I will avenge (Hosea 1:4).
I will hedge up your way with thorns (2:6)
I will allure her (2:14)
I will…bring her into the wilderness and speak comfort to her (2:14)
I will give her vineyards from there, and the valley of Achor for a door of hope (2:15)
I will take away the names of Baalim out of her mouth (2:17)
I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field (2:18)
I will betroth you to me (2:19)
I will betroth you to me forever (2:19)
I will betroth you to me in righteousness (2:19)
I will betroth you to me…in judgment (2:19)
I will betroth you to me…in lovingkindness (2:19).
I will hear (2:21).
I will sow her for myself in the earth (2:23)
I will have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy (2:23)
I will say to them which were not my people, You are my people (2:23)
Because you have rejected knowledge, I will also reject you (4:6)
Therefore will I change their glory into shame (4:7)
For I will be to Ephraim as a lion (5:14)
I will go and return to my place till they acknowledge their offence, and seek my face (5:15)
I will not execute the fierceness of mine anger (11:9).
I will place them in their houses (11:11)
I will make you to dwell in tabernacles (12:9)
I will be your king (13:10)
I will ransom them from the power of the grave (13:14)
O death, I will be your plagues (13:14)
I will heal their backsliding (14:4)
I will love them freely (14:4)
I will be as the dew to Israel (14:5)

You can read this series of meditations together with many more in the daily devotional, Milk and Honey.

Go through any church and you’ll find lots of Davids, Peters, Pauls, Matthews, Marks, Johns, etc. And among the ladies, multiple Sarahs, Rachels, Marys, Ruths, Rebeccas, Leahs, Lydias, etc.

But there’s one woman’s name you won’t find anywhere. Which is passing strange because she’s the only woman in the Bible who:

• Is named in the Messiah’s genealogy (Matt. 1:5), and
• Is praised for her faith (Heb. 11:31), and
• Is praised for her works (James 2:25).

She also had the most incredible conversion story, being saved from a totally pagan community and a completely immoral life, she performed some of the bravest actions in the Bible, and she raised one of the godliest sons in Israel’s history (Boaz).

What’s her name?

Rahab!

Probably the most commended woman in the whole Bible.

But few if any want to name a daughter after her.

Why not?

Is there too much grace in her story?

Or too little faith in our hearts?

Genesis

Genesis was written by Moses to the Israelites who had just come out of Egypt and were wondering if they should have left after all.

Original Message: God’s power to create order and light out of disorder and darkness in the universe and in individual lives should encourage Israel to leave the disorder and darkness of Egypt behind them, and confidently move towards the order and light of Canaan.

Present Message: God’s power to create order and light out of disorder and darkness should encourage the new Israel (the Church) to leave the “old world of Egypt” (this present evil world) behind and move toward the “new world of Canaan” (new heavens and earth).

Exodus

Exodus was written a bit later than Genesis when Moses’ leadership was being continually questioned by the Israelites following him in the wilderness.

Original Message: Israel should continue to follow Moses because God clearly authorized him to be Israel’s deliverer, law-giver, and worship-leader

Present Message: The Church should continue to follow Christ’s fulfillment and application of Moses’ teaching because God clearly authorized him to be the Church’s deliverer, law-giver and worship leader.

Deuteronomy

Deuteronomy was written to the Israelites on the border of the Promised Land and reviews Israel’s history to encourage them to go and take the land God had given them.

Original Message:  Israel should renew their commitment to the God’s covenant under a new leader (Joshua) facing new challenges.

Present Message: The church should renew its commitment to the God’s covenant under a new leader (Christ) facing new challenges.

Judges

Judges was written to show what happened in Israel when there was no king in Israel but every man did what was right in his own eyes.

Original message: Israel should commit itself to the godly King of Judah for spiritual and social blessings on a personal and national level.

Present message: The Church should commit itself to the godly Judahite King (Christ) for spiritual and social blessings on a personal and national level.

Kings

The two books of Kings were written to Israel in Babylonian exile asking, “Why has God broken His covenant promise to us?” Kings demonstrates that far from breaking His covenant promise, God has kept it by punishing Israel with exile for her sins, and calls her to repentance.

Original Message: The nation deserved the exile, but restoration was possible through full repentance

Present Message: The Church deserves chastisement, but restoration is possible through full repentance

Chronicles

The two books of Chronicles cover the same period and stories as the two books of Kings, but they were written at the end of the Babylonian exile not the beginning. So, although they tell the same stories, Chronicles tells them in a much more optimistic, upbeat way. The emphasis is not on past sins, but past examples of faithfulness. The difference is due to different people, different times, and different purposes. Chronicles was written at the end of the exile when God was trying to encourage the Israelites to return to their land and to His blessing with these inspiring stories from their national past.

