‘Behold, the Lamb
of God’
ide
o amnos tou theou
College Study
88th teaching
10.6.2014
“Making Sense of
the Old Testament”
Part II
Review:
Last week, before we moved on
into the New Testament, we held a study which we called “Making Sense of the
Old Testament”. Our honestly admitted that we have some difficulty with reading
and understanding the Old Testament, making sense of its many stories and
characters and events, and placing them in any significant way into the Bible
storyline as a whole. It’s almost as if we took a good look at the whole Old
Testament just like you might look at the whole picture on the front of a
jigsaw puzzle box before diving in to try to make sense of all the individual
pieces.
Why did we spend a whole night doing this? Because
we realized that we run the risk of walking around with about as much bare
knowledge of the Old Testament as you might get from Veggie Tales, that we might grow up and retain a kind of children’s
theology even as adults. So to battle the plague of biblical illiteracy, we
attempted to get a big picture of the Old Testament and make sense of it all.
For if we don’t know the Old Testament, then that’s what? Some 60% to 70% of
the Word of God that we don’t know?
Do anybody remember what this picture depicts
(show chart)? It reminds us that the Bible fits together as a whole, the New
Testament completing the Old Testament like a roof completing a house. And if
we’re to have a Christianity that we can live in, it must be like a house, with
walls and foundation and ceiling and roof. You can’t live in a house with no
walls, that’s a gazebo; you can’t live in a house with no ceiling, that’s just
a fenced-in yard. So then, the whole thing fits together, New and Old, and even
in the Old Testament, each of the individual pieces, the books and stories and
characters all fit together into one grand scheme.
So just what is the Old Testament? Why is it
called the Old Testament? What is a covenant? What is the Hebrew name for the
Old Testament? Tanakh, which is an acronym. And we talked about how essential
reading the Old Testament is; without it, it would be like walking into a movie
half-way through and expecting to understand or appreciate that movie.
And then remember I told you to remember three
things to provide a framework for understanding the Old Testament. Thing One
was Content. What does that mean? It means sections. How many sections are
there in the Old Testament? Five: the Pentateuch, the Historical Books, the
Writings, the Major Prophets and the Minor Prophets. Thing Two was Context, by
which we meant storyline. Can anyone give us a super-brief summary of the
storyline of the Old Testament? Thing Three was Christ. Remember to understand
the Old Testament in terms of Content, Context and Christ. Jesus said that the
Scriptures testify or talk about Him.
What we did toward the end of our study last week
was examine in a nutshell what each of the books of the Old Testament contain
and what they’re about and what they say concerning Christ. Anyone remember how
far we got?
End
of Review
So
we still have our work cut out for us and so we don’t waste anytime and run the
risk of having a part three, let’s jump back into the flow of things with
tonight’s study entitled: “Making Sense of the Old Testament, part 2”.
We made it through the Pentateuch, aka
the Five Books of Moses, and we hustled through history with the Historical
Books from Joshua to Esther. With Esther, we come to the end of the actual
storyline, or history, included in the Old Testament. Almost everything else that lies ahead in the Old Testament—the
prophets and the writings—simply fall back on the history that we’ve already
covered, or in other words, the following books already occurred, took place
and were written during the timeline of the previous books. In that sense,
they’re parenthetical, like footnotes, upon everything that’s come before. You
might even think of the prophets and the writings as detailed flashbacks into
the history we’ve already covered.
As we cover each of these next books,
I’ll give you a key-phrase to sum up the book, a key-verse out of the book, and
we’ll of course consider how Christ is revealed in each book.
Since we left off with Esther and the
Historical Books, which section comes next? The Writings. And which book
follows Esther and opens this new section? One of my personal favorites…
JOB
What do we know about the book of Job?
A key-phrase that sums up the book of
Job is: the Problem of Suffering, or the Problem of Pain in the words of C.S.
Lewis. Job is not really a series of songs like the Psalms nor is it a series
of wise-sayings like Proverbs. Rather most of Job consists of philosophical and
theological speeches given by its main characters as they argue over the nature
of evil and why Job is suffering.
The book is named of course for its
main character, a man who probably lived during the time of the book of
Genesis, who it says was a blameless and upright man. The story begins when
Satan accuses Job of loving the Lord simply because he had been given great
blessings. God tests Job’s character by taking away those blessings. But Job still
blesses the Lord. Then Satan comes again, having been proven wrong, and accuses
Job basically of loving himself more than God. God allows Satan to take away
Job’s health, and Job is left unrecognizable, sitting on a pile of ashes,
covered from head to toe with painful boils and sores, scraping the puss of his
flesh with a broken piece of pot.
