Voices From the Past

I like paper, as in books. In a book, I when I want to go back to a certain passage, I remember where it was on the right- or left-hand page, and approximately how far through the book it was. I’ve often said a book on a “device,” be it phone or tablet, is like a book with no page numbers and no binding. The pages float, somewhere, no one knows where, and if you did not put a bookmark on that thing you want to remember, well, good luck.

Having said that, I do love my ESV Bible app. Maybe it’s because I know the book well enough that I can navigate and not get lost. But the app lets me click on a cross-reference and right back to the starting point in a flash, saving a lot of page-turning. So, I actually do look up many more of those than I do with a “real” book.

OK, let’s leave that and go on a short detour. Every now and then, I like to “speed read” or just scan through a long portion of the Bible. It gives a different perspective and usually brings up some connections that I have entirely missed for my whole life.

Recently I was reading rapidly through the book of Matthew. Or, I would have been, if not for the reference notes in my app. I discovered, verse after verse, piling up almost faster than I could click there and back, references tying everything in the book to a prophecy in the Old Testament. Some were put in by the author (Matthew) and some by Jesus Himself, but all said the same. Everything Jesus did and everything that happened to Him was “to fulfill what the Lord spoke by the prophet.” Clicking on those prophecies took me all over the Old Testament. “The Prophet” was Isaiah, Hosea, Micah, Jeremiah, Malachi, David, Zechariah, Moses, Daniel.

We know these things, but it was quite enlightening to see them all together.

We sometimes get the idea that it’s OK to ignore the Old Testament. After all, the New Covenant supersedes the Old, right? We don’t live under law, right? It seems pretty obvious that if we don’t understand the Old Covenant, we aren’t going to have a full appreciation of the New. But, here is the lesson from Scripture. Jesus quoted the Old Testament through the entirety of His ministry, giving it His entire trust and His own endorsement. (That’s not surprising, since He wrote it.) The Gospel writers quoted the Old Testament through their entire narratives. The Apostles, including Paul, quoted the Old Testament continually as the basis of their arguments that Jesus is the promised One and the only way of salvation. And all that quoting was based on the principle, “the Lord spoke.”

If we accept the fact of our own sin and accompanying fate and we accept that He is the Rescue for our impending disaster, then we do accept all that the Old Testament has said about those things. We do not need to evade, excuse or downplay the Old Testament. We cannot reject parts of the Old Testament, based on current “science” or politics or even our own laziness (it’s so long!), and then pretend that we absolutely do believe the New Testament. Understanding the point and purpose of the Old is the only way to make sense of the New. Let us follow the example of Jesus, the Gospel writers and the Apostles.

--Lynda Shenefield