IS THE OLD TESTAMENT NEEDED TODAY?

March 29, 2022| Frank Tunstall | Biblical Study, Scriptures, Sermons 4

By: Frank Tunstall, D. Min.

Let’s take a journey together showing how the Old Testament was the cradle for the New Testament and continues to inspire today.

The Lord’s apostles had only the Old Testament for teaching and preaching. They did not have the New Testament; the Holy Spirit gave them the assignment to write it.

What they did have was formidable, however. The apostles had lived with Jesus for three years and had first-hand knowledge of the Lord’s teaching and His miraculous ministry. Jesus’ gory death by crucifixion was forever stamped in their memories as eyewitnesses. The apostles had the Old Testament prophets, as well as John the Baptist, the Messiah’s forerunner. They were also eyewitnesses of Jesus’ resurrection. They saw our Lord for themselves, talked with Him, and ate fish with Him (Luke 24:42; Acts 10:41). They watched Him as He went bodily into heaven. They felt it when the Holy Spirit fell on them in the Upper Room, and they saw the cloven tongues of fire that sat on each of them.

Yes, the apostles had plenty to go on, even in those earliest years before the New Testament began to be written about twenty years after Jesus’ resurrection.

The New Testament was concealed in the Old Testament and waited to be revealed in the New Testament. But the question naturally follows, once the New Testament was written, what was the value of the Old Testament – is it even needed today? Dr. Luke’s account should be adequate to make the point (Luke 24:44-49).

“Then [Jesus] opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures.” The Lord was referring to the Old Testament Scriptures; not a single book of the New Testament had been written at this point.

“(Jesus)  told them, ‘This is what is written: the Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high’” (Luke 24:44-49).

1. Jesus expressed some twenty-five different facts about the Gospel in this passage, and they all have their roots in the Old Testament.    They certainly tell us the importance of the Old Testament! [I challenge you, dear reader, see how many of the twenty-five you can find. And if you find them, send me an e-mail – FrankTunstall3992@Outlook.com. I’ll write you back.]
2. The sacrificial law to this day remains a teacher who helps believers learn many details about the Messiah and His gospel. The 1500 years of Moses’ Law also proved the Law was limited. When Jesus died on the cross and then walked out of his tomb three days later, ah! the perfect sacrifice had finally arrived and had been accepted in the Holy of Holies in heaven (Hebrews 4:14).
3. The moral covenant anchored in the Ten Commandments lives with full force to this day.
4. Secular history gives all the credit to Greece for birthing democracy. That thinking is largely appropriate, but not totally. The civil Law of Moses introduced a kind of forerunner of branches of government and separation of powers – kings, prophets, and priests. Kings could be prophets, but not priests, for example. The tribe of Levi controlled tabernacle and temple worship and kings dared not try to intervene. Samuel the prophet and judge anointed the first two kings of Israel (1 Samuel 13:8-14; 15:10-28). Kings had great power in the government, but they were not absolute – prophets could give them orders, and from time to time they did (see 2 Samuel 7; 12:1-18). Rehoboam mustered his entire army of 180,000 fighting men to start a civil war against Jeroboam with the goal to reunite the recently divided kingdom. But a little-known prophet named Shemaiah spoke in the name of God and shut down the king’s plan; he even sent the entire army home (2 Kings 12:21-24). King Rehoboam obeyed without dispute (see also 2 Chronicles 20:11-23; 26:18-20).
5. The stories in the Old Testament of victories won, defeats suffered, pain and struggle, heroism and cowardice are true to life in the modern era. They are as current as today’s newspapers and the twenty-four-hour news cycles.

The gospel was rocked in the Old Testament cradle. This especially includes the Messianic prophets, including accounts of triumph and failure that tell the good and the bad, all of which are part of the divine revelation. One example is the prophet Nathan’s bombshell he dropped on King David: “Thou art the man.” Nathan exposed the king’s adultery with Bathsheba and the account of the murder in battle of her husband as David tried to cover his sin (2 Samuel 12:7). The Old Testament continues to help cradle and mature believers to this day. The Holy Spirit also gives personal guidance to believers. In doing so the Spirit illuminates the Old Testament and the New Testament but will never contradict the written Word of God in the Bible.

This understanding makes the Bible a marvelous treasure in earthen vessels, divinely inspired in the whole and in each of its parts (2 Corinthians 4:7).

It is unthinkable to neglect the Old Testament!

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