The rest of the books concerns Job’s
discussions with his three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, and a young man
named Elihu who joins the talk later on. Job’s “friends” accuse him of being
sinful and that’s why he’s suffering God’s punishment, only we’ve already been
told that this is no punishment, but it’s a test. Eventually God Himself shows
up and speaks to Job out of a whirlwind, bringing the debate to a close.
Strangely, the book of Job does not definitively answer the Problem of Pain and
give it a full explanation, but it’s conclusion is that in any suffering we are
to maintain our faith in God who allows things to happen for a reason.
A key-verse is Job 1:21, “And he [that
is, Job] said: ‘Naked I came from my
mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there. The LORD gave, and the LORD has
taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD’.” That really captures Job’s
heart throughout his story. He wrestles with complaints and despair but he does
not come to curse the LORD God.
Christ is seen in the book of Job when
Job complains that there is no mediator between him and God, nobody between
them to plead Job’s case before God. Job was then anticipating Jesus Christ,
the one mediator between God and man, the One to bridge the gap between fallen
humanity and the Creator. Christ is seen, then, as the Mediator.
PSALMS
What do we know about the book of
Psalms?
What is a Psalm, anyway? Well, a psalm
means a sacred song or hymn. A key-phrase for the Book of Psalms is: “Heart of
Worship”. This is the heart, the center, bringing together all these songs of
worship.
These psalms were originally sung or
recited as songs or poetry during Jewish and later Christian worship. That may
seem a little strange to some of us modern Christians, especially since we use
an overhead projector display to show the lyrics to any number of songs written
by any number of people, but the closest thing to the book of Psalms in modern
terms is the Hymnal that some churches use. I grew up as a Baptist and I loved
looking through the hymnals, books that collected various songs together. But some
of these psalms we ourselves still sing today; we sang a portion of Psalm 61
earlier tonight.
The Book of Psalms, then, is a
collection of psalms, a music book of sorts. It contains 150 songs that cover a
colossal range of emotions, subjects, situations and topics. Excitement, war,
peace, worship, judgment, prophecy, the Messiah, praise, joy and sorrow are
some of the many different flavors contained in the psalms, with each psalm
having a different theme just like songs have themes.
It a very human book, perhaps the most
human of all the Old Testament books, because it was written from the
perspective of some very heartfelt emotions. I’ve heard it said that you can
find any human experience in the book of Psalms.
In the original Hebrew language, this
book was known as the Sepher Tehillim,
“Book of Praises”, since almost every psalm contains some note of praise toward
God. In Greek, they named this book Psalmoi,
which meant “Poems Sung tot eh Accompaniment of Musical Instruments”. Very
specific, but that’s the root of where we get our English title: “Psalms.”
Many of the psalms were written by
King David, but there are other poets or psalmists mentioned: the sons of Korah
and the sons of Asaph, for example. King Solomon, David’s son, wrote a couple
psalms. Even Moses himself dabbled in poetry and wrote Psalm 90. So you see
that the book of Psalms collected these lyrics over the course of a long time
in history.
A key-verse out of Psalms is perhaps
the most famous of all the psalms, Psalm
23 by King David. “The LORD is my
shepherd; I shall not want.” Even that one opening line describes a
profound human experience: finding complete contentment and satisfaction in the
Lord as your shepherd, your guide and protector.
The psalms describe Jesus in so many
different ways. Take the famous example of Psalm
22, which describes Christ’s suffering the crucifixion: “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? …I
am poured out like water, and all My bones are out of joint… They pierced My
hands and My feet…” With so many other examples, let’s just take David’s Psalm 23, since Jesus Himself said He is the
Good Shepherd, reminding us of David’s psalm.
PROVERBS
What
do we know about the book of Proverbs?
If Psalms is the heart of the Old
Testament, then Proverbs is the mind. Psalms may be the “Heart of Worship”, but
Proverbs is the “Mind of Wisdom”. We’ll take that as our key-phrase.
Like Psalms, Proverbs is a collection,
not of songs but of wise-sayings, proverbs. There are many cultures that have
developed wise-sayings, but those of ancient Jewish origin are gathered here in
the Book of Proverbs. Most of these sayings are attributed to Solomon, no doubt
because he was gifted with great wisdom by the Lord. In fact, the original
Hebrew title was “Proverbs of Solomon”, though not all of the proverbs were
written by Solomon.
In the past we’ve described Wisdom as
good judgment, or practical knowledge. Wisdom is different from knowledge in
that Wisdom takes knowledge and does the right thing with it. You can’t just
look up wisdom in the same way you can look up facts: Wisdom has to be received
and remembered and lived out. Proverbs then, is an incredibly practical book.
As Psalms was an emotional book, Proverbs is a practical book about correct
living and conduct and ethics and behavior. On famous example is Proverbs
chapter 31, which describes the virtuous woman and her righteous habits and
lifestyle.
A key-verse out of Proverbs is the
rightly famous verse: “The fear of the
LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction”
(Proverbs 1:7). That ties all of the
wisdom in Proverbs back to the LORD, it all finds its place in living with God
as Lord, but it also says that it is foolish to despise wisdom and instruction.
Christ is seen in Proverbs where the
book anthropomorphizes Wisdom, capital “W”, as a person who was with God at the
Creation of the worlds and was the agent through which God made everything.
Jesus Christ is revealed in the New Testament as that same agent that made
everything, therefore Jesus is seen in Proverbs as the Wisdom of God.
ECCLESIASTES
What do we know about this book?
Its author identifies himself as “the Preacher, the son of David, king in
Jerusalem” which leads us to believe that this book was also written by
King Solomon. The title Ecclesiastes comes from the Latin word meaning “Speaker
Before an Assembly”, referring to the Speaker or Preacher that is the author of
the book.
Of the trilogy of books written by
Solomon: Song of Songs, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, it seems to me that Proverbs
characterizes the early part of Solomon’s life when he wisely lived for the
Lord, and then Song of Songs characterizes the part of Solomon’s life when he
began to fall in love, eventually with pagan women, and then finally
Ecclesiastes characterizes the final years of Solomon’s life with all the
feelings of emptiness and depression that he had earned from departing from God
and focusing on life under the sun.
In fact, that will be our key-phrase
for Ecclesiastes: “Under the Sun”. Ecclesiastes depicts human life as circular
and meaningless, vanity, without God. Ecclesiastes is a book written without
much of God in mind. The Preacher complains of the meaninglessness of life seen
in the shared fate of death for the wise and the fool, the brevity of life, the
worthlessness of pleasure, the fruitlessness of labor and selfish gain… but he
does conclude his book with a verse that we’ll take as our key-verse for
Ecclesiastes: “Let us hear the conclusion
of the whole matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is man’s all.”
(Ecc 12:13)
Solomon can say that, having seen all
the pleasure and the labor and toil through his life, he realizes only at the
end that man’s all is to fear God and keep His commandments.
Jesus is seen in Ecclesiastes as
really the Meaning of Life. What we
find in this book is that without Him, life under the sun is just meaningless.
Jesus gives life meaning. He is the Meaning of Life.
SONG
OF SONGS
Also
known as Song of Solomon, this is an ancient love song written by King Solomon.
It overflows with metaphor and allegory, picture-language relating to the
ancient Middle East culture, often in some very tender and very graphic terms.
If the Bible were made into a movie, the Song of Songs would definitely earn it
a rated-R explicit rating.
The title “song of songs” comes from
the very first words in the book. The title means “the song above all songs” or
“the best song”. Interesting that the Bible considers the best song ever to be
a love-ballad, a romantic song. God Himself is Love. Among the Writings, Song
of Songs stands unique. It’s not concerned with wisdom like Proverbs or
Ecclesiastes, or philosophy like Job, or even praise like the Psalms. It is
concerned with Romance, specifically a celebration of sexual love in the pure
and holy context of God’s description of marriage between one man and one
woman.
What I find most interesting is that
in many places in modern Christianity, sex is a dirty word. But it’s not. God
invented it and it is a good thing in the correct marital context. The Old
Testament itself celebrates it.
We’ll just say a good key-phrase for
Song of Songs is “the Love Song”.
A key-verse is found in 6:3, “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine…”
Traditionally, Song of Songs has been
interpreted as an allegory for the way that the LORD loves Israel His chosen
people. Later, Christians would interpret Song of Songs as a picture of how
passionately and tenderly Christ loves His bride, the Church, you and I. Thus
Christ is seen in Song of Songs as the
Lover of Your Soul.
*That brings us to the end of the
Writings section of the Old Testament: five books – Job, Psalms, Proverbs,
Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs. What section comes next?
ISAIAH
Isaiah
is the first of the Major Prophets. Simply put, Isaiah is galactic. It is
gigantic. It’s huge, but not just in the amount of words, verses and chapters
here, but also in Isaiah’s scope. His prophetic writings cover a vast amount of
historical area, themes and projections into the future.
Since Isaiah has 66 chapters and the
whole Bible has 66 books, some have compared Isaiah to a mini-Bible, the whole
Bible in capsule form, since it covers such a variety of different themes and
subjects. The first 39 chapters in Isaiah, like the 39 books of the Old
Testament, are full of judgment upon immorality and idolatry; but the final 27
chapters, like the 27 books of the New Testament, are filled with hope and
describe a Savior and His cross, and a Sovereign and His crown. A key-phrase
for Isaiah, then, is “the Miniature Bible”.
The book is named as all the following
prophetic books are named: for their authors. Isaiah is named for the prophet
Isaiah, who had an active ministry for about 40 years in Judah. Therefore,
Isaiah is a pre-exilic prophet, one who was active before the exile to Babylon.
His name is a shortened form of the phrase “Jehovah is salvation”. His name
perfectly summarizes his prophetic writings, since he begins with the sinful
plight of man and ends with the hope of the salvation provided not just by God but in God as Jesus Christ.
A key-verse is the famous prophetic
passage Isaiah 9:6, “For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son
is given; and the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name shall be
called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”
There is probably no other book in the
Old Testament that more looks forward to the coming Messiah than the book of
Isaiah. But since Isaiah depicts this Messiah as born of a virgin, as God with
us, as God and man, as a healer, as a light, as rejected and despised, and as
living forever, we can simply say in a general way that Jesus is seen in Isaiah
as the Coming Messiah. Everything
Isaiah has to say is included in that statement.
JEREMIAH
Jeremiah
was a prophet who was called by God when he was still a young man. Jeremiah’s
ministry occurred just after Isaiah’s. What characterizes Jeremiah’s message is
the heartbroken tone. Jeremiah was known as the Weeping Prophet. We’ll take
that as our key-phrase for Jeremiah, “the Weeping Prophet”. He proclaimed the
same message for forty years to a stubborn people that refused to turn away
from the doom that lay ahead of them. Just imagine the anguish Jeremiah felt,
seeming to be the only one crying out for repentance to a people who were marching
steadily toward their own destruction.
Jeremiah’s purpose in writing this
prophetic book is found in Jeremiah 5:19,
which we’ll take as a key-verse. “And it
will be when you say, ‘Why does the LORD our God do all these things to us?’
then you shall answer them, ‘Just as you have forsaken Me and served foreign
gods in your land, so you shall serve foreigners in a land that is not yours’.”
Apparently, part of Jeremiah’s mission was to explain the purpose of the
Babylonian exile to the people.
Not only did Jeremiah have to proclaim
this message to a people who refused to turn and repent, but he lived to see
his own prophetic warnings come to pass with the conquest of Judah by
Nebuchadnezzar. Not only that, but while he was ministering to the people, they
consistently rejected him. They beat him and threw him in the stocks. Later, he
was imprisoned, threatened with death, called a false prophet and thrown into a
cistern, that’s a big reservoir for holding water. No wonder Jeremiah was the
Weeping Prophet.
Still, Jeremiah proclaimed his message
not only of doom but of hope, prophesying of the coming Messiah who would be
called the Lord our Righteousness. That reminds us that Jesus Christ clothes us
in His righteousness and that we stand before God in Him. Jesus is seen in
Jeremiah as Our Righteousness.
LAMENTATIONS
The
Book of Lamentations, a word which means a passionate expression of grief, and
is sort of the sequel to the book of Jeremiah. It is also known as the
Lamentations of Jeremiah, a black five-poem dirge where Jeremiah lets loose his
emotions. Lamentations cries over the destruction of Jerusalem, the very thing
that Jeremiah warned against all throughout his book. Now it has come to pass.
The Book of Lamentations fits into the Historical Books exactly where Pastor
Mike left off this past Sunday with the invasion of Nebuchadnezzar and the
destruction of Jerusalem.
A great key-phrase for Lamentations is
“New Every Mourning”, from the key-verses Lamentations
3:22-24, “Through the LORD’s mercies
we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every
morning; great is Your faithfulness. ‘The LORD is my portion,’ says my soul,
‘Therefore I hope in Him!’”
Jeremiah expresses that even in
Judah’s darkest hour, even among the rubble of the city of God, Jerusalem, God
remains faithful to His people. The Lord has not completely destroyed them and
wiped them off the face of the earth. Hope remains.
What we find is Lamentations is the
weeping of a prophet. What we also find in the New Testament is that Jesus also
understood human sorrow. In fact, He is prophetically referred to as the Man of
Sorrows. And we know that He wept. He wept at Lazarus’ tomb. He cried out in
the garden of Gethsemane. He had compassion over the masses. He wept over Jerusalem.
Jesus understood human grief and has empathy, compassion upon His creatures.
Lamentations reminds us that Jesus is not “a” but “the” Weeping Prophet.
EZEKIEL
Ezekiel
was an active prophet during the time of the exile, after Jerusalem’s destruction.
That makes Ezekiel an exilic prophet. His name means “Strengthened by God”.
Surely he and the survivors of Judah would need to rely on God for strength
during that long and tragic exile. We’ll take our key-phrase there: “Looking to
God for Strength”.
Psalm
137 describes the sorrows of this period of time: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we
remembered Zion. We hung our harps upon the willows in the midst of it. For
there, those who carried us away captive asked of us a song, and those who
plundered us requested mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How
shall we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land?”
Ezekiel himself was carried away among
the upper class Jews who were taken into exile and there he had his ministry to
those exiles. Of all the prophets, Ezekiel’s writings may be the most bizarre.
He had strange visions of God, describing wheels within wheels and supernatural
living creatures. He saw the Presence of God departing from the temple before
its destruction. As part of his ministry, he had to lie on his left side for
390 days to equal to the number of days of Israel’s punishment, and then
another 40 days on his right side for the years of the punishment of Judah. For
another object lesson, he had to use human feces, though it was later changed
to cow feces, to cook bread over for himself to eat, to represent the defiled
bread that the children of Israel would eat in their exile among the Gentiles.
Some crazy stuff in Ezekiel.
A key-verse out of Ezekiel 33:11, “Say to them, 'As surely as I live, declares
the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather
that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why
will you die, O house of Israel?’” You can hear the desperation of the
pleading prophet calling for the people to turn from their destruction.
There may be many obscure foreshadows
of Jesus Christ in the book of Ezekiel, but we can look no further than
Ezekiel’s first vision of God seated gloriously upon His throne in chapter one.
No doubt that vision of God is what strengthened Ezekiel throughout the
difficult time ahead, that glorious vision of God enthroned. That same glory of
God would depart from the temple before its destruction. And we remember that
Jesus Christ is the Glory of God.
Hebrews 1 says Jesus is the brilliance of God’s glory, the radiance of His
light.
DANIEL
Daniel
is an exilic prophet and the last of the Major Prophets, although his book is
shorter than Hosea’s, a Minor Prophet. Daniel’s book, however, covers a huge
scope of time and prophetic content. Primarily, Daniel’s book is concerned with
prophetic rise and falls of nations and governments, looking forward to the
ultimate everlasting rule of the kingdom of God. Therefore, a key-phrase for
Daniel will be “the Rise and Fall of Kingdoms”
Daniel himself, whose name means “God
is my Judge”, was an exilic prophet, taken into captivity in Babylon as a young
boy with his friends Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, or Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego.
There in Babylon, he is blessed by God to rise among the political ranks
through interpreting the king’s dreams and he eventually becomes a high ranking
official. Daniel is interesting in that respect, in that he showed that a
believer can have an incredible influence upon his or her own culture, even
from within the framework of its government.
Daniel’s book describes what the
Babylonian captivity was like, beginning with Daniel’s exile and going through
the rise and fall of kings Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar until the book ends
with a variety of prophetic visions. Daniel survives until he is an old man,
outliving the Babylonian empire that took his people into captivity.
A key-verse from Daniel comes from the
mouth not of the prophet Daniel but out of the mouth of king Nebuchadnezzar. He
says in 4:3, “How great are His [God’s] signs,
and how mighty His wonders! His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and His
dominion is from generation to generation.”
Contrary to the rise and fall of human
civilizations and empires, Daniel foresees a coming kingdom to be ruled
forever. Jesus Christ will occupy the throne of that everlasting kingdom, thus
Daniel displays Jesus as the Everlasting
King.
*Alright so we have one final section
left, the shortest and most mysterious books in all the Old Testament, the
Minor Prophets, aka the Twelve. Each of them will usually address a single
theme and stick with it, as opposed to the vast scope characterized by the
Major Prophets. Next week, "the Twelve".
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