6 Ways the Old Testament Speaks Today: An Interactive Guide

by Alec Motyer

Overview

What does the Old Testament have to do with us today? 

To many of us, the Old Testament can seem distant, foreign, and confusing, with difficult language and events disconnected from our present-day lives. But with a little guidance, it is quickly evident that the Old Testament still speaks today.

In this engaging book, late pastor-theologian Alec Motyer leads us to discover the everyday significance of six key themes that resonate throughout the Old Testament: history, religion, worship, prophecy, wisdom, and theology. Each chapter focuses on one theme, featuring a week’s worth of Scripture readings paired with accessible commentary on the biblical text. Clear, accessible, and warmly pastoral, this book will help you see what this collection of ancient texts from the past has to do with our day-to-day lives in the present.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781433558542
Publisher:	Crossway
Publication date:	05/16/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	719,406
File size:	614 KB

About the Author

Alec Motyer (1924–2016) served as principal of Trinity Theological College in the United Kingdom, as well as pastor of several churches in England.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Voice of History

A Review

Between the time when the Lord called Abraham (Genesis 12) and the time of Malachi, the last of the prophets, there are about 1,500 years. Within this time span the Old Testament tells how the Lord chose one man, gave him a family, and made the family into a nation. Patiently he persevered with that nation through thick and thin, never deviating from his freely given commitment to be their God.

Figure 1.1 (p. 16) shows an outline of the story. A chart can only give an impression: this is what the skeleton of Old Testament history looks like. But put some flesh on the bare bones by following the events on the map (see fig. 1.2).

One Man to Bless the World

God had a worldwide purpose when he called Abram from Ur of the Chaldeans (Gen. 11:31–12:5; 15:7), and we, marveling at the simple trust of the man who "went out, not knowing where he was going" (Heb. 11:8), can follow him along the established trade route from Ur to Haran and on into Canaan. He went on his way trusting the promises God had made to him — that he would be a universal blessing (Gen. 12:2–3) and possess the land of Canaan (15:7). In due course the promises passed to Isaac (17:19–21) and then to Jacob (27:27–29; 28:13–15).

Possessing the Land

Part of the promise was fulfilled when Jacob's sons, now a large nation (Ex.1:1–7), left Egypt under Moses and later entered and possessed Canaan under Joshua. The book of Joshua tells how the land was conquered (see Josh. 1:1–5;21:43–45). Judges 1 sketches how individual tribes claimed their inheritance, but the main message of Judges is the good care of the Lord in providing judge-deliverers according to the people's need but contrary to their deserving (2:10–19).

The Kings

Then the people asked for a king (1 Sam. 8:6), and after the failure of Saul's kingship (1 Sam. 8:1–7; 10:20–24; 13:13–14; 15:26), David united the kingdom around his new capital city, Jerusalem (2 Sam. 5:6–9). His son Solomon further cemented this unity by building in Jerusalem a temple, or dwelling place, for the Lord (1 Kings 6:1, 37–38).

But Solomon's son Rehoboam was the sort of person we would today call a "loser." Under his reign, the kingdom broke into two (1 Kings 12:1–19), with Israel (also called Jacob and Ephraim) to the north and Judah to the south.

Exile and Return

The single dynasty of David lasted in Jerusalem for four hundred years, but in the north one dynasty followed another. King succeeded king by conquest and assassination until Israel was taken captive to Assyria in 722 BC. Judah, however, did not fall to Assyria's imperial successor, Babylon, until 586 BC, and then the exile of the Lord's people was complete. But the faithful Lord never allows his promises to lapse (Ezra 1:1). He brought them home again in 539 BC but only to live as provincial subjects within the Persian Empire. They were never again a sovereign, independent state, and the dynasty of David was not to surface again until he came whose right it is to reign (Luke 1:29–33).

What Sort of History?

There are five things we can say about Old Testament history.

