College Study #87: "Making Sense of the Old Testament"

‘Behold, the Lamb of God’

ide o amnos tou theou

College Study

87^th teaching

9.29.2014

 

“Making Sense of the Old Testament”

 

          Review:

                    So we’re still making our way through the Life of Christ and through the Pre-Incarnate State. We’ve talking about His appearing and His anticipation throughout the Old Testament times. We’ve seen that Jesus appeared in the form of Theophanies, or rather Christophanies, and that He was anticipated by the many Old Testament prophets.

                   Along the same lines of prophecy, what was our subject last week (a specific kind of prophecy? Messianic prophecy, that is prophecies concerning the coming of the Messiah. Our title from last time was “Desire of Nations”, a phrase borrowed from the book of Haggai. Now, let’s try to think back to last week: What is the point of prophecy (really the same as the point of the Bible)? What was the book of Haggai about, or what was his message? What does the word Messiah mean? Anointed One or Chosen One. What is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word for Messiah? What is the difference between foreshadowing and prophecy? What’s an example of a type or foreshadow of Christ in the Old Testament? What is the Protoevanglium? Then we talked about the Prophet, the Davidic Descendant, the Suffering Servant and the Triumphant King, all of them prophecies about the coming Christ. We finished up talking about Christ being the Desire of Nations and asking ourselves whether He is also the Desire not only of Nations, but of our own hearts; and we applied the words of Haggai to ourselves “Is it time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses and this temple to lie in ruins?” and how we need to prioritize God’s will and service above our own plans. (I think Pastor Mike definitely echoed that at the end of the Sunday services, if you recall)

          End of Review                                                                            

 

          So this is where we’re headed. We’re now at the crossroads. We’ve gone through the Life of Christ, the appearing and the anticipation, and now we’re ready to leap into the New Testament and witness the Incarnation and get on with the Life of Christ… but not so fast.

          I think it would be appropriate to make a few closing remarks on the Old Testament before we jump into the New. Let’s get a better understanding of the Old Testament before we move on.

          Turn to Hebrews 10. What better book of the New Testament shines some light of understanding upon the Old Testament than the book of Hebrews? Hebrews emphasizes a clear understanding of the Old Testament and quotes from it many, many times, putting the Old Testament into perspective under the New.

          Read Hebrews 10:1-10 and note the references to the Old Testament concepts like the law and sacrifices and priests. Hebrews puts these things into perspective with Christ.

          More on this passage later.

          But I think that for many Christians the Old Testament can be a challenge. Maybe the Old Testament is a challenge to you. I mean what do you know about it? It may seem to you like uncharted waters. And you really can’t blame someone for thinking that.

          There are times when the Old Testament becomes an absolute challenge to read, whether you’re skimming your way over brutally unpronounceable names and genealogies or you’re rushing through the admittedly over-detailed laws of how to dispose of a garment that has mold in it. Or you’re reading and you find yourself reading over an obscure historical event wherein this king did this and this army came in and won and this guy died and you say to yourself in the honesty of your own heart: “well, who really cares about all this?” I mean, what does it all mean?

          I like the bishop-scholar N.T. Wright’s metaphor of the Old Testament as a house, an old house that has many different rooms. It’s a large house with many pictures and furniture and belongings in it that were owned by people who lived there before the people that live there now, many generations of people who died and left their marks behind. It’s as if you’ve been invited to live in that house now, and you’ve got to find your way through all of the rich history of the people who have gone before you.

          The Old Testament is like that house with an incredibly rich but foreign history to it. But rather than make the attempt to read and understand the Old Testament, I think there’s many Christians who simply avoid it entirely. And the sum of their knowledge of the Old Testament may come from these two mooks: Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber.

          Now nothing against Veggie Tales, but men and women, it’s a show for children. So what we find in is that there are many Christian adults walking around with the theology of children, with a rudimentary and basic apprehension of the Old Testament.

          I mean, think about that for just a moment and let the thought shock you by putting it into other terms. Imagine if doctors, who are charged with medically saving human lives, had the working medical knowledge of an eight-year-old. How comfortable would you feel in the hands of a doctor who had posters of children’s games like Operation on his office wall in place of real anatomical charts?

