if there was not a world with sin, we could never see his wrath. And if there was not a world with rebellion, we could never experience mercy in the wake of that rebellion. We would never know that God can be a saving God.

So here’s Paul, Romans 9:22 and 23: “What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power…” That’s what he wanted to do, to actually let the world see him for who he was in all of his glory in his greatness. “What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction…” Centuries and centuries, enduring with Israel’s hard-heartedness, enduring with the rest of the world’s hard-heartedness. “What if God, wanting to show his wrath and power has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy which he prepared beforehand for glory, even us, whom he has called not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles?”

God’s desire, his delight, was to make known the riches of his glory to vessels of mercy. And he’s done that through the appearing of Jesus. When darkness was as dark as it could be, he sent the light to pierce into the night and our hearts are awakened and we see the beauty of God like we would have never seen had we not watched centuries upon centuries of rebellion and darkness, highlighting the deep need for a savior. So Jesus is magnified and we find our own souls increasingly satisfied because of the way God chose to make an old covenant that bore a ministry of condemnation, and that’s not my word. That’s Paul’s language in 2 Corinthians 3:9, he says the old covenant bore a ministry of condemnation and is superseded by the new covenant’s ministry of righteousness.

TK: So we’re talking about four characters. We’re on Moses, and clearly because he said it over and over about the hard-heartedness of Israel. Can you pick out something that you’d say this, this verse, this place shows he saw something different, though?

JD: Absolutely. He did see something different, and that was after the exile, after Israel has, as a nation, experienced death. He’ll bring resurrection. He’s going to, after their exile, after their judgement—

TK: So this is after the king, after the Kings of David and the Kings reigned, and all of that.

JD: And yet, it’s right after Jerusalem has fallen, after Israel has been kicked out of their land, God promises that he will raise up a prophet like Moses, and he also promises that that is a covenant-mediating prophet who will be and do better than Moses did and was, and he will mediate a new covenant. In this day, God will restore his people, drawing them back to himself and he’s going to do a change in their hearts. So in the old covenant, he hadn’t given the majority the heart they needed. But now it says he will circumcise their hearts, causing them to love him with all their heart and all their soul. That’s Deuteronomy 30:6.

But then we read in Deuteronomy 30:8, and this is significant: “In that day…” In that day, when God changes hearts, “you will turn and listen to the voice of the Lord and keep all the commandments that I command you today.” So there it is. Moses was commanding things in his day that would only matter for the majority in the future day. But in that future day, when their ears are opened, they will hear God’s Word in his book. And they will obey. Whereas most of Moses’s initial audience didn’t obey, Moses knew his words would be obeyed by that future generation, in the days of the new covenant-mediating prophet like Moses. In that day, after the exile, when their hearts were changed, Moses’s book of Deuteronomy would matter. That is, it was revealed to Moses that he was serving not himself, but us.

TK: And we’re going to have to get there, Jason, not in this podcast, but for new covenant believers, then, these things that Moses was commanding back in Deuteronomy, somehow we’re supposed to be obeying these things. And so it’s something we’re that which would be really good to talk about and just say, “Yep, Moses is expecting that.” We just aren’t going to do it at this moment.

JD: That’s right. We’ll talk about the lasting relevance of Moses’s law and how we’re supposed to understand that at a different time. But the fact is, Moses anticipated that it would matter in the days when hearts were changed, in the days of transformation. And I’ll just make a note that in Romans 2, Paul is explicit. Talking about the Christians, Gentile and Jewish alike, he says, “A Jew is one inwardly…” First, he says “No one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical.” So he’s contrasting physical circumcision with something else, and that’s what we just saw in Deuteronomy 30. “But a Jew, a true Jew, is one inwardly and circumcision is a matter of the heart by the spirit.” And he’s talking about the church. That’s why I believe we’re living in the day when Deuteronomy matters, when Moses believed Deuteronomy would matter. Let’s consider Isaiah.

TK: you probably hear this sometimes from people, but for a book that you’ve spent a lot of time in and are actually working hard on a commentary on now, that thought of why would you write about something old that doesn’t matter? That could be a thought people have, believers, right? Why not write about the gospel and you’re getting part of the answer here is because it really does matter.

JD: That’s right. So even though we’re not under the old covenant, the teachings of the Old Covenant proclaimed the same God that we believe in, and he clarified the nature of love. Indeed, it helps us celebrate what it means that Jesus perfectly obeyed and that Jesus is our righteousness. All of a sudden the old covenant becomes a tool not only predicting the coming of Christ in all of his perfections but in guiding us in what a wise life looks like when we consider how deep and wide, how tall the love of God and love of neighbor is portrayed in a book like Deuteronomy.

TK: That’s really good. All right, on to Isaiah.

