"Gospel and Kingdom" Introduction and Chapter 1

The Sunday school anniversary service has just begun and the hall is packed with children under the watchful eyes of teachers and parents. They all sing lustily with the help of an accordion and a couple of guitars while the song leader conducts energetically from the platform.

The children's eagerness for the Bible story soon to be presented is not shared by the young man sitting on the platform and nervously thumbing through his assorted illustrations and flashcards. Perhaps more thoughtful than most, he is seized by a sudden doubt about the application he intends to make from the Old Testament story he is about to tell.

There's nothing wrong with his visual aids and his storytelling technique is recognized to be of a high standard. There is something which bothers him. How is he to take those far off events of a thousand years or more before Christ and make them say something to his youthful hearers of the 20th century?

This uncertainty is not a sudden thing. Let us suppose our friend, call him Ken, is someone who has been brought up in a Christian home and a living Bible-based church. Over the years, he has been well taught in the contents of the Bible and has learned a way of applying these to his Christian existence, assumed to be the only proper way.

As a Sunday school teacher, he gradually acquired a skill in this kind of application, but was never quite sure of the principles behind the method. But through an interest in Bible study, he began to be aware of the variety in the literature of the Bible as well as of the historical context of the events.

Not that he shared the doubts of some of the books he read as to the inspiration of the Bible, but he did become aware of the rather haphazard approach to both the original meaning of the text and to its application to the here and now, which he previously accepted.

The invitation to speak at the anniversary service has faced Ken with a new problem. He cannot simply rehash the story in accordance with the lesson material in their Sunday school curriculum, not that he was very happy with it.

His uneasiness about the method of telling a Bible story was intensified a couple of weeks previously when he listened to another speaker at a children's rally present the story of David and Goliath. It had been well done and the children loved it.

There had been lots of excitement in the play acting of the great victory by God's chosen leader and the use of visual aids had been carried out with care and precision. But Ken was most troubled by the way the speaker had applied the story.

The fellow dressed up as Goliath had previously revealed a list of childhood sins by peeling cardboard strips off his breastplate one by one as the speaker explained the kind of Goliaths we all have to meet.

Then a strapping young David had appeared on cue and produced his arsenal, a sling labeled faith and five stones listed as obedience, service, Bible reading, prayer and fellowship. The speaker had admitted to say which stone actually killed Goliath, a matter which caused a little mirth when Ken discussed the talk with some friends.

But underneath the mirth was a real sense of uneasiness and confusion over the matter of how such an Old Testament story should be applied. Ken was troubled by all this because six months ago he would have done exactly the same thing.

But now as he prepares to take the platform, he is very unsure about it all. He has come to appreciate more of the historical unity and progression of the biblical events. Somehow the ingenious jumps from Goliath to our sins, from David's weapons to our faith and Christian virtues and more significantly from David to ourselves seems at the one time both logical yet arbitrary.

Any wonder Ken is still troubled. He is about to give a talk which leans heavily on the same kind of approach and which seems to say something valid without clear reasons for its validity. This story could be written a thousand ways to fit your situation in mind.

If you are not a Sunday school teacher, you are a camp counselor, a holiday Bible club helper or maybe just an ordinary Christian struggling with the question of the relevance of the Old Testament to your Christian life.

Or you are a Christian parent who wants to lead your children toward a sense of the meaningfulness of the Bible and toward a maturity in the handling of the text of Scripture. Every time we read the Bible, we meet this problem of the right application of the text to us, the meaning of the ancient text to today's world.

Bridging the Gap Between the Ancient Text and Modern Application

This book has been written to help bridge this gap. In order to build a bridge that will link this ancient world to modern man, we must know what manner of gap separates us. This is not an easy task, but we must make a start.

If we believe that even children can learn to understand something of God's way of speaking to them through the Bible, then we must accept a lifelong calling to increase our understanding of God's word so as to build sure bridges.

