Most believers today, other than Jews, concentrate on the New Testament, pretty much ignoring the Old Testament, even though it is included in their Bible. This goes for ministers as well, some of who go so far as to say that we no longer need the Old Testament. If that’s so, then why do we still have it in the Bible? Is the Bible wrong, or are they?
Part of the reason why we see people make comments like this is lack of knowledge. The Prophet Hosea tells us God’s message: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge…” (Hosea 4:6). This is nowhere clearer than the idea that we don’t need to understand the message of the Old Testament. As in many cases when people lack knowledge, they make up their own understanding. In this case, saying that it is unnecessary.
Allow me to ask one simple question: if the Old Testament was unnecessary, why did Jesus quote it 180 times, in the 1,800 verses in the Gospels where His words are recorded? It seems like a 10% quote rate is significant; isn’t it? Paul was also known for quoting from the Old Testament, including both the books of the Law (known as the Torah) and the prophets.
Not only is the Old Testament quoted extensively in the New; but there are countless references to people and events that are recorded there. King David alone is mentioned 54 times in the New Testament. If we didn’t have the Old Testament, with its historical books of First and Second Samuel to tell us the story of David’s life, those references would have no meaning.
Paul goes even further than this, telling his son in the faith, Timothy, just how important the scriptures of the Old Testament are:
All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. – 2 Timothy 3:16-17
Some might try and say that Paul was referring to the New Testament here, but that argument doesn’t stand up to the test of logic. The book of Second Timothy was written by Paul in about 65 AD. While that makes it one of the latter books he wrote, it wasn’t for another 25 years that all the books which are included in the New Testament were finished. Those weren’t “officially” canonized into what we know as the New Testament until the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD; and the earliest possible date that we can say that there was a widely accepted canon of the New Testament was 170 AD, almost a full century after Paul made this reference to “scripture.” So, it is clear that he wasn’t referring to the New Testament. That leaves only the Old Testament as the Scripture he could have been making reference to.
Why is that important? Because if Paul, the author of two-thirds of our New Testament books, refers to the Old Testament as scripture; we should accept his opinion of it. While the Old Testament doesn’t need us to declare its legitimacy; we need to accept in our minds that it legitimately qualifies as scripture, rather than ignoring it.
How Do the Two Tie Together?
When we look at the Old Testament and the New Testament, we must understand that they are two parts of one story. God gave the Old Testament to the nation of Israel, as He revealed Himself to them. A big part of this revelation was the future coming of their Messiah, especially in the prophetic book of Isaiah. That prophecy is shown to be fulfilled in the New Testament, specifically in the Gospels.
While we can understand the message of the New Testament without studying the Old, there are some parts of the message we may not fully understand. Knowing that Jesus Christ was born to be a sacrifice for our sins and therefore become our Savior (the Jewish Messiah) is one thing; but knowing that God foretold His coming through his servants, the prophets, adds a distinct element of “Wow!” to that knowledge. The coming of Jesus wasn’t just something that God decided to do; but rather, something He had planned all along.
In reality, God had been building towards the moment of Jesus’ crucifixion pretty much since the beginning of time. God said to the serpent, after he had been used by Satan to lead Adam and Eve into sin:
And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel. – Genesis 3:15
God wasn’t talking about Abel and Cain here, when He used the word “seed” in reference to her descendants. He was talking about Jesus. We know this, first because we have seen through the New Testament that this prophetic word was fulfilled by Jesus. But we also know it because the word “Seed” and the word “He” are capitalized. That is only done when the Bible makes reference to a member of the Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit).
Considering how early this happened in biblical history, it’s clear that God had been planning on His Son being born of a virgin, growing up and dying on the cross for a long time. But without chapter 3 of Genesis, we wouldn’t know that; just like we wouldn’t know the reason behind a lot of other things in the New Testament, if we didn’t have the Old Testament.
The Silent Years
There is a period of time, after the prophet Malachi, the last prophet in the Old Testament, and the birth of Jesus, as talked about in the Gospels, which is referred to as the “silent years.” These years aren’t silent because God wasn’t doing anything during that time; but rather, just because our Bibles don’t have anything in them that was written during those 400 plus years. Yet the Catholic Bible contains a number of books which were written during that time. How can this be so?
What we know as the Old Testament was the Jewish body of Scripture, which they call the Tanach. Deciding what books to include in the Tanach fell to the scribe Ezra, the same who is the author of the book of Ezra and was involved in the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. Not everything that had been written was included in the Tanach, just as not everything that was written during the time of the Early Church has been included in the New Testament. Some books, like the book of Enoch, which Jude made reference to (Jude 1:14) in his short epistle. We know it existed, because Jude quoted from it; but it is not part of the Tanach.
Since Christianity grew out of Judaism (Jesus was the Jewish Messiah), it was decided by the Church Fathers, to adopt the Tanach as the Old Testament. That is, the Tanach as Ezra had put it together. But God was still moving after the time of Ezra and there were still books written, talking about the things that God was doing. These are the books that are included in the Catholic Bible, but not in other Bibles. They are referred to as the Apocrypha.
While the books of the Apocrypha are not considered part of the Bible by most Christinas, they are still useful books in a historical sense. Since they cover the years between Malachi and the Gospels, they tell us of what was happening in Judah, bridging that gap in our understanding. As such, they make the stories of the Old and New Testament come more together as one.
