How To Understand the Old Testament
The Old Testament can be difficult to read, especially when applied through our modern lens. Why shouldn't we overlook the stories of the Old Testament? In this Q&A with Pastor Grant Caldwell, we examine what is the importance of the Old Testament, and how do we view it in our society and day-in-age.
The Old Testament can be a confusing and challenging book to read. The goal of these questions was to frame questions that skeptics have asked in search of Biblical truth. We hope that non-believers and believers alike will find new understanding and inspiration in God's word. These were not easy questions, and we would like to commend Grant Caldwell for his thoughtfulness and decisive answers.
To start, I'm going to jump ahead a little bit. What is the ultimate reasoning and purpose behind the Old Testament? It's essentially a historical document touted as a religious document. How do we look at this?
Yeah, it is, but it is also the whole part of our scriptures. What you see in the New Testament is that it says that all Scripture is useful for teaching and correcting reproach. In 2 Timothy 3, Paul refers to the already circulating New Testament Gospels and Epistles, but also the Old Testament, or what we call the Old Testament, so it's massively important. It's part of God's revelation of who He is. It's part of us seeing truthfulness about who we are, and it's part of God's speaking directly to us. So the Old Testament is a necessary part of our canon to know precisely those two things.
Ultimately, we say that all Scripture points us to Christ. All Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, tells us about the Gospel and the message of how God created us, we fell into sin, then Jesus enters into this story to redeem and restore us. It says that there will be a day when we will be back in His perfect creation with Him forever and in eternity. The Old Testament is the foundation of that story. It's also already teaching us about Jesus hundreds of years before He arrived. It's an essential part that’s not to be neglected.
That's an interesting thought. The story of Jesus is not normal, for lack of better words. It's pretty odd if you take it out of the lens of religion. It's a man who came, who claimed to be God, died, and three days later, He was walking around the earth again. That's pretty wild in and of itself.
When we think about the Old Testament, my mind is immediately drawn to the crazy stories; burning bushes, talking donkeys, seas splitting in half, and much more. It's challenging to comprehend and believe some of these stories when they're so far outside the norm.
Yeah, there is a lot. When you think of some of the stuff, especially when you look at the Book of Judges or some of the prophets, you have to question if this is really in the Bible. All of that has to be in the context that we're basing our lives on the reality of what you said about Jesus, that God Himself entered into His creation, as a human, lived a perfect life, paid the penalty for sin, died, and then was resurrected three days later in a way that completely changed the world and completely changed history.
Pastor Tim Keller talks about this that many people have claimed to be a thought-leading person. Individuals such as Plato, Aristotle, or any of the Enlightenment figures, there's been many people that have come onto this earth, that have been wisdom teachers, and they can be in one category. On the other hand, there's been a lot of people that have claimed to be God in the flesh or a god. But there's only one that can do both of those. Keller makes the point in his book Reason for God: only Jesus is this world-changing thought leader and someone who claimed to be God in the flesh.
As Christ-followers, the resurrection shapes everything. Even Paul says that in 1 Corinthians, this idea that if Jesus wasn't raised from the dead, our faith is nothing, and we're people to be pitied above all else.
When we think about the believability of the Old Testament, with some of the stuff that is difficult to acknowledge, it's all through the lens of we believe that someone literally and physically was risen from the dead in a way that changed the world. It took all of these things and created a movement that was so strong that it's still going today. That's probably another conversation about why the resurrection is believable; maybe that's our next conversation. But when we look at the believability of the Old Testament miracles, it has to be through the lens of Jesus and the resurrection because if we believe that, and we start there, then a lot of other things can begin to fall into place.
It seems easy to slip into picking and choosing with this question, but are we looking at these stories as literal with the mentality that we're supposed to believe them as historical facts, much like we believe George Washington is the first U.S. president? Or do we consider them to be metaphors? Perhaps they're allegorical and intended for us to take something from the story rather than believe it outright.
I think that's an excellent question. If someone is struggling with these questions, it has to be assumed that it's okay to struggle with them. It has to be under the assumption that if you read something that you think is weird and you're struggling to grasp it, you can get there. It's okay. It's okay to doubt and struggle with something that doesn't align with a scientific view that you believe in and hold to it.
Let's look at the resurrection and then go backward. If there's a bullseye in our faith, it's the gospel message and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If we start there and believe that, we can work our way out to some of these other things.
First, I'll just say that when you ask, is it literal to think of Jonah in the belly of the fish? Like was he literally in the belly of the fish, or was that a metaphor? I would say, don't get tripped up over that. If you're just getting into the Bible, our faith is not based upon that. It's based on that Jesus literally did what He said. No matter what, I would begin with that.