This book aims to provide a basic structure upon which to build a more confident use of the Old Testament and thus of the Bible as a whole. It is intended to help Christians cross the deep ravine that separates them from the original meaning of the biblical text.

It does not tell the whole story of biblical theology, but offers an invitation to begin the exciting task of reading the Bible as a living whole. Before commencing to build our bridge, we must ask a more basic question.

Why Christians Must Read the Old Testament

Why bother bridging the gap in the first place? For many Christians, the problem is not how to read the Old Testament, but why should it be read at all? Some people still are influenced by the intellectual climate of the 19th century, which did much to undermine a positive appreciation of the Old Testament.

The philosophical understanding of the time led people to conclude that the Christian religion as found in the New Testament was nothing more than the natural evolution of man's ideas about God. Consequently, the Old Testament was regarded as primitive and therefore outdated, an old expression of religion.

It was seen not only as being pre-Christian because it failed by several centuries to be concerned with the events of the gospel, but also as being sub-Christian because it failed to reach the ethical and theological heights of the New Testament.

Yet many people who are quite unaffected by such ideas about the Old Testament may in practice adopt a similar attitude, for they see it as no more than a background to the teaching of the New Testament.

Perhaps they would refuse to downgrade the theological importance of the Old Testament because of their convictions about the inspiration and authority of the whole Bible. But in practice, such people can be even more neglectful of the Old Testament than other Christians are who do not hold to such a high view of inspiration.

Ironically, the evangelical view of scripture itself can make the problem worse. For the evolutionist is happy to dismiss as crude and primitive those parts of the Old Testament which he finds morally offensive.

The conservative, on the other hand, has to find some way of reconciling his view of the Old Testament as the word of God with such things as Israel's slaughter of the Canaanites, the cursing of enemies in some Psalms, or the wide prescription of capital punishment in the Law of Moses.

Even if parts of the Old Testament do not appear morally reprehensible to the conservative Christian, other parts appear to be completely irrelevant. For a third group of people, the problem with the Old Testament is simply that, on the whole, they find it dry and uninteresting.

It is wordy, cumbersome, and confusing. Whatever their view of scripture, the sheer weight and complexity of this collection of ancient books, more than three times the bulk of the New Testament, leads to boredom, apathy, and neglect rather than deliberately thought-out rejection.

There's a simple way to avoid these difficulties. Our consciences are less likely to prick us for the neglect of the Old Testament if we are giving ourselves to the study of the New. After a while, the Old Testament drops right out of sight, and that does not cause us any pain at all.

Happily, there are people who still read the Old Testament. Their conviction that the Old Testament is part of God's written revelation is no doubt partly responsible for this. Also, if it is interpreted correctly, the Old Testament yields much to interest both young and old.

Children speakers and designers of Sunday school curricula are amongst the most consistent users of the narratives of ancient Israel for they contain a wealth of excitement and human interest to capture the imagination of children of all ages.

Tell a good story about one of Israel's battles, and you can have the kids on the edge of their seats. Yet pitfalls abound for the teacher who wants to draw out a Christian message from the Old Testament, though they may not be apparent until the unity of the Bible is understood.

Failure to recognize the unity of Scripture led some of the early expositors to follow false trails. The emergence of the allegorical method of interpretation in the early church provides a good example.

Because much of the Old Testament was seen as unhelpful or sub-Christian, the only way to save it for Christian use was to distinguish a hidden spiritual sense concealed behind the natural meaning. Allegory seemed to be a legitimate method of interpretation because it was controlled by the content of the New Testament or, later on, by church dogma.

What was lacking, however, was the kind of control the New Testament itself applied when it used the Old Testament. Instead, the relationship between the natural meaning of the Old Testament and the teachings of the New was left to the ingenuity of the expositor.

One serious effect of the allegorical method was that it tended to hinder people from taking the historical or natural sense of the Old Testament seriously. Nor did this problem exist only for the Old Testament.

