Un-Perplexing the Old Testament (Covenant Theology #1) | Theocast

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Hi, this is John, and today on Theocast, Justin and I are going to help you think through the

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Old Testament, and, well, we're going to do our best to unperplex it for you. So much confusion when it comes to how to interpret

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God's Word, just even reading it. Are we to take it allegorically? Are we supposed to look at it and moralize all of the text or take it literally?

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It's so confusing, and so we're going to do our best to help you look at it from a historical and biblical perspective.

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Stay tuned. A simple and easy way for you to help support Theocast each month is by shopping at Amazon through the

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Amazon Smile program. When you make a purchase through Amazon Smile, a portion of the proceeds will be donated to our ministry.

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To learn how to sign up, just go to theocast .org slash give. Welcome to Theocast, take three, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ, conversations about the

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Christian life from a Reformed and pastoral perspective. Your hosts today are Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, and I am

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John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and we are alive and well today,

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Justin. Thankfully, we've had to do this three times. Why do it once when you can do it three times?

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For the triune God we serve. That's right. Come on. He is perfect. We are not. Justin, real quick before we get into the subjects today, let's talk about things that we love to talk about on whenever we record, but today is a

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Tuesday morning. Typically, we talk about our sermons right before we sit down and record. Talk to us, my friend, about what you are continuing to preach about.

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Continuing to preach through the book of Genesis. I preached, I think, the 18th of 22 sermons this past Sunday and was in chapters 37 and 38.

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For those familiar, chapter 38 is quite a chapter with Judah and Tamar and what happens there.

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The Bible is repeatedly, and this has been true in Genesis, the Bible is repeatedly just very blunt about human sin and corruption, even the corruption of God's people.

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We saw that yet again. It was encouraging to two things. The way that God repents

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Judah. It's that very David and Nathan kind of moment where Tamar sends the articles, the personal effects, if you will, of Judah ahead.

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She's like, hey, I'm pregnant by the one to whom these belong. Could you please identify them? He says, yes, she is more righteous than I am.

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It really is that David and Nathan, you are the man. It does seem that Judah is repented by God in that moment.

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That was kind of a sweet thing to see, but then even more profoundly impactful than that is that the union of Judah and Tamar results in the birth of a son named

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Perez. To think that this man, Perez, and then

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Judah and Tamar, we read of Perez in Ruth 4, and then we read of Judah and Tamar and Perez in Matthew 1, in the genealogy of Christ.

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It's like, hey, if you ever questioned that our God's a redeemer, look at this. That he works through this and works through broken vessels like these people to bring about salvation and redemption and to bring about the promised child who would save them too.

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Anyway, so it was a sweet Sunday, man, and it's always a joy to go to texts that are difficult like that, and without any kind of weird gymnastics or tricks or smoke and mirrors, just straight up look at it.

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Here's the reality. Here's who God is, and my goodness, is he not a redeemer? Let's consider Jesus, and it's really good.

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So you're being to tell me you're bringing some clarity into some confusing passages. Trying to unperplex some stuff, that's what

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I'm trying to do. We're going to talk about that today. So speaking of unperplexing passages, I started

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James, I did my introduction, I had some people joking about how I spent an entire 40 -minute sermon on one verse, but I was like, well, if you don't understand -

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You did some overview work. I did. If you don't understand who James is and the audience and why it was written, then you are going to completely butcher everything that James says, which traditionally has happened.

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So we talked about James, we also talked about law, gospel, distinction, and if you don't understand that, you're going to glossable everything and to flip it all up on its head.

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So it was good. A lot of glossabling going on. That's right. I've always enjoyed preaching, but James is one of those more challenging books, and I'm really excited about preaching the next four sections of that.

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Brother, one of my favorite series that, I mean, I always enjoy the one I'm in, right? And you're always sad to leave it, but preacher talk, true confession.

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But one of my favorite series that I've ever done in the life of our congregation was First John for kind of a similar reason, because most people have only ever been exposed to First John as like the great litmus test of salvation, and to be able to go in and preach that as a letter to Christians who had been abandoned and bombarded by false teaching and for John to actually be reassuring them that they are in Christ Jesus was a sweet thing to do.

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Sorry, I just bumped my table. No, you're good. For those watching on the YouTubes, you got a little earthquake there.

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Yeah, but I hear you, man. Similar thing in James. You're able to go in and look at it through the lens of law and gospel distinction and just a very,

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I don't know, the sufficiency of Christ hermeneutic, right, and how God works through union with Christ to work in as people and save us and sanctify and that whole like status forward, identity forward reality.

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It's just good stuff. Good stuff. Yeah. Well, if you want to listen to those, you can find those wherever you get your podcast,

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YouTube, go to their website, covbap .org or gracereform .org. You got it. Justin, let's jump into it, man.

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Today is a little bit of unique. We call, I had to do three takes on our introduction, unfortunately, go around on this episode.

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So explain to us what we're doing. I'm going to explain. Yeah. Multiple levels. So just track with me. So first things first, this is our second time around on this episode.

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So we recorded this last week. We double dipped last week. I'm going to try to explain all this in a way that makes sense.

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So this is our second time through on this episode, and that's going to matter for what I'm about to say. This is the first of three planned episodes on effectively like practical implications of covenant theology, right?

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Because a lot of you out there are pastoral implications, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. Practical and pastoral implications of covenant theology.

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Like, why does this matter? Effectively, the way I put it is, why does this matter to the person sitting in the pew?

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Why should this matter? I'm not a pastor. I'm not a seminary prof. Help me understand why covenant theology matters for my daily trusting

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Christ and in my daily living life in the context of the church, just trying to love my brothers and sisters.

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Why is covenant theology important? So that's what these three episodes are aimed at answering. It's not exhaustive, but three important things that flow out of covenant theology.

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And so this is a little bit weird for us to try to do because we recorded the first two episodes last week, and then we lost the audio of this one.

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It was just corrupted and not good. And so now we've got to try to go back and retrofit this in and say what we said before, having already recorded episode two.

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So be gracious with us. Hopefully we're not going to be like stealing our own thunder too much or repeating ourselves too much because we don't write extensive notes for these shows.

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We just kind of bullet point them and go. We're going to trust God. Yep. There you have it. I mean, here's...

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Yeah. I mean, mine's not much better. You're watching on YouTube. You're seeing behind the curtain right there. There's our notes. So yeah, just that's sort of the public service announcement side.

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Awesome. But here's what we're doing. This week we're talking about, as the title implies,

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Unperplexing the Old Testament. And a lot of people, if they're honest, they go to the

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Old Testament in particular. Maybe they do this whole scripture, but the Old Testament especially is confusing.

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People go and they read it and they don't quite know what to make of it. There's a lot of different kinds of literature in the

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Old Testament. There are a number of different narrative sections that have some pretty wild stories.

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God does give the law to his people. There's the wisdom writings, the writings in general, and you have the

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Psalms and you have Proverbs and you have Ecclesiastes and Job and then Song of Solomon and who knows what to do with that.

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And so people leave confused and perplexed about how to understand their Old Testament.

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And they've heard a number of different ways to go about doing that and many of them might not have been very helpful to them.

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And so our goal today is to try to declutter and unperplex the Old Testament for you, the listener, and we're going to be doing that using the tool of covenant theology.

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And so if I can really quickly before we jump into the meat and potatoes of the episode today, the skeleton of it really, this is going to be useful to do.

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We're probably going to do this in all three episodes just for anybody new. The basic things to have in mind regarding covenant theology, the thing really is what we would call from a theological perspective, the tri -covenantal framework of Scripture.

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And I'm going to try to outlay or lay that out for us in like 90 seconds. So three big covenants in the

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Bible. Number one, the covenant of redemption. Number two, the covenant of works. Number three, the covenant of grace.

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The covenant of redemption is made amongst the Godhead, particularly between the Father and the Son before the world even began.

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Read Ephesians 1, 3 to 14. That's the most clear place to see it described, but there are boatloads of other passages in the

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Bible that refer to the counsel of God, the plan of God, you know, even the plan of the

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Father and the Son and how that works out for God to save a people. It must be about my Father's will. Exactly.

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You know, all those the Father gives to me will come to me. You know, Psalm 2, you'll inherit the nations. You know, the

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Father says to the Son. All of these things where it's very clear that God is planning to do this before creation even occurred.

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And so that's the covenant of redemption, the pactum salutis that God made amongst the persons of the

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Godhead to save a people through the work of God the Son. The second big covenant in Scripture is the covenant of works, which is the covenant

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God made with Adam in the Garden of Eden, sometimes referred to as the Adamic covenant, sometimes called the covenant of creation.

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And that's where God made Adam and gave him a charge of how he was to live. He gave him a particular prohibition that was the test of this covenant.

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Don't eat of that particular tree. And if you do, you'll die. And that happened. Adam plunged himself and all of his posterity into ruin.

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We're going to think more particularly about that covenant of works in the third of these three episodes and the implications of it. And then lastly, the third big covenant in Scripture is called the covenant of grace.

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It's promised by God in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 315 when he promises a redeemer who's going to come to crush the serpent's head.

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And basically the rest of the Old Testament and the rest of the Scripture is the unfolding of the accomplishment of that promise.

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And that covenant of grace is established formally and accomplished formally in the coming of Christ in the new covenant.

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And so that's how we understand the Bible, like at a 30 ,000 -foot view with that redemptive historical but also covenantal framework of redemption, works, and grace.

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So having done that, I'll also refer the listener to our five -part teaching series on covenant theology.

