Audio Transcript

Today’s question I can relate to. I read my Bible in the morning. I come across a promise or a text in the Old Testament. I write it out in a notebook. I take that text or promise into my day. But later in the day, when I return to the text, I’m left wondering if I lifted the verse out of context. Maybe it doesn’t really apply to my life like I first thought it did. Many texts feel more and more remote to me as the day goes on. Has that happened to you?

Well, it has certainly happened to me, and it has happened to Maureen. She writes in to say, “Pastor John, thank you for the Ask Pastor John podcast! How do I know which Old Testament verses are for me, as a Christian today? Sometimes I select a verse that is meaningful to me from my Bible reading in the morning. But then later in the day, as I further reflect on it, it feels like I’ve lifted the verse out of context and misapplied it to myself. How do I know which Old Testament promises are for me?”

Even though I know it’s an oversimplification, I’m tempted to say, “All of it. All of it is for you. All of the Old Testament is for Christians.” Romans 15:4 says, “Whatever [underline that word] was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” All of it.

Then there’s 2 Corinthians 1:20, “All the promises of God find their Yes in [Christ].” And Jesus said in Matthew 5:17–18, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” So, even though it’s an oversimplification, it’s true, in a wonderful way, that all of the Old Testament is for those who are in Christ Jesus.

He came to confirm and fulfill all of it for his people. Second Timothy 3:16–17 says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable [that’s important — it’s all profitable] for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” It’s practical and profitable.

From Israel to the Church

But the reason it’s an oversimplification to say that it’s all for us is that some profound changes in the way we use the Old Testament Scripture took place when Jesus came into the world, was rejected by Israel, established a new covenant by his blood (which was different from the old covenant, the Mosaic covenant), and said, “I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18). He did not say, “I will restore Israel.”

Maybe what would be helpful for Maureen, for me, and hopefully for others too is to list the differences between the people of God (the church) today and the people of God (Israel) in the Old Testament, as well as how God relates differently to each. These points can then function as a kind of filter.

At least, this is the way I function as I read the Old Testament. I have a filter, and I put things through this filter to know how I should embrace them, how I should apply them in my life. This is what I hope will happen now as I walk through these points of difference between Israel and the church. Because we are the church, we need a filter to know how to make proper use of Old Testament teachings.

1. Israel was an earthly nation.

Israel was an earthly, political nation-state among other political nation-states, but the church is not. It is a people whose citizenship is in heaven and who are sojourners and exiles here, scattered among all the nation-states. Christians are not first citizens of earthly nation-states, but only secondarily citizens of nation-states. We are more closely related to Christians of other political countries than we are unbelieving fellow citizens in our own earthly country.

2. Israel was a theocracy.

Israel was an earthly government authorized by God as a theocracy to carry out God’s punishments for those who broke his law, including capital punishment for idolatry and various other sins. The church is not a civil government and is not authorized as a church to carry out God’s punishments. Excommunication from the church through church discipline replaces execution through the judicial processes.

3. Israel was one ethnicity.

Israel was basically one ethnicity, the Jewish people, but the church is made up of all ethnicities. The kinds of practices that were designed to separate Israel from the surrounding peoples and ethnicities, like food laws and circumcision, have been done away with as requirements for God’s people.

4. Geography mattered for Israel.

Israel had defined geographic borders and a geographic religious center where the tabernacle or the temple was. The church has no geographic borders or religious center. Where the people of God are gathered in the name of Jesus, there is the center. There is Christ in the midst.

5. People were born Jewish.

People were born into the Jewish people, but people are born again into the church. The new covenant is entered by the miracle of God’s forgiving sins through faith and through God’s writing the law on our hearts (Jeremiah 31:33–34). That’s the new covenant.

6. The Great Commission came later.

The Old Testament religion was mainly a “come and see” religion, while the New Testament religion is mainly a “go and tell” religion. There was no Great Commission to go reach the nations in the Old Testament. God’s focus was on blessing Israel among the nations, so that the queen of the South came and had her breath taken away by Solomon’s wealth (1 Kings 10:4–5). God never said to Solomon, “Use your wealth to evangelize the nations,” but that is precisely what he says to us in the New Testament.

7. Israel used a sacrificial system.

The people of Israel maintained their fellowship with God by regular sacrifices, ministered by a select, Levitical priesthood, but that entire system was done away with when Jesus fulfilled it by becoming the final sacrifice and by acting as the final High Priest. In the new-covenant people, we get right with God and maintain our fellowship with God by trusting the substitutionary work of Christ and by depending on his daily intercession for us in heaven.

