rich’s blog

Old Testament Review

 

Preface: 

Well. Today we are talking about the Old Testament.  And we maybe should have had this message before we opened up Judges last week; but sometimes I plan poorly.  So. 

 

But I hope that we’ll leave this morning a little more interested in the Old Testament, wanting to understand how it related to the New, and a little better positioned to understand and look for some themes that are all over the pages of our Old Testament. 

 

But first, let’s pray: 

 

Prayer: 

Father.  Help us to value Scripture, all of it; and let this morning be a time that makes us interested again in all the things you’ve done to get us back.  Keep me from misleading us, keep us attuned to what you would have us learn.  Make your Spirit strong in us.  In Jesus’ name; Amen.  

Why Bother? 

So we should start this morning with a basic question: Why bother? Why should we have a whole message concerned with the Old Testament? And anyway we talked about the Bible just a couple of weeks ago; wasn’t that enough?  Geeze. 

 

Except that I don’t think it was, really.  I think we do need to talk about the Old Testament, for the simple reason that by-and-large, we don’t: we tend to ignore the thing until we’re in some sort of argument with somebody, and feel like some Old Testament thing can help us prove our point. 

 

Disconnection & Confusion: 

Here’s what the church does: We don’t say you shouldn’t read the old testament.  We just don’t train Christians to read it.  

 

When we introduce people to what it means to follow Jesus, the only mention we make of Old Testament stuff is the fact that God made the world and “humanity sinned against God,” or something like this: occasionally we’ll toss in something about sacrifice, which makes everyone involved uncomfortable, but we figure we have to mention it. (Maybe I’m projecting here, I don’t know.) 

 

The point is, when we introduce what it means to be a Christian, we don’t really mention what goes on in the Old Testament, don’t connect it to the life of Jesus or our own lives; we simply, almost unethically, allow people to continue believing what America around them has been telling them all along, which is that “Old” equals “Bad,” dismiss it: but “New” equals “Great.” 

 

And once we join with the church, we are taught–not explicitly, but we pick up on this–that we don’t really have to care about the Old Testament all that much, that it’s not all that important. 

 

We learn that we can be perfectly good Christians and all we have to do is look at the last couple hundred pages of a 1,000 page Bible.  But we’re also told over and over and over: read your Bible, the whole Bible is important.  So this conflict happens, right? 

 

Our explicit message is: love the Bible! Love it so much you want to marry it! And the implicit message is: but not that first chunk. You can ignore that. 

 

And you know what happens when this explicit message slams into this implicit one?  Generally, we end up feeling guilty, we end up confused about how we’re supposed to engage with the Old Testament, if at all: and so we just ignore the guilt until it goes away, and avoid the “Old” Testament because it’s just a reminder of guilt and confusion and all sorts of “shoulds” that we ignore. 

 

I got a 100!

A few of us break the curve.  We fall in love with the Old Testament; we talk about it all the time, and the rest of us sort of treat these unusual people like special pets: we’re fond of them, we think well of them, but they are clearly a different species. 

 

And these aren’t new problems, you know? 

 

Old Problems:  

Once Christianity became primarily a gentile thing, a non-jewish thing, we began to have trouble with the Old Testament.  We in fact began calling it the Old Testament; not simply “Scripture.”  

 

Have you ever heard the term “worldview.” It’s a way to talk about how a particular person, or group of people, views the world.  It’s a word that’s shorthand for the total picture of how we think the world works, what’s most basic to life and reality.  

 

Instead of trying to figure out what it meant to be a Christian with a Jewish worldview, looking at the world through Jewish glasses, the Gentile church began looking at the world with whatever philosophical glasses they happened to have on.  

 

The Problem:

But the problem in forgetting that Jesus was Jewish, that Christianity came from somewhere, a Jewish “where,” is that there are some things that just make no sense unless we are familiar with the Old Testament, with the history of Israel; as a people, and as a nation. 

 

Words & phrases like “Righteousness,” and “Covenant,” and “Messiah” and “Spirit of God” that–even though we’re so used to hearing them they seem familiar and usual–don’t make any sense, just don’t, apart from what the Old Testament tells us about God and God’s work in history, through the people we call Jews. 

 

Translation:

And of course one of the greatest strengths of the church, of our faith, is that it is translatable into a thousand cultures; that it is not ethnically or racially specific, but explicitly is concerned with humans, all of them everywhere.  God makes a claim on the whole world in a way that doesn’t surprise us, but sure did surprise Paul and the early Jewish church.  

 

So this is a strength; but even as we translate our faith into a language other cultures can understand, we can’t forget that at its roots it speaks with an Old Testament accent, has an Old Testament-informed view of the world. 

 

Everyone with me?

 

Emphases: 

 And when we think of Christianity, we tend to always emphasize the way it breaks with what came before it; that’s not unreasonable; dramatic things happened.  