JD: What’s clear is that Isaiah had disciples who could understand his teachings, but most of his audience was spiritually disabled. This was part of his ministry from the beginning. We saw this text recalled several times in our last podcast. In Isaiah 6, the prophet’s mission was to declare, “Keep hearing but don’t understand. Keep seeing, but don’t perceive.” God says, “Isaiah, make the heart of this people dull, their ears heavy, blind their eyes, lest they see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their hearts and turn and be healed.” So the same terms in Deuteronomy 29:4—“God hasn’t given you eyes to see, ears to hear, a heart to understand.” God is saying, “I want you to bring judgment, a spiritual disabling judgment on the people of Israel.” As we walk through the book, we see this is exactly what’s happening.

It seems counterintuitive, Tom, but it’s exactly what God has done. Because their hearts were rebellious, he gave them over increasingly to their sin. So we read in Isaiah 29:9-10, we read: “Astonish yourselves and be astonished; blind yourselves and be blind! Be drunk, but not with wine; stagger, but not with strong drink! For the Lord has poured out upon you a spirit of deep sleep, and has closed your eyes, and covered your heads.”

It says next in verse 11, the vision that Isaiah is declaring, the very vision written down in this book, the very vision of all this has become like the words of a book that is sealed. When men give it to one who can read, saying, “Read this,” he says, “I can’t, I can’t read it, for it is sealed.” That’s what Isaiah’s book was like for most of his audience—a sealed scroll they could not understand.

Paul actually quotes this very text in Romans 11:7-8 when he says, “What then? Israel failed to obtain what it was seeking.” Now there was the elect, that remnant group, who obtained it, but the rest were hardened, as it is written, and then here it is, a quote from Isaiah 29:10 matched by Deuteronomy 29:4, “God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that would not see and ears that would not hear, down to this very day.”

That’s verse 10 of Isaiah 29. But in Isaiah 29:18, Isaiah envisions a future period when new creation will dawn: “In that day the deaf shall hear the words of a book, and out of their gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind shall see. The meek shall obtain fresh joy in the Lord, and the poor among mankind shall exult in the Holy One of Israel.”

TK: If I think back to what I knew from Deuteronomy, where Moses is saying that day will happen after the exile when God circumcises the heart, I should be able to say I think I know exactly what Isaiah’s talking about. He’s talking about the same exact period.

JD: That’s right. When we think about this text through the words of Peter, he says the prophets who spoke about the grace that would be ours searched and inquired carefully, trying to know what person and time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when predicting the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. Isaiah was reading Moses to gain clarity on when this day would come, and God was giving even greater understanding to Isaiah than Moses had.

Now we have both Moses and Isaiah operating as part of our Christian scripture. Isaiah envisioned a day when all of the sudden the very ones for whom his book was sealed would be overcome by a new generation whose ears would be open and whose eyes could see. In the very next chapter, God says this, “Write it before them on a tablet and inscribe it in a book, that it may be for the time to come as a witness forever.” That’s Isaiah 30:8, and my point is just that God told Isaiah what he was writing was for a time to come, a future day when people will actually have ears to hear.

TK: So when reading a book like Isaiah or something like Deuteronomy, where we’re getting a part saying you won’t be able to hear, and then he’s talking about a day when you will hear, what would you recommend as a reading strategy? Is the book arranged so that, for instance, the first half of Isaiah is all “you’re going to be hard-hearted,” but then the second half is, “Hey, a day is coming when it won’t be like that”? Almost like a storybook where we’re getting to the good part of the story. Or would you say no, it’s not arranged like that, we have to approach a book of prophecy in a different way than that?

JD: Yes, it’s not quite like that. The way Isaiah is shaped, and so many of the other prophets are shaped, is they keep looking at the same reality from different angles. So already very early in the book, I mean, it’s Isaiah 2, we have all the nations gathering to the mountain of God. The good news in Isaiah is already in Isaiah chapter 2. In Isaiah chapter 4, that very mountain where all the nations have gathered is declared holy, and God’s presence is hovering over that mountain as if it has become his very temple.

Isaiah 11, the mountain appears again, and we’re supposed to say, “Oh, it’s the same mountain,” but now it’s the child king who was called Immanuel, “God with us,” in Isaiah 7:14. He was called “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” in Isaiah 9:6. That same child King shows up now in Isaiah 11, ruling and reigning from God’s Holy Mountain and endowed by the very spirit of God, such that where he goes, it’s as if he’s a movable temple.

I think we’re seeing the exact same reality. His people are the very nations that gathered in Isaiah chapter 2. As we’re walking through the book of Isaiah, there are these statements of recollection so that the spirit-empowered child king is then called the spirit-endowed servant in Isaiah 42. And then he’s the spirit-endowed Anointed One in Isaiah 61: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he’s anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” They’re all the same person. So as we’re walking through these prophets—

TK: —all scattered throughout the whole book.