Original Message: Work for the restoration of Israel’s throne and temple to enjoy God’s blessing.

Present Message: Work for the restoration and rebuilding of the throne and church of God to enjoy God’s blessing.

Song of Solomon

The Song of Solomon was written to a people in covenant with God, whose spiritual relationship with God was often portrayed by Moses, the Psalmist, and the Prophets as a marriage.

Original Message: Enjoy God’s gift of love in every relationship, but especially in relation to Him

Present Message: Enjoy God’s gift of love in every relationship, but especially in relation to Christ.

I hope this sample encourages you to take this approach with other books, and parts of books. Some of these are adapted from Richard Pratt’s He Gave Us Stories, which is the go-to book for learning more about the original message of the Old Testament books.

You’d probably grab your diary and photos back, kick him out of the door, and rebuke him for his cheeky self-centeredness. “How dare he think these things are all about him!”

So why do we do that with the Bible, especially with the Old Testament. We pick up this old collection of “pictures” and stories and the first question we ask is, “What’s in this for me?” or “What does this say to me?” How dare we!

Cheeky self-centeredness
This cheeky self-centeredness is not quite so common when we deal with the New Testament as more people recognize that the letter to the Corinthians was written to a specific people at a specific place at a specific time for a specific purpose. Same with Paul’s letters to the Romans, to the Galatians, to the Ephesians, etc. Teachers and preachers will often explain New Testament verses in their original context before drawing application to today’s readers and listeners.

But when we come to the Old Testament, people read Genesis or Ruth or Isaiah as if it was written directly to the 21^st century western Christian, with hardly a thought about the original writer, the original audience, or the original reason for writing. I must confess, that’s how I used to read the Old Testament, and even preach it.

Revolution
However, my approach to the Old Testament was revolutionized by Dr. Richard Pratt’s Old Testament Introduction lectures and his book, He Gave Us Stories. Pratt insisted that we must research when an Old Testament book was written, who wrote it, and why. That will give us the original message to the original audience, enabling us to make more accurate application to similar audiences meeting similar challenges today.

Tomorrow, we’ll survey the original message of a number of Old Testament books and how that guides us to understand their message to us.

1. What does the passage reveal about God?

2. What does this passage reveal about the coming Savior?

They knew they were not just reading a national history about themselves and their ancient ancestors. They knew they were reading about God and their promised Messiah.

Let’s take these two questions to the Old Testament passages that describe the cities of refuge (Numbers 35, Deuteronomy 19, Joshua 20). These were six cities in Israel that God designated as places where anyone who accidentally killed someone could run for safety from the family members who wanted to exact vengeance upon them.

What would the Israelites learn about God and the coming Savior from reading about these cities?

1. God is just: Blood-shedding was to be punished: by death if deliberate, by exile in the refuge cities if accidental.

2. God is merciful: God’s provision of these safe places reveals him as far more merciful to the killer than the dead man’s relatives who chased him there and who often lingered at the city gates for the least chance to kill him.

3. God is sovereign: God decides the way of deliverance. He chose which six cities would be safe places. No other city would do.

4. God desires to save: God chose the locations so that each city would be within a day’s journey of most Israelites. He also ordered that the highways be kept clear, open, and well signposted.

5. God is available: The city gates were never to be closed but to be open all hours and to all-comers, to Gentiles as well as to Israelites.

6. God guarantees salvation: As long as the killer stayed within the city gates, he was guaranteed safety. It wasn’t enough to know this, the offender had to get to and stay in the city.

7. God frees through the death of the mediator: The only way for the killer to eventually be freed from exile was when the high priest died. What a moment for all these killers in all these cities when news came that the high priest had died and so freed them to return home to their families in safety.

When I preach from Old Testament passages like this, I often find it helpful not only to explain the passage, but to describe the experience of someone in that situation.

Surely we can use a bit of sanctified imagination to picture and portray someone who accidentally kills, remembers this passage, starts running without a thought of home, doesn’t stop until he gets within the city gates, enjoys the increasing sense of thankful wonder as he experiences the safety God has provided, talks to other refugees about their experience and what they learned about God and the Savior, prayerfully studies the passages as never before, longs for the liberating death of the mediator, etc.

These are rich, graphic, vivid, and memorable displays of the God of Israel, and ultimately of the coming Savior who far exceeds and excels these cities as a place of refuge for all kinds of condemned sinners.

Sometimes they are also our questions.

Where’s God? And what’s He doing?

And sometimes our answers are, “I do not know. And. I do not know.”

But Job provides us with better answers.

God knows where I am.

“He knows the way that I take” (23:10a).

Although I don’t know where God is and I may not even know where I am, God knows my exact location, direction, and destination. As a child on a long car journey, I don’t need to know; as long as Dad knows.