When it comes to the question of did this or that really happen? I would lean towards, yes, this really happened. But, when you think of what Jesus said and did, I look at that through the lens of the resurrection, and the resurrection is not a metaphor for redemption. It's not an analogy for renewal.
We believe that He was literally killed on a Roman cross and literally rose from the dead.
These Old Testament miracles, the way that Jesus handled them in His teaching, and Paul and other New Testament writers speak of them, it wasn't told as an analogy, illustration, or story. They're speaking of them as they're true. So if we follow Jesus, and He looked at these events as actual factual events, we can look at them as real and concrete events.
Like I said, if you're struggling with Joshua, the day being longer while the sun lingered in the sky, there's room to wrestle with that. This isn't a litmus test of your faith.
I'd like to address that since you brought it up. When I watch a movie, like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, I suspend belief for the sake of the story. We all know that the Millennium Falcon doesn't actually exist, nor could it with our current technology, but I'm choosing to believe in the setting of that story. When I read the story of Jonah, where is that line of suspending belief and acknowledging historical honesty?
I think part of it is when you look at Biblical Studies is to understand genre and context. When you look at the Old Testament, you've got 39 books, but within those you've got multiple genres. There are historical narratives that tell the story of Israel and the people of God. There is Hebrew poetry and wisdom literature. There's also prophetic imagery. These are all woven together in different books.
When you think of Psalm 19, David praises God's created order, and he uses Hebrew poetry to do that. He's also saying that the sun is going like a bridegroom across the sky. It's vital with genre to understand that the sun is not literally a bride going across the sky; he's using poetry.
So I would say, on the one hand, understanding the genre and the context is critical. Though when it comes to suspending belief, that comes down to faith. In Genesis 18, God asks Abraham and Sarah if anything is too hard for the Lord? If we're to humble ourselves under that picture of God, the reality of some of these miracles becomes less difficult to believe. We understand that God is the creator of everything and the sustainer of life controls everything.
So if He is entering into this story in a way to suspend the natural order of the laws that He created, that point to Him in His goodness, and you look at the intricacies of our created order as Creator, He can do that. He did do that when Jesus entered into the story.
So I think it comes back to faith. When it comes to this idea ask yourself, do I need to suspend the belief that God is who He says He is?
How much of our doubt over these stories stem from our modern society where we have cameras in our pockets to instantly and constantly track anything and everything we see. How many things have been exposed in recent history purely because of the accessibility of smartphones? If we were on the banks of the Mississippi River and the water split in half, I'd tell everyone about it until I was on my death bed. But I'd also record it on my phone as proof. The Old Testament did not have that, so are we supposed to believe that because these stories are so unbelievable, they were passed down because it was so crazy?
I think there's a whole other conversation here, which is way out of my depth, on textual accuracy, and how we can know about what we're believing. There have been tons of studies by people much smarter than me, and I'm happy to acknowledge that.
I think there's a lot of criticism and thoughts of almost like, we have an Old Testament in the way that we would play the telephone game. One person passes it on to another person, another person passes on to another, and what began as it was "a windy day" ended with "the Red Sea parted." That's an entirely false picture of how we have the Scriptures.
We have the accuracy and reliability of comparing them to other ancient texts. It's off the charts of how reliable and trustworthy these texts are when it comes to something like that, and I think it is essential to know that what we're reading is an accurate picture.
I think it's also essential to approach the Scriptures with the mindset that God is speaking through these texts and that this isn't someone's opinion. As Christians, we believe that our texts are the inerrant Word of God speaking to us. We believe these are not accidental. I think we approach texts a lot, like picturing Moses in the corner scribbling them down. There is not a word in these texts that is accidental or off.
That's important to understand when we go into reading them that everything is there for a reason, and that reason is that these are the words of God for His people.
We talked earlier about understanding the history of the text. There seems to be a significant entry point to understanding the Old Testament. If I want to read a book, I want to read it and put it down when I'm done. I don't want to read four other books to understand one book. We can't all go to seminary, so how do we get to a point where we can understand what's behind the words and the larger context?
You mentioned having a smartphone in your pocket, there are so many great resources that are available at our fingertips. I would recommend investing in a good study Bible. Most study Bibles that you could pick up at any bookstore will have a brief introduction to each book. That will give an overview of: author, historical context, literary context, and the themes that you might see. When you study a text and don't understand the context or the genre, you're essentially going in blindly. It's not hard to wonder what that text might be talking about.
Something that's been helpful for me and you can find on your phone is called Bible Project. They have short introductory videos for every book of the Bible that you can watch on your phone.