JD: That’s right, as we’re walking through the book, we’re seeing the same story, the gospel story, unpacked over and over again—a story of judgment and destruction, a story of amazing deliverance through this Messiah. So it’s different than how we read the book of Genesis or how we read the book of Judges. The prophets are declaring about the same realities from numerous angles.

TK: I think that’s a real help when I approach the book like it’s a book of narrative, a story, and thinking, “Wait a minute, I thought we were like you said on the mountain and all these good things were happening. And now the people aren’t hearing anymore, what’s going on?” Recognizing this is how books like this work, showing the same story from different perspectives.

JD: That’s right.

TK: So, Isaiah is not the only one who does this. We mentioned Jeremiah as well.

JD: Yes, Jeremiah 30 is a great example. God says to Jeremiah, “Write in a book all the words that I have spoken” (Jeremiah 30:2). And then we get a conjunction, “for,” and in my mind, that’s very significant because it gives us the reason why Jeremiah is supposed to write all of his words down. Remember 1 Peter 1:12, it was revealed to those Old Testament prophets that they were serving not themselves, but you.

And this is what we read: “Write it in the book, Jeremiah, all the words that I have spoken to you, because behold, days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will restore the fortunes of my people.” So a future day—write it in a book because there’s going to be a future restored community of my people who are going to need it.

Indeed, at the end of the chapter, after he has detailed the destruction that God will bring on Israel, he says a storm is coming. After he has highlighted that a Prince from the people will rise, who will enjoy God’s presence (and I think he’s talking about Jesus), after he’s noted that it’s not just a restored community of ethnic Israelites who will be following God, but he’s noted that there are foreigners who will serve Yahweh their God and David their king, after noting all of this, Jeremiah declares to his audience:

“Behold, the storm of the Lord’s wrath has gone forth, a whirling tempest; it will burst upon the head of the wicked. The fierce anger of the Lord will not turn back until he has executed and accomplished the intentions of his mind. In the latter days, you will understand this.”

So when is understanding going to come for the majority? Not until the latter days.

TK: It’s the days when, after the exile, when the people’s hearts would be circumcised.

JD: That’s exactly right. That’s how Deuteronomy uses that phrase “in the latter days.” Jeremiah actually answers it in the very next verse. He says, “In the latter days you will understand this. At that time, declares the Lord, I will be the God of all the clans of Israel, and they shall be my people.” Well, that phrase—that’s now Jeremiah 31:1—in Jeremiah 31:33, that phrase is the very phrase that’s associated with the new covenant.

So when are the days when people will understand what Jeremiah is writing? It’s in the days of the new covenant when God brings transformation on the world, when he’s raised up the Prince, this Davidic Messiah figure, when he has called in foreigners who are alongside ethnic Israelites, following Yahweh their God and David their king. “Write it in a book, Jeremiah, because days are coming when I will restore the fortunes of my people.” Jeremiah knew his book was for a future redeemed people.

TK: It certainly means, Jason, that if it’s for a future redeemed people, and we are supposed to read it, it means necessarily that because he says it here, you will be able to understand it. It means these books are actually understandable to God’s people. They’re not strange books that we’d have to say nobody gets Jeremiah, for instance. The Old Testament writers are saying, “Wait a minute, the new covenant people, they’ll read it and they’ll get it.”

JD: That’s right. With God’s help and by the Spirit, spiritual people can interpret a spiritual book. I’m thinking about just how Paul talks in the beginning of 1 Corinthians, when he says to this church, “We impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit. We are interpreting”—now, that’s what the prophets did, they interpreted what the Spirit gave them—“We are interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.”

So we need to be spiritual people, and that’s one thing that Jesus does. He awakens an entire covenant community that is spiritual, that has spiritual disability overcome, who have the eyes of our hearts enlightened by our Savior. And now, because the Spirit is ultimately the one who authored Deuteronomy and authored Isaiah and authored Jeremiah, now that same Spirit is with us and able to guide us to understand what those prophets wrote about. And they anticipated that—they anticipated it.

TK: So Jason, the last prophet we have, his book appears actually in the writings, and he’s a little different from the other three. The book is different. So Daniel, how does Daniel fit in with this chapter?

JD: Well, it’s really a very necessary component because it is the only place in the entire Old Testament that I have found where the Old Testament prophet himself is not given clarity or understanding about his own prophecy. Daniel knows most of the visions that he has. He gets graphic visions. He receives the dreams that other kings have, and Daniel’s able to see them. Then Daniel has his own visions and dreams, and he understands almost all of it. God is a revealer of mysteries, and he reveals to Daniel these mysteries such that we get a verse like 10:1, where Daniel simply writes:

“In the third year of Cyrus king of Persia, a word was revealed to Daniel, who was named Belteshazzar, and the word was true, and it was a great conflict. And he understood the word and had understanding of the vision.”

