Triggered thoughts on OT and NT

The Relationship of New and Old Testaments:

Some thoughts triggered by reading

Sarahbeth Caplin’s

Confessions of a Prodigal Daughter

Comments by Dan McDonald

 

 

                Writing is one of the means through which we participate in the ongoing human conversation of all the topics and issues we face in life. As we converse around a family dinner table, a café, in a Sunday school class or in a pub so we participate in conversation when we write or express ourselves in the various arts. We express ourselves to be participants who have heard others and yearn also to know that we have something to offer in return to others.

                The blog I am presenting today came into being to a large degree because some thoughts jelled and came together while I was reading the story of how Sarahbeth Caplin progressed from a Jewish childhood to faith in Christ. She describes this story in her book Confessions of a Prodigal Daughter.

                The part of her account that ignited thoughts within my own mind was when she described how she was spiritually attracted to this Jewish man named Jesus as she discovered him in the Gospels. She discusses at times how the faithful within Judaism and Christianity often understand the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures very differently from each other. It was as I thought about these differences between Jewish and Christian readings of the Hebrew Scriptures that a thought entered my mind that for me has important implications in how we view the Bible and how we present the Christian faith to others. Let me add the implications are such that we will likely be refining how we do these things throughout our lives.

                The thought that I had as I read Sarahbeth Caplin’s book was that her experience of coming to the Christian faith involved some of the same features that seem evident regarding John the Baptist, Jesus’ disciples who later became the Apostles, and a Rabbi named Saul of Tarsus who became the Apostle Paul. One of the features we discover in our reading of the Gospels is that it was common for all these men to be perplexed and confused about what they saw in Jesus. John the Baptist was convinced enough that Jesus was the Messiah to announce him as such, yet later in life he sends a messenger to ask Jesus if he is the one or if they should look for another. Simon Peter confesses Jesus as the Christ or Messiah and then immediately says to Jesus when Jesus is telling the disciples he must die how he cannot die. It becomes clear that though Simon Peter has come to recognize Jesus as Messiah that his image of a Messiah still isn’t exactly the course Jesus is fulfilling as Messiah. There is ample evidence that all of the disciples had their struggles with the way Jesus was fulfilling the Messiah role. They spent three years with Jesus and yet were unable to see many of the things that were true about Jesus. This is something inscribed into the Gospel accounts. Saul of Tarsus, on the outside of the Jesus movement was more critical yet. He saw the movement as contrary to Judaism, a sort of heretical group that was leading many astray and needed to be halted even if that required the force of persecution.

                These were the men who became the early witnesses of Christ after his death, burial and resurrection. As we consider, for example the so-called problem of Jewish unbelief, one of the realities we need to remind ourselves as Christians is that all the writers of the New Testament first saw and were attracted to Jesus before they understood all the ways the Old Testament had pointed to Jesus as the Messiah. Let me say that again in hopes that what I am saying may percolate within your own thoughts. The early Christians did not have a list of the prophecies about Jesus that they checked off as they looked at Jesus and then decided based on the Old Testament evidence that they would follow Jesus since he fulfilled the list of prophecies they were looking to be fulfilled. It worked the other way around. They saw something in Jesus they could not deny and came to believe that he offered words of eternal life; eternal not only in forever into the future, but that forever and the infinity of the eternal one had entered our world in the person of Jesus Christ. The disciples and Saul of Tarsus came first to believe in Jesus Christ and then they could look back at the Old Testament Scriptures and see how they pointed to Christ as the Messiah.

The Scriptures known by John the Baptist, the disciples, and Saul of Tarsus

 

                From a Christian perspective part of the problem faced by the Jewish people during Christ’s time was that they were insufficiently prepared to see Messiah as taking the form which Jesus took. But let me add something in their defense. Who could have been prepared to see Jesus as the Messiah? Again let me explain my thinking here.

                A number of Christian church Fathers looked back at the creation and believed that God’s plan from the beginning was to create man in God’s image, so that God would enter that human image and complete the work of creation by his entering into a union with all of creation by God himself becoming man. Humanity was created in God's image so that God might fill that human image with God's divine presence. Humanity could thus become the temple of the Living God upon the earth. If for a moment we acknowledge that as something God possibly planned from the beginning of creation; we would be able to see why no one would have imagined the exact way Jesus would fulfill the role of Messiah. For any man to have been able to do so would have meant that such a man knew the person of God well enough to predict how the divine presence would look if inserted into a single human being.

                This then was the difficulty the disciples had. If we had faulty perceptions of the person of God, we would have faulty perceptions regarding the God who would fill the man in Messiah’s sandals. Philosophically speaking, no one could accurately envision God for no man had seen God, certainly not in his infinite unknowable glory. So even if the Old Testament were an accurate revelation of God, no man or woman could have been fully prepared for the Jesus that came on the scene. For who among us understood or could understand how a mighty God, an everlasting Father, a Prince of Peace, one who was glorious beyond measure and dwelt with the low and humble and meek of heart would look like in human form?

                So much of what we see in the New Testament are men who after coming to know and believe in Jesus Christ, spent the remainder of their lives coming to understand who it is they had come to know and believe. As they understood what they had seen in him, they began to rearrange their perspective of how to understand the Hebrew Scriptures in which they had been grounded. Something far more dramatic than they had been prepared for had taken place. They expected Messiah to lead Israel to victory over the unbelievers. Instead Jesus came as the presence of God in a human being to have all creation joined to him in the eventual marriage feast of heaven and earth. Thus in Ephesians 5 when St. Paul quotes the creation ordinance for marriage of a man leaving his father and mother and being joined to his wife, he adds “but I am speaking of Christ and the Church.” God has entered humanity and is being joined to an entire creation which has been destined to be summed up in Christ. Such an understanding of Jesus led the writers of the New Testament to understand the Old Testament with a new perspective. They lived with a realization that they had seen the one whom the Old Testament had promised would come.