Old Testament History Is Reliable

Specialist opinion regarding Old Testament history has undergone a wide pendulum swing. There was a time when specialists were saying that the stories should be accepted as true only if verified by evidence from outside the Old Testament. But now many are prepared to allow that the stories can be assumed to be true unless other evidence contradicts them. It is fair to say that the major tendency of outside evidence is to confirm what we read in the Bible. But we have a much surer foundation to rest on than this piece of evidence or that. Our great privilege is to look beyond specialist opinion to the Lord Jesus Christ. When he referred to stories in the Old Testament, it is plain that he accepted them as the wholly reliable Word of God, and we who follow him need have no hesitation in accepting as true whatever the Old Testament is found to affirm about events and their sequence.

The words "found to affirm" are important. Old Testament history is notproblem-free. It is not easy, for example, to fit together the reigns of the kings of Israel and Judah from dates and chronologies supplied by the books of Kings; neither is it certain who is referred to as "Darius the Mede" in Daniel 5:31. On the other hand, it is clear from archaeology that the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph accurately reflect life and customs in the period 2000–1500 BC. Details formerly disputed (like the very existence of Belshazzar, Daniel 5) are now well established. We need to work at the stories until we are sure what it is the Old Testament is saying and claiming.

Old Testament History Is Selective

In being selective, Old Testament history is no different from every attempt to write history. Not even the longest history book, inside or outside the Bible, contains all that happened in its chosen period. H. A. L. Fisher wrote his History of Europe without making any reference to my grandmother. The same is true of R. F. Foster in his book Modern Ireland 1600–1972, even though the old lady lived in Ireland well within this period. Were I to write of the years 1850–1939, Grandma would figure very largely indeed. It is all a matter of what a writer thinks important.

Even historians who cannot discern any purpose in the flow of history still have to decide what to include and what to leave out. This is just as true of the Old Testament, not because it contains a peculiar sort of history or because its writers were ignorant or biased but because selection is the only way to write history.

Take Manasseh as an example. He reigned for many years over Judah (ca. 690–640 BC), and economically, politically, and militarily, he was an astute ruler, but 2 Kings tells us nothing of all this. Only eighteen verses are allotted to his fifty-five years (2 Kings 21:1–18), and they say, in effect, only one thing about Manasseh: "He did what was evil in the sight of the Lord" (v. 2).

Fifty-five years and only one fact! It would be easy to dismiss such history writing as no history at all. How very different it is from modern histories with their social, economic, political, and military detail. But notice verse 17:

Now the rest of the acts of Manasseh and all that he did, ... are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah?

In other words, the Old Testament historian had all the facts available, but he simply did not think them important for his purpose. Rather, this was his concern:

Still the Lord did not turn from the burning of his great wrath ... against Judah, because of all the provocations with which Manasseh had provoked him. And the Lord said, "I will remove Judah ..., and I will cast off this city that I have chosen, Jerusalem." (2 Kings 23:26)

The point is that it was Manasseh's moral and spiritual failure that subsequently caused the ruin of Judah and Jerusalem. In 2 Kings 23:26, notice the word "still." Manasseh was succeeded by Josiah (2 Kings 22–23). Unlike his father, Josiah was devoted to the Lord. Indeed, of all the kings of Judah he came nearest to the ideal, the "golden boy," David. Think of it this way: Manasseh dropped a huge brick into the pond; Josiah, by his godliness and his reforms, fetched the brick out again, but nothing could stop the ripples that Manasseh had set in motion.

Why then should we need to know of Manasseh's domestic and foreign policies? It was not on them that history turned, for it is righteousness, not astuteness, that exalts a nation (Prov. 14:34). All Old Testament history is selectively written to demonstrate this single principle. The fortunes of nations are settled not by economic, political, military, or diplomatic factors but by their standing before God.

Old Testament History Is God-Centered

The Hebrew Bible — the Old Testament — consists of three sections. They are arranged differently from our English versions (which follow the order given in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament) and are grouped as shown in figure 1.3.

This is the Bible as Jesus knew it. In the upper room on the first Easter Day, he spoke to his disciples about how "everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled" (Luke 24:44). It is pretty marvelous to realize that we have the same Bible the Lord Jesus knew and loved.

But the particular point to notice is that the early editors, who organized the Bible books into the three-section order of the Hebrew Bible, described the history books of Samuel and Kings as "prophets." How can this be? What does it mean?

