The Old Testament: Building Foundations (2 Timothy 3:15-17)

2 Timothy 3:16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Here’s where the fun begins. What scriptures is he talking about here? The Gospels? Revelation? We can look at the prior verse to get an idea.

15 and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

There’s a case to be made that early books of the NT were already being considered scripture; however, the only scripture available at the birth of Timothy is the Old Testament.

Why The Old Testament?

The OT gets a bad rap. It’s in the name “old”. It makes it sound like it’s out of date. However, I’m a huge fan of the OT. For one I love history, and the OT is filled with it. I’m that annoying guy who when people say, “This is the worst thing any American politician has ever done!” points out something like, “Aaron Burr was tried for treason for trying to start his own nation while the VP.”

It has all the action. Paul has his letters, but the OT has Samson slaying Philistines, The Flood, The Plagues. People being turned to salt. If the New Testament is Interstellar, then the OT is End Game. But most importantly the OT is foundation that Christianity is built on!

The Gospel

Let’s talk about one of the most foundational things in all of Christianity: the Gospel. If I were to ask the average person, “What is the Gospel?” I would probably get one of a couple answers like, “John 3:16,” or “the good news.” Let’s look at Paul’s description of the Gospel:

3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance[a]: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,

Twice Paul mentions the scriptures. Jesus died and rose again for our sins and was raised again according the scriptures. The Gospel is sowed all throughout the OT let’s look at perhaps the 1st example

14 So the LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, “Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.15 And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring[a] and hers; he will crush[b] your head, and you will strike his heel.”

Take a look what God is saying to the serpent. He’s telling the serpent that woman will have offspring and that offspring is going to crush the serpent’s head. Let’s look at one more out of Isaiah 53:

Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? 2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.3 He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. 4 Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. 5 But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. 6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

I would argue that there’s not a better description of Jesus than this.

Now, about sins… How do even know what sins are? In general, we would look at them as breaking a commandment. Again, those are from the OT.

The Old Testament Answers Some Big Questions

Do you ever wonder why God just doesn’t declare himself from the mountain tops? Why not make some grand gesture and remove all doubt? The OT has the answer.

• After the plagues in Egypt and the crossing the Red Sea, the Israelites sing a song of praise. Yet 3 days later, the people are complaining about the lack of water. 11 days later they complain about a lack of food. 3 months later they make a new God who they claim brought them out of Egypt It seems that having wonders and miracles is enough to get a pig headed people across a dessert, but not enough to build the kind of faith God wants.

• Job deals with the big question of why do bad things happen to good people

• Ecclesiastes deals with leaning on wisdom

• Song of Songs deals with love or women with goats teeth, that one I’m not completely clear on.

In Conclusion

Normally I would close with something for you think about. I’m a big fan of “how is it with you?”

This time I don’t have a big call. Rather, I would like it if you were to give the OT another try.

Open it up, maybe read Exodus as family. I think if you give a try with Jesus in mind, you might be surprised at the nuggets you will find

PRAYER TIME

The Old Testament also speaks of repentance, which is our theme this month. Let’s spend some time in prayer before we close with a few songs.

Psalm 32

1 Blessed is the one whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered.2 Blessed is the one whose sin the Lord does not count against them and in whose spirit is no deceit.

Take a moment to thank God for his faithful forgiveness. If you can name the sin, even better.

3 When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. 4 For day and night your hand was heavy on me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. 5 Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.” And you forgave the guilt of my sin.

Take a moment to acknowledge and uncover your sin, and pray for the faithful forgiveness of Christ. Be as specific as possible.

6 Therefore let all the faithful pray to you while you may be found; surely the rising of the mighty waters will not reach them. 7 You are my hiding place; you will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance.8 I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my loving eye on you. 9 Do not be like the horse or the mule, which have no understanding but must be controlled by bit and bridle or they will not come to you.

Take a moment to pray that God helps you to kneel before the cross willingly and not stubbornly, remembering that you alone offer the true song of deliverance.

10 Many are the woes of the wicked, but the Lord’s unfailing love surrounds the one who trusts in him. 11 Rejoice in the Lord and be glad, you righteous; sing, all you who are upright in heart!

Thank God for his unfailing love: you are righteous only because He has the power to declare repentant sinners righteous. He has the power to take the fallen wicked heart and turn it into an upright heart. Rejoice at not only the forgiveness of God, but on the life, hope and joy on the other side of repentance.

GCengage: Is God A Monster?

Richard Dawkins famously wrote: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

That kind of accusation makes sense coming from someone who wants to discredit Gd and the Bible. However, it's not just the atheists who struggle with the Old Testament. I was raised in a pacifist Mennonite community, and there were just large sections of the Old Testament that nobody talked about in polite company. We read the story about David and Goliath with as much detachment and inner condemnation as we could. We wondered how much we should cheer for David’s mighty men, who were the elite forces of their day. We cheered when Sampson brought the temple down, but with some guilt.  So what do you think we did with all the God-ordained wars in the Old Testament?