As you said, it can be overwhelming and intimidating to walk into. I mean, you're holding in your hand a document that's 1,000s of years old and has been translated from Hebrew to English. It can be challenging to read.
This applies even if we're looking at the order of it. It's broken down by section with rough chronological order. But then you get to the prophets that speak to specific issues from the historical books. If you don't know what Malachi is talking about, it's tough to understand that. Or, if you don't understand the world that Jonah was living in and how he was prophesying to Israel at the height of their power against the Ninevites, it makes that much harder to understand.
It's also good to acknowledge that it's difficult to understand. Sometimes it takes work, but work is always the most valuable thing.
When I think about God in the Old Testament versus the New Testament, God doesn't seem very nice in the Old Testament. From flooding the earth to waging war against multiple cities, He appears to have a harder edge than He does in the New Testament. Can you explain the difference between the Old Testament God and the New Testament God?
A big misconception is this distinction between an Old Testament God and the New Testament God when God's revelation of Himself is consistent. When God speaks about Himself in His Word, He says He doesn't change. Our God is who He says He is, and that we can count on and trust that.
There isn't a distinction between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament. The God of the Old Testament is the God of the New Testament is always our Lord. He is who He says He is, and He's unchanging. It's called the Immutability of God.
How we perceive that through Jesus changes things because He changed everything. But God and His attributes are consistent from start to finish. His grace, mercy, and love are seen in every book of the Bible. This thought that grace and mercy come in the New Testament through Jesus, but grace and mercy are all through the Old Testament. It is filled with stories of grace and mercy. It's filled with stories of God entering into this loving covenantal relationship with His people in the same way as the New Testament.
I would say that understanding God's inability to change in His character, being trustworthy and consistent, helps with that idea. You see that God is who He says from Genesis through Revelation.
The way you say that, does that mean when we think about God waging war, flooding the earth, things like that, it's an oversimplification of His mercy and justice being perceived through our modern and human lens, and that we can't comprehend what God's mercy is?
I think it is. As you just mentioned, that this modern lens we're looking at it through shapes our perspective. If you look at Joshua, he commanded his armies to wipe out the Canaanites from the land. It feels so foreign to us. It feels so harsh. This goes back to what I said earlier about acknowledging that doubts are real, and you need to patiently and humbly search this out.
A part of that is in our culture, and our inability to talk about sin. We also cannot discuss God's holiness and how God's holiness cannot be in the presence of sin. So we look at the Old Testament and see God's righteousness in His inability to be in the presence of sin. This inability manifests in ways of, just as you mentioned, the flood, warfare, and so on because God cannot be in relationship with sin. We think, "Oh, that's so foreign,” but when we look at the New Testament, that picture is exactly the same God, and His holiness cannot be in proximity with sin.
The message of judgment in sin is the same, and for us to talk about this holiness causes this idea to feel so hard and messy for us. The message of the New Testament does not let God off the hook in any way. The message is clear, which is those that are apart from Christ that the wages of sin are death. Jesus repeatedly talks about a place of darkness, weeping, and gnashing of teeth. We don't like to go to the pictures you see in Revelation that awaits those apart from Christ. We forget that it is just as much a story of salvation in judgment in grace and mercy as the Old Testament is.
But I think we struggle with this because we don't like to talk about God's holiness. It's so close that it reveals the sinfulness in our heart, which scares us. So then we hide, not realizing that we're already hidden in Christ, and He already paid for that.
When I think about the daily application of this and justice in our modern world, the phrase "they got what they deserved" keeps coming back to me. How do we balance the Bible's justice and realize that punishment from God doesn't always look like we expect it to?
When you look at the Psalms, so many of the psalms are David, crying out to God for justice and for God to act. So when we look at discussions of justice, which I think is probably a whole other conversation, we see this idea of getting what they deserved when it comes to justice. But we see that God is both just and the justifier. We see this critical picture come out of God's mercy and love because the parent message of the Gospel is that we don't get what we deserve, that Jesus takes on what we deserved. Because we're in Jesus, we get what we don't deserve. We get mercy and grace.
The thing is, those in the Old Testament are looking forward towards that, and we're looking back towards that. But the route of God for justice and mercy does not change. When we see elements of justice throughout the Old Testament, it's a foreshadowing of Christ. You see Job crying out for justice if only there's an arbitrator that could stand between us; the arbitrator is Christ.
We can look backward and see what he was looking forward in faith. The Gospel is important because, we see that someone did take what we deserved, and that's in Christ. In that we get the complete picture of the New Testament.
I hear the phrase "God is love" so often. How do you justify that to someone when you're explaining God killing all of humanity except for Noah in the boat?
