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What is the point of the Old Testament?

The Old Testament can be tricky to get into. If we start with the Jesus we see in the New Testament, full of grace of truth, it can be a bit of a lurch to go to the Old Testament. What is the relevance of the endless genealogies (e.g. Chronicles 1-9)? Why does God seem to encourage violence and genocide (e.g. Joshua 11:1-16)? What’s with all the blood sacrifices (e.g. Leviticus)? And why do we need swathes of prophecies full of judgement and wrath (e.g. Jeremiah)? Marcion of Sinope, a heretic during the Early Church period, thought that the Hebrew God of the Old Testament was a different God altogether to Jesus Christ revealed in the New Testament, and decided to get rid of the Old Testament altogether.

So why should we keep the Old Testament?

Recording the Revelation

A helpful start is to go back to the beginning. Our God is a God of love, always wanting to reveal Himself to us so that we can have a relationship with Him. But as we see from the first few chapters of Genesis, the devil is always seeking to destroy that relationship through corrupting God’s revelation. The Lord shared his loving prohibition to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but the serpent twisted this into the sly question: “Has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1). Attacking God’s revelation of Himself has been one of the enemy’s main strategies ever since.

To counteract this, the Lord needed to do two things:

set the record straight by cleaning up the revelation that was already there;
keep that revelation recorded in a way that would prevent it from getting easily corrupted again.

It’s interesting how certain ideas from the earliest parts of Genesis seem to pop up in cultures all over the place. Perhaps the messianic prophecy of the serpent bruising the heel of the woman’s seed (Genesis 3:15) ended up as the Greek myth of Achilles’ Heel? Certainly, creation myths and stories of a Great Flood can be found in many different places. The written word, as opposed to oral tradition, then becomes a fantastic way of preserving this revelation throughout millennia. The Dead Sea Scrolls show us just how amazing the Jewish people were at accurately copying and thus maintaining the scriptures.

Looking like Jesus

Ok, so the Old Testament gives us an enduring record of God’s self revelation, leading to His full revelation in the person of Jesus Christ. But why does so much of the Old Testament not really look like Jesus at all? Part of the answer to this is in the way God has to work with people where they were at: you can’t fix everything all at once! Genesis seems to lay out God’s ideal of marriage, in that’s it’s between one man and one woman for life (Genesis 2:24). But plenty of characters used by the Lord in Old Testament history had multiple wives, and maybe a few concubines, and the Lord didn’t seem to address that. But when we get to Jesus, He reiterates the original intent for marriage (Matthew 19:5).

However, there is a deeper and more profound prophetic way of understanding the Old Testament. Jesus is the Word of God (John 1:1) and all communication and revelation that flows out of the Father’s heart is Jesus. Our eyes must be opened spiritually to see Jesus in all of the Old Testament, but He’s definitely there. On the road to Emmaus, after Jesus’ resurrection, He appeared to some disciples walking there, and “beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures” (Luke 24:27). Jesus is the full revelation of God, but He is able to help us see that He is revealed on every page of the Old Testament. The early church, after all, did not have the ‘New Testament’ as they were still busy writing it, but we find them quoting the Old Testament like mad as they discover some wonderful fresh glimpse of their Jesus in the most unlikely of places.

It’s a bit like if the New Testament revelation of Jesus is a key and the Old Testament is the door. If you take them both by themselves, you can only get so far. If you only have the key, it’s very beautiful to look at of itself, and you can even marvel at it’s wonderful craftsmanship and metalwork. And if you just have an old and dusty door, it’s just a puzzling and impenetrable barrier. But if you put the key in the lock and turn it, door swings open and you can go in! When we read the gospel accounts of the crucifixion, we are moved by the love and self-sacrifice of Jesus. But as we read Lamentations, we get a deeper insight into Jesus’ sufferings; as we meditate on the Servant Songs of Isaiah we understand more of the Lord’s purposes at the cross; and as we immerse ourselves in the Psalms, we see more clearly the victory of our God.

Perhaps the most compelling reason is that Jesus read and paid attention to the Old Testament.

“Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” (Matthew 5:17-18 NASB)

Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets, but we need the read it to know what he’s filling up! Let’s keep reading the whole of our bibles, always asking our Father in heaven to show us on every page more of His wonderful Son.

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Gods Strategy in Human History – Volume 1: God’s PAth to Victory

If you are interested in reading more about God’s plan for humanity as revealed through both the Old and New Testaments, we recommend you read God’s Strategy in Human History, Volume 1: God’s Path to Victory by Roger Forster and Paul Marston, available to buy in our shop.

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Different Bible Translations

With popular versions these days including the NIV, the NLT, the NKJV, NRSV and ESV, the NCV and the NET, it’s not quite as easy as ABC to get your head around the many different Bible translations that exist today. (Unless it’s The Message, which has managed not to suffer the same fate of acronymisation.)

The Bible consists of 66 books in three ancient languages: Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. Unless you happened to study all of these languages, they’ll need to be translated for you, and that’s where the many different Bible versions come in.

After a few pioneering English translations between 1300-1600, the famous King James Version set a high watermark with publication in 1611, and remained the standard in the English speaking world for a few hundred years.

The language shifted and changed, though, presenting a need to update the translation of the Bible. Add to this the discovery of older (ie. more reliable) manuscripts in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it increasingly became the project of academic departments, publishers and churches alike to seek fresh, and often more readable, translations. More new translations were seen in the second half of the 20th century alone than had perhaps been produced at any other time in the English-speaking world.

With a multiplicity of translations comes the need to understand their different aims. Why is one translation different from another?

Translation Approaches

There are, broadly speaking, two approaches to take when translating into English from ancient languages (or from any language):

1. To literally translate, word-for-word, exactly what the text says, with perhaps only a bit of rearrangement of the words so that they make sense in English. This is what is known as a ‘literal’, or ‘formally equivalent’ translation. Examples in use today would be the NASB (favoured by Roger Forster and others), the NKJV, the NRSV or the ESV.
2. To translate the meaning of the phrases, sentences and paragraphs of the original text, trying to get the correct meaning out of a phrase, employing different words in English if necessary. Less focus is placed on translating each individual word; what’s important is that the reader understands the meaning that the original writer intended. This is what is known as a ‘dynamic’ or ‘dynamically equivalent’ translation. Examples in use today would be The Message, the NLT, the NCV or the GNB (Good News Bible).

There are, of course, the cons as well as the pros on each side. In the case of literal translations, they are often found to be clunky and difficult to read; their language can easily sound archaic, and it can be possible to lose or not understand the sense of a phrase which has been transliterated.

In the case of dynamic translations, readability is traded off against reliability: much of the time, what you might be getting is the translator’s interpretation of the text, which obscures other possible meanings that could be there if you knew what the literal rendering would say.

Other translations fall somewhere in the middle, such as the popular NIV or the increasingly popular NET (an online translation with many excellent translators’ notes). This is because they see value in both approaches, and want to achieve a healthy middle ground in conveying the original text into English. Surely these are the best ones to go for, you might say! I certainly think the NET has some significant value. But sometimes these translations can end up falling off the fence they’re sitting on, rather than being strong for holding the ‘middle ground’! Really they should just be another tool in your box for studying the Bible.

Comparing different Bible versions

So which Bible version should I read?

If you want a fresh approach to the Bible, to help you engage with and enjoy the meaning of a passage, try reading it in a dynamically equivalent translation. But if you want to study a passage in greater depth, think about the meaning of specific words and phrases, and perhaps look up where else those words and phrases occur in the Bible, try one of the more literal translations. Both kinds are good, but it is helpful to know which approach is being taken by the translation you’re reading.