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We'll link that in the show notes so you could go back and listen to about three hours of content on covenant theology that might be helpful to you.

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But now we want to transition and pivot to the real point of today's episode, which are the practical and pastoral implications of this.

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And beginning with, John, I think we want to discuss some of the maybe not great ways, do a little deconstructing before we reconstruct, some of the not great ways that people approach the

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Old Testament. I think this is what I would call a defense. If you want to know a lot of the Scripture backing, because a lot of times people struggle with that structure, that's what that series is for.

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We'll also put some books in the notes below. But what we want to do is help you understand why it would behoove you to take the time to understand these theological frameworks.

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What a great word, behoove, is. It is. Just trying to expand our, you've taught me some words that I'm like, wow,

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I've never used that one before. That's a good word of the day. That's right. Word of the day. One of the dangers that I grew up in and a lot of people hear is, you know, it's good to challenge and encourage people to read their

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Bibles. And you hear that a lot. And there's a lot of pressure on it. And what is not offered to people is a guide on how to read it.

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So it's really crazy if someone didn't understand it, like if they were a child and they didn't understand genre, right, the difference between fantasy, fiction and history or a biography, and they just started reading it and you hand them a fiction book and they're not sure what to take of this.

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Like, is this real? Do dragons really fly? Like, have I not seen these before? It can be really confusing to that individual.

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Well, I just started reading the Narnia books to my kids and I'm having to explain all the time. Like, here's what this, you know, here's what this means.

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And this is a make -believe world and all these things. But it's pointing to this other stuff anyway. Right. But what happened to Jonah is not make -believe.

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You know, it's like, wait a minute. So this is real, but that's not real. Well, when it comes to the

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Bible, this is what happened. Just read it. And so people pick up their Bible and they just start reading it. And the assumption is, if I read it,

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I should understand it because I'm a Christian and the Holy Spirit was within me. And they are completely confused.

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So what they have to grasp onto is something to help them make sense of the chaos, seemingly chaos.

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I don't think it's chaotic. I used to, but the seeming chaos that's there. And one of the first things that most people are headed to that probably started back during revivalism and I would say even a rejection of any type of reformed confessionalism or structure, which we would say covenant theology, you have this introduction of moralism, which really started back in the 1800s when you started to see the influx of dispensationalism theology.

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You start realizing that you have these stories and how do you interpret these stories? Well, when you don't have a law gospel distinction, understanding what's going on as far as this is law and the law leads us to the gospel, but you have a collapsing of the two, you take a story like David, Daniel, whatever, and you start moralizing.

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And what we mean by moralize it is that you take the story and you find moral implications, whether they be good or bad, and the ultimate application or purpose of that passage is the do and don'ts.

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Don't do this, or as in you're saying, you know, with Judah, don't go sleeping around with women that you don't know you're sleeping with.

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Yeah, don't go sleeping with your daughter -in -law. Who presented herself as a prostitute.

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Yeah. And don't do that either. Right. You know, deceive your father -in -law into something like that. Which is true.

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You shouldn't do those things, but it's not the point of why it was written. Well, brother, not to be punchy, but if we need to open up to chapter and verse to convince people that that's wrong, we need to have a different conversation.

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Right. Absolutely. Ten commandments are pretty clear. No, sure. You can do some unpacking of just the corruption and the ugliness of it, which

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I did this past Sunday. But your point is made. I think what people do a lot of times in this moralization of the Bible and the

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Old Testament in particular, it's this project of everything is viewed through the lens of law, and we follow around the

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Old Testament saints to determine how we can be like them. Or maybe if they really botched it over here, things that we need to avoid.

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But usually it's the former. It's usually, how can we be like David? How can we be like Daniel?

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How can we be like Moses? How can we be like Joseph, etc.? Rather than the emphasis being on something else, in particular, like what

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God did in and through said people, which I know we're going to get to. Well, in comparison, so you were talking about a covenant of grace and covenant of works, which is a framework we're going to expand over these next three episodes.

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But when you don't have an overarching redemptive historic understanding, in other words, the whole

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Old Testament is about God redeeming sinners. If that's not the framework, we're going to get into the literalist view here in a little bit.

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You want to see that the Bible is beneficial. So, of course, Proverbs are helpful.

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Psalms are there. Some of them are like, whoa, I'm not sure what to do with that. And then we'll take the promises made in the

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Psalms and make them apply to us. Or promises made to national Israel and overlay them on America or whatever we do.

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It's just it's really not great what we know. So the whole Old Testament really turns into a proverb.

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We treat it like a proverb. Here's examples of it says, if you do this, not to do exactly.

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When I asked somebody to tell me, well, then how is it the gospel was preached to Abraham and he believed?

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Where in the Bible did that happen? Because that's what we were told in the New Testament that happened. There's, well,

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I'm not really sure. Like, yeah, I don't. When was Jesus Christ crucified for? Yeah, I mean, according to the

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Apostle Paul, it was in Genesis 12, three, when God said that the nations would be blessed through Abraham. That's right.