          Yet we as Christians are “charged” with preaching the gospel in order to help save human souls. We simply cannot afford, or rather others cannot afford, for us to be walking around with the theology of an eight-year-old. Oh we know lots of the stories, we’ve heard them over and over: we know about David and Goliath, about Noah’s Ark, about the Garden of Eden, about Daniel and the Lion’s den… but do we really know what are these stories about? What are they in this book for? Why are they important? How do they fit into God’s storyline and plan for salvation?

          See we may know a few stories here and there, but that’s about it, and the rest of it remains a dim and obscure shadow of ignorance. Some weeks back, we confronted the admission that we simply don’t know a large chunk of the Bible specifically that has to do with prophecy, a chunk as large as 25%. That’s 25% of the Bible you might know absolutely nothing about, because we hardly ever touch the prophetic books. They’re weird. They’re too hard to read.

          By extension of the same idea, what about the Old Testament? That’s what, between 60% and 70% of the entire Bible that remains closed to us aside from a few scattered stories we remember out of colouring books from Sunday school? Ladies and Gentlemen, it need not be so.

          There is a plague sweeping across the nation. It’s not the entovirus. It’s not chicken pox. It’s biblical illiteracy. Christianity today is characterized by people who have very strong opinions, but don’t really know why they believe those opinions. Christianity is characterized by people who simply no longer know the book of their faith, and by extension then no longer know how to act like a Christian, be changed like a Christian, behave and think and feel and have their identities like Christians. Really you can trace almost any problem you might be facing now, whether it’s a sense of isolation or doubts or depression or aimlessness or a sense of valuelessness or even matters of physical exhaustion to a root problem of biblical illiteracy. And how ironic that this is even a problem in an age when the text of the Bible is at our fingertips at any second, through any device; ironic that we know less in the information age.

          So then, let’s fight back. Let’s fight against this plague, against biblical illiteracy, targeting tonight our knowledge of the Old Testament before we take any step further to move on into the new.

          Here’s our title for tonight: “Making Sense of the Old Testament”.

          How do we make sense of it all? What kind of frameworks can we use to help us place each passage and story and character into the big picture?

          Tonight we’ll look at a framework for understanding the Old Testament, but first let’s ask ourselves: What is the Old Testament?

          Simply put, the Old Testament is a library of ancient Hebrew texts. It is not a single book no more than the Bible is a single book. Rather, it is a collection of books, written by different authors over a great length of time. Also, the collection of books in the Old Testament span different subjects and literary styles: for example, there are historical books and then there are prophetic books; there are books of poetry and music and books of wisdom and philosophy.

          That right there provides some of the difficulty in reading it. It’s a very large collection of works and because it is so large it can seem cumbersome and hard to get a grasp on. Now let me admit from the get go that I’ve always loved the Old Testament. For me, I’ve had a harder time reading the New Testament than the Old. I like the narrative of the Old Testament as literature rather than the discourse and exposition of the New Testament.

          Doesn’t mean I don’t like the New Testament. Not at all. But in my past, I’ve always gravitated to the Old Testament more than the New, for some reason. Heck, the first book I ever taught through in an actual Bible study was the book of Numbers, which I still think is one of the best books in the whole Bible. But now, I get to share my love for the Old Testament in hopes that it will help you, if you’re struggling with it, to get a better grasp on understanding it.

          So the Old Testament, though, is a collection of ancient Hebrew texts, inspired by God and included in one place in the Bible under the title “Old Testament”.

          Next question: Why call it that? Why is it called the Old Testament as opposed to the New Testament? Is it just that it has older books than the New Testament?

          Well, that’s true that the Old Testament books are older and more ancient, but that’s not the reason why. In fact, “Old Testament” is not even its original name. This collection of ancient Hebrew works was known as the Tanakh, sometimes referred to as the Hebrew Bible. Actually, the word Tanakh was an ancient Hebrew acronym, based on the first Hebrew letter of each of the three traditional sections in it: the Torah, the Nevi’im, and the Ketuvim or TNK… TaNaKh.

          So if that was what it was originally called, why don’t we still call it that? Why call it the “Old Testament”?