The author of Hebrews calls some of what happened before Jesus “obsolete.” And “obsolete” things are lame, ignore them all you please things, right?  

 

But what happens in the New Testament, what happened in Jesus, it’s also a continuation of what came before; and talking about the way Jesus & the church fulfill Old Testament things is a lot easier if we respect the continuity between New and Old Testament, not just disregard it. 

 

Framework: 

So one thing I want us to try to do is develop a way to understand how the Old & New Testaments relate to each other.  I want us if we can to develop a Framework of the Bible that respects both the continuity between the Testaments–the ways they are similar–and also the discontinuity–the breaks that we do see, the “new things,” that Jesus set in motion.  

 

And when we come up against some Old Testament thing we’ve never seen, or some New Testament thing that confuses us, we can place it.  Does this make sense? We can put this idea, or principle, or theme where it fits, and–this is like putting together a puzzle, you know–over time, fill in all the spaces within this frame. If we do this well we end up with a consistent, theological and biblical understanding of God, how God works, who God is and who people are, and what God desires for all creation!

 

Am I the only dork excited about this? 

 

Various Frameworks: 

And there are all sorts of ways people have framed the Old & New Testaments, integrated what we learn about God and creation within them.  Some are better than others; sometimes people love their framework so much that they jam the Bible inside it, and snap off a piece or two in the process.  

 

I’m thinking of a few right now!

 

Various authors have suggested in different ways that we look at the whole story of the Bible as a play with multiple Acts; and we are people who are living in the last Act, right before the resolution is about to happen.  

 

N. T. Wright talks about how the Act we’re in started with Jesus’ resurrection, and ends with the picture of Revelation 21 & 22; and we’re right in the middle of living this Act out, except we have no lines.  

 

So we have to look at what’s gone before: Jesus’ life, the early church–and how things will end up: Revelation 21 & 22, and figure out together our lines.  And we’ve got the Holy Spirit tele-prompting us all the time.  

 

Other frameworks are built around the covenants–special relationships w special promises and responsibilities–God has made with individuals: Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Israel, David, and of course a New Covenant, inaugurated by Jesus.  This New Covenant is one of the main themes of the book of Hebrews, by the way.  It draws on the promises that God makes in Jer 31:31-34.  

 

“The days are coming,” declares the LORD, 

       “when I will make a new covenant 

       with the house of Israel 

       and with the house of Judah.

    It will not be like the covenant 

       I made with their ancestors 

       when I took them by the hand 

       to lead them out of Egypt, 

       because they broke my covenant, 

       though I was a husband to them,” 

       declares the LORD.

    “This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel 

       after that time,” declares the LORD. 

       “I will put my law in their minds 

       and write it on their hearts. 

       I will be their God, 

       and they will be my people.

    No longer will they teach their neighbors, 

       or say to one another, ‘Know the LORD,’ 

       because they will all know me, 

       from the least of them to the greatest,” 

       declares the LORD. 

       “For I will forgive their wickedness 

       and will remember their sins no more.” (Jer 31:31-34 tniv)

 

People using this framework talk about what God has done by moving from covenant to covenant, and telling the story of what happened before and after each, and why each one was important and unique, but why the one we’re all benefiting from is the most important of them all.

 

Stories:

And really, these frameworks tend to be stories.  They tend to be narratives; stories of what God has done since the beginning of the world, where the world is going, and how we fit into all this.  Jesus is an utterly critical part of these stories; a turning point in the story, surprising and dramatic, something no one expected: but he’s not part of a different story; just a surprise move by the story’s hero. 

 

This is what we saw in the passages that were read to us this morning.  Peter and Paul are telling the story about what God has done in the world: Peter is telling it to Israelites, Paul is telling it to Gentiles; but they are both pulling the parts of this story out that they feel are most relevant for the moment, and sharing them with people. 

 

They are working with a framework, a story of God & Creation and all the junk going on between the two; and they mention what is most helpful to mention in the moments they speak.  And of course they bring Jesus to the front of things; they want those around them to see him, know him.  

 

But they also make sure to point out how Jesus is part of God’s work in history that stretches back through the Old Testament and depends upon all of it. 

 

Simple Framework: 

And most of us have a simple framework already; something like creation, fall, redemption.  That’s our tiny story most of us have.  But we forget that redemption didn’t start with Jesus; it started way before that; Jesus just blew it wide open to all of us, achieved the hopes of God and all creation that cried out for Him. So what we can do, over time, is expand that tiny story: Creation, Fall, Redemption in all directions, open it up like one of those accordian pockets that stretches as wide as we need it to be–”Oh, the book of Judges, it’s about a season in God’s redemptive plan with the ethnic group he chose to work through to redeem all creation.  It’s a season of bad examples and immorality and terrible, really: but it reminds us of how terrible we can be and how committed God can still be to us.”  And Judges may never be a core part of the story we remind ourselves of when we go to our mental framework; but we’ll know where it fits, know what place it has, and how it can speak to us in our situation, when we need it.  Paul & Peter draw on the parts of the story that they need for their moments, point out certain parts of their framework, but I really think they’ve got a much larger one than they let on in those few verses.  And my framework, which started with simple “Creation, Fall, Redemption,” and still can shrink down to that if it has to, most of the time is much, much bigger. 