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You know, and that's we're kind of getting ahead of ourselves a little bit here. But yeah, moralizing the text, moralizing the scripture is just an epidemic.

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Generally speaking, I think it is super prevalent when it comes to the Old Testament. People generally approach the

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Bible with a moralistic framework because we view it almost like a Christian version of Aesop's fables. What can we glean from this?

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And what can I learn from this? It's going to help me in my life. And yeah, it's not a helpful way to go about reading the

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Old Testament. We're going to miss the main point of it. Justin, when you say it's not helpful, the implications of a moralistic view of the

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Old Testament is only dread. I mean, you can only read it because what you're saying is you're trying to live up to the expectations of these particular people.

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And you're basically saying God is going to bless me because this is what the promise was to Israel. God's going to bless them if they obey the law and he is going to curse them if they don't.

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And so you're putting that same implication upon yourself that if I don't obey or if I don't use these people as examples of how

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I should perform, then God's going to be angry with me. He's going to cast me out like Israel. If I obey, he'll be pleased.

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If I obey, I'll be blessed. If I obey, then maybe God will be happy to save me.

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If I don't, then he's going to be happy to judge me. And yeah, it's very harmful.

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There are many people who don't even know how Old Testament believers or people in the Old Testament were saved, justified, were cleansed of their sins.

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And there's confusion on that. I mean, I've had a lot of people say, well, yeah, how were people saved in the Old Testament?

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And their confusion is, were they saved by the law or were they because Jesus wasn't there? And again, that is because if you only moralize the text, if you're only going there to find helpful tips of what to do and not to do, you are missing the point of what is there.

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So that's point one. Justin, what's our second thing that typically people approach the

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Bible as far as how to interpret it or understand it? If you're new to Theocast, we have a free e -book available for you called

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Faith vs. Faithfulness, A Primer on Rest. And if you struggled with legalism, a lack of assurance, or simply want to know what it means to live by faith alone, we wrote this little book to provide a simple answer from a

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Reformed confessional perspective. You can get your free copy at theocast .org

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slash primer. Yeah, so a second way that people often approach the

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Old Testament is to look at the Old Testament that's unhelpful and confusing is it's almost like this solve the puzzle approach.

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You know, like we've got to look at particular passages in the Old Testament and figure out how to unlock them with like some mystical, magical key.

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I don't know if it's some code. I don't know if it's some like number system, you know, some like charts and graphs and all these kinds of things.

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And we can like lay it over top of the Old Testament and we can like read between every line and we're going to figure out what the real point of the thing is.

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And it's like, well, how in the world would anybody reading the text ever come to such a conclusion, you know, is often the thing.

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And there's a lot that we'll probably say here later on, maybe as we reconstruct in trying to help people see what the

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Old Testament's about. But I mean, I just go and say, John, I mean, right now, in particular, I'm thinking of a pretty much

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I'm thinking of like the dispensational hermeneutic here where there's always this emphasis on trying to figure out, you know, timelines and all of this stuff and like the key that unlocks how we understand this particular

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Old Testament incident or this particular feast or meal that was given. And what's this going to look like?

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Are the temples going to be rebuilt? I mean, it's just all of this stuff that's like, okay. Why don't you riff on that for a second and I may jump back in.

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Well, it's almost like you have to have a doctorate in numerology, you know, it's like, or even geography, understanding the maps and a lot of this.

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Archeology or something. Archeology, yeah. And a lot of it, and where this comes from sometimes is an evidentialist -based perspective where if with enough evidence,

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I can convince people of God and I can convince them of the gospel. This is why Genesis in the last hundred years has become such a debated book over against evolution.

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And there's a lot of great men, a lot of great ministries. I'm happy for them and I'm thankful that they're defending in the best way they know how to defend the

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Bible. But the Bible becomes really an apologetic project where we are defending against either liberalism or against atheism.

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We're trying to defend the scripture on the seven -day literal creation, the flood, things like that, where you read the

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Bible. I had to tell a congregant to stop doing this. And he thought

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I was saying, stop reading the Bible. And I said, no, stop reading the Bible as a defense mechanism.

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He would only go to the Bible to use it as proof texting against whoever it is that he was arguing with.

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That is not how the design of the word of God is to be. It's not. God doesn't need your defense. And that's not why he wrote it.

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As a matter of fact, I have said this multiple times, but if you want to understand the whole purpose of Genesis, you have to read it from the perspective of Exodus.

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The book wasn't even written until 1500 years after creation. Moses, through the hand of God, frees the people from Egypt and takes them to the mountain.

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When he goes there, there's a covenant that's made between Israel and God where God becomes their

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God and they become his people. They have no idea who this God is.

