How to Read the Old Testament - Part 1 - Michael Brown

The Old Testament can sometimes seem like an oddball family member. Like that strange great uncle that you don’t know quite what to make of. He does odd things like putting ketchup on his roast dinner, he tells long impenetrable stories about people and places you’ve never heard of before and whilst you love some of the things he says, every now and then he’ll say something that makes you feel extremely uncomfortable.

Anyone else have a family member like that? No, just me? Okay, sorry Uncle Norman.

The truth is that the Old Testament can be very hard work, at times we can find it confusing, boring or offensive. Many a Christian has found themselves lost in the weeds of Numbers, Chronicles or Ezekiel.

If you have ever felt that way, don’t worry, there is a very good reason why that is the case. It turns out you are not an ancient Israelite, you (probably) can’t read ancient Hebrew and haven’t had your whole way of thinking shaped by the cultural contexts, customs and attitudes of the ancient Middle East, go figure.

This is a book written by a vast number of different authors, covers a range of different genres, over a period of over a thousand years, in a different language and from a cultural perspective that is almost entirely alien to our own. Of course it’s difficult, it would be strange if it wasn’t.

And so, what often ends up happening is that we start to neglect the Old Testament in our reading. After all, when you are stuck trying to plod through all the many instructions for the construction of the tabernacle, the temptation to just read Ephesians again instead can be a strong one. But, when we do so, we miss out on so much of what God has to offer us in his word.

I’m a huge fan of The Lord of the Rings and I often think that just reading the New Testament is a little bit like just reading The Return of the King (the third book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for those not as geeky as me).

Sure, in the Return of the King you technically get all the bits that matter, (SPOILER ALERT!) the One Ring is destroyed, Sauron is defeated, the new King is crowned, and the Shire is saved. These are the crucial moments in the whole story, the climax.

But if you only read the Return of the King, you would miss out on so much of the meaning and depth behind these moments. You wouldn’t understand why the ring must be destroyed or why that would even matter, you wouldn’t understand why the Shire is in danger or why that is a bad thing, and you wouldn’t understand why there wasn’t already a King ruling in Gondor.

It is like this when we miss out the Old Testament. Jesus only makes sense in the light of the Old Testament, so much of the New is rooted in the Old. The entire worldview of the New Testament writers is shaped by the Jewish scriptures, they quote from the Old Testament extensively and constantly use it as the basis for their teachings. And they also loved it.

This was Jesus’ Bible and Paul and Peter’s Bible; the scriptures they delighted in and based their actions upon. After all, when Paul says in 2 Timothy that, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16) he is talking about the Old Testament, there wasn’t a New Testament yet.

So, I want to help us the read the Old Testament with a little bit more joy, ease and understanding. I don’t think it will ever stop being hard, but hopefully in the series of blogs that follow this introduction you will find some tips and advice of use to make it just that little bit easier.

I pray you enjoy the journey.

Read the other blogs in this series here: