Survey of the Old Testament - Lesson 2

I. Million Dollar Question

The purpose of this lecture is to understand and identify the significance of a theological center for the enterprise of Old Testament interpretation. It is important to note that the quest for a center constitutes, for us, only one of three main entry points for understanding the Bible and the Old Testament. I have a theological center, a thematic framework, and a covenantal or canonical structure. You can think of John Frames’ triperspectival apologetic approach. This is my triperspectival approach to biblical interpretation, when it comes to the Old Testament. Here’s the million dollar question: what is the Bible about, and how is that message communicated? When you get into an elevator with someone and they see you carrying your Bible, if you’ve got it, probably not anymore, it’s on your phone, right? They say, “Hey, what’s that book about?” Do you have a 15 or 30 second elevator speech that you could give to them on the contents of your Bible, that’s both accurate and comprehensive?

It’s really one of the most basic questions about the Bible that we could ask. All of us have answered that question in our mind somehow. Whether you’re aware of it or not. You all have presuppositions about how you think about the Bible. The question is, are they correct? Are they Biblical presuppositions? Where did you get those presuppositions? Did your parents pass them down to you? Did you get them in school? Did you get them by reading the Bible? There’s all kinds of ways. There are lots of influences in your life. As we grow and mature over time, we think about the Bible in different ways. We want to know, fully and accurately, what it’s about, because the way in which you think about the Bible is the way in which you’re going to interpret it.

I had sat in the ministry of one pastor for a while, and for him, everything in the Bible was about missions. Creation was about missions somehow. Crossing the red sea was about missions somehow. The period of the judges, the judges were on mission. Are you on a mission? That one thing shaped everything. 

II. The Challenge Is The Diversity Of The Bible

The question is: what’s going to be the one thing that shapes everything for you? Some people think the Bible is all about obeying, obeying, obeying. So everything comes out that way. The Bible has mission in it and obedience in it, but what’s the thing that undergirds all of those things and makes sense of them? The challenge of asking this question is the diversity that exists in the Bible, but especially in the Old Testament.

Consider some of these factors. Number one, the Bible consists of approximately 600,000 words in three different languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. In our English Bibles, the Old and New Testaments total well over 1,000 pages of English texts, that's without those versions with notes all over the place. In our English Bibles, there are as many as 39 different books in the Old Testament and 27 individual books in the New Testament. The first books of the Old Testament, The Pentateuch, were penned by Moses, I’m going to argue, in approximately 1446 to 1406 BC. The last book of the New Testament, the book of Revelation, about 90 AD. All this is a rough estimate.

III. Unity In Authorship

We have 1500 years of authorship. Think about that when you work on a book, it might take you three, five, or six years to write a book and publish it. This one took 1500 years. It was a team job. Let’s think about authorship, or collectors. In the Old Testament, we have authors we know, like Moses, David, Solomon, Daniel and Ezra. We have 15 prophets and as many as 13 anonymous books in the Old Testament. For some people, that’s alarming. In the New Testament we have Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, James, Peter, Jude, and one anonymous book, Hebrews. Notice also that in our Old and New Testament, but especially the Old Testament, there is a diversity in the types of revelation, in general, we have divine words and divine acts.

We have creation itself and that reveals God to us. We have general revelation and special revelation. We have things like poetry, prose, law, and gospel. We have history, wisdom, praise, prophecy, apocalyptic literature, dreams, visions, gospels, histories, epistles, and sermons. Even in the New Testament, there are dreams and visions. Think of all the different authors that we know and don’t know about, all the different genres, and the different languages that are employed. 

By way of summary, the Christian Bible contains 600,000 words written in three different languages, by as many as 28 different human authors, including 15 books without identified human authors over a period of 1500 years, which resulted in some 66 individual books and two testaments. That is a work in progress. Is there a hope for identifying a theological center for biblical interpretation? Does the New Testament identify that center for us somehow?

IV. Other Attempts At Identifying A Theological Center

A. Old Testament

Let me give you just a couple of reasons I think it is possible. Number one, we have single divine authorship. The Old Testament is God-breathed and it was the Spirit of Christ in them, these prophets and apostles, that guided them in the writing. We do have a controlling factor, or feature, that spans the Scriptures and that can account for some of the diversity. I think when I show you the covenantal design of the Bible, you’ll be shocked at the unity that exists in the macro structure of the Bible where it gives evidence to the fact that only God could have pulled this off over those many years and to that many people. 