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To help them understand this covenant that they just made, Moses writes the first five books of the law, but specifically he writes the history of them.

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They know they're of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They know the story of Joseph because they took

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Joseph's bones out and they buried him in the desert. So, they know that part of their history. But everything else, you have to understand, they're polytheistic, meaning they believe in multiple gods.

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It's an issue with Israel for the rest of their history. They make a golden calf as soon as they get out there. Moses writes down and says, in the beginning, one

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God named Yahweh created everything. Here is how your relationship with him started, and here is how it's going to go forward.

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There was no idea of evolution in the perspective of Moses when he wrote that. It was polytheism.

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This is one God who created everything, not multiple gods who created everything. Totally. We'll probably pick back up on the point of the first five books of the

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Bible, even in just a minute, as we reconstruct this thing for folks. Last thing about this is,

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I think a lot of times this whole solve the puzzle approach, it makes it seem like there's some mystical hidden meaning underneath the text that we've got to somehow just magically find.

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That's not the way we should approach it either. Like we've said, as though you need a code or some kind of secret key to unlock.

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Like Daniel's 40 weeks? Yes, 70 weeks. Basically, that has been turned into a whole end times thing.

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It's like, no, that's a prophecy about the Christ coming. If you don't have a covenantal framework, and if you don't understand sabbatical years, and the year of Jubilee, and all these kinds of things, which are clearly revealed in the law, in Leviticus, and other places.

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If you don't understand those things, and you're going to do crazy stuff with that. Anyway, Daniel's 70 weeks, in other words, it's about Christ.

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It's about Him coming to accomplish salvation. Shocking as that may be. All right, so we're going to move forward.

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Third way that people unhelpfully approach the Old Testament, and then we are going to get to the positive in the reconstruction.

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We'll do this quickly. Is what we might call a literal, like an over -literal hermeneutic, or like an immediate context hermeneutic in a way that is just off -center.

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This is that, we've spoken to these things before, where there's this hyper -focus on original authorial intent, as though we can interpret

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Moses, or David, or Jeremiah, not in light of what's going to come after, but only in light of what is going on in the immediate context, or what's happened before.

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Those things are great to consider. Consider the immediate context of the writing. Amen. Consider everything that's happened up to that point in redemptive history.

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Absolutely. But if we don't consider the Old Testament in light of the New Testament, if we don't consider the

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Old Testament in light of what's coming, namely Christ, and then the Church being founded, and the writings of the apostles, then we're going to not say the most important stuff that we could say about the

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Old Testament books, and we're going to end up preaching Old Testament sermons that need to get saved. Because we're going to say all kinds of things that might be true in the immediate context, but there's going to be no

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Christ in them, man. If you're just binding yourself in this way, and I think a lot of times Christians read their

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Bibles like this, they're like, all right, well, I got to think about what this must have meant only in the immediate context that David or Moses are writing to.

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I can look backward in terms of what he might be referring to, but I can't look forward because that would be irresponsible, and I'd be reading something into the text.

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And we're just here to say, no, actually Christ and the apostles say different. Well, it's original context priority.

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So that's where... Yeah, an over -prioritization. So Justin and I will take every passage literally the way it was intended to be taken.

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We take everything seriously. Right. Well, literally, like if it's prophetic, then we're going to take that literally prophetic.

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And if, you know, the thing about it is Justin and I, we don't ever want to allegorize anything that is not intended to be allegorized unless the text literally says this is an allegory or this is a picture.

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Which it actually does often. Yes. The Old Testament is full of imagery. That's right.

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When you understand the nature of what it is and the design of what it is, then it helps you understand that context in light of a greater context.

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In other words, there's one story with multiple characters and multiple timelines and multiple things unfolding all at once, right?

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So you have the cosmic battle between Satan and the angels going on.

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You have the story of redemption of the seed coming out through Eve, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

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You have the law. There's so much that's, you've got all these different strands, but they're all rooted back into one particular story that's unfolding.

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So if you look at one story and one context and you can't connect it to the greater context of what's going on.

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A great example, let's just since this is freshening your brain, Justin, let's talk about your story. Let's think about how this could potentially be very complicated and hard to understand the story about Judah.

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If you aren't connecting it to what you did, which is the line of Christ, to the promises of Abraham, to the promises of the seed of the one to come, which is all prophetic pushing us forward.

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If you only look at it, what would be the application that you could make? I mean, it would be, you would have to either go, this is basically a story and there is no application, or you'd have to make it a moral application because you are not allowing the greater context of all of scripture to influence your application.

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You would have to make a moral inference from the scripture that, you know, here's how we should handle ourselves sexually.

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Here's how we shouldn't. And that's the, that's the emphasis that Moses is making. And it's like, yeah, clearly, even in the context of the book of Genesis, in all fairness, that is not what he's trying to communicate.