          Turns out that the word “testament” is an old English word that means “covenant”. In Latin, the word testamentum was used to translate the original Greek and Hebrew words for covenant, and sine we get our English from the Latin, the old and new covenants became the old and new testaments. So really, we could even divide our Bibles and call the first part the Old Covenant and the second part the New Covenant, referring first to the old agreement of man trying please God under the works of the law and then second to the new agreement of grace that came by Christ’s blood. That’s specifically what the two Testaments are referring to when they are called the Old and the New: the Law (the Old) and then Grace (the New).

          Now another question: How essential is the Old Testament?

          I remember once meeting a Christian who refused to read the Old Testament. He was a young man who had the excuse that Christ fulfilled the law. That’s what he said, and he believed that meant he didn’t have to read the Old Testament, wouldn’t be expected to and shouldn’t even think about it.

          He also told me that Jesus wasn’t Jewish, so I think he had a few theological and historical glitches, but that’s another story.

          To the answer the question, how essential is the Old Testament, we must realize that it is absolutely essential! Imagine if you walked into a movie at the half-way point. You’ve got hardly any idea about what’s happened in the first part of the movie. You missed out on the characters and setting being set up. You don’t understand what the conflict of the story is or where it’s going.

          So you walk in to the theatre to watch Disney’s Lion King for the first time. You just see this adult lion named Simba living this carefree hippie life out in some jungle paradise with his two underachieving buddies Timone and Pumbaa. Then chick-lion shows up and gives Simba the googley-eyes and you hear the tender tones of “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” play, and you’re like “Alright, fine. Biology. Okay.” But then chick-lion tells Simba about his uncle or something and about how he took over? And you’re like “What? Simba you got a good thing going on here, you don’t need no woman to bring you down!” Ha, but really you get the point. Because you’ve missed the opening, the climax of the film and its ending will be confusing and shallow. It is just simply too difficult to appreciate the end of a piece of work, like Lion King, if you haven’t seen the beginning.

          Same thing with the Bible. Sometimes the New Testament may not shock us and stir up our hearts with joy because we’ve provided no backdrop for it. A diamond stands out stark against a black velvet backdrop, and so too the grace of the New Testament stands out incredibly brilliant against the dark backdrop of all the condemnation of the Law and the failure of men to live up to it that fills the Old Testament.

          Think in terms of a house once more. But imagine the whole Bible as a house now. The Old Testament is like a foundation and the walls of that house, and the New Testament is like the ceiling and roof of that house. The New Testament is the climax of the Old Testament. The New Testament completes the Old Testament, like the ending completes the beginning of a story, or like the roof completes the dwelling place of a house.

          Without the walls and foundation, what have you got? A wall-less house? That’s a gazebo. And you can’t live in a gazebo. So too, you can’t live in a Christianity, folks, where you don’t have the foundation, or vice versa the roof. You need a complete knowledge of the Bible. You need to know this book. How can you expect to live if you haven’t got the foundation, the walls or the roof?

          Now to prove to you visually how appropriate it is to think of the Old and New Testaments as being complementary and fitting together, check out this beautiful image. Anyone try to guess what it is?

          It’s a chart. The gray lines along the bottom represent all of the chapters in the Bible from Genesis to Revelation and all of the coloured lines are every time one chapter in the Bible references another chapter in the Bible. Look at how many lines there are! The Bible totally references itself, over and over, again. It fits together. Though it is a collection of many works, it is totally one single work at the same time.

          This other chart shows different colored lines to represent the New Testament referencing the Old and the Old the New.

          So then, how can we expect to understand and appreciate the New Testament unless we understand the Old? And how can we hope to make sense of the Old unless we read it’s completion and fulfillment in the New? In that respect, the Old Testament is absolutely essential. It’s not something you can ignore. You can’t blow it off just because it’s difficult to read. Study it until you understand it, or you will be doomed to confusion and this whole Christianity thing will make no sense and you’ll be one more casualty among millions who have succumbed to the plague of biblical illiteracy.

          We’ve seen that the Old Testament is a collection of ancient Hebrew texts, and that it is called the Old Testament because it is about the Old Covenant in the Law and how people failed to live up to the Law, and we’ve seen that we have to understand this book. We don’t have any option otherwise. That doesn’t mean you have to know absolutely everything about the Bible, since we’ll always be learning. I guess the point is: keep learning. Don’t give up on these precious words of life.

          Now we know what the Old Testament is, why it’s called what it’s called and the importance of knowing it, but how can we provide a framework for knowing it?

