I wonder if you can remember the first time you picked up the Old Testament and tried to read it?

One thing you probably noticed right away is that it is really long.

They say, 77.2 percent of the Bible is the Old Testament. And ten percent of the New Testament is the Old Testament.

That’s a lot of material.

And it’s not just long. It’s complicated too.

For one thing, most of us don’t many books written thousands of years ago. To make it even more difficult, it was originally written in another language. What we are reading is a translation. It contains all kinds of different writing styles. It was written to people of all sorts of different cultures as well.

When you pick up the Old Testament, there is a lot you are not familiar with. There are nations you never heard of before. The Amalekites, Edomites, Jebusites, Canaanites, Hittites, and Philistines. There are laws you don’t know what to do with. As someone else has pointed out, there’s a whole chapter dedicated to explaining what to do in situations when a man or woman has a disease on the head. There are different suggestions based on whether it is yellow hair, or black hair, or white spots, or reddish white spots. And that’s not all. We have got chapters on the kind of clothes a priest should wear, laws concerning cities of refuge, concerning warfare, and what to do with unsolved murders.

With how long the Old Testament is, how old the Old Testament is, how different the Old Testament seems, with all the unfamiliar details in the Old Testament, we can understand someone picking it up and wondering, what is it all about?

What is it about?

That is an important question. If you don’t understand what the Old Testament is about, you are not going to understand it.

You can imagine completing a long study of a particular book and having someone ask you, what is that thing you are studying about? If you say, I don’t know. They will say, well then haven’t you kind of missed the whole point?

If you do understand what the Old Testament is about, you might not be able to explain all the details, but you will benefit from it and you will at least have a chance to understand them with further study.

The First Step

But, how do we understand what the Old Testament is about?

You can start by making sure you know what the Old Testament is.

Some people think it’s a magic book.

I remember going on a hike in Africa. I was nearing the top of the mountain when I heard loud shouts. I turned the corner and found a large group of people standing and screaming different phrases from the Old Testament because they thought of those phrases as having some kind of power.

Others think it is a rule book.

I am sure you heard about the person who tried to keep all the Old Testament laws for a year. I think they called the book, the year of living biblically, which was strange, because they weren’t reading the Old Testament the way it was intended.

Others might think of it like an inspirational book.

And so they will flip through their Old Testaments, hoping for a phrase to encourage them. It doesn’t matter who said it or who it was said to, if it inspires them, that’s enough, because that’s what they see the Old Testament as being about, I guess.

Some people think it is a book of various teachings.

They read the Old Testament like a reference manual, as if it were made up of different articles you can turn to in order to discover how to live your best life.

It is a story!

Really, the Old Testament is much bigger and better than that.

It is not magic, but it is powerful. It does show us how to live when you properly understand it. It has great quotes. There is a lot in the Old Testament! But, fundamentally it all comes together to tell a story.

I once heard someone describe the Old Testament using the idea of a museum.

Museums usually have a point. I suppose there might be a museum somewhere where they just hang things on the wall randomly. But most museums are different. You walk through the museum and see many different items, but it’s all been carefully organized in such a way to tell you a story.

The same is true with the Old Testament.

The Old Testament has a beginning.

The story begins literally with the first sentence.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”

It’s got an ending as well.

Technically, the ending of the Old Testament is given in the New. The story of the Old Testament ends on a cliffhanger. But even still, you get glimpses of the ending of the story throughout the Old Testament as well.

If you go to the very last page in the book of Isaiah, as an example.

Isaiah 66:22 says.

“For as the new heavens and the new earth that I make shall remain before me, says the Lord, so shall your offspring and your name remain.”

In the beginning we had a heavens and an earth. Here we have a new heavens and a new earth that remain.

And it’s not just a place that lasts either. There’s going to be worship!

God continues in verse 23.

“From new moon to new moon, and from Sabbath to Sabbath, all flesh shall come to worship before me, declares the Lord.”

We also have judgment.

Isaiah 66:24.

“And they shall go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me. For their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.”

So clearly we have a plot. How did we go from the old earth to this new earth? From people shaking their fist at God, to everyone on the planet worshiping Him? And who are these people being judged and why?

More than random details

Reading a story this big and important, it shouldn’t surprise us, there’s a lot we need to know to understand it.

That’s why God sometimes puts the story on pause.

You are reading Genesis, story. The beginning of Exodus, story. Then pause. Leviticus.

This is where reading the Old Testament often feels difficult.

Why all these details? What is going on?

God is giving us the information we need to understand the rest of the story we are reading is about. All the laws and rituals and sacrifices are, somehow coming together, to help us understand this one BIG, HUGE story about God, the universe, why everything exists and where everything is headed.

This makes the details important of course. But it also means that if you are going to understand them, you have to understand the story it tells first.

I remember someone saying it’s little like someone showing you a picture they took of Mount Rushmore using the zoom lens. You might be able to notice the rocks and some of the details. But unless they show you a wide angle lens picture as well, you are not going to be able to really know what the picture is about.

Or imagine asking your friend to tell you about the movie they saw. And they say, “The main character wore black. He dressed up like an animal. And he had a cousin. And the cousin had these strange tattoos.” Or they just start quoting random lines from the movie. Like, “My son, it is your time.” Or, “Guns, so primitive.” You’ll have no idea what they mean. No matter how many details they give or how loudly they quote the different lines, it’s not going to help. To understand the lines or details you have to know, what first?

You have to know the story.

That is how it works with the Old Testament. Until you understand the story it is telling, it’s going to be hard to understand much.

Especially not Jesus.

Worth the work

It may be a long time since you picked up the Old Testament for the first time. But how much better do you understand it than you did back then?

It may seem intimidating but it is possible.

It is going to take work. Of course! It is a big book, a long book, a complicated book, an old book. But we need to understand it because Jesus clearly saw himself as connected to the story the Old Testament tells and we want to know Jesus.

In order to know Jesus better, we need to understand our Old Testament better. That begins with understanding what it is. It’s a story. And if it is a story, we need to know what that story is about. In our next post, we’ll work at understanding the Old Testament better, by trying to understand just that.