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There is a greater message. And that's, that's what we're pointing out here today in trying to set people free and help them see that bigger message so that they can go to the

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Old Testament and make some sense of it. Which I think is one of the most perplexing things that happens in the New Testament is that if no one's ever taught you to read every single verse in light of the whole, then when you get stuck in what

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I call dark and weird and places that are just culturally and linguistically confusing, you have no guidance on how to handle this and what to do with it, which that's what we want to talk about today is there is some guidance.

29:36

Justin Perdue If you, if you don't understand the whole, you will do terrible things with the parts. It's absolutely true when it comes to reading the scripture.

29:43

All right, so let's take that. Yeah, let's pivot. Why don't you start, John, like set the table really quick. Like you mentioned the book of Exodus, and I think you did a good job a few minutes ago of kind of teeing that up a little bit.

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Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, what we call the Pentateuch. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.

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He's writing it to the people that God has covenanted with to be his people. He will be their

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God. And like you said, they know generally some things about their history and they know, you know, that they hail from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all those things, but they don't know the

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Lord specifically. They're worshiping other gods alongside him. And Moses is writing to them to tell them several things.

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And maybe we'll take these one at a time briefly before we maybe get into some flyover stuff. I want to hit some highlights of the

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Old Testament before we're done with this. But yeah, who is this God? What's he like? Can he be trusted? How will he save his people?

30:36

Yeah, that is what Moses is writing to. That is what he's writing with. So whenever I first learned redemptive historic understanding, that's what immediately popped in my brain.

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And that's how I've always understood the Old Testament law is that that's what

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Moses is giving people because they can't think about this. You're saying this God is going to be my protector.

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Because at first, Israel didn't quite understand who God is as far as salvation, right? They understood the relationship of the nation.

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And then God begins to say, listen, I need you to understand who I really am. I am the

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God of your salvation, which eventually when you get to the Psalms, it's very clear when they write the Psalms that he is not only the nation's salvation, but the ultimate salvation.

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So if he is going to be the God of our salvation, Moses says, who is this God? What is he like?

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This is important. Is he a God, a tyrant? Because the polyistic God, they are not gracious gods.

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The pagan gods are not good. Yeah, but this God is merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

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Yes. Showing steadfast love to thousands. That's right. Forgiving and trusted. Forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin, and by no means will clear the guilty.

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That's what he is. So can he be trusted? You have the children of Israel sacrificing children to other gods, and then you have

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God coming in and showing how he is the one who can be trusted because he's a holy and righteous and good

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God who provides. Abraham and Isaac is a great example of this, where he takes his son up to be sacrificed, and God says, trust me,

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I will provide, and he ends up doing this. Ultimately, this is the most important question. Once we know these things, how is he going to save us?

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How do we know this promise that he has given us that I will save you? Is he accomplishing this?

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Well, yeah, exactly. Two thoughts immediately. He reveals his character.

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Exodus 34, 6, and 7 is the first time that the Lord actually speaks on his own behalf and says, this is what

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I'm like. That's an incredible text where God speaks to Moses in that way.

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Then I think you notice that over and over again in the Old Testament, God always points back to the Exodus event.

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Well, why does he do that? He is demonstrating that I am a redeemer, and just like I redeemed you then, you can trust that I'm going to save you ultimately from an even greater bondage than you were in in Egypt.

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He's going to save us, ultimately, all of God's people from all time from the bondage that we are in to sin, death, and hell.

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He's going to do that, and he can be trusted to do that because he always keeps his promises. That's what he reveals himself to be over and over again in the pages of the

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Old Testament. And to your question, how is he going to save us? That last one is massive.

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The answer to that is, well, he promised that there's going to be a person, a human being who would come, who's going to be born of woman, who's going to crush the serpent's head, the great enemy of God's people.

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Then he begins to reveal by farther steps who that guy is going to be and what he's going to do.

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So he's going to come from Abraham. He's going to come through Judah. He's going to come through David.

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He's going to be a king who will represent the people, who will keep the law, and accomplish righteousness on behalf of the people who will be called.

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The Lord is our righteousness. He's going to be a prophet who's going to finally and ultimately reveal

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God to us. He's going to be a high priest who's going to be the intermediary, the one mediator between God and man.

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And so that's the stuff that the Old Testament's revealing to us so that by the time Jesus shows up on the scene, it's obvious that he's the one.

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I might do some of this more in just a minute, like the language of the prophets and even the sacrificial system and the priesthood, but it's so helpful when you go to the

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Old Testament, realizing that ultimately the Old Testament is about Jesus. It really unperplexes that thing in a hurry.

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We can begin to see, okay, here's the plan of God to save sinners, and it's going to happen through this individual who's going to be the

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Savior, and we're learning a lot of stuff about him. This is basically setting the stage for him to come and do it.

34:48

Justin Perdue That's right. What's interesting about when you ask people about a particular movie, like what is this movie about?