In the Middle Ages, the logic was taken a step further. Not only was the unhelpful natural sense of the Old Testament given its spiritual sense from the natural sense of the New Testament, even the natural sense of the New Testament was seen to require its own spiritual interpretation, which was found in the tradition of the church.

Thus authority now lay, not in the natural meaning of the canon of Scripture, but in the teachings of the church, as it interpreted the spiritual meaning according to its own dogma. The Middle Ages saw the development of interpretation according to the four meanings of Scripture.

A. The literal or natural meaning. B. The moral reference to the human soul. C. The allegorical reference to the church. D. The eschatological reference to heavenly realities. Not all texts were read with four meanings, and there was considerable activity in the field of biblical studies, especially from the 12th to the 15th centuries, as scholars sought to give proper place to the literal meaning.

The Reformation and Sola Scriptura

It was the Protestant reformers who helped the Christian church see again the importance of the historical and natural meaning of Scripture so that the Old Testament could be regarded as having value in itself.

When the reformers recovered the authority of the Bible, they not only reaffirmed a biblical doctrine of the church and salvation, but also a biblical doctrine of Scripture. Protestant interpretation was based upon the concept of the perspicuous, clear, and self-interpreting nature of the Bible.

By removing an authority for interpretation from outside of the Bible, the infallible church, the reformers were free to accept and use the principles of interpretation that are contained within the Bible itself.

So the self-interpreting scriptures became the sole rule of faith. Sola Scriptura, Scripture alone, was a rallying cry of the Reformation. The right of interpretation was restored to every believer, but this did not mean that the principles of interpretation found within the Bible could be overlooked, and every Christian follow his own whim.

The allegorical method became far less popular because the historical meaning of the Old Testament was found to be significant on its own within the unity of the Bible. Perhaps we understand the Protestant position better in the light of the other great principles which emerged at the Reformation.

The reformers maintained that salvation is a matter of grace alone, by Christ alone, through faith alone. Grace alone meant that salvation is God's work alone, unconditioned by anything that man is or does.

Christ alone meant that the sinner is accepted by God on the basis of what Christ alone has done. Faith alone meant that the only way for the sinner to receive salvation is through faith, whereby the righteousness of Christ is imputed or credited to the believer.

Salvation by Grace Alone, Through Christ Alone, by Faith Alone

What had this got to do with the Old Testament? It meant that the reformers were establishing a method of biblical interpretation in which the natural historical sense of the Old Testament has significance for Christians because of its organic relationship to Christ.

God's grace seen in his dealings with Israel is part of a living process which comes to its climax in his work of grace, the Gospel. That is in the historical events of the Christ who is Jesus of Nazareth.

Just as it is important to assert that this Old Testament sacred history or its salvation history must be interpreted by the word Jesus Christ, it is also important to recognize that the Gospel is God's acting in history, more specifically, through the history of Jesus.

Medieval theology had internalized and subjectivized the Gospel to such an extent that the basis of acceptance with God, of justification, was no longer what God did once for all in Christ, but what God was continuing to do in the life of the Christian.

This dehistoricizing of what God had done once and for all in the Gospel went hand in hand with the allegorizing of the history of the Old Testament. The Reformation recovered the historical Christ event, the Gospel, as the basis of our salvation and, in turn, the objective importance of the Old Testament history.

This is, of course, a very different thing from the modern approach of seeing the Old Testament as part of the historical development of man's religious ideas or as merely a background history to the Old Testament age.

Basically, the Old Testament is not the history of man's developing thoughts about God, but the whole Bible presents itself as the unfolding process of God's dealings with man and of his own self-disclosure to humanity.

The New Testament's Witness to Christ in the Old Testament

The most compelling reason for Christians to read and study the Old Testament lies in the New Testament. The New Testament witnesses to the fact that Jesus of Nazareth is the one in whom and through whom all the promises of God find their fulfillment.

