In the very earliest days of the New Testament and hardly before the ink was dry, the church already faced a pernicious error. Marcion of Sinope felt that the Old Testament presented an angry, condemning God, not at all like the gracious God of the New Testament. Accordingly, he proposed that there are two gods—the Old Testament god utterly inferior to the transcendent God of the New. But he couldn’t stop there, and so Marcion ultimately proposed a new list of only eleven legitimate New Testament books. Still not content with the damage done, Marcion went on to edit out the parts of these books that he still didn’t like. In short, Marcion rejected most biblical revelation, picking and choosing in order to create a religion more to his liking.

All of this would seem like a lot of irrelevant church history trivia, were it for one very important fact—Marcion is still with us.

In fact, you’ve almost certainly encountered it from someone evading certain biblical ideas. “That’s in the Old Testament,” they might say, “and there are all kinds of things we don’t do now. Do you trim your beard? Do you wear mixed fabric? See, the Old Testament doesn’t apply to us today.” These are specific questions I hope to address in a future post.

But it’s not just the skeptics that follow Marcion. We all struggle here. The Old Testament can be hard to understand. Some sections seem impenetrable and opaque; others utterly irrelevant. And so if through nothing else but neglect, we turn to the New Testament again and again, all but pretending that the first 75% of the Bible doesn’t exist. Can any of us deny that we have very strong preferences for Ephesians, Colossians, the Gospels and maybe the Psalms but certainly not 1 Chronicles, Lamentations or Leviticus?

And so it is absolutely worth establishing that the God of the Bible is the same in both testaments. You should love the God of each testament for a very simple reason—He is the same. He is one God; always has been, and has never changed.

The Old Testament reveals Him to be gracious.

The charge that the Old Testament reveals a harsh, vindictive God is actually quite easy to answer. You just have to read it. One of the earliest places we see His character is when He passed by Moses in the rock. Of everything God could proclaim about Himself, He chooses this—“The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Ex 34:6).

What makes this interesting is that this then becomes a refrain. Twelve other times the Old Testament references this core statement (Ex 34:6; Num 14:18; 2 Chr 30:9; Neh 9:17; Psa 86:15; 103:8; 145:8; Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:2; Nah 1:3; 1 Cor 15:49; James 3:9). The theme seems almost like the summary of an attributes section in a systematic theology, while the rest of the Old Testament fills out the details.

In fact, if you begin reading the Bible to find out what God is like, you should probably start here. And this statement, of course, is found in the Old Testament.

The New Testament never regards the Old Testament as different.

One critical reason not to downgrade the Old Testament is that we have to listen to the New. Jesus tells us He did not come to abolish it (Matt 5:17). We find also remarkable summaries of the Old Testament—it brings the message of love (Matt 5:17; Rom 13:10; Gal 5:14), it points to Christ (Luke 24:26-27, 44–47; John 1:45), and the Old Testament shows the same way of salvation (Acts 24:14; 28:23; Rom 3:21).

There are certainly passages that seem to set up a divide between the two testaments (John 1:17; Rom 3:21; 6:14; Gal 2:16; 3:12). That will have to await a future post, but suffice it to say that there is a right way to understand these passages and it isn’t by downgrading the Old Testament.

We forget how much we actually rely on the Old Testament.

Even if you only read the New Testament, you actually need both more than you think. Cut the Old Testament out of your Bible and you’re left with an extremely impoverished religion. Take creation. Without the Old Testament you only know a handful of things: God made it (Rom 1:25; Eph 3:9; Rev 4:11) with a word (Heb 11:3). But the seven days of Creation, the blessing on the world, man’s role to have dominion…you can’t know any of this apart from the Old Testament.

That’s not to mention the image of God, the narrative of the fall, the curse, the promise of a coming Redeemer and the rising hope of God’s promises to Abraham, David and the New Covenant.* These aren’t mere details; they’re core to the biblical story.

In fact, while we struggle with some things in the Old Testament or worse, expunge it by sheer neglect, we are silently relying on it all the while. All kinds of things that we take as obvious, basic information come solidly out of the first 75% of our Bibles.

I’ll just offer one more example. We hold as precious the idea of Christ dying in our place, a substitute for  the judgment we deserve. Certainly, the New Testament teaches this idea in a number of places (Rom. 5:12-21; 2 Cor. 5:21; 1 Pet. 3:18). But the clearest explanation comes from a part of our Bibles we are happy to get through as quickly as possible—Leviticus, Numbers and Exodus. He’s our Passover. He’s our sin-offering, guilt offering, trespass offering, and finally peace offering. Do we realize that the core of our salvation is rooted early in the biblical story? Starting there we find our only hope.

The Old Testament is full of Christ.

Finally, we desperately need the Old Testament because it points to the same grand theme—Jesus Christ. Standing before teachers of the Old Testament law, Jesus can tell them to go and “search the [Old Testament] Scriptures…they bear witness about me” (John 5:39). At the end of his life, Jesus started with the books of Moses and interpreted “in all the [Old Testament] Scriptures the things concerning Himself” (Lk. 24:27). “The Law and the Prophets bear witness” to the gospel (Rom. 3:21). Everything, from Christ’s suffering to His resurrection was simply what “the prophets and Moses said would come to pass” (Acts 26:22-23).

In fact, this is my greatest concern. By neglecting the Old Testament, believers miss the richness of the biblical story. They miss the wonderful progression of longing and hope that then breaks into joy when the Messiah finally came. To miss the Old Testament is to miss part of the glory of Jesus Christ. And this is an error that none of us can afford to make.

 

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*I recognize that the New Testament does allude to some of these points. But would I ever understand the image of God if all I had was 1 Cor 15:49 and James 3:9? How would we even make sense of references to David and Abraham without knowing their lives from the Old Testament and the content of the promises they received? As I pointed out above, we are relying on assumed Old Testament knowledge far more than we realize.