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If they can't tell you the point of it right away, then there's probably a problem with the author.

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And I would say that there are, to people's own defense, because of how many years the

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Bible has spread out and with how many different generations and with different authors, it can come across very chaotic.

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But because we aren't given the key, which I think the key is real easy. Jon Moffitt It's not a trick.

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Justin Perdue Chad Bird wrote a book recently who's a Lutheran, The Christ Key, which

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I think is great because Jesus is the key to the Old Testament. If you don't get that. I don't remember what episode

35:39

I asked you this before, but we've been recording so much. But I want to ask you, what's the point of the book, the series

35:46

Harry Potter? And your answer was? Jon Moffitt Harry Potter. Justin Perdue Harry Potter, right. Which is kind of, if I could change the title of the book,

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Bible, it should be like the story of Jesus' redemption or should be about Jesus.

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I mean, the whole thing is about Jesus, right? This is what it's about. Jon Moffitt Yeah. I mean, it's the story of redemption through Jesus.

36:08

Justin Perdue That's right. So, the reason why we say all of this, and I want to get back down to the implications of it.

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When you start reading your Old Testament, you should ask one question. This is what the

36:20

Old Testament is answering. If you're a Christian, the only reason you really read your Bible is because if you're a

36:26

Christian, or if you want to know who God is, or if you want to be a Christian. Even my dear dispensationalist friends don't do this.

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No one reads the Old Testament rejecting the New Testament unless you're a

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Jew, right? And you reject the coming of the Christ. So, you read the Torah and you do not read the New Testament.

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But no one reads the Old Testament without the perspective of the New because we already have it.

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It's been around. It's been taught to us. So, everybody does that. The question is, what part of the

36:58

New Testament are you allowing to influence you? You see, the Old Testament is a Christian document. That's the thing about it.

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We think it's an old Hebraic document that doesn't apply to the church and it doesn't apply to Christians because Jesus is in the

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New Testament. Jon Moffitt Right. Or God was different back then or whatever. And it's just so unhelpful. Jesus is in the first verse of the first book of the first chapter because He's the

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Creator, the Sustainer of all things. That's right. So, when you read your

37:25

Bible, you have to read it using these lenses or frameworks.

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I'll give you one example I use all the time, but everyone who has been trained in a good theological church believes in the

37:37

Trinity. Otherwise, you're anti -evangelical, right? You're not orthodox. You're heterodox. That's right. So, when you read any verse in the

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Bible that talks about Jesus' Spirit or God or Father, you understand that to be a triune.

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These aren't separate individuals. These are one. We have to understand that if you don't read the

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Bible that way, it can get very confusing very quickly, especially when Jesus says, I and the Father are one.

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What does He mean by that? If you allow the nature of Christ and the nature of God to influence how you read

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Scripture, you should also allow the nature of the book, which is the story of redemption, to influence how you read the

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Bible. It will take the entire puzzle that you're trying to put together upside down and flip it over.

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It's got full picture and color, and it's got a full narrative and a map. The map is very clear where it's leading you to Jesus.

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I'm going to try to do this in a way that I hope is helpful. Going back to that tri -covenantal framework, if we approach the

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Old Testament with the covenant of redemption in view, that God, before anything got started, decided He was going to save a people, and He would do it through the work of God the

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Son. Then He makes everything, and He makes man. Man fails in the covenant that God makes with him in which

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Adam could have earned eternal life. That's a failure. Then God makes a promise of grace that He's going to save, not on the basis of our merit, but on the basis of His grace and mercy.

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He's going to do that through the work of this Redeemer who is to come. If you just take that and understand that the

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Old Testament is about that message, that's super helpful. But then you can learn a ton as you read beyond Genesis chapter three.

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We've already learned what we need. We need somebody to come and accomplish what Adam failed to do. That needs to be in our minds.

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Then as God begins to work in and through Abraham and the nation of Israel that descends from him, you've got to ask the question, too, what is the point of Israel?

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The point of Israel is to bring about the Christ, to bring about the Savior most pointedly.

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Everything that God does with that nation is about the one who would come from that nation to save the nations.

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So we've got to think in those terms as we read the Old Testament. The things that God gives specifically to Israel are instructed to us in a number of ways.

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When He gives the moral law summarized in the Ten Commandments, we understand what He requires of humanity.

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So when we read that, we need to be thinking, okay, God requires that of us, and we have all failed to do it.

40:08

So this Redeemer who's going to come is going to keep that law. Okay, that's huge. The ceremonial law and the civil law that God gave to Israel, what purposes do they serve?

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Well, the civil law God gave to Israel governs the nation from which the Christ would come. So that's the purpose of that.

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Yes, we can glean principles of general wisdom and equity that might be applicable today, but those judicial civil laws that God gave to Israel were for the purpose of sustaining that nation and ruling that nation so that Jesus could come from them.