          Consider that the best way above all else is to simply read it. And in that respect it’s not that hard. You don’t have to make this long pilgrimage to a holy site, or flagellate yourself with whips, or meditate motionless for hours on the hard floor, or chant vain prayers over and over again, or nearly any of the other things that other religions force their adherents to do in order to be better believers. All you have to do is read. In comparison to whipping yourself, that’s not that bad, even if the language is a little difficult. Stop being a whiner! ;)

          So best way to get an understanding of the Old Testament is read it. Read your Bibles.

          But let’s keep three other things in mind. If you can remember these three things, I think that it will greatly help you to understand the Old Testament.

          Thing One, remember Content.

          The Old Testament is written in sections and whole groups of books fit into these sections. Knowing what these sections are can help you figure out what it is you’re reading, based on what book you’re in exactly. Say you’re reading Isaiah, you know then that this is a prophetic book. Okay, so it’s about prophecy and it has a historical backdrop. Say you’re reading Proverbs, it’s a book of writings or wise sayings, so there’s no real historical backdrop to it and it’s not about prophecy.

          Let’s take a look at the Old Testament Content and break it up into sections. Flip over to your table of contents in your Bible.

          Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy are the first five books of the Bible and they’re referred to as the Five Books of Moses, since Moses was their author. They are also known as the Pentateuch. You can call this first section then: the Five Books or the Pentateuch. This is sort of like the introduction to the Old Testament, it’s got the creation, the fall of man, the choosing of Abram, the birth of the nation Israel and the giving of the Law for them to live by.

          The next section goes from Joshua all the way to Esther, twelve books. These books are known as the historical books. They cover the period of Israel’s history from the conquering of the Promised Land through the fall of the nation and then into their restoration after their exile ended. These historical books form the timeline and backdrop for all of the judges and the kings of Israel, and for all the writings of the psalms and proverbs and ecclesiastes, and for the messages of the prophets too. Most of the rest of the books in the Old Testament fit into this time period of history. So there you have the Historical Books.

          The third section is known as the Writings. These are philosophical and musical and proverbial works and they include Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs (or Solomon). These are the reflective passages of the Old Testament written by people who lived during the Historical Books. So you see that the Writings take place during the Historical Books, even though they’re included in the Bible after the Historical Books. That’s true of all of them except for Job, which probably took place sometime during the timeline of the book of Genesis.

          Fourth section you’ve got the Major prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel. Lamentations has to do with Jeremiah so it’s often included among the Major prophets group. Obviously, these are prophetic books and they take place during the same period of time as the Historical Books. You’ll notice if you read them that books like II Kings mention Isaiah and Jeremiah as prophets active during certain time periods. The best way to understand these prophetic works are to remember the times that they were written in and the then-contemporary things they referred to.

          Finally, you’ve got the Minor prophets, also known as the Twelve: Hosea to Malachi. As we mentioned before, they’re called “minor” simply because they’re books are much, much shorter and smaller in theme and scope than the Major prophets like Isaiah. The Twelve are some of the most mysterious books to us in the whole Bible because, one, we hardly ever touch them and, two, they can be notoriously difficult to understand, but they refer to some incredible things that we neglect to our shame.

          So there you have it, the whole Old Testament in just five parts: the Pentateuch, the Historical Books, the Writings, the Major Prophets and the Minor Prophets. So always remember the Content of the Old Testament.

          Second thing to help you understand the Old Testament: Thing Two, remember Context. By context, I mean storyline.

          Did you know that there’s a single unifying storyline throughout the Old Testament? What is it? In a nutshell it is this: God made man to have fellowship with Him but man sinned against God and broke that bond of fellowship, so God enacts a plan that spans many generations to bring the Savior into the world. God chooses a specific man, Abraham, and creates through him a group of people, Israel, who would live under God’s laws and be God’s light to the world (that’s the Pentateuch). Israel became a great kingdom and produced wisdom and songs (the Writings). But Israel failed to keep God’s laws and God sent prophets to them to warn them about the coming judgment. When they wouldn’t turn back to God, the Lord destroyed that nation and sent them into exile. When they returned, God wanted to restore them and sent more prophets to them to encourage them to rebuild the ruined walls and the temple (that’s the Historical Books, and the Major and Minor prophets). The Old Testament ends awaiting the coming Savior that God had promised as far back as Adam and Eve.