Nothing.

We loved Jesus when he said “love your enemy” and “turn the other cheek,” but God? God in the Old Testament was sometimes treated like the crazy uncle who shows up at family reunions. Nobody really knows how to interact with him or explain him to others.

From a Christian apologetics standpoint, this issue is important. I think many Christians remain as confused as I was. But this is an crucial topic to address because those outside the faith aren’t letting this one slide – and rightly so. How could God be “good” if he commanded so much evil? This is the question we must be prepared to answer.

So how do we understand a sometimes confusing Old Testament God, and how do we respond to critics such as Dawkins? Let's tackle this issue by looking closely at this critique of God. In the process, we will see that the God of the Old Testament is not a God for which we need to apologize, but is rather a God who loves the world.

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The accusation: "God’s actions as seen in the Bible are incompatible with his character as described in the Bible (with genocidal wars, etc). Either he doesn’t exist, the Bible is hopelessly muddled, or God is a monster.”

First Response: “Is it possible that God knows things and/or has reasons that our beyond our ability to understand, but would make sense if we knew them?”

Sometimes we read stories about alleged police brutality or wartime atrocities, then find out later that the police were justified in what they did. We didn’t have the whole story. Of course, we get in trouble in a lot of situations precisely because we are not God – we don’t have perfect knowledge, and justice, and mercy, etc. But if God has all these things (which is the Christian claim), isn’t it possible that if we knew what God knew, we would understand? This is a modest point, but an important one.

Second Response: “Let’s clarify what we are talking about before we go any further. What do you mean by good and evil?”

The most popular atheist writers today are very outspoken about things they think are wrong, while at the same time claiming there either is no such thing, or that morality is just a personal or cultural preference.

• “Morality is a collective illusion of humankind put in place by our genes in order to make us good cooperators.” – Michael Ruse

• “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect of there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”  - Richard Dawkins

• In an interview with Skeptic, Frank Miele asked Mr. Dawkins,“How do you determine whether something is good or not, other than by just your personal choice?” Dawkins responded, “I don’t even try.”

In other words, atheists are criticizing God for being evil when compared to some sort of universal standard - which they don’t believe in. I point this out not to belittle the people holding this position, but to highlight the problem with the criticism. Not liking what God does is very different from God being evil.

Third Answer: "When the Old Testament is read properly, it becomes clear that God in not a monster at all."

Paul Copan has written a book called Is God A Moral Monster? In it, he notes some key things to remember as we think of God in the Old Testament, specifically when it comes to the issue of war. I have written on this in detail at TC Apologetics, but I will summarize here:

•  There were justifiable reasons for cultures to be judged.

• God waited and warned the people involved (for example, the high priest Mechizadech lived in Canaan in the city of Salem).

• The Jewish nation exercised lex talionis (a principle which says that punishment cannot exceed the crime). What other nations had done to others was now being done to them.

• Biblical “war texts” record a dispossession of people and destruction of worldview centers. God was destroying sinful cultural strongholds and their perpetrators (priests and military) while dispersing the population.

• God commanded the Israelites to accept immigrants from these nations, clearly showing God was not interested in genocide.

• We continue to see favorable references to people from all nations living in Israel after the wars.

This is not a history of genocide, but of the salvation of an area of the world from specific cultures that were some of the most brutal on record in human history. In an interview with Lee Strobel, Paul Copan quoted Miroslav Volf, a Croatian who lived through unspeakable violence during ethnic strife in the former Yugoslavia. I think his perspective contains great insight into the nature of God:

“I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days!

How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.”

This is one of the messages of the anger of God in the Old Testament: God is not indifferent with respect to those who suffer human cruelty. Is it possible to conceive of a being who embodies love but does not become outraged at injustice? And while not every injustice in this life is addressed immediately, God’s plan offers at least a hope that justice will have its day, if not in this life then the life to come.

“Human anger at injustice will carry less weight and seriousness if divine anger at injustice in the service of life is not given its proper place. If our God is not angry, why should we be? That God would stoop to become involved in such human cruelties as violence is…. not a matter for despair, but of hope. God does not simply give people up to experience violence. God chooses to become involved…so that evil will not have the last word.” – Terence Fretheim

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Recommended Resources

Tactics, Greg Koukl

Is God A Moral Monster? Paul Copan

“How Could God Command Genocide in the Old Testament?” Justin Taylor, at the Gospel Coalition

“Killing The Canaanites,” Clay Jones

TC Apologetics: God of War Series (tcapologetics.org)

TC Apologetics: The Shape of Reality (Identifying Evil)