The New Testament Wouldn’t Exist without the Old Testament
With the way that the story of God’s plan unfolds through biblical history, it becomes obvious that the New Testament could not have existed without the events of the Old Testament. We couldn’t exist without the story of creation, shown in the first two chapters of Genesis. There wouldn’t have been a need for a Savior, without sin, as first occurred in the Garden of Eden, in Genesis, chapter 3. But allow me a moment to show you the key Old Testament event, which made it so that God had to send Jesus Christ as the Savior of mankind.
God is a covenant God, who does everything through His covenants. There are a number of these shown in the Bible, as the Bible itself is a covenant document. The word “testament” literally translates as “the testimony of a covenant.” So, we have an Old Testimony of an Old Covenant and a New Testimony of a New Covenant. The New covenant doesn’t do away with the old, but builds upon it, making it better.
The specific Old Testament covenant that we need to concern ourselves with isn’t the one God made with Adam or Noah; but rather, the one He made with Abraham. That one is key, because it laid the foundation for God to be able to send Jesus Christ to die for our sins. Had that covenant not existed, Satan could have cried “Foul!” when Jesus offered Himself on the cross and then rose from the dead.
In Genesis, chapters 15 and 17, God established a covenant with Abraham. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on the details, but through that covenant, God changed Abram’s name to Abraham; adding the “h” from His own name, Jehovah, to that of Abram, showing that they had joined into the covenant. He also promised Abraham that his descendants would receive the land from the Euphrates River to the Nile River.
We could spend a considerable amount of time studying covenant; but there is one point that is extremely important to us right now. That is, when two people enter into a covenant, what belongs to one, belongs to the other. If someone in a covenant asks their covenant partner to give them something, it is unthinkable to deny that request. It is with this in mind, that we must look at chapter 22.
Now it came to pass after these things that God tested Abraham, and said to him, “Abraham!” and he said, “Here I am.” 2 Then He said, “Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” 3 So Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son; and he split the wood for the burnt offering, and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. – Genesis 22:1-3
God made a demand of Abraham, based on the covenant that they were in. I’ll have to say that the demand He made seemed really out of character, as God doesn’t want us sacrificing our children to Him. There are commandments in the Old Testament Law against this. But the Law had not been written yet, so Abraham did the only thing he could; he obeyed covenant law, obeying God.
That is, he obeyed God until God stopped him. God allowed Abraham to go to the place He had chosen, build an altar, lay out the wood, bind his son and lay him on the altar. Yet at the moment that Abraham raised up his hand with the knife to take his son’s life, the Angel of the Lord called out to him, stopping him. Abraham and his son Isaac offered a ram, whose horns were caught in a thicket, instead.
There are an incredible number of parallels between this story and Christ dying on the cross, which makes sense, as the two incidents are intertwined. But the key point is that in offering Isaac on the altar, Abraham put a requirement on Jehovah God to offer His Son on the altar for the descendants of Abraham. Even though it took almost 2,000 years for God to fulfill that requirement, Jesus drying on the cross was God fulfilling his part of the covenant He had with Abraham.
Since God was offering Jesus on the cross as a fulfillment of His covenant with Abraham, merely giving to the descendants of Abraham in the same manner that Abraham had offered Isaac on the altar, Satan couldn’t cry “foul” at God’s actions. Were it not for Abraham’s obedience to God, through their covenant, Satan would have had a legitimate complaint in saying that God was circumventing his own Law and giving mankind a “loophole” to exploit. But because His action was taken to fulfill His covenant obligation, God circumvented Satan and his complaints.
Had it not been for Abraham’s willingness to obey God, first by leaving his father’s home and heading towards Canaan, without even knowing where God was taking him, God wouldn’t have made a covenant with him. But it was really his willingness to obey God through offering Isaac on the altar, that Abraham proved his faith in God and his faithfulness to God. That opened the door for our Savior to come to earth and die for our sins.
How is the Old Testament Useful to Us?
I’ve already mentioned how the Old Testament gives us the historic foundation for the events of the New Testament, especially Abraham offering Isaac on the altar. Without it, New Testament events hang in history, without a whole lot of reason to explain them. But when we see them together with the Old Testament, the whole story makes more sense. But that’s not all that the Old Testament does for us.
The Old Testament is full of stories of the people of Israel. There are more books of history in the Old Testament, than there are in the New Testament. Therefore, when we are looking for stories to demonstrate and explain New Testament principles, we are more likely to find them in the Old Testament, than we are to find them in the New Testament. The same biblical principles existed all the way back in time, even though we might have trouble seeing them in the pages of the Old Testament.
Every preacher has taken advantage of this sometimes, preaching about David, Sampson, Moses, Gideon and a host of other Old Testament personalities. We see the same things that Jesus taught in the Gospels and Paul wrote about in the Epistles, being carried out in these people’s lives.
That shouldn’t be all that surprising, as Jesus was teaching from the Old Testament, to a people who understood the Old Testament. Those stores were what they had grown up on. Likewise, Paul was a Talmudic scholar, as well as being a Pharisee. When we look at his writings in the New Testament, what we are really seeing is Paul making commentary on the Old Testament Law, through the light of Jesus Christ. Almost everything he talks about is based upon things written in the Old Testament, which makes sense, considering that He was a Talmudic scholar.
It also makes sense because any true biblical principle is found in both the Old and New Testaments, which serves as an excellent test that we can use. If we can’t find a principle discussed or demonstrated in both, we need to question whether we are missing something or whether what we are thinking is truly a biblical principle or not. Keep in mind on this, that some things aren’t as obvious in the Old Testament as they are in the New, and vice-versa.