God knows what He’s doing.

“When he has tested me, I shall come out like gold” (23:10b).

He is proving me: He tests me as a skilled carpenter tests his work to its limits – to demonstrate his confidence in his work.

He is improving me: With His eye on the timer and His hand on the thermostat, He knows exactly how hot and how long to leave me in the furnace in order to make my gold purer and brighter.

God knows where I am and He knows what He’s doing!

Prophet
Say “prophet” to most people today and they will think of a fortune teller, someone who predicts the future. However if we turn to the Old Testament we find that while a prophet sometimes told the future, his main task to explain and apply God’s Word to people (Deut. 18:15-22). As it is often put, he was to be a forth-teller more than a fore-teller.

Thus, when Christ is presented in the New Testament as THE prophet (John 6:16; Acts 7:37), we should not be looking for new revelations and predictions of the future (although there are some of these), but explanations and applications of God’s existing Word.

Priest 
“Priest” makes most people think of Roman Catholic priests. In the past, with less media scrutiny, they were thought of as some kind of detached, perfectly holy, super-spiritual order of beings. Today, with the never-ending media revelations, many people hear the word “priest” and think “hypocrite” or “abuser.”

However, Old Testament priests were to be ordinary men who could sympathize and identify with sinners. They were not dressed in pompous royal clothing, but rather in white linen, often spattered with the blood of sacrifices. They were to be filled with love for needy souls (Heb. 5:1-2).

If we want to present Christ as a sympathetic and trustworthy high priest (Heb. 4:14-16), then we need to turn people away from their ideas of modern priesthood and toward the Old Testament description and portrayal of priesthood.

King
For most people a “King” is someone who is above the law. They can do what they like without consequence. They live lives of unbridled luxury. They often oppress the innocent and befriend the evil.

The Old Testament, though, presents the king as someone under God’s authority, someone who was answerable to God, someone who was accountable for the way they related to God and the people, and someone who was to represent God to the people (Deut. 17:14-20; 2 Sam. 23:1-5). That view of kingship will transform our view of Christ’s kingship (Phil. 2:9-11).

Covenant
A couple of years ago, a student and I filmed some “man-on-the-street” interviews on the streets of Grand Rapids. We asked passers-by: “What is a covenant?” You would have thought in such a Dutch Reformed city that at least some people would have some idea of what a covenant was. However, what we found was large-scale ignorance. The closest most people came was the idea of a contract or a deal. “If you do this, then I’ll do that.” That’s what most people think of – some kind of commercial bargain or contract.

However if we go to the Old Testament we find that a covenant is a relationship, initiated and imposed by a superior, with life or death consequences.

Biblical Covenants are always initiated by God, and bestow benefits upon needy and undeserving sinners, who can never repay, but who are encouraged to respond with thankful obedience. That gives a whole new understanding to Christ’s word, “This is the new covenant in my blood.”

But sometimes it feels like I’m learning a foreign language. More than once I’ve been asked, “So, what language do they speak in England?” or “What is your first language?” Sometimes it’s just spelling: not colour, but color. Sometimes it’s a matter of emphasis: not gar-age, but gar-age. Sometimes it’s pronunciation: not tom-ah-to, but tom-ay-to. But sometimes it’s a completely new word I’ve had to learn for the same thing: not trousers, but pants; not biscuits, but cookies; not pavement, but sidewalk, etc.

Confusing conversations
I could persist in using my old vocabulary, but it doesn’t get me very far, and can result in some confusing conversations. So, I must learn this nation’s vocabulary to improve both my understanding and my ability to communicate (without losing my valuable accent, hopefully!).

This is also true for all of us when we try to understand and communicate the Gospel. How do we understand the theological words, phrases and concepts of the New Testament? Do we consult dictionary.com, Merriam Webster’s, OED, etc? If so, we will import 21st century Western meaning into ancient Eastern words, confusing ourselves and others.

So, how do we understand the theological words, phrases and concepts of the New Testament? Where do we turn?

The first question
While we may get some light from Greek lexicons, our main dictionary should be the Old Testament. When we come to a word, phrase, or concept in the New Testament, our first question should be, “What does the Old Testament say about this?” Remember, the New Testament was originally written by Jews, and much of it was written to Jews. It assumes a knowledge of the Old Testament, and builds upon it. Therefore, we must always read the New Testament with the dictionary of the Old Testament in our hand.

Tomorrow I’ll give some examples of how we can use the Old Testament as a dictionary of Christian vocabulary.

I’ve been preaching through 2 Samuel in a local church, and last week I came to chapter 13, one of the most horrific and sordid chapters in the Bible. It’s got everything – rape, incest, abuse, injustice, and murder. Surely nothing profitable in there. Well, yet again, Scripture surprised me with the width and depth of its cultural relevance and spiritual challenge.

