Sermon 66
BibleGateway.com
- Passage Lookup: Romans 4;
A boy was sitting on a park bench
with one hand resting on an open Bible. He was loudly exclaiming his praise to
God. "Hallelujah! Hallelujah! God is great!" A man who was passing by asked the boy about
the source of his joy. “I’ve just been reading that God opened up the waves of
the Red Sea and led the whole nation of
"That can all be very easily
explained,” said the man. Modern scholarship has shown that the
The boy was stumped. His eyes
wandered from the man back to the Bible laying open in his lap. The man turned
to go, but scarcely had he taken two steps when the boy began to rejoice and
praise louder than before. “Now what’s happened?” he asked
"Wow!" exclaimed the boy happily, "God is
greater than I thought! Not only did He lead the whole nation of
A few months ago I went to a
smart lunch party and I sat next to a lady who proved to be a considerable
trial! Someone had told her that I was
going to be ordained so it only took a few moments before she started on her favourite
hobby horse – the Old Testament. “I
think it ought to be cut of the Bible and thrown away”, she said. “It’s so full of cruelty and judgment, but
the NT is fine - it speaks of love and forgiveness, and the sermon on the mount
contains the greatest moral teaching the world has ever seen.” I began to protest that without the OT the NT
made no sense but she would have none of it.
In church she refuses to say any words which seem to her to refer to the
OT; she even believes that the legacy of
the OT can be seen in the way the Jews in
But did she have a point? It might be helpful to have a look at some of the common objections to bothering with the Old Testament; the first is Sheila’s point: (1) There is so much violence in the Old Testament, - surely the God of the OT is different from the God of the NT? (2) follows this. The OT has been superseded by the NT. All those laws in the 1st few books of the Bible which we don’t seem to follow. And anyway we don’t need to read the OT to find out about God because Jesus has shown us what God is like. (3) The OT is about ancient history – how can it have any relevance for today? (4) surely the text of the OT is unreliable – it was written so long ago, how can we ever know what they really said or wrote? And (5) all those ‘unlikely’ stories. I expect you noticed how I highlighted some of them in the quiz. Was the world really created in 6 days? Did people really live to over 900 years old? Are we seriously meant to believe that donkeys talk? How can the sun stop still in the sky?
A brief word about each of them.
No 1: The violence really isn’t at all surprising because it’s set in violent times and it’s clearly a story of a people learning what God is like.
No. 2: The interesting thing is that Jesus himself didn’t think that the OT was out of date. Do you remember our reading from Dt? You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength. Jesus was steeped in the OT and much of what he taught about the nature of God came from the OT.
No. 3: The answer to the question of relevance can only be found by actually reading the OT. It’s remarkable how many themes emerge that are precisely what people grapple with today, questions of identity, origin, justice and morality. Yes, there are many difficult bits and some quite dull bits but they are all there to paint the picture of the way God deals with men and women for all times.
No 4: the supposedly unreliable text. In fact what evidence we have suggests that the texts were copied with extraordinary faithfulness. Story telling was the main way of passing on ideas; people remember stories and so that means that it’s far from absurd to believe that the texts we have in our Bibles are very reliable.
No. 5: It would take far too long
to go through every passage that seems difficult to believe. My silly story of the small boy reading about
the crossing of the
So far I’ve been rather negative
– trying to answer common objections to the OT, so in a minute I want to start
looking at some of the positives – why we should read it and what we can hope
to gain from it? But, before I do that,
it’s important to get hold of the big picture.
What’s the story of the OT? The
next 2 slides are about this. Now it
won’t take you long to notice that I’ve left something out at the beginning of
this one – no mention of creation, or the early biblical characters such as
Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel, Noah or my old friend Methuselah. Well, this
part of the Bible – 1st 11 chapters of Genesis could go under the
heading “Beginnings” and it’s not really possible to put dates for them (unless
you follow Abp Ussher who added up all the ages mentioned in the Bible and
calculated that the world was created in 4004BC – in October, in fact). Even the dates I have given are fairly
approximate and scholars differ on the details, but you’ll see we move through
the patriarchs – Abraham, Isaac & Jacob – through Moses and the Exodus, and
on to the time of the Judges and the first kings until the kingdom splits in
two following the reign of Solomon. The 2nd slide shows how the
northern kingdom of
But how does all this history fit
in with the Bible – well unfortunately the books in the Bible
are not arranged in chronological order.
