Old Testament Survey
OLD TESTAMENT SURVEY: FOUNDATIONS
Foundations: Why Study the Old Testament?
What is the most important thing about you?
“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God. Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God.”[1]
We study the Old Testament…
Because it reveals to us Who God is.
We must want to know Who God is to get the most of this study. Not merely intellectual knowledge, but to aid our worship of Him.
And once we understand Who God is, we can then rightly understand who we are. 3/4 of the Bible is the Old Testament.
59% of the books of the Bible (39/66).
78% of the chapters of the Bible (929/1,189).
The Approach of the class to the Old Testament:
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Assumes its perfection (inspiration, inerrancy).
The approach of our class is coming to this with the assumption that it is God’s Word, inspired and without error (2 Tim 3:16–17).
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Assumes that meaning is drawn from the author’s intent.
Inspiration means that the words of the Old Testament are the words of God, having both a human and divine author (1 Pet 1:21). So, when we seek to find the human author’s intent, it is the same as finding God’s intent of the text.
Illustration: Getty Art Museum, Rembrandt section. Not like that, we are not trying to insert into or project a meaning onto the text, but to draw out the meaning from the text.
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Assumes a posture of humility in light of the Old Testament’s authority.
We must come to the Bible in humility (Isaiah 66:2). God knows better than us. Instead of thinking of Bible texts as weird in our own understanding (flood, hardening the heart of Pharaoh, driving out the Canaanites), we must seek out the author’s intent and trust that God knows better than us.
Bad approaches to the study of the Old Testament place reason over revelation as the authority. Reason is a good and helpful tool. But it never has the final authority – God does. How prideful would it be for use to assume that we know better than God?
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Assumes the Old Testament is God-centered, not man-centered.
Our approach – Each theme is going to be God-centered, not man-centered. God alone – not Adam, Abraham, Moses, David, or anyone else – is the main character of the Bible. It can be tempting to take a man-centered approach, but this will ultimately fall short. In other words, a God-centered approach means that God, not man, is the main character of the Bible. We are going to study God in this class.
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1 Tozer, Knowledge of the Holy, page 1 (italics added).