          That’s a single storyline from start to cliffhanger ending: Man sins, God promises a Savior. God raises up Israel. Israel fails and awaits the Savior. That’s it. The Old Testament is there to whet your appetite for the Savior. The Old Testament shows how the Law failed to make anyone righteous and that no one could keep it, and thus increased the awareness of a need for the Savior.

          Don’t look at the details until you get the big picture. All the weird names and the strange events have a point and a purpose so much as they fit into the whole grand total and sum of the Old Testament. Always ask of any Old Testament passage how it fits into God’s grand scheme of things, how David and Goliath fits into the whole storyline.

          So always remember Content, the sections of the Old Testament; always remember Context, the storyline of the Old Testament. Finally, third thing, remember Christ. Content, Context and Christ.

          This takes us back to what we first read about in Hebrews 10. Remember how it compared the sacrifices under the old covenant, the blood of bulls and goats that could not take away sins, to the final perfect sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ. That passage compares an old covenant concept to a new covenant truth: animal sacrifices under the law to the crucifixion of the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, by which came grace.

          But in that same passage, these words are attributed to Christ when He came into the world: “Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, but a body You have prepared for Me. In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin You had no pleasure. Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come—In the volume of the book it is written of Me—to do Your will, O God’.” (Hebrews 10:5-7)

          Interestingly, Jesus says that in the volume of the book it is written of Him, in other words, that the Scriptures, the Old Testament, are written about Him. Elsewhere in John 5:39, “You search the Scriptures for in them you think you have eternal life, but these Scriptures talk about Me.”

          Thus when we read the Old Testament we should look for Jesus, in the prophecy, in the foreshadows and in the stories of the Old Testament.

          So here’s what we’re going to do with the remainder of our time together. Let’s go through the books of the Old Testament and very briefly touch on a couple facts about each one, seeing how they each fit together like the pieces of a puzzle played out over thousands of years. We’ll see how each part advances or enriches the story and how Christ can be seen in each book. For those of you who have shied away from the Old Testament, take a deep breath, and prepare for some discoveries.

          Genesis

          What do you know off-hand about Genesis?

          Where does it fit? It’s the first of the Five Books of Moses. The title Genesis means “origin”. This is a book about origins. Genesis starts with the creation of the universe and ends with the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob living in the land of Egypt.

          A great quote out of this book is Genesis 15:6, “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.”

          Jesus Christ is seen in Genesis as the promised Seed of the Woman, a prophetic phrase we looked at last week.

          Exodus

          What do you know about Exodus?

          It is the second of the Five Books of Moses. The title for Exodus refers to the exiting of Israel out of their slavery in Egypt.

          Exodus starts off with the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, called the children of Israel, in bondage in Egypt where the Pharaoh is oppressing them. Through a powerful series of plagues, God uses Moses to deliver Israel out of slavery and take them into the wilderness where they can receive the Law to govern their society and faith.

          In it, Jesus is seen as the Deliverer of God’s people, just like Moses delivered His people out of Egypt.

          Leviticus

          What do we know about Leviticus?

          It may be one of the most unpopular books in the whole Bible. It is the third of the Five Books of Moses. The title Leviticus is a reference to the Levites, one of the tribes within this new people group called Israel. It’s easy to remember then what Leviticus is all about, just remember that the Levites were the priests for Israel. Leviticus, then, is about the rules for the priests. It takes place during Israel’s stay at Mount Sinai as seen in the previous book, Exodus.

          Leviticus includes things like how to do the sacrifices, and the dietary laws, laws about intercourse and what to do with cleanliness and diseases.

          Jesus is seen in Leviticus in a powerful way, since Jesus was called the Lamb of God. That title takes us right back to Leviticus of all places and reminds us that the blood of Jesus washes away our sin, something which the blood of the animals under the old covenant could never completely do.

          Numbers

          What do we know about Numbers?

          It is the fourth of the Five Books of Moses. The title Numbers refers to the multiples times a census, or counting, of the peoples of Israel is taken, sort of like an assessment of the size of their camp and their army. That’s because Numbers goes from the ending of the receiving of the Law and through the wilderness wandering of 40 years to the border of the Promised Land that God swore He would give to Abraham’s descendants.