The first diagram (Not shown on this webpage), which you may
not be able to see all the details of, is an attempt to show all the books in
the right order – from left to right – though again some of it is
guesswork. No on really knows whether
Job for example depicts life at the same time as Genesis, and in fact most scholars think it was
written as much as a 1000 years after Abraham walked the earth. Some of the books are a great deal easier to
read than others, which can seem puzzling to us, but there’s no need really to
be surprised. Imagine that we wind the
clock on a few days to Wednesday morning and the postman has dropped 2
envelopes through our front door. One
looks like this – and the other is like this (yes, Wednesday is Feb 14th!) As we open them we prepare ourselves for what
we are likely to find inside – a letter from our bank manager, or a letter from
– well, you know – someone special. We
change the way we read them automatically, and it’s important when we read the
Bible and especially the Old Testament, to realise what sort of writing we are
dealing with so that we can make sense of it.
If we get mixed up we can end up getting confused between picture
language describing, say, the end of the world, and something quite
different. Try this, for example. Is it an attempt to forecast unusual physical
phenomena – rather like a weather forecast?
The stars will fall from heaven, and the sun will cease to shine, the
moon will be turned to blood, and fire mingled with hail will fall from heaven,
but the rest of the country will have sunny intervals and scattered showers. It’s ridiculous, of course. Anyway that’s why I’m going to show the Bible
books diagram again, but this time coloured in.
Each of the colours represents a different kind of literature and we need
to be aware of this so that we can read and understand them in different
ways. There are going to be 4 more
sermons in the OT series and each sermon is going to cover one coloured group
of books. The blue ones are the
first 5 books of the Law, often called the Law, but in addition to the legal
material they include poems, songs and narratives about the people of God. They tell a story that starts at creation and
ends with the people of
So, what are the positives about the OT? Why should we bother to read it? I would like to suggest 3 reasons. The first is because of Jesus’s attitude to it. Do you remember the temptations in the wilderness? Three times he quoted the book of Deuteronomy, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone’ . . . It is written ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God’” and so on. Jesus found it a powerful tool in helping him live his life close to God. But more than that, he considered that it had authority – “Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning made them male and female and said, For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife?” If it had authority for Jesus then clearly we need to take it seriously.
The second reason is because of the early church’s attitude to it. In Acts 18 it says, Apollos powerfully refuted the Jews in public, showing by the scriptures that the Messiah is God. And there are many other examples of this.
The third reason is that we need to know and understand the OT if we are properly to understand the New.
As an example of that I would like to take our reading from Romans 4. Many Christians, I guess, would say that the 2 testaments in the Bible represent two plans that God had for his world. Plan A shows how God wanted people to obey his law, and keeping the law was how to stay friends with God. The trouble was that plan didn’t work very well, so God had to send Jesus to sort it all out. That’s the NT – Plan B. Well, I’m afraid our reading from Romans 4 shows that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Bible’s story. What it says is that there was one plan all along, and that plan is for God’s people to trust in God’s promises. What Genesis 15 says is echoed in Romans 4 “Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness”. I’ve put up verse 23&24 on the screen to help make it clearer. The words “it was credited to him” were written not for Abraham alone, but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness – for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead”. Can you see how these verses bracket Abraham – the greatest OT patriarch – with us? Abraham was saved by faith, and so were Moses, Elijah and all the OT heroes of faith. It’s always been by faith and not as a result of good deeds. Abraham was a great man of God but there were times in his life when he let God down, but God still accepted him because he trusted in God. That’s exactly what the NT teaches. So, the OT is all about the great unfolding of what it means to be accepted by God. Contrary to what many people say the God of the OT isn’t different from the God of the NT. He is the same yesterday and today and forever.
Yes, there are parts of the OT that are difficult for us to understand. But there’s a lot of truth in the saying I was taught many years ago by a gentle and godly man I used to know. “The New is in the Old concealed. The Old is in the New revealed”.