Point two, when you think about diversity and unity, the formal literary Genesis, and a biblical revelation, where did it all start? It is located in the book of Exodus. God appeared to Moses at the burning bush and confronted him with a task, while delivering divine revelation to Pharaoh. God commands Moses to prefix his address with three key words that become the standard formula for divine authorship in the Old Testament. In Hebrew they’re “koh-Amar Yahweh,” “Thus says the Lord.” This is how Moses was to deliver everything that he did to Pharaoh. It becomes the prophetic mantra when they introduce their speech. “Thus says the Lord,” this formula occurs 293 times in the Old Testament. It spans from Exodus to 2 Chronicles which is the last book of the Hebrew Old Testament. Interestingly, the prophet Jeremiah (who did not like his job), uses this formula 153 times in his book, because he wants you to know, “I’m not saying this, it’s the Lord.”

Over half the occurrences appear in that. If you add to this, the introductory formula, and “the Lord,” or “Yahweh,” or “AdonaiI said,” that’s 210 more times. There’s implications, if you add it all together, we find that the Old Testament explicitly identifies itself as containing the very words of God on 472 different occasions. Explicit, where you have those formulas. You divide that by the number of books in our English Bible, which is like 39 or 40, that’s at least 10 times in every book God saying, “I’m telling you guys this” or “Wake up.” No other human author, citing “Moses said” or “Moses wrote,” and “Joshua wrote,” comes even close to that. So by implication, I would say that at least 51% of the controlling interest in biblical revelation must be reckoned to Yahweh, the covenant God of the Old Testament.

Additionally, and finally, the God who spoke in the Old Testament becomes the incarnate God in the New Testament, and no longer is the messenger formula required of this person. Rather, God arrived, and now he speaks directly to his people. Not “koh-Amar Yahweh,” but “Truly, truly I say unto you.” Even that statement could have gotten him in trouble because by saying that he’s saying, “I have this authority, I don’t need the prophetic mediator messenger formula anymore.“ The Old Testament word of God became the incarnate word of God and testified to the singular truth of them. There’s a large section that I’m going to skip because so many people have attempted to find a controlling center, either for the Old Testament or for the New Testament, or both. All of these are good things, because they all appear in the Bible.

The question is, how do they relate to one another? Whatever you give prominence is going to be that which controls how you move forward. So people have suggested things like covenant, promise, the acts of God, communion, life of God’s people, dominion, justice, righteousness, Yahweh. Some people do paired themes, like law and promise, election and obligation, creation and covenant, salvation and blessing, dominion and dynasty…Steve Dempster, great book, get it. 

B. New Testament

In the New Testament, people said: kingdom, gospel, righteousness, justification, faith, new creation, law, gospel, promise and fulfillment. In terms of the whole Bible, there’s some good ones, but there are a couple of funny ones in there, promise and fulfillment, type and antitype, salvation redemptive history, relationship with the living God, Christology, monotheism, covenant faithfulness, God’s reign, righteousness, covenant selection, grace, obedience, people of God, Exodus, new Exodus, creation, new creation, sin and salvation, God and Jesus in salvation history, and the promised plan of God (Walt Kaiser wrote a great book), sin and salvation, worship kingdom through covenant (Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum, wrote on it recently). Some people put themselves as the center of the biblical revelation and that gets them in trouble as well. 

Does the lack of consensus, then, among scholars, preclude the possibility of getting into the center? There currently is no evangelical consensus with regard to any proposed center for biblical interpretation. There is no evangelical consensus with regard to any proposed structure for biblical interpretation. There is no evangelical consensus with regard to the scope of biblical theology. Should the Old Testament have one? Should the New Testament have one? Or should the Old and New Testament have one together? Do we include things like the Apocrypha or not? Do we do the Jewish Bible, the Catholic Bible, the Protestant Bible? We’re running around. If there’s a million dollar question we’re trying to ask ourselves, is there a center? Then what’s the million dollar answer?

That’s what we want to get here…the million dollar answer. I’m going to argue from Acts 28:23 and some other spots what that is. We’ve mentioned it in the last lecture, but it’s worth reviewing. Paul was in Rome for two years, teaching day and night and Luke is summarizing his teaching by saying, he’s trying to testify about the kingdom of God and persuade them, concerning Jesus, from both the law of Moses and the prophets from morning till evening. Then just after that, it says in Acts 28:30-31, he says, “and he stayed there for two full years in his own rented quarters and welcomed all who came to him, preaching the kingdom of God and teaching concerning the Lord Jesus Christ, with all openness unhindered.” So for two years, not just day and night, but also over a course of two years, Luke is summarizing Paul’s teaching ministry as being about the kingdom of God, and then trying to persuade them that Jesus is the King of the kingdom from the Old Testament.