These promises are only to be understood from the Old Testament. The fulfillment of the promises can be understood only in the context of the promises themselves. The New Testament presupposes a knowledge of the Old Testament.

Everything that is a concern to the New Testament writers is part of the one redemptive history to which the Old Testament witnesses. The New Testament writers cannot separate the person and work of Christ, nor the life of the Christian community, from this sacred history which has its beginnings in the Old Testament.

It is, of course, of great significance that the New Testament writers constantly quote or allude to the Old Testament. One estimate is that there are at least 1 ,600 direct quotations of the Old Testament in the New, to which may be added several thousand more New Testament passages that clearly allude to or reflect Old Testament verses.

Of course, not all these citations show direct continuity of thought with the Old Testament, and some even show a contrast between Old and New Testaments, but the overall effect is inescapable. The message of the New Testament has its foundations in the Old Testament.

Contrary to what is sometimes suggested, the New Testament writers were not in the habit of quoting texts without reference to their context. In fact, a quotation is sometimes intended to prompt the recall of an entire passage of Old Testament scripture.

For example, Paul's quotation in 1 Corinthians 10, verse 7, a part of Exodus 32, verse 6, refers to the festivities of the Israelites. The intention is to bring to mind the whole narrative of Israel's idolatry and the golden calf.

A person may become a Christian without much knowledge of the Old Testament. Conversion does, however, require a basic understanding of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. The Christian cannot be committed to Christ without being committed to his teaching.

It follows that Christ's attitude to the Old Testament will begin to convey itself to the Christian who is carefully studying the New Testament. The more we study the New Testament, the more apparent becomes the conviction shared by Jesus, the apostles, and the New Testament writers in general.

Namely, the Old Testament is scripture, and scripture points to Christ. The manner in which the Old Testament testifies to Christ is a question that has to be resolved on the basis of the New Testament, since it is the New Testament which provides the Christian with an authoritative interpretation of the Old.

The effect of this is twofold. As Christians, we will always be looking at the Old Testament from the standpoint of the New Testament, from the framework of the Gospel, which is the goal of the Old Testament.

But since the New Testament continually presupposes the Old Testament as a unity, we, who are not acquainted with the Old Testament in the way the first Christians were, will be driven back to study the Old Testament on its own terms.

To understand the whole living process of redemptive history in the Old Testament, we must recognize two basic truths. The first is that this salvation history is a process. The second is that this process of redemptive history finds its goal, its focus, and fulfillment in the person and work of Christ.

The Gospel as Objective Redemptive History

This is the principle underlying this book. Failure to grasp this truth, largely because the proper study of the Old Testament has been neglected, has aided and abetted one of the most unfortunate reversals in evangelical theology.

The core of the Gospel, the historical facts of what God did in Christ, is often downgraded today in favor of a more mystical emphasis on the private spiritual experience of the individual. Whereas faith in the Gospel is essentially acceptance of and commitment to the declaration that God acted in Christ some 2 ,000 years ago on our behalf, saving faith today is often portrayed more as trust in what God is doing in us now.

Biblical ideas such as the forgiveness of sins or salvation are interpreted as primarily describing a Christian's personal experience. But when we allow the whole Bible, Old and New Testament, to speak to us, we find that those subjective aspects of the Christian life, which are undoubtedly important, the new birth, faith, and sanctification, are the fruits of the Gospel.

The Gospel, while still relating to the individual people of their point of need, is rooted and grounded in the history of redemption. It is good news about Jesus before it can be good news for sinful men and women.

Indeed, it is only as the objective historical redemptive facts are grasped that the subjective experience of the individual Christian can be understood. At this point, some readers may be thinking that we have strayed from our original aim by discussing the history of the biblical interpretation.

I hope that a few technical points will not deter them, for it is my solid conviction that all Christians need to develop a biblical way of understanding the Bible and of using it. It is not only possible, but even necessary for all Christians, including children, to gain a total perspective on the whole Bible so that the really important relationships between its parts begin to appear.