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Then the ceremonial laws, the feasts and the sacrificial system and the priesthood and the days and all these things, what's that about?

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Well, ultimately, all of those are pointing to Christ and what He would do, and they find their fulfillment in Him.

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And so whenever we're reading about, whether it's the Passover, or whether we're reading about the

40:55

Levitical priests and how they would intercede for people, or we're reading about the sacrificial system, Jesus flashing light needs to be going off because it's what these things are telling us about.

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They're telling us more about who this one is who's coming and what He would accomplish, namely atonement for the sins of the people.

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He would make satisfaction be a propitiation for them and would satisfy the wrath of God that is due against their sin.

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He would absolve them of guilt, and He would then keep the law so that they might be declared righteous, and they would be united to Him.

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And in being united and represented by Him, they would be saved. And so that's what we're seeing unfolding throughout the entire

41:36

Old Testament. And so saints, friends, please read your Old Testament through this lens.

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It's not complicated. It's not rocket science. This is the message of Christ and the message of the apostles, and it will unclutter and unperplex so much of it for you if you just go with these basic tools in your backpack to any passage in the

41:55

Old Testament. Jon Moffitt The ultimate design of the Old Testament is to lead you to have faith in the

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God who can keep His promises, who can remove your sins, who can provide you salvation and righteousness in Jesus Christ.

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What I love about the Old Testament is that it is the reputation builder of two things.

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We learn about the nature of man, and we learn about the nature of God. We learn about man cannot keep promises, and God never fails to keep promises.

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So when Jesus shows up on the scene and says, I'm God, that is a massive statement because you cannot understand the weight of that if you have not the

42:33

Old Testament. They don't set it up in the New Testament. What do the New Testament writers do? They are always pointing us back to the

42:40

Old Testament. It's because we have a reference point. I said this a while back, but when

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I say this, what's the first thing that comes to mind? I say 9 -11. You and I can have an entire conversation without me ever saying the terrorist attack on 9 -11 and the planes that are flying.

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That's exactly what the New Testament does. I am the temple. I am this. You destroy the temple in three days,

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I'll raise it up again. Well, what does he mean? They're thinking physical temple. He's meaning body. So the New Testament is built upon the foundation.

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Jon Moffitt He's thinking what the temple represents, access to God. Jon Moffitt Which is what

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I want to get into in the SR, Semper Firmata podcast. When we don't have these structures, what we do to the

43:30

Old Testament is we say it basically has one application, it only has one purpose, and that's the immediate context.

43:39

We have some dear brothers in Christ who write about these things, who have been writing about it for a while, and we'll give some greater explanation.

43:46

But the pictures and the typology of the

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Old Testament is often lost, ignored, or rejected, because the immediate context is the only context that we can ever look at in Scripture.

44:05

This is where you and I are going to push back on why covenant theology is so important, because it really unlocks the beauty and all of the angles of Christ and what

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Christ is for us—prophet, priest, and king. I always ask people, why is it so important for Jesus to be king?

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The last king who sits on the throne of David, which we're not going to talk about this week, next week, most people can answer that question.

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They're like, well, he's our king. I'm like, no, no, no. It is your eternal righteousness that's at stake if he's not.

44:38

As the king goes, so go the people. All of these types and shadows are presented to us.

44:46

Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are the children of Israel. We're going to get into the dangers of when you don't allow types and shadows to be what drives the

44:54

Old Testament. When you literalize Israel, and Israel only becomes about the land of Israel, the nation of Israel, and their sacrifices, and it's not a picture of what is to come, you're going to miss a lot of stuff.

45:04

You don't see Israel as a type of the people of God. Israel is the thing that will be fulfilled in the nations, the church being saved.

45:14

Every believing Jew being a part of that, obviously. Yeah, totally. A lot that can be said.

45:20

Jon Moffitt In many systems, Israel becomes the focal point and point of the Old Testament. Justin Perdue Honestly, the point of the whole scripture, where we come back to that.

45:29

Jon Moffitt We're going to talk about it in a little bit. So, we're going to jump over. Justin and I do another podcast called Semper Reformanda, which is

45:36

Latin for always reforming. We love this podcast. This is where we do a little bit more nerding out.

45:41

It's a podcast we do for our families, for those who've decided to partner with us to help

45:46

Theocast fund us, keep us growing. But we also created a little community. Not little, it's growing.

45:52

It's big. We created a community where we gather together and encourage each other around these podcasts. We have an app, and we go in there and post things, encouragement.

46:01

If you want to be a part of that or learn more about it, listen to the podcast, be a part of the local and online groups that we are developing, you can do that by going to our website.

46:09

We're going to continue this conversation over there. Justin, my friend, as always, it's great to tee the podcast up twice because the second one always goes straighter.

46:19

Turning one hit record into two, man. That's right. Your b -ball is always your better ball. So, we'll see you guys next week.