It’s mind blowing to think about those things. When we slow down enough to take in what is being written down here, it’s not just a passing statement. You’re supposed to focus on that, saying, “Wow, two years.” Paul wasn’t going around saying “Kingdom of God, Kingdom of God, Kingdom of God.” No, we know from his epistles he covers all kinds of things like high-level Christology, good sanctification and living, the indicatives and the imperatives, eschatology. He covers everything, but notice how Luke summarizes all of it under the Kingdom of God and Jesus. So that’s where we’re going to go. I’m going to try to convince you now that the personal work of Jesus is the best theological center, not just for the whole Bible, but also for the Old Testament.

So the purpose of this part of the lecture, which is part B of this lecture, is to identify and understand Jesus as the theological center of the Christian Bible, both Old and New Testaments. It may be clear to us that Jesus is a theological center of the New Testament, but I’m going to argue that the same center exists for both testaments, unifying them together. 

C. Lack of consensus 

Now, let me just show you that some people disagree with what I’m about to argue. I think it’s fair to give them a voice. One is a guy named Paul House, who is a great Old Testament scholar. He has a great Old Testament theology and he does the right Hebrew Bible order in it. So I love that. One of the things he wrote, he says this, (and this is another book, not theology), “We should give up arguing that one theme, and one thing only, is the central theme of the Bible, and highlight major themes. Let all other ideas as sub-points.” So he’s arguing against my kind of, “It’s all about Jesus” point. Then he backs up and says, “Of course we should never fail to assert that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are at the center,” he just used the word “center,” “of any Unitarian Biblical theology, nor should we ever fail to assert the Bible unfolds God’s redemptive history and the necessity of human response to God’s gracious acts.” Now reading between the lines, he has a very Trinitarian theology and redemptive history, but he’s saying, “Okay, the Trinity is at the center of it,” and by redemptive histories is code for covenant. He’s in a sense arguing the same thing, but different words, and that’s what we do as academics. We like to nuance everything and play with it. 

So House concludes that there’s simply too much diversity contained within the Christian canon of Scriptures to allow for an arguable and defensible theological center. He’s kind of doing, “Well, it’s about God and redemptive history.” Which I totally agree with, except for the words “redemptive history,” it’s not redemptive for everybody.

Covenant history has both blessings and curses. Blessings for obedience, curses for disobedience. So it wasn’t redemptive for Egypt on that day. It won’t be redemptive for the non-elect on that day, it’ll be cursed. So redemptive history is the label of the winner, but “covenant history” is the one we should be using because covenant history has that blessing and curse nuance in it. 

Here’s another scholar who writes in the New Dictionary of Biblical Theology. He says, “It follows that the Old Testament can hardly be called a book about Jesus, as if he were the principal subject. Where there is a future hope, it is centered on God himself, and in some places, on a messianic figure who is not identified. Jesus is not explicitly present. It follows that the Old Testament is perhaps not best described as a book about Jesus, but is rightly seen as a Christian book by Christians. Without it, the writers of the New Testament would not have had the resources which they needed for expressing their understanding of Jesus.” So it just becomes in some sense like how some people use second temple literature like the time between the Old Testament ending and the New Testament starting. Literature, like the book of Maccabees, to help explain the cultural context out of which the New Testament grew. They’re saying that’s what the Old Testament is like for the New Testament, it’s the cultural context out of which Jesus isn’t there. Well, I’m going to argue differently. 

V. Million Dollar Answer

I’m going to argue differently that the Yahweh of the Old Testament is the second person of the Trinity most of the time. I’m also going to argue that when we have those theophanic appearances of the angel of Yahweh, that is the second person of the Trinity. He’s there. So there’s a great book on some of that, Michael Heiser, The Unseen Realm, does a great job in talking about some of that, especially with the name of Yahweh and the double Yahweh figure. So I recommend that to you, but again, it’s out of the scope of this class. My working thesis is going to be that Jesus is the theological center for all Biblical revelation, both the Old and New testaments.

VI. The Person And Work Of Jesus Is The Center

Jesus is the heart of the canonical body, that which gives life to the whole, the living force of the canonical word must be the incarnate word. The canonical structure and the thematic framework would represent severed and lifeless body parts without the living force of the theological center. Jesus Christ, he is the point, the goal, the fullness of it all, the unchallenged ruler over the Kingdom of God, as expressed in his covenantal-canonical-kingdom-word, triple hyphenation. 