When we speak of "prophets," we often mean "predictors" or "forecasters," but this is only one of the things a prophet did. Acts 2:11 and 17 will help us here. As the crowd listened to the apostles speaking on the day of Pentecost, Peter reminded them that Joel had predicted that "your sons and your daughters shall prophesy." However, what the listeners heard them proclaiming was not predictions but "the mighty works of God." This is how the Old Testament history books are prophecy: they are written in order to tell us about God and the way he runs the world; they are a record of his wonderful works.

Listen to Amos:

Did I not bring up Israel from the land of Egypt, And the Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir? (Amos 9:7)

This must have been a shock to Amos's listeners. They had been raised to believe that their God's "mighty works" in bringing them out from Egyptian slavery were unique to them. This was right as far as it went. Sadly, however, they had come to think of the exodus simply as a date on the calendar and of themselves as right with God simply because that date had passed. Nothing could be more false or misleading. The fact is that the mere presence of a date on the calendar — whether Christmas, Easter, or any other event — saves no one.

So Amos was challenging a deadly spiritual complacency that said, "We must be right with God because the exodus happened," irrespective of personal trust or obedience or holiness. He challenged it head-on: "As far as the exodus is concerned, why, you are no different from anyone else! Who do you think masterminded the migration of the Philistines from Caphtor and of the Arameans from Kir? You boast of your exodus, but your God is so great that he is behind every movement of peoples and nations!" He is the God of all history.

Listen to Isaiah:

Woe to Assyria, the rod of my anger;
When the Lord has finished all his work on Mount Zion and on Jerusalem, he will punish the speech of the arrogant heart of the king of Assyria and the boastful look in his eyes.

Shall the axe boast over him who hews with it, or the saw magnify itself against him who wields it? (Isa. 10:5–7, 12, 15)

Assyria was the superpower of the day. We must not belittle that power simply because their weapons seem so primitive compared with the savage weapons of destruction that are the childish pride of nations today. The Assyrians had developed the most advanced war machine of their time; they were dreaded for their seemingly invincible capacity for total war. However, says Isaiah, what is Assyria but an expression of the Lord's wrath (v. 5), a messenger on the Lord's errand (v. 6), and a tool in the Lord's hand (v. 15)? The superpower on earth and the superior power of a sovereign God!

One major lesson of all the history books, and one reason why so much of the Old Testament is occupied with history, is that we may see that behind all events and behind their whole sequence is a great and wonderful God engineering and controlling everything and working his purposes out in the flow of history.

Old Testament History Is Moral

Let's stay with Isaiah 10:5–15. Assyria invaded Judah and threatened Jerusalem in 701 BC. It was a justly deserved disaster for the Judahites, and Assyria was the Lord's chastising rod. But from the point of view of the king of Assyria, nothing of the sort was happening. He was an imperialist. He took it for granted that it was his right to rule the world, that if he so wished he would jolly well do so, and that Jerusalem was as helplessly and rightfully his prey as all the other nations he had conquered (vv. 7–11). He was wholly motivated by what Isaiah calls his "arrogant heart" (v. 12). Under a sovereign God, Assyria's power would be used for the Lord's holy purposes (vv. 6, 12); under a holy God, Assyria's pride would be punished (vv. 12–15).

The king of Assyria was both a tool in the Lord's hand and a responsible agent in his own right. Isaiah helps us to understand this a little by suggesting an illustration:

Because you have raged against me and your complacency has come to my ears,
The Assyrian king was like a powerful horse with enormous energy and drive, but the Lord was the rider determining where and to what extent that power could be used. In this way the Bible reveals a God who is not only fully sovereign but also undeviatingly holy. It also reveals a world in which people are fully responsible for what they do and yet live within the control of divine rule.

Many are troubled by the fact that the Old Testament seems so full of war andcruelty: "Such a savage book," people say.

There are three things to be said about this. First, we must be careful not to criticize the Old Testament for being realistic. Its history, after all, is about this world, and if it contained no wars with their cruelties, probably the same people who accuse it of savagery would be the first to criticize it for living in a dream world.