8. The Holy Spirit had yet to come.

Finally, though the people of God in the Old Testament did experience the working of the Spirit of God, they did not experience or know the Spirit as the indwelling Spirit of the risen Christ. Today, we know the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Christ. He works in his church, therefore, in a way that he did not work in the Old Testament because the church is his body, the body of the risen Christ.

Every Text Ours in Christ

My hope for Maureen and for all of us is that with this filter, with these eight points, we can take any text in the Old Testament and make it our own by treating it as fulfilled in Christ, with the necessary changes implied by these points.

For example, consider the end of Psalm 51. It’s a surprising end to a psalm that we love — until we get to the last paragraph, which goes like this:

Do good to Zion in your good pleasure;     build up the walls of Jerusalem;then will you delight in right sacrifices,     in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings;     then bulls will be offered on your altar. (Psalm 51:18–19)

So, we come to the end of Psalm 51 saying, “This is exalting. This is mine, and this is mine!” And then we read those words and say, “What? What am I supposed to do?” What do we do with that? How are we to embrace that text as ours?

Zion was the geographic center of God’s people, standing for the presence of God among his people. Today, we would embrace that commitment of God to his people and say, “Do good to your church, O Lord, wherever it is gathered in your holy name. Build up the body of Christ, and make your presence felt everywhere that your people are centered on you.”

Then we would come to the end, and we would conclude by praying, “Oh, how I delight in the one, great, final sacrifice for sin that your Son offered. We glory with you in that final fulfillment of every bull that was ever offered on your altar, and we give ourselves to you as a living sacrifice for your glory.”

Audio Transcript

Today we look again at life when it’s at its darkest. Christians often go through dark seasons, sometimes long dark seasons. Maybe that’s you right now. Maybe this episode is providentially put into your life right now.

This is the context for today’s email from a young man named Joshua. Joshua lives with his dad in California. “Dear Pastor John, thank you for this podcast. Is there anything I can do to help God help my dad? We’re not in the best living situation, and though we’ve prayed, we haven’t found a new place to live. I am actively pursuing the Lord in my mornings, and I am trying to lead my dad here, yet he still struggles with his faith. Just last night he said he doesn’t feel God’s love for him as his son. Life is hard for him right now, and God feels distant. What can I say and how can I pray for a dad who does not feel God’s love?

Joshua, here’s what I would want my son to do for me if I were in a dark place like your dad is right now. And I could be there; I have been there. There’s no Christian who doesn’t experience seasons when God feels distant or when we don’t feel his love as sweetly as we would like to.

Meditate on the Cross

First, I would want you, my son, to speak the truth to me about the objective reality of the love of God in the historical act of the death of his Son. Even though your dad does not now feel the preciousness of the love of God in giving his only Son, he needs to hear it. “Faith comes [by] hearing” (Romans 10:17) — over and over, not just at the beginning.

Make the connection for him between the love of God and the death of Jesus, because that’s the rock-solid, objective foundation of our feelings of being loved. For example:

“While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person — though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die — but God shows his love for us [he shows, he demonstrates his love for us] in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:6–8).
“The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).
“In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10).
“Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
And that precious, present-tense word loves in Revelation 1:5: “[He] loves us.” Not loved, as in most places. “[He] loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood.”

That’s what we need to hear. That’s what I would need to hear and what your dad needs to hear. When our feelings don’t correspond to reality, we need rock-solid, objective, historical truth about the death of Jesus.

Treasure Signs of Life

If I were your dad, I would want to be reminded that the love of God for me was shown to me not only when Christ died, but also when he made me alive and gave me the mustard seed of faith that I’m struggling to hold on to. “God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us . . . made us alive together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:4–5). If I have any life in me at all, small as it feels right now, it is owing to the great love of God for me in making me alive.

Remind your father that when God made us his own by his great love, nothing can now separate us from him:

I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38–39)

Learn Gutsy Guilt

Surprise him with a passage he may never have thought about. I love this passage. I’ve called it gutsy guilt:

Rejoice not over me, O my enemy;     when I fall, I shall rise;when I sit in darkness,     the Lord will be a light to me.I will bear the indignation of the Lord     because I have sinned against him,until he pleads my cause     and executes judgment for me.He will bring me out to the light;     I shall look upon his vindication. (Micah 7:8–9)

Even when we sin our way into darkness, the child of God can speak with boldness to the darkness and say, “Darkness, you will not have the last word. Even the God who put me here in discipline, who made darkness cover me, he will bring me out. He will execute judgment for me, not against me.” That’s what I call gutsy guilt for the justified children of God.

Wait for the Morning

Remind him that even when darkness covers us, and wherever we go in our weariness and lack of feeling, God is there, and he is our light.

Where shall I go from your Spirit?     Or where shall I flee from your presence?If I ascend to heaven, you are there!     If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!If I take the wings of the morning     and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,even there your hand shall lead me,     and your right hand shall hold me.

And this is so relevant for his dad:

If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,     and the light about me be night,”even the darkness is not dark to you [O God];     the night is bright as the day,     for darkness is as light with you. (Psalm 139:7–12)

And then add this promise for a sweet application of that psalm:

Weeping may tarry for the night,     but joy comes with the morning. (Psalm 30:5)

Pray for Spiritual Strength

And finally, remind him that the apostle Paul knew that the struggle to feel the love of Christ would be part of the Christian warfare, so he taught us how to pray about it:

[I pray that you] may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:18–19)

The amazing thing about that prayer is that Paul shows us that it takes strength to comprehend the love of Christ. There is a kind of soul strength that God gives in answer to prayer that enables us to grasp and feel and enjoy the love of God in Christ for us personally.

So, I pray, Joshua, that you will be filled with peace and joy and hope as you share these things with your father. And you can tell him that our little APJ band here is praying for him.

Audio Transcript

How do I decode the point of a whole chapter of the Bible? How do I summarize the main point of a whole psalm? Welcome back to the podcast. That’s the question we need answered today. And if you’re reading your Bible along with us, using the Navigators Bible Reading Plan, our reading schedule hits January 8 today. That means we’re reading Psalm 8 together. Psalm 8 is rather hard to make sense of, hard to summarize, so it’s a good time in our Bible reading to pause and ask Pastor John how he summarizes it and other whole chapters and whole psalms.

Philip asks this very question: “Dear Pastor John, I’ve really enjoyed the way you go through individual verses and explain them very clearly by breaking them down and explaining each part. I understand that meditating on small parts of Scripture can help us really suck all the nourishment from it, but sometimes my problem is in understanding entire chapters or larger sections of the Bible.

“I read something like Psalm 8, and although I can understand small parts of these texts, I really get lost and fail to follow the entire flow of argument or where the chapter is going. I’m often confused by a whole psalm. It seems disjointed to me, and I can’t follow how one line leads to the next. Could you help me to figure out ways to understand large sections of Scripture as a whole, rather than just small chunks disconnected from other parts? Thank you.”

Let me see if I can help, first with an analogy — namely, an analogy of a jigsaw puzzle — and then with an exhortation about the hard work of seeing a whole chapter. Then I’ll give an example from my own experience.

Scripture as a Puzzle

Think of a larger unit of Scripture, like a chapter or a few paragraphs or maybe several chapters — think of it as a jigsaw puzzle, a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle. There are five hundred pieces laid in front of you, and as you look at them, they do not look at all like the painting on the front of the box. They are just one big jumble.

That’s how the words and phrases and clauses might look to you in a chapter in the Bible when you try to think of the chapter as a whole. They’re just lots and lots of words and phrases and clauses that might say some nice things, but my oh my, they don’t make one big picture.

How do you go about seeing the whole picture instead of five hundred scattered pieces? Of course, the Bible doesn’t have a picture on the top of the box. You’ll work a little harder here. How do you see a chapter as a whole, with a main point, with all the pieces fitting together to make that main point, instead of just seeing sixty or seventy scattered clauses and phrases? That’s the goal.

You take one piece, right? (I love to do puzzles like this because I love figuring this out.) You take one of the pieces, and you look at the piece very carefully. You don’t just keep scanning your eyes over the five hundred pieces superficially while saying, “Oh, let me see something. Oh, let me see something.” No, no, no, no. You get nowhere that way.

You take one piece, and you examine it very carefully. You notice that half of this piece is solid red and the other half is gold, solid gold, and you notice that the little protrusion at the top is split in half. Half of it is gold and half of it is red. From this you infer, with careful thinking, that there is another piece somewhere here, somewhere, that will be half red and half gold, and instead of a protrusion there’s going to be an indention in the bottom of the piece, leading up into half red and half gold.

Now you’re looking very specifically for that piece. As you scan the five hundred pieces, this time you’re looking specifically for it. You find maybe six or seven or eight pieces that have this half red and half gold, and you slide them around, looking for how they can fit together.

You push them off to the side of the table in a corner, and you find one or two that fit, and then another and another, and pretty soon you realize that you’ve got five, six, seven, eight pieces all fitting together. You notice, “Oh my, this is a robe draped over the arm of a throne. So, that’s going to go here, probably.” You set that midsize unit aside now, and you do the same thing all over again with another piece and its peculiar characteristics, fitting the pieces together as you go.

That’s how you build little pieces into midsize units. We might call those two or three verses, or a paragraph, and we’ve got maybe five paragraphs to fit together. Now you’ve got several — maybe three, four, five, six, seven, eight — midsize units, and you should be able to ask of those three, four, five verses in each unit, “What’s the main point here?” because of how they fit together