It's a tough thing. It really is, and it's okay to doubt and struggle with those stories. But, I keep coming back to this idea of the bullseyes, the resurrection. The resurrection is God's clearest message of His love. It's where justice, mercy, truth, and love all come together. So when answering that question about God's love on the flood, beginning with the resurrection scene that God has shown His love for us by dying for us, then you're able to work your way backward to the flood.
It is a challenging question, though. It's hard to read Genesis, and you go from creation to things very quickly taking a sharp turn. I don't want to repeat myself, but when we struggle with God's holiness, we're struggling with the idea that sinful creation cannot be in a relationship with a perfect and holy creator. Seeing the link that Jesus paid to restore that relationship changes how we view these narratives.
In the Old Testament, there are many references to polygamy, slavery, and misogyny, especially in today's culture, which are wrong and the subject of social change. So how do we balance that in our modern-day?
So when these things that happen in the Old Testament, I think it's important to note, what is Scripture instructing us to do? What is Scripture describing to us that happened? I think when you see these things happening, they're explaining what happened, and they often, if not always, go badly for the people of God when they engage in these things. So we need to know the context, genre, and all of these things we discussed earlier when we approach the Scripture to understand what God is describing, instead what He's instructing us not to do.
It's essential to have that lens through the Old Testament because there are many things that just because you're reading doesn't mean that we're to go out and do it. So we can see that not just because of inferring it, but because what they're doing is contrary to the rest of the law that's revealed and who God is.
In the Old Testament, you see polygamy, which you mentioned; we've already seen in Genesis 2 that God's plan for marriage was one man and one woman. We've already seen that God has given us a design for marriage. So when we see people doing the opposite of God's design, that doesn't mean that we have the license to do that. We're able to know that they have failed in this in the same way we can fail in that too. They instruct us in that way, but not in the form of following them.
Is it safe to say that a lot of these are cautionary tales more than anything else? It doesn't outright say this is bad, so how do you read the story as a cautionary tale and gather that information where it's a little more obscure in the Old Testament?
I think it was Paul Tripp that gave this analogy that our goal with the familiarity of Scripture is to be so familiar with it that it's like a city we grew up in. We know exactly how to get where we need to go. It's not a step-by-step direction of what to do. If I'm lost in New York, and someone gives me step-by-step directions of getting back to my hotel, that only works if I can follow that path perfectly. But if I make a wrong turn, those step-by-step directions are useless to me. What I need is someone from New York and knows the city, so that no matter where I'm at, I can get me back to my hotel.
When it comes to description, I think it's helpful with the Old Testament that the more we familiarize ourselves with it in terms of context, genre, and everything we've discussed, the more we understand. When we understand Genesis to Malachi, we understand the bigger picture of who God is from Genesis to Revelation. This gives us God's revelation of Himself and how that points to Jesus. The more that we learn the character of God, the more that we're able to see some of these stories and what's going on.
I lightly touched on this earlier is the difference in picking and choosing what we believe. The Old Testament tells us not to eat shellfish or wear certain clothes. I had shrimp the other night for dinner. Why am I seemingly allowed to pick and choose what I believe in the Bible when it clearly states in the Old Testament that we’re not to follow certain practices?
The first five books of the Old Testament are devoted to understanding the law. You see David, praising it in the Psalms, you see when it's rediscovered after the temple falls. Understanding the law as a Christ-follower is incredibly important.
The purpose of the law for us is a few different things:
It shows us what God's character is
It provides a mirror to our soul and how we fall short of God's character.
It points us to our need for Christ to be the perfect embodiment of the law to show us the way back to God's perfect plan.
When we look at the law in the Old Testament, though, it's essential to see everything through the lens of Christ. So when we go back to the last question about the familiarity of Scripture and see it not just as a pick-and-choose chosen version, but as a part that's connecting the whole Scriptures, we have to take some of these verses and look at him through this lens of the entire Scriptures.
If you think of the law, think of it like looking at a diamond. There are different sides to it. When you look at the law in the Old Testament, there's a moral component of the law that sets legal regulations about how Israel was to worship. But if you shift the diamond a little bit to the left, you'll see that there's the civil component as well that regulated how Israel as a nation was to live. Then, if you shift it again, there are all these ceremonial laws of religious cleanliness and purity that Israel was called to. Examples of this are things like sacrifices, festivals, and celebrations that Israel was commanded to do for the sake of their ceremonial cleanliness and purity.