Second, the Old Testament does not necessarily approve of all it records. Its stories rarely embody a moral comment one way or the other; we are usually left to draw our own conclusions of right or wrong. Consequently, actually to be told in 2 Samuel 11:27 that "the thing that David had done displeased the Lord" is somewhat out of the ordinary.

Another incident in the life of David is allowed to pass without comment. The Lord brought David to the throne without his fighting for it. He promised it to David and kept his promises (2 Sam. 7:8–11). Equally, David, for his part, resolutely refused to seize the throne for himself (1 Sam. 24:4–7; 26:8–11). Once he was on the throne, however, what do we find? He went to war against the poor rump of Saul's kingdom ruled by the incompetent and rather pathetic Ish-Bosheth (2 Sam. 2:8–?4:12). By doing so, he sowed seeds of bloodshed that would in due course become a harvest of hatred and division.

Was this war justified? Should not David have continued to trust that the Lord who had kept his promises so far would go on keeping promises until they were all fulfilled? Does the Old Testament approve of this war making? Surely not! It is recorded not because the Old Testament delights in war but because its people (even the best of them) are tragically human and their lives blighted by human frailties.

In other words, the history books of the Old Testament not only reveal God but also reveal people. Even the best of them were sinful — lustful, ambitious, cruel, mistaken. Like us, they failed, and their failures are faithfully recorded in this most honest of books. Indeed, isn't it one of the greatest of the "mighty works of God" that he continues to bother with such people?

Third, the long sweep of Old Testament history allows us to see the holy God governing the world by his own moral laws. Joshua entered Canaan with a mandate that horrifies us: he was to put to death every human being without regard to age or sex (e.g., Josh. 6:21). But this frightfulness is the end of a long story that began in Genesis 15:16. The time was four hundred years earlier, and the Lord was speaking to Abraham:

And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.

Even on a timescale of centuries, history is governed by the Lord's moral rules. To take the land of the Amorites from them and give it to Abraham just like that would have been an injustice. They were its rightful owners, and their rights had to be respected. But in four hundred years' time, the story would be different. They would have had four centuries of probation, and by the end of that time their "iniquity" would have been "complete." Awful as would be their end, it was no more than the wages of their sin (Rom. 6:23). "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?" (Gen. 18:25).

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "6 Ways the Old Testament Speaks Today"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Alec Motyer.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Preface to the Second Edition,
Preface to the First Edition,
Introduction,
1 The Voice of History Bible Readings: Old Testament History,
2 The Voice of Religion Bible Readings: Old Testament Religion,
3 The Voice of Worship Bible Readings: Old Testament Worship,
4 The Voice of Prophecy Bible Readings: Old Testament Prophecy,
5 The Voice of Wisdom Bible Readings: Old Testament Wisdom,
6 The Voice of God Bible Readings: Old Testament Revelation of God,
Appendix: Short Daily Bible Readings,
Old Testament History,
Old Testament Religion,
Old Testament Worship,
Old Testament Prophecy,
Old Testament Wisdom,
Old Testament Revelation of God,
General Index,
Scripture Index,

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“I have lost count of the number of times I have read this book. Priceless wisdom and exquisite summaries of Old Testament genres, with the added bonus of Motyer’s wit and wisdom, make this book a treasure indeed.”
—Derek W. H. Thomas, Senior Minister, First Presbyterian Church, Columbia, South Carolina; Teaching Fellow, Ligonier Ministries; Chancellor’s Professor, Reformed Theological Seminary

“Alec Motyer was both a princely man and a prince among Old Testament theologians, teachers, and authors. Devout and witty, scholarly and accessible, theological and commonsensical, God-honoring and Christ-centered, Spirit-illuminated and practical—he seemed to sprinkle gold dust on every page he wrote. And from seminary-trained leaders to the youngest believer, every reader can share his generosity by a little digging into 6 Ways the Old Testament Speaks Today.”
—Sinclair B. Ferguson, Chancellor’s Professor of Systematic Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary; Teaching Fellow, Ligonier Ministries