Basics of the New Testament - Lesson 1

Before we get into the actual text of the New Testament, I want to give a brief introduction to what we’re going to be doing. This is basically a three-hour class. We’re going to look at 27 books written by about 9 authors over 60 years, approximately, and they are the most studied and the most read books in the history of the world. And it’s quite a challenge to compress that down into three hours, but I’m going to do it by just trying to paint the general picture of what’s going on in the New Testament. We’re going to be looking at the basic structure of the New Testament. We’re going to be learning the main people who are in the stories, and we’re going to be looking at the major themes that are in the New Testament. There are links in the bottom of the lesson pages to other lessons if you wanted to go deeper in any of these topics.

In terms of the structure of how I want to present the New Testament, I’m going to use the same structure that I used in another class, The Basics of the Bible. And the structure ultimately came from Burt Downs’ class called Bible Survey that’s on the website. But what we’re going to do is we’re going to break the New Testament down into three parts. The first part is the foundational part. These are the four Gospels. These are the stories of the good news—that’s what gospel means—the good news of what Jesus did, his life, death, and resurrection. And these four Gospels provide the foundation for everything else that’s going to happen in the New Testament.

Then the second section is the historical section. This is the Book of Acts, and this is the account of how the Gospel spread throughout the ancient world—the ancient known world at that time. And it did spread, and it spread relatively quickly. When Jesus, right before what we call his ascension, when he was done visiting with his disciples and he ascended to heaven, he said, “You are to be my witnesses into Jerusalem, and in all of Judea and Samaria, and to the very ends of the earth.” And so those are the three phases that Acts picks up as we look at the three phases of the growth of the church through the ancient world.

And then there’s the instructional part. These are letters, 13 letters written by the Apostle Paul, and a few of the letters we classify as the general epistles. We call them that because they aren’t addressed to any one particular church. But these are basically taking what Jesus taught us and applying it in real-life situations.

Don’t get lost in the weeds, okay? There’s a big picture here that we need to keep in our mind. What is the Bible about? The Bible is about the fact that people were created to live in relationship with God, their Creator. I love the line that’s repeated all the way through the Old Testament, “I will be their God, and they will be my people.” We were built for relationship. But when Adam and Eve sinned in the garden, that relationship was damaged. And so what you have all the way through the Old Testament is a series of promises that God is going to redeem his people. And he says, “If you’re faithful to our relationship, there will be blessings. And if you are not faithful to our relationship, there will be punishment.”

Now I’m going to be using the word ‘covenant’ quite a bit, so I want to make sure that you understand what it is. A covenant is just an agreement, an agreement between two parties, God and his children. And the first 4/5 of the Bible is, we call it the Old Testament. It never calls itself the Old Testament or the Old Covenant, but we call it that because there’s going to be a new covenant coming, I’ll talk about in just a second. And so because there’s a new covenant, we refer to the first 4/5 as the Old Covenant. You could call it the First Covenant. You could call it the Hebrew Scriptures, a lot of different names for it, but it’s generally called the Old Testament, the first agreement that God had.

And what we’re doing in this is we’re starting, in essence, with the person of Abraham. Abraham was made certain promises. The Bible says that Abraham believed God, and based on his belief, God declared him to be righteous. He declared him to be right before God. And there are three things that God promised to Abraham: that he would have descendants, that he would have land, and that he would have a blessing to the whole world. And as you read through the Old Testament, what you see is that there always is a remnant of faithful descendants of Abraham; but for the most part, the bulk of them weren’t faithful. The remnant received the blessings, and the bulk that weren’t faithful received the curses. And yet, in this whole process, God remains faithful.

And it brings it up to a prophet named Jeremiah, and Jeremiah makes a really important prophecy. In Jeremiah 31, verses 31 and following, this is what he says: “The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant” (they were not faithful to the covenant), “though I was a husband to them” (in other words, God remained faithful). “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my law in their minds.” In other words, the law isn’t going to be just on tablets of stone, but it’s actually going to be written into their hearts. “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.” So what you have in Jeremiah, and then there’s related prophecies in Ezekiel and in Joel, that the way that God was going to bring about the new covenant was that he was going to put his own Spirit within us. Okay, this is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and we’ll be talking about that. And so no longer is this relationship defined by external things, primarily, but it is defined and motivated and empowered by the Holy Spirit living within us.

So when you get to Jesus, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus in the Gospels, what you realize is that he is the fulfillment of these prophecies, and through the work of Jesus on the cross, that new covenant is now available. 

So what did Jesus do? Well, he did for us what we could not do for ourselves; that when he died on the cross, he provided forgiveness for our sins and access to God the Father to live in relationship with him. And we enter into that relationship just like Abraham did. We enter into it through faith. We trust that Jesus did for us what we could not do for ourselves. It is through Jesus and Jesus alone that we actually have access to forgiveness and a relationship with God.

And then the New Testament calls us to live faithfully within that new covenant, within that relationship with God. And as we live in relationship with him, and as we are obedient to the covenant, then we receive the blessings of the covenant. So welcome to our journey through the New Testament.