The Bible Jesus Read

So have you ever heard that verse that talks about how useful Scripture is? Second Timothy chapter three, verses sixteen and seventeen: "All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work." Those verses are commonly used to argue for the primacy of the Christian Bible. But what Scripture was Paul referring to in these verses? History tells us that the canon of Scripture we currently know to be the Bible was not fully agreed upon until sometime in the third century CE. Let me ask the question in a different way. Jesus relied heavily upon Scripture to guide everything He did. But what Scriptures? Obviously the gospels and the Christian letters we know as the epistles weren't written until after Jesus died, so He didn't have those to go by...

While I may be stating the obvious here, have you ever given much thought to the fact that the Scriptures of Christ and the early Church were what we now refer to as the Old Testament? Jesus and Paul wouldn't have called them the Old Testament, they just called them their Scriptures. According to Paul, the Hebrew Scriptures (aka the Old Testament!) provided the benchmark for living a life equipped for every good work.

Those of you who know me or are regular visitors to the blog can probably surmise that I am an Old Testament buff. I dig it in a big way. There is a fairly common perception within Evangelicalism that the Old Testament was a sort of dress rehearsal leading up to the real performance seen in the gospel of Matthew and on further towards the right of the book. With all due respect I totally reject such a perception. First, I find it impossible to fully dig into the New Testament minus an understanding of the Scriptures of the characters described in the New. Second, and more importantly, the Old Testament was Jesus' Bible.

Now I know how it goes, I would venture to guess that many people who have decided they were going to read through the Bible started at the beginning and got lost, bored, or confused by the time they got to Leviticus. (As an aside I find Leviticus to be a really fascinating book, but I confess if I just picked it up not knowing anything about Scripture I would probably prefer to give myself a root canal than continue reading it.)

Admittedly the Old Testament is tougher for us to understand. It is much easier to relate to one of Paul's letters than it is to engage with a story of Elijah, one of the old kings, or one of the prophets. But Jesus and the Jews who comprised the early Church would have known their Scriptures well. Through the pages of Scripture they were able to get a glimpse behind the curtain at Yahweh, the God of creation, provision, and power. Often we view the Old Testament as the story of a mean, angry God while the New Testament is about Jesus, who is much nicer than His dad. But what about when Jesus said to his disciple Philip in John 14:9 that if he had seen Jesus then he had seen the Father? Jesus didn't make excuses for, or offer a defense of, His Father. One of the biggest misconceptions people have about the Old Testament is that it introduces an angry God. Now does God ever show Himself as angry within the pages of the Old Testament? Yup... for good reason. Do you know how boneheaded Israel often acted in those stories? But through the Old Testament God doesn't just show Himself as angry, He also shows Himself as loving, forgiving, merciful, gracious, protective, powerful, present, and intimate. Merciful? Gracious? In the OLD Testament? Uh huh. Every characteristic we think of when we think of Jesus--through those we see the heart of the Father.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love the New Testament. The stories of Jesus are so encouraging, uplifting, and (most importantly) salvific. But I feel we do the Bible a great disservice if we skip through the first two-thirds of the book to get to the part we feel more comfortable with. On any given Sunday across this country I would venture to guess that more than one-third of Christian sermons are devoted to New Testament Scriptures. (In fact I would be pretty darn surprised if a number anywhere close to one-third were devoted to the Old Testament.)

Here is where I might get a bit controversial... feel free to disagree with me, I am a fallible human who is not claiming that the words I write or speak are anywhere close to as authoritative as Scripture.

I had a phone conversation this morning with a pastor friend of mine who was curious about my opinion on something he had recently heard. He was told by someone that all preaching should be focused on Jesus. Now this third party wasn't saying that all preaching should come out of one of the four gospels, but that all preaching should end with a focus on Jesus. So if someone preaches out of the Old Testament it should ultimately come back to a Christocentric culmination. I just simply do not agree. Now ultimately do we as Christians come back at the end of the day to a life that points toward the cross? Sure, but two-thirds of Scripture took place before the Incarnation of Christ. A focus on the Father is not a denial of the Son. In fact in John 10:30 Jesus tells us that He and the Father are one. So a focus on another aspect of the Triune God is indirectly a focus on Christ whether the cross is mentioned or not.

A couple of months ago in the post Links in a Chain I told the story of the people who we bought our house from. She had been raised Jewish. When the man who would eventually lead her to a belief in Jesus first began speaking to her she said that he could only preach the Old Testament to her. She was on to something there.

If Jesus' Bible was good enough for Him, it seems that it should also be good enough for me. Now that having been said, I will never throw out my New Testament. If I'm right in asserting that we need the Old in order to dig deeper into the New, in the same way the Old Testament takes on a richer more vibrant complexity in light of the cross. But in the end any Americanized conceptualization of Jesus the westerner misses the mark. Jesus was a first century Jew who was undeniably influenced and shaped by that context in combination with a study of the Hebrew Scriptures. Any vibrant Christianity worth its salt needs to keep that in mind.