          The people are all prepared, they’ve got their laws, their priests, and they are organized. But they fail to enter the land the first time and are sentenced to wander the desert for 40 years. That’s a potent warning against unbelief.

          Jesus is seen in the book of Numbers as the pillar of Cloud and Fire that guided and protected the people through the wilderness, even in their time of rebellious wandering. Think about that, Christ has your back even when you act like a total jerk and rebel against Him.

          Deuteronomy

          What do we know about Deuteronomy?

          It’s the fifth and final of the Five Books of Moses. The title is Latin for “second law”. Now it’s not that they threw out the first law and had to get a second one. This is sort of a re-emphasizing and re-assessment of the warnings and rules of the Law. It is also Moses’ last words, since he could not enter the Promised Land where they now stood at the borderline.

          In it, Moses prophesies of a coming Prophet like him. Jesus is that promised Prophet.

          Joshua

          Joshua is the book that opens up the Historical Books, the section on the history of this newly formed nation of Israel. Joshua was the servant of Moses who becomes Israel’s leader once Moses dies, and Joshua leads Israel into the Promised Land and conquers the forces of the debaucherous heathen nations that dwelt there. So Joshua begins when they enter the Land goes through the invasion campaign and division of the land into different territories for each tribe and it ends when Joshua dies.

          During the invasion, you’ve got an appearance of the Commander of the LORD’s Army, which we saw was a visible appearance of the Pre-incarnate Jesus Christ to Joshua. So you’ve got Jesus as the Commander of the LORD’s Army.

          Judges

          After Joshua’s death, the time of the judges proved to be a dark age for the nation of Israel. Moses was dead. Joshua was dead. Now they found themselves leaderless and unable to govern themselves. They became wicked and followed after the heathen gods, the gods of the people they were to conquer, and God would punish them until they cried out and God would send a deliverer in to save them. These deliverers were the judges, miscellaneous people sent by God to save Israel out of the hands of their enemies. Famous judges were Samson and Gideon.

          The Book of Judges contains a cyclical series, wherein the people sinned, God judged, the people cried out and God sent a judge to deliver them, then years would pass and it would start over again with the people sinning.

          In Judges, Jesus Christ is seen in the judges themselves, since Jesus is the One who will Judge all the earth, the living and the dead.

          Ruth

          Ruth is a neat little book, most often referenced by women’s studies for some weird reason, tucked in after Judges. Ruth actually takes place during the same time as the book of Judges and is sort of like a snapshot into a few specific lives during that dark time. It follows the story of a woman named Ruth whose husband dies and she returns to Israel with her mother-in-law Naomi and is rescued from poverty by Boaz, called a Kinsman Redeemer. Both Ruth and Boaz appear in the bloodline of Jesus Christ.

          And what’s more Jesus is seen in the life of Boaz as the Kinsman Redeemer.

          First and Second Samuel

          Originally, both first and second Samuel were one book in the Hebrew Bible. These books are named after the prophet Samuel, a central figure in the earliest part. First Samuel takes us from the time of the judges through to Israel demanding God for a king, to the election of Saul as the first king of Israel, to Saul’s failure and the election of King David, to Saul’s tragic death at the end of the book. So First Samuel contains the rise and fall of King Saul and the rise of Israel’s greatest king: David.

          Second Samuel continues the story of the life of David. David went from humble beginnings as a shepherd boy through to a king over God’s people, and because he was a man after God’s own heart, he became the greatest of Israel’s kings and helped to usher in a golden age for Israel and put away the dark age of the judges and the ruins left behind by Saul’s failed life. Second Samuel ends with the waning years of David’s life as he has grown old. Throughout his lifetime, David wrote many of the songs collected in the book of Psalms.

          In Second Samuel, God promises to David that one of his descendants would sit on David’s throne forever in a kingdom that would never end. The fulfillment of that Davidic prophecy is in Christ, who will rule over the future kingdom from David’s throne. The books of Samuel show us Jesus as the Son of David.

          First and Second Kings

          The Books of the Kings are, obviously, all about the kings of Israel. First Kings opens with David’s death in old age and the rise of his son Solomon to the throne. Solomon was a wise king and brought Israel to the height of its wealth and glory. Solomon built the Temple for God. But Solomon also gave his heart away to many wives and to foreign gods, and his heart wasn’t solely the Lord’s like his father David’s was. So Solomon’s failure to love the Lord with all his heart began a downward trend of failed lives with king after king after king, some good but many wicked, and the division of the nation of Israel into two separate countries: Israel in the North and Judah in the South. First and Second Kings emphasizes the failure of the people to keep the Law of God and the failure of the Law to save anyone.