When we take that diamond, we put on our "Jesus glasses" and look at them through the lenses of the Gospel. Things look very different when we look at them through Christ. When we look at the moral laws, Jesus aims right at the heart with His teaching. He doesn't abolish these laws, as it says in Matthew 5; instead, He shares the law's true intent. So it's not just that you would not commit adultery; it's, I want to know about where's your heart is at when it comes to lust and adultery.
This perspective allows us to look at the Ten Commandments, that these things are still applicable for the Christ-follower today because Jesus commanded us to follow them. He also commanded us to look at them through this heart lens of how am I following Him.
It's different, though, with those civil and ceremonial ones. The Great Commission changed that we're not the civil national of Israel anymore. We follow Jesus, which means now we participate in the people of God, not as a nation of Israel, but as the Church of Jesus Christ. The civil laws were changed by Jesus's life, death, and resurrection in the teaching of the New Testament.
Sacrifices do not find the same as the ceremonial ones, like cleanliness and purity on the altar. Hebrew tells us that it's found by once in the perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. That's why when he teaches in Colossians 2 the substance of these things in Christ that we don't need festivals nor cleanliness and ritual purity laws anymore. We have all of this purity and cleanliness in Christ.
Often when people ask," Why do you do X and not do Y?" They're looking at some component of moral law and comparing it with a civil or ceremonial component of the law. Of course, it's all the law; it's all connected. But they're looking at it from two different angles without the lens of Jesus in the midst of it, which is why as Jesus showed to Peter, we can eat shellfish as Christ-followers. They don't determine our cleanliness. Jesus determines our cleanliness.
What is the relevant application of these things today? For example, when looking at a book like Numbers, how do we apply something like that to today?
Bible scholar Tara-Leigh Cobble points out that if you're struggling with relevance on a given day, sometimes what God is teaching you is how to be disciplined. For example, there will be days where you read something in the Old Testament, and it's genealogies or laws, and you'll go, I don't understand what I'm supposed to get out of that. Her encouragement is, maybe what you're supposed to get out of that today is the act of what it means to be disciplined.
Before getting into anything else, the New Testament is full of Old Testament allusions. It's full of Old Testament illustrations and connections. So I think it's essential to see what we lose if we dismiss the Old Testament. There's so much included that provides us with the complete picture of Jesus. If all of Scripture points us to Jesus, as He taught in Luke 24, on the road to Emmaus, if the law, the prophets are all pointing us to Jesus, then we can't set these things aside as irrelevant because they're teaching us something about the Gospel that we believe.
As we start to wrap up, I have two questions that are intertwined. First, if you're a non-believer and made it to this point, and you're still skeptical, what are your next steps?
What's tempting with the Old Testament, or really with the Bible in general, is that we want to pick it up like any other book that we read and start at the beginning on page one. That's not my recommendation to start with the Old Testament, especially if you're a non-believer.
If you're a non-believer, I would love for you to consider Jesus and who He says He is and what He did. Let's start there. He is the bullseye at the center of our faith, and everything falls or rises on Him.
I would encourage you to go about three-fourths into your Bible and begin with one of the Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. I would recommend Mark or Luke for the first book you read. Then, as you read, slowly consider who this person is and how He lived and loved. Consider how He combines these attributes of love, justice, mercy, truth, and grace.
After that, work your way through the New Testament, and once you finish that, go back and read the Old Testament. I think when you do that, you'll have more of an appreciation of what you're reading.
So what you're saying is, it's basically like you have to watch the original Star Wars trilogy before you watch the prequel trilogy to appreciate what you're seeing?
Absolutely, and the more that you watch the old and familiarize yourself with it, you'll have an appreciation of all the new stuff that keeps coming out.
Okay, so last question: We're going to flip it on the other side, if you believe in Jesus Christ, how do you read the Old Testament and get through all the genealogy and appreciate what you're seeing?
Please don't do it alone. Even if you're not reading the Bible, I would say the same thing. Begin with the New Testament, start with Jesus, work your way through the New Testament, and then return. But don't go at it alone. Instead, find a good study Bible that helps you walk through these things, watch the Bible Project videos, or do it in a community. There are several great plans out there that you can do with a friend or a family member.
Also, don't neglect it because understanding Scripture is vital to your Christian faith. All the things we've talked about are the foundation for what Jesus reveals. So don't get discouraged with it because God is teaching you many things through these words, even if it just feels like discipline. He's promised that His Word will not return void, and that is true from Genesis 1 to the end of Revelation.
Related Articles
The Problem of Evil by William Merriman
How to Read Difficult Scripture by Brad Bogue
About Christ Church Memphis
Christ Church Memphis is church in East Memphis, Tennessee. For more than 65 years, Christ Church has served the Memphis community. Every weekend, there are multiple worship opportunities including traditional, contemporary and blended services.