I’m not the only crazy person out there who believes this kind of stuff. I had team “nay” now I’m going to have team “yay.” One of my favorites is Graeme Goldsworthy. If you can get any of his biblical theology stuff, he’s an Australian Old Testament scholar. In fact, his book on Christ-centered biblical theology and Christ-centered interpretation really revolutionized the way I thought about the Old Testament, and really helped me when I was getting into this business. So anything you can get by Goldsworthy, go for it. 

This is an essay, Biblical Theology is the Heartbeat of Effective Ministry in Biblical Theology: Retrospect and Prospect, edited by a former professor of mine, Scott Haffeman, a colleague of Bill Mounce. He says, “The hub of the church and of the life of the believer is Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord. He is not only the hermeneutical center (by hermeneutic we meet interpretational) of the whole Bible, but according to the biblical testimony, he gives ultimate meaning to every fact in the universe. He is thus the hermeneutical principle for all reality, providing the center that holds it all together. All things were created by him and for him and through him.” Goldsworthy is amazing, I don’t know if people really realize what he’s arguing, that Jesus is not just a center of your Bible, he’s the center of the universe. Does that make sense?

You can’t make sense of anything without him. That’s why some people who deny that fact have blinded themselves to the most important fact of history, the one thing that explains everything. Another great scholar wrote in his book, Look to the Rock: An Old Testament Background to our Understanding of Christ by Alec Motyer, puts it this way, “Jesus came from outside,” that is our world, “and voluntarily and deliberately attached himself to the Old Testament by way of incarnation. He affirmed it to be the Word of God and set himself at cost to fulfill it. This fact of facts cuts the ground from under any suspicion that the doctrine of biblical authority rests on any circular arguments, such as ‘I believe the Bible to be authoritative because the Bible says it’s authoritative,’” he says, “Not so, it was Jesus who came from outside, the author, as the incarnate son of God, Jesus, who was raised from the dead as the son of God with power, who chose to validate the Old Testament in retrospect, and the New Testament in prospect and who himself is the grand theme of the storyline of both testaments, the focal point, giving coherence to the total picture in all its complexities. He’s the climax, as well as the substance and the center of the hole. In him, all the promises of God are ‘Yes and amen.’” He’s using a couple of different words here that are important, where he says “climax, substance, and center” at the end. So some people might say, “The Bible is not Christocentric, but Christotelic,” that is all the Old Testament eras are driving to Christ to make sense. And that’s a good word too, I like that because Christ is the climax of the covenant. 

A. Jesus is the center of everything

We’ll have a climactic age where He returns and brings into consummation the new heavens and new earth. That’s a Christotelic substance as well. You could also use the word that I’m going to make up: “Christopantic.” “Pantic,” or “pan,” is the Greek word for all. You have “Christocentric,” it’s that he makes sense of it all. Christotelic, it’s all about him in the end, but Christopantic, it’s just all about him. He’s not just the center, but he’s also everything around it as well. Like all things created by him and for him and through him, it’s Christopantic. You can never ascribe too much meaning or significance to the personal work of Christ in your life. Ever!

You can never worship him too much. You can never obey him too much. You can never adore him too much. You can never search for him too much in the Scriptures. He is the one thing, the one person, that can bear the weight of all your needs. No one else can do that. No other thing can do that. See, that’s what idolatry is, is when you move from out of that stance. The moment you say, it’s Jesus, plus a little bit of this, or Jesus plus a little bit of that. Or this thing can also have meaning in my life, in such a way that takes from that, it moves into idolatry, and our hearts are idol factories.

We know that little famous statement, but he’s the one thing that can bear the weight of every need that you have. That’s how we’re approaching the Old Testament, we’re going to go there and we’re going to say the Law of the Lord is perfect. “Revive my soul, according to your Word.”

B. The word counting game

Let me end this little part of the lecture with just what I’ll call the word counting game. This is a fun little exercise.

One of the things that we have a tremendous ability to do now with computer databases, like Accordance or Logos or the now dying Bibleworks is we can search the Scriptures in certain ways to find all kinds of things. I’m a Hebrew dude, I’m always doing weird Hebrew searches on how things work. When I have free time, I do Hebrew word searches. Let’s think about this from a literary perspective, let’s say we’re just all literature scholars here. The Bible’s great literature. Let’s just pick a book. We can pick any book, but some popular ones right now we could say, are let’s say the Harry Potter series.