Tools: 

So this framework can be a tool we use as we try to understand themes or principles that span the whole good book.  So if we wanted to ask, “What is Righteousness?”  We’d want to look in the New Testament, and see what it says about righteousness, of course: but we’d also want to know how righteousness was used in the Old Testament, what the context of righteousness was, and we’d want to ask how being an Israelite related to righteousness, what righteousness means to God, to Jesus.  

 

All sorts of questions that we won’t look at this morning. 

 

But we’d gather answers to these questions and fit them into our framework of God’s work in the world, and whenever we see the word “righteous” or “righteousness” in the New Testament all sorts of things would flood back into our mind, the argument Paul makes in Galatians about righteousness and what it is and where it comes from would become so much clearer, and if someone asks in small group or over coffee “What’s the deal with the whole you’ve got to be “righteous” thing,” we’d be able to answer in a way that takes into account how much God has always his people, and the work he died, culminating in Jesus, of course, to bring people back to him. 

Tools II:

And what do we do with tools? Most of us have crafts, have trades, or hobbies: things that we use tools with, don’t we? We cook or build things, do crafts and sew, write or draw or make music, garden or tend to pets, work on the cars and houses and things that we’re responsible for maintaining.  And all of these things take tools.  And we care for our tools, we fix our tools, we pay attention to them: if they get rusty, we clean them up, we put them where they go, we return the ones we borrow. And we ask for training on how to use them, and we practice with them. I could drive this tool thing into the ground; we do all sorts of stuff with tools that we have to do. 

 

But we neglect this one, this framework that brings the Old & New Testament together in our heads, so that we can make sense of the stuff we find inside the Bible.  It’s a tool we just don’t bother with, because, like we already talked about, most of us just don’t bother with the Old Testament. 

 

If we did? 

But what if we did? I’ve been thinking about this.  What would we need to know more than anything else if we did bother with the Old Testament?  

 

I think what we’d need to know is the best way to engage the thing? Does this make sense? The best way to pay attention to the Old Testament, and not just sort of see it and move on.  

 

And part of this is just being aware of the stuff we’ve already talked about: that we need the Old Testament to understand the New, and while there are breaks between Jesus and everything else before him, there’s also a lot of continuity. And part of this should be remembering the things we talked about a couple of weeks ago: genre, context, the uniqueness and purposes of each book. 

 

(We’re sort of lucky in this sense because if anything we’re far more likely to try to find these things out before we open an Old Testament book than a New Testament book, because we know we don’t know everything there is to know about the first 39 books in the Bible, and we don’t feel as guilty or embarrassed to admit it. Or I don’t, anyway.)

 

Brueggemann: 

And I think if we make ourselves aware of just a few things when it comes to the Old Testament, we would find that we’re much more able to figure out how to fit it into the New Testament well. 

 

Walter Brueggeman–a fairly well-respected, Christian, Old Testament scholar, if name-dropping helps reassure you–suggests we pay attention to a few themes in particular.  And if we notice these, I think we’ll be set up for good Old Testament times. 

 

Three Tension-filled Pairs: 

He suggests, in his work “The Book that Breathes New LIfe: Scriptural Authority and Biblical Theology,” that we pay attention to six Old Testament themes that we see over and over, which are paired up and held in tension with another.  Does this make sense?  

 

Three pairs of Old Testament themes, and in each of these pairs, the two factors go back and forth, are held in tension.  

 

6 things, 3 pairs, each one of these pairs in tension with its partner. Like a little competition-filled married couple. 

 

Covenant & Exile: 

The first thing Brueggemann says we should look out for as we read through the Old Testament is the way the themes of Covenant & Exile interact with each other. Covenant as a theme is the idea that we are God’s people, that God has partnered with us in a special relationship, and we get special benefits because of it.  But Exile as a theme is the idea that Israel lost all the benefits of their relationship with God, lost their promised land, lost their place in the world. 

 

It reminds us that Israel went into Exile because they consistently ignored who they were supposed to be and what they were supposed to do, as God’s covenant partners.  Imagine everything bad one spouse could do to his or her spouse, what it would be like if the spouse simply lived as if they weren’t married: slept with other people, spent all their cash, left the toilet seat up.  

 

Israel was sent into Exile because they lived as if God didn’t exist, and God had never married them, entered into a special relationship with them.  And we can read in the Old Testament this interplay between “We are uniquely in a relationship with God,” and “we’ve got nothing to show for it, so what’s the deal?” 

 

Back and forth Israel relishes their covenant relationship, but finds that it costs them dearly when they ignore their part in it. 

 

So we could look for this as we look through the Old Testament and build a mental framework that connects it to the New. 

 

Hymn & Lament: 

Brueggemann suggests we notice the interplay of “hymn” and “lament,” and what he means is the interplay of praise and joy and happiness and pleasure that Israel sings about all the time, and the fact that they also remember their losses, and their sadnesses, and they complain to God about life.  

 

He says that “Israel’s relentless tradition of complaint finds a way of destabilizing every grand positive claim” (135).  And anyone of us who have ever opened the Psalms can see this, right?  This back and forth between “God is good!” and “Everything’s terrible!”

 

He also points out how we Christians tend to want to “protect God,” paint a picture of how nice God is all the time, but Israel was much more likely to voice their concerns, their questions, their troubles and even accuse God of being a scoundrel occasionally (135).  They held onto both praise & hymn, and lament & complaint, and we need to pay attention to this as we explore the life of Israel as seen in the Old Testament. 

 

Presence & Theodicy: 

Alright fancy Walter Brueggemann.  Theodicy is a word that points out the problem of evil.  It basically points to the question that everyone asks, which is if God is so Good & Loving & Powerful, why is there bad stuff?  And the short answer is free will, I’d toss that out there. The long answer hasn’t been finished yet because people have been drafting the thing since they were taken in by a snake and had an apple for breakfast. 

 

But all of us know this: when we are sad and broken, it is good to have someone around, right?  Not always speaking, not always hugging, but just nearby, present.  Henri Nouwen calls this the “ministry of presence,” when someone who cares about us shows up, and because of it things seem a little brighter. 

 

Brueggemann wants us to notice as we go through the Old Testament the constant promise God makes that he’s with his people, he’s near them, and he will be near them if it feels like he isn’t.  And we Christians love this stuff; Jesus as Immanuel, God with us, is one of the biggest flags we hold out and wave; Jesus tells us that he had to go so that the Spirit could come and be closer to us than even he was in the flesh.  

 

For the people of God, God’s presence with them is one of the biggest promises they cling to.  But in the Old Testament we see this promise that God was with his people, in tension with the fact that bad things are happening everywhere, and if God is nearby, why are would they happen.

 

So Brueggemann says notice this tension in the Old Testament between “I am with you,” and “But not all you’re problems are going away.” 

 

Interplay Between the Pairs: 

And this presence & theodicy pair relate to covenant and exile, and hymn & lament, too, doesn’t it? We praise God that he lives near us in the Temple because we are his covenant people; then when we find ourselves in taken into exile, we question what it means to be God’s covenant people, and we wonder how far away he is from us, because life is so hard: but in our wondering, we see Ezekiel and see an image of the chariot of God flying to us his people who are out under the Babylonian sun, slaving away in their captivity, and we praise God that he remembers his promises and comes to us again with his presence.  

 

These three pairs: “covenant & exile,” “hymn & lament,” “presence & theodicy,” these things go back and forth, and interact with one another up and right into the New Testament. 

 

If we can pay attention to their interaction whenever we open the first 3/4s of our Bibles, we’ll be better positioned to understand the last 1/4. 

 

Nearly Done: 

So what have I asked of us this long morning?

 

I’ve asked that we develop a framework of God’s work through history that honors not only the break between the Old & New Testament, but also the striking continuity. 

 

I’ve suggested that we make the effort to engage with the Old Testament in a way we maybe never have before–intentionally–in order to build this thing, so that we can better understand God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, better understand what it means for us to claim that this God of this Bible has drawn us to himself and what He asks of us. 

 

And as we spend time in this First Testament, the first few Acts of this Biblical story, we should pay attention to the interplay of certain themes: covenant & exile, hymn & lament, the presence of God & the presence of pain.  We can notice the way these things flow through the Old Testament and flow into the New Testament: into Jesus’ life, into the life of the early church, and into our life, here along Smoky Row Rd.   

 

Conclusion or Beginning? 

But what I haven’t done this morning is talk in detail about much at all. I think, though, that if we take these things: these three pairs of competitive themes, this concern to develop a framework that connects the Old Testament with the New, we’ll be able to open the first 80% of our Bibles and ask the right questions about what to do with it. 

 

And we can bring those questions to our small groups, to each other, to the “questions” class we’ll have in a couple of months on Sunday morning, and we’ll find answers that aren’t just informative, but transformative, moving us closer to the Jesus that clarified and answered the hopes of Old Testament Israel.  And we’ll become a place where we value everything God has done to draw us back to Himself.