          During this period is when many of the prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah warned the people of God’s coming judgment. By the time Second Kings comes to a close, that judgment comes. Israel in the North has already been conquered by Assyria and Judah is the next to go, being carried away into exile by the Babylonians, a time period covered by the book of Daniel.

          Clearly, the failure of all these human kings reminds us of the failure of so many governments in history to lead their people as God would have them do. First and Second Kings makes us anticipates Jesus, the King of Kings, to come and be Lord over this earth and over His people.

          First and Second Chronicles

          The title Chronicles means “a historical record”. These books are unique in that they don’t really advance the story further but they go back and retell much of Israel’s history and enrich it with additional perspective and detail. Think of the Chronicles as the same story told from a different point of view.

          Chronicles begins with a genealogy starting with Adam and Chronicles ends with the proclamation of King Cyrus of Persia to allow Israel to return to their land and rebuild the temple that had been destroyed.

          Although Chronicles retells much of the time of the books of Kings, Chronicles unlike Kings ends with a note of hope and restoration, and so we’re reminded that Jesus is our Hope in the very darkest times, that everything we believe in rests on Jesus Christ.

          Ezra

          Continuing the story, Ezra tells of the return of the exiles to Jerusalem from their 70 year captivity in Babylon. They come back to Jerusalem, Israel’s former capital city, and they rebuild the temple under the leadership of the governor Zerubbabel, and then they rebuild the spiritual condition of the people under the scribe Ezra, for whom this book is named.

          The book of Ezra sees the return of the exiles, the completion of the temple-restoration, and the putting away of pagan wives that the men of Israel had taken for themselves.

          In Ezra, they rebuild the temple and we’re reminded that Jesus is the Builder a temple today, a spiritual house as the apostle Peter put it, comprised not of brick and mortar but of the members of the church.

          Nehemiah

          This book is named for the man Nehemiah, a contemporary of Ezra, and one of the exiles to return to the Land. Though Ezra focused on rebuilding the temple for the people’s spiritual needs, Nehemiah focused on rebuilding the walls around Jerusalem for the people’s physical needs.

          In Nehemiah, the spiritual condition of the people continues to be restored. They hold the ancient feasts days again. Ezra reads to them the Books of the Law. Nehemiah is all about reformation.

          We’re reminded by Nehemiah that Jesus is not only the Builder, but also the Restorer. Jesus takes broken lives and makes them new. He takes sinners and makes us a new creation.

          Esther

          The last of the historical books, Esther is a Hebrew woman during the time of the exile who helps to save God’s people from destruction. Her story is a neat little standalone episode that marks what the time of the exile was like, specifically under the rule of the Persians.

          Though the book of Esther never mentions the name of God, the work of God is sensed behind the scenes orchestrating all the events by His providence so that His people could be preserved. Providence is key for the book of Esther.

          Esther herself who was willing to risk her life to save God’s people is a picture of Jesus Christ, who not only risked, but gave His life to make sinners God’s people.

         

          Well, we’ll have to stop here for this time and continue on next week. But take this thought with you on your way… Christians have sometimes been referred to as “the People of the Book”. Note that Christianity doesn’t have many of the “bells and whistles” of many of the wilder religions of the world. It is simplistic faith of a few key concepts and it is all based around one God, one Savior and one Book.

          The question I have for you at the end of this study is this: Can you call yourself one of the People of the Book? How much do you know your Bible? If the answer to that question is not looking that good, then you’ve got your work cut out for you and there’s nothing for it but to just get started.

          Rome was not built in a day and nobody ever became an instant expert of the Bible, but you’ll never become an expert of the Bible unless you get started reading and studying it. It’s as simple as that and there really are no excuses. When you boil it down, it’s really just that you and I don’t want to read it. That’s it. Just selfishness. At the end of the day Self is the only thing that stands in the way.

          So… get over your Self. Climb that wall. And read and know this Book. As Hosea the prophet said: “Let us know, let us press on to know the LORD.”