If I were to do a word search, and I had my Harry Potter database, and I searched for all proper names. What would be the number one name that popped up in the book? Harry, of course, because the book is about Harry Potter, even the title says “Harry Potter.” The same thing if you had the book The Hobbit and you searched The Hobbit for the number one most common proper name, it would probably be the hobbit, Bilbo. You almost know it intuitively because if you’ve read the book, The Hobbit is about Bilbo and Harry Potter is about Harry Potter. You could do it with some other books, it would be trickier, but it works like that. Let’s apply that basic literary principle to the Old Testament.

There are almost 475,000 Hebrew and Aramaic words in the Old Testament. The Old Testament is 77% of the Christian Bible. There are 13,905 different proper names, like Moses, Aaron, and Saul, or Jerusalem. They occur 35,783 times in the Old Testament. That’s approximately 7.5% of every word in the Old Testament is a proper name. If you were going to write a fake document, you wouldn’t put all this kind of explicit evidence in there that could be looked up and documented like names and places.

I use this as proof, for the truthfulness of the Bible. We have names, places, and dates that we can look at. Let’s do the top seven proper names that appear in the Old Testament. Number one is Israel (2,509), number two is David (1,075 times in the Old Testament), three is Judah (the person or the tribe, there’s more about the tribe, 820 times in the Old Testament), four is Moses (766 times in the Old Testament). There’s Egypt (682 times in the Old Testament), there’s Jerusalem (643 times in the Old Testament), and Saul (406 times in the Old Testament). Then, when you compare that to YHWH, the Tetragrammaton (6,820 or 19.1% of all proper names in the Old Testament), Elohim (2,602 times in the Old Testament) and Adonai (700 times in the Old Testament), which totals 10,131. I want you to compare 10,131 to 2,500, you have the people of God (Israel), the king (David), from the tribe (Judah), the covenant mediator (Moses), the bad place (Egypt), the good place (Jerusalem), the bad king (Saul). 20% of all proper names refer to Yahweh, but then if you add God’s other names, it’s way higher. It’s an astonishing figure.

If you read the Old Testament, the number one speaker, player, and actor is Yahweh, instead of Harry Potter, it’d be called The History of Yahweh, or The Works of Yahweh. That would be an appropriate title for the Old Testament: The Works of Yahweh. Remember that number, 19.1%. 

Sorry guys, this is going to be the New Testament. I like to call that the Old Testament answer key, it appears in the back of the book and it gives you all the right answers. Aside from Jesus, which you know he’s going to win, who do you think the number one name is in there?

Paul (158 times in the New Testament), Peter (156 times in the New Testament), John (135 times in the New Testament), Pharisee (98 times in the New Testament), Moses (80 times in the New Testament), Jerusalem, Simon, Abraham, Israel (68 times in the New Testament. In both lists; Moses, Jerusalem, Abraham, Israel), you can see the continuity or the overlap there. 

The New Testament, there are approximately 138,167 Greek words. So let’s compare that to 475,000 in the Old Testament. In it, there are 551 different proper names that occur approximately 4,132 times or 3% of all the words in the New Testament are proper names, people and places. 

Jesus is 917, God or Theos is going to be 1,317, Lord or Kyrios, is going to be 717. These aren’t proper names, these are titles, so my percentages are just based on that, So this right here is 22.2% of all proper names in the New Testament, it’s even higher than the Old Testament. So you have 20% in the Old Testament is Yahweh, more than 20% of the New Testament is Jesus. When you come to the conclusion that they’re basically the same person, like the Yahweh we encounter and experience in the Old Testament is primarily the second person of the Trinity.

Now there’s some blurring and blending, read Heisner, the same person is at work in both testaments with just slightly different names. We’re going to talk about this when we get to the book of Exodus, what does the divine name mean, Yahweh? I’ll just tell you right now that the divine name represents the promise of the divine presence. We often think of it as “I will be,” but it’s actually, “I’ll be with you,” is what it means. We know that Jesus in the New Testament, in Matthew, is called Emmanuel, which is the fulfillment of the promise of the divine name, “God with us.” These two people are not two different people, but the same person. One pre-incarnate, one incarnate. What I’m going to do after this is give you some biblical testimony. How you can think about this for when you hear preaching and teaching, and then what’s the significance of this for your interpretation in the next lecture?