That’s how most of this book plays out. Daniel understands the word and has understanding of the vision. But then we come to chapter 12.

TK: That would explain why he can give a warning, for instance, to King Nebuchadnezzar saying, “Let me tell you what you need to do based on what I’ve seen here,” because he understands.

JD: That’s right. He fully understands. And I think that is the pattern of our Old Testament prophets. They understood what they were talking about. Now, certainly seeing Jesus gives us even greater understanding because we see the full end of what they were longing for, what they were anticipating. Many prophets and righteous men longed to see what you see, and they did not see it. And Daniel and Jeremiah and Isaiah and Moses would have been among all those.

But my point is that they understood at the core what they were declaring almost always. But then we have Daniel 12, and in Daniel 12, we find out that at the great Day of Resurrection, those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the sky above, and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever. But then God says, “Daniel, I want you to shut up the words and seal the book” that he has just written. He’s just written an extended account of salvation history working through major kingdoms of men and noting how they’ll be triumphed by the ultimate supremacy of God manifested through an anointed son of man.

The son of man will be the king of God’s Kingdom, just as all the kingdoms of men had kings over them. But it’s that final king, God’s king, who will triumph in this book. God says, “Shut up the words and seal the book until the time of the end. Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.”

Then Daniel says, “I looked, and behold, two others stood, one on this bank of the stream and one on that bank of the stream. And someone said to the man clothed in linen, who was above the waters of the stream, ‘How long shall it be till the end of these wonders?’ And I heard the man clothed in linen, who was above the waters of the stream; he raised his right hand and his left hand toward heaven and swore by him who lives forever that it would be for a time, times, and half a time, and that when the shattering of the power of the holy people comes to an end all these things would be finished.”

And Daniel says, “I heard, but I did not understand.” Then I said, “O lord, what shall be the outcome of these things?” And here’s God’s response: “Go your way, Daniel, for the words are shut up and sealed until the time of the end. Many shall purify themselves and make themselves white and be refined, but the wicked shall act wickedly.”

So here we are. It’s the only example that I’m aware of in all the Old Testament where the Old Testament prophet himself did not understand the details of God’s revelation. Most of the book he understood, but now we come to this “time, times and half a time” declaration that even for Daniel was a mystery. But the declaration is that in the time of the end, the wise will understand.

That is significant, and it’s intriguing that Jesus, in a passage I believe is Matthew 24, will say that when the Son of Man returns in the clouds, he will raise the righteous unto life and the wicked unto death. And then there’s a parenthetical comment that simply says, “Let the reader understand.” And I think it’s a signal that the readers of the New Testament are those who are living in the time of the end, upon whom, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10:11, the end of the ages has come.

That means we’re living in the days of sight, living in the days of hearing, living in the days when Moses’s law now matters, living in the days when Isaiah’s book and Jeremiah’s book and this specific vision given to Daniel are understood. We can, with the help of the Spirit, gain clarity and make it known to the nations. The mysteries of God are now disclosed in the very prophetic writings where the secret was kept hidden, and they’re declared to all the nations.

What I’m seeing here in the Old Testament is reaffirmation of everything we saw in the New Testament regarding the Old Testament’s audience and comprehension. The original audience, almost all of them, were stubborn, rebellious, deaf, blind, spiritually. But the Christian audience is soft-hearted, seeing, hearing, able to understand with the help of the Spirit of Christ in us. And the prophets anticipated this day; they wrote their books for a future. And we’re amid the future—the Old Testament is Christian Scripture from its initiation. It was Christian Scripture written for us, upon whom the end of the ages have come.

TK: Just as a conclusion to this, Daniel’s words are striking. Revelation uses Daniel over and over again, and Revelation doesn’t quote Old Testament books like other New Testament books do. It never says, for instance—John never says, “As it says in Daniel.” He just will say something, and he’s thinking you will know, “Oh, that came from Daniel.” And you’ll go there. But Daniel, or John, is not supposed to seal up Revelation. And it just reminds me of how great it is to be living in a day with the Savior who’s come and a circumcised heart and the Holy Spirit who helps me understand a book that’s not sealed. And helps us understand it. What a gracious gift we have.

JD: Praise the Lord. That’s right.

TK: All right. All right, Jason, thanks for walking us through this. I think next time it will be good to say, OK, if we’re supposed to go back and be using these books, what’s the approach I would take? Do I approach it like the old covenant people did or are things supposed to change for me?

JD: Sounds good, Tom.

TK: All right.

JY: Thank you for joining us for GearTalk. You’ll find a large number of resources including lectures, outlines, articles and sermons at jasonderouchie.com. You’ll find many resources for teaching and preaching, and a number of languages at handstotheplow.org.