1. Beauty can be dangerous
How many grieve because they are not attractive and labor all their days to become more attractive. Yet, as Tamar found out, a beautiful figure and face can attract the wrong kind of people for the wrong kind of reasons.  Many’s a beautiful person has come to loathe their beauty as a curse. This is no way blames Tamar nor excuses Amnon for what he did. It’s simply a well-observed fact that beauty attracts more than its fair share of beasts.

2. Lust can make you sick
Although we’re told that Amnon “loved” his half-sister Tamar, the chapter reveals it was more lust than love. Instead of wanting to give himself to her for her good, he wants to take from her for his “good.” His lust was so powerful it actually made him sick. Lust entertained and encouraged can grow into a life-dominating monster that is a punishment in itself.

3. Friends can be your enemies
When Amnon saw that Tamar’s secluded life and purity made it impossible for him to get near her, he consulted a “friendly” advisor, Jonadab. But instead of warning Amnon away from his sin and rebuking him for his wicked lust, as a true friend would, he hatched a plan to help him fulfill his lust.

Unknown to Amnon, Jonadab was in league with Absalom to prevent Amnon from inheriting the throne. Like Jonadab, any “friend” who advises us to sin and helps us to do it, is actually an enemy hastening our destruction.

4. Everyone can do great evil
Amnon was the king’s son, surrounded by the privileges, comforts, and pleasures of the royal court. He’d been brought up by a godly father. He would never…Would he?

When Tamar entered his room, she clearly didn’t have the least thought of what his mind was full of. He was her brother, a sick brother, the kings son. She had no reason to suspect him of anything. He couldn’t…could he? But everyone can, can’t they?

5. Sin can defeat all reason
“You are my brother. I’m not willing. It is forbidden. It is perverse. It will shame me. It will disgrace you. Ask the king for permission to marry me.” She pours out reason, after reason, argument after argument. All to no avail. The devil blocks Amnon’s ears to all her arguments. Her comfort, her honor, and her happiness must be sacrificed to satisfy his uncontrollable passion.

6. Guilt can make the pleasant painful
His lust for her is satisfied; his hatred for her erupts. He hates her more than he lusted for her and immediately tries to get rid of her. “Get up. Get out!” he yells at her. And when she refuses, he calls a servant “Get this out!” She’s nothing but a piece of trash to be taken to the garbage.  He hates the humiliation of being rejected by her, but above all he hates her pure presence convicting him.

7. Victims can be cruelly treated
When her full brother, Absalom, hears about it, he tells her, “Don’t think about it too much.” Showing a complete lack of compassion for her, he can only think of how best to take advantage of this situation for himself. Having been trapped, ignored, raped, and despised, she is now banished to Absalom’s house, desolate and disgraced.

Surely David will do something. We’re told, “David was angry.” Is that it? Angry? No action? Not even an attempt to get an apology? What cruel injustice from her half-brother, her brother, and her father.

8. Family can be put before God
David was too indulgent towards his own children. Perhaps he saw his own sins of adultery and murder in his children, and felt his lack of moral authority. But personal failings and family connections must not be put before the honor of God in seeking justice for victims. The least he could have done was to challenge Amnon and call him to seek forgiveness from Tamar and from God.

9. Chastisement can be very painful
Absalom let the whole matter die down, waited for his brother to drop his guard, and then pounced in murderous fury to kill an unsuspecting Amnon.

God had promised David that for his sins of adultery and murder, though forgiven, he would be chastised by sexual abuse in his family and the sword would never depart from his house. The divine sword is unsheathed and begins to plunge not only into David’s house, but into David’s heart. No wonder David wept and wept.

10. Sin can be forgiven
David confessed his sins of adultery and murder and was forgiven. If Amnon had confessed his adultery and Absalom had confessed his murder and sought mercy from God, they both would have been forgiven. Instead, they both died gruesome deaths, and are today in hell, while their equally sinful father is in heaven. Sin, even the worst sin, can be forgiven through faith in Jesus Christ.

That seems to be the most common view of the relationship between the two Testaments.

Paul appears to confirm this in Romans 10 when he quotes Moses to illustrate attempts at salvation via law-keeping. “The man who does those things shall live by them” (Romans 10:5 quoting Leviticus 18:5)

That settles that then, doesn’t it.

Oh, wait, he quotes Moses again in the next verses to explain salvation by faith in Christ (Rom 10:6ff quoting Deuteronomy 30:12ff).

Either Moses and Paul are very confused; or we are.

I think I’ll take the safer option there.

Moses related Law and Gospel in the Old Testament in the same way as Paul did in the New.

Oh, and Jesus too! (Luke 10:28).