The Old Testament as a Resource for Christian Discipleship
From The Forum Magazine, Spring 2014 - view the full issue here
Many years ago, while participating in a walking group, I met a young woman whom I’ll call Heather. She soon became a regular conversation partner and friend. As our relationship developed, Heather began asking me about Christianity and matters of faith. In time, I gave her a New Testament and invited her to read the gospel of John. When I followed up with her a week later, she told me that though she found it helpful, the gospel of John did not deal with her primary questions and concerns about God. It turned out that as a child, Heather had known tremendous loss and suffering, leaving her rather jaded about God. “The problem,” she confessed, “is that if God is good and God is powerful, how could God have allowed others to hurt me so?” I was stunned. Now what? What could I say that she hadn’t already heard to convince her that God loved her, that God did care, that God hated her suffering and died to put an end to such evil.
I decided to try again. This time, I gave her the Bible (Old and New Testaments) and suggested she read the story of Job. Not a week had passed by when she announced that she had finished all forty two chapters. “Now I understand,” she said. “What is to stop me from becoming a Christian?” To this day, I’m a little fuzzy about what Heather understood. However, what I do know is that as she read this rather obscure Old Testament book, the Spirit stirred in her heart convicting her of God’s goodness and love and arousing in her faith in Jesus Christ. Not long afterward, Heather was baptized into the body of Christ.
Heather taught me something valuable through this experience—that the Old Testament can be a rich resource for Christian discipleship and formation and yes, even for evangelism. Now I recognize that this may sound strange, that the Old Testament has something to teach us about being disciples of Jesus. Even so, it seems that Paul and the other New Testament writers believed the Old Testament could function this way. “All Scripture is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,” we read in 2 Tim. 3:16. And indeed, if the Old Testament bears witness to the same God as the one who is revealed in Jesus Christ, then we as Christians can learn much from the Old Testament about what it means to be followers of Jesus and citizens of the Kingdom of God.
Consider, for instance, the Old Testament laws. These laws have much to teach us about how to live as God’s joyful people. The various teachings about the Sabbath are a good example. While the practice of Sabbath, ceasing from our labor one day a week, has fallen on hard times in the broader culture, the Old Testament presents Sabbath-keeping as an important spiritual discipline for God’s people. In Exod. 20:8–11, for instance, we read, “Remember the Sabbath day … for in six days the Lord made heaven and the earth … but rested the seventh day.” By associating the Sabbath with creation, Exod. 20:8–11 grounds the practice of Sabbath-keep ing not only in the natural rhythms of work and rest that God established at creation but in the confession that God is the creator. It is he, not we, who sustains and upholds the world in his loving care. Sabbath-keeping reminds us of this and invites us to practice our creatureliness by entrusting the world, our world, one day a week, to God.
A second Sabbath text, Deut. 5:12– 15, associates Sabbath not with God as creator but with God’s act of deliverance in the Exodus. According to this text, the Sabbath was to be a celebration of Israel’s redemption. In other words, it was a celebration of what Israel had been delivered from, namely slavery, and what they have been delivered for, that is, freedom—the freedom to stop working, the freedom to rest, and most importantly, the freedom to worship God. While this text is rich with lessons for the Christian life, one area of consideration is our relationship to work and the place it holds in our lives. With the advent of new technologies, work has become ubiquitous, increasingly pressing in on our lives, claiming more time and energy. Practicing Sabbath can be a way of reminding ourselves and declaring to a watching world that we are more than our work, more than what we produce. Our proper end is not labor. Instead, we were created and have been redeemed for the purpose of loving God and enjoying him forever.
If the law teaches us how God would have us live, that is, what we should be, the prophets show us what we are. As interpreters of their times, the prophets named and exposed the corrupting and dehumanizing values of the dominant culture. Of particular concern to the 8th c. b.c.e. prophets was the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few and the accompanying greed and self-interest that gave rise to structural inequalities and systemic injustices. Isaiah declared, “The Lord enters in judgment with the elders and princes of his people: ‘It is you who have devoured the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor?’ says the Lord God of hosts” (Isa. 3:13–15). For the prophets, this relentless pursuit of prosperity and selfish ambition at the expense of justice, and on the backs of the poor, was inconsistent with claims to love God and be God’s people. Loving God was not, after all, to be a private affair relegated to the spiritual realm, but was to find expression in physical and tangible ways, in the practice of justice, the love of kindness, and walking humbly with God (Mic. 6:8). What the prophets invite us to consider as Christians today, then, is how our love for God finds public expression, particularly in the face of dominant ideologies and values of our own time that are remarkably similar to those of Judah in the 8th c. b.c.e. What does it mean to follow Jesus, for instance, in a nation where the gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen, where economic and educational disadvantage persists, particularly in communities of color, and where the number of those living in extreme poverty, without the basic necessities of life, is growing?
Lastly, we turn to the psalms. The most striking aspect of the Book of Psalms is the wide range of emotions that are expressed in these prayers. Some psalms capture the joy of our life with God. “Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere,” the psalmist declares (Ps. 84:10). Other psalms, psalms of lament, reflect the darker side of life. These psalms may surprise us by their raw and uncensored expressions of anger, torment, and grief (see, for instance, Psalm 13). The inclusion of these psalms in Scripture, however, assures us that the full range of human emotions and troubles—our fears, our doubts, our anger, our questions, our temptations, our failures, our loneliness, our shame, our grief—properly belong before God to be addressed in the context faith. In this respect, the psalms of lament encourage in us an honesty and authenticity in our relationship with God. Furthermore, far from being an act of impiety, these psalms, which cry out to God and petition God to act in times of crisis, acknowledge the fundamental truth of our faith, that God is our Redeemer. Salvation belongs to the Lord!
Thus, even as they give us language and permission to voice our distress, our anger, our despair before God when the brokenness of the world presses in upon us, they also move us through our grief and direct our gaze toward the Lord who, the psalmists testify, hears our cries and is mighty to save.
In the end, what strikes me most about the Old Testament is that this ancient text, written so long ago, has such a keen grasp of the human condition and of our need for a savior. Perhaps this is what Heather heard in the narrative of Job, an honest assessment of her life and the challenging word that she too needed saving. And perhaps this is the great gift of the narratives and poetry of the Old Testament for us today, their ability to name the wilderness of our current lives and remind us that God is here, redeeming, renewing, transforming our wilderness through Jesus Christ and by the power of the Spirit, and holding out the promise that one day, we will have life and have it abundantly.
(Amanda Benckhuysen, former Associate Professor of Old Testament)
