Perspectives on Preaching the Old Testament as Christian Scripture (2)

Part 2: Two Key Words From Jesus

In our first article of this series on preaching the Old Testament as Christian Scripture, we worked to get a big perspective on the task of understanding the Bible as Christian readers and preachers. In the next few articles we will begin to examine some key New Testament texts that might guide us in the details of how we might approach proclaiming the Old Testament as Christians. We will start to do this by gleaning what we can from Jesus and the apostles as to how they approached the Old Testament, which were their scriptures.

A common way of doing this has been to study to the way that Jesus and the New Testament authors use the Old Testament. While this is of great value, for our purposes a more fruitful way ahead is to observe what is specifically said by them about how they think about what we now call the Old Testament and how these writing should be dealt with. In this article we will look at two key passages in the teaching of Jesus while in the next we will look at the resurrection account where Jesus interacts with disciples on and after the road to Emmaus.

John 5:39–40

John 5:39–40

In John 5 the conflict between Jesus and the religious leaders of his day begins to escalate. The focus in the early part of the chapter is the Sabbath. In verse 18, this heightens because these same leaders hear Jesus making himself equal with God when he says that “My Father is working until now, and I am working” (verse 17). Jesus follows this up with a discourse on this authority in relation to the Father (18–30) as well as the witness of John, Jesus’s own works, and the Father to him (31–38). It is in this context of witness that Jesus then turns to also talk about the witness of the Scriptures and he says…

–

Jesus affirms that the religious leaders are indeed diligent students of the Scriptures. However, he notes that when they search the scriptures they do so with a primary motivation which is set toward their final acceptance by God (“eternal life”) but that the scriptures themselves do not, of themselves, give life. Rather, he asserts, it is the message that they contain about him that leads to life.

Jesus states that the true purpose in the Old Testament scriptures is to look to them for the message that they contain about him. They bear witness to him and the life that is found in him. However, these religious leaders refuse to come to him so that they might have life.

In this sense we might say that Jesus is the true subject of the Old Testament scriptures, the true purpose for which they were written. Therefore, to fail to be aware of that purpose when reading those scriptures and therefore to fail to come to Jesus when confronted by him, their fulfilment, is to corrupt and foil that purpose. Moreover, we need to hear his warning that it is possible to study these scriptures and master them technically but not know their core message or to hold it at arm’s length.

The implications for preaching from the Old Testament are obvious. We should preach them convinced that Jesus is the subject of them and show our hearers how this is true wherever it occurs so that they might come to him. This does not of itself mean that every detail, or even every passage, contains a prophetic prediction or type of Christ, but that these Scriptures we preach are part and parcel of a united testimony to the person and work of Christ which people should heed and not neglect. To cut them loose from this testimony in our reading is to misread them. To cut these scriptures loose from this testimony in our proclamation of them is to mislead the people to whom we speak.

Matthew 13:52

And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.

Matthew 13:52 offers the concluding question and comments on a long passage on parables which began at Matthew 13:1. Intriguingly, as Jesus talks about the parables he uses some of the same language that is often used in both the Old and New Testament about Israel in relation to the Old Testament scriptures (see the next article on Luke 24). For example,

• Jesus talks about the fact that parables seem to confirm the hardheartedness of those listening and cites Isaiah 6 in doing so (13:14–15).
• He also talks about the fact that the disciples have been given seeing eyes and hearing ears (13:16).
• Moreover, just as he opens up the Scriptures to his disciples in Luke 24, so he explains the parables to his uncomprehending disciples in Matthew 13.

The details of the passage are replete with technical, difficult, and debated terminology with widely varying interpretations and one of those debates concerns the identity of “every scribe” who has been “trained for the kingdom of heaven” (or “made a disciple for the kingdom of heaven.”

The language of “scribe” at the very least conveys the idea of an interpreter of Jewish Scripture and Jesus is therefore offering a contrast between the person who has been ‘made a disciple of the kingdom of heaven’ and those who have been seen up to this point in Matthew and who will be critiqued harshly later (e.g. Matthew 15:1–9; 23:1–36).

We might therefore say that this new breed of interpreters stand in line with Moses on the plains of Moab (Deuteronomy 5:1–5) and Ezra in the post-exilic community (Ezra 7:10). They take what was given in Exodus and apply it to the new context (as Jesus himself did in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5).

However, there is a definitive difference with these new scribes; they come to those same Scriptures having been transformed in their understanding by the genuinely new reality of the kingdom of God as seen in Jesus. They are therefore able to do much more than the existing scribes who can only produce what is old, that is, they can bring out of these same treasures both new and old.

It is important to note that while the new does take some sort of precedence over the old, the sense is that the old is not abolished (Matthew 5:17) but “judiciously integrated into the new perspective of the kingdom of heaven.” [1]

These new disciple-scribes know that the Scriptures have their focus and fulfilment in Jesus and are therefore able to dig deep into this storehouse to draw out from them both new and old truths. In other words, they can do the same sort of things that we see both Jesus and Matthew do in Matthew’s Gospel. Having been trained for the kingdom, they are able to do with the Scriptures what Jesus has done in relation to the parables.

From this, particularly given the reference to “scribes”, it is probably best to take the “old” to refer to the Old Testament scriptures. Given that, what might it mean for Christian readers and what implications might there be for Christian preachers as they attempt to bring God’s Old Testament word to God’s twenty-first century Christian readers?

Implications for Christian Preachers

First, we can expect that there are many things that the OT teaches that are “old” in the sense that a Jewish reader could agree with what is said (e.g. “You shall not steal”; Exodus 20:15; Romans 13:9; Ephesians 4:28). However, the fact that the “old” witnesses to Christ and has been fulfilled in him will also mean that there are many things that it teaches that are “new” in a sense that only a Christian reader could understand fully. The Christian preacher will therefore also explain how the same Old Testament passage contains things concerning Christ or when and how it fits into God’s purposes in him. The Jewish scriptures are thereby not dispensed with but are read in the light of the one to whom they witness but who has now come in the flesh.

By way of example, although Christians have an additional understanding of holiness because of their knowledge of Christ and his calling of them, a Christian teacher or preacher can urge their hearers with the same words that a Jewish teacher and preacher might, that is, “Be holy as God is holy” (Leviticus 11:44; 1 Peter 1:15–16). However, if we take this very passage from 1 Peter, we should also note the striking difference in surrounding language. There are no detailed instructions about sacrifices and rituals (things “old”).
Rather, the language surrounding the exhortation to be holy speaks of things “new”, that is, the sacrifice of Christ rather than the “old” sacrifices of Leviticus.

Similarly, Paul could teach from Genesis in 1 Timothy 2 with an exegesis that looks as if it could apply equally to Jewish as well as Christian readers, that is, in a way that has no explicit Christian interpretation (see particularly verses 12–14). In other words, God’s later revelation in Christ has not changed the meaning of the text as it stood in Genesis and it can be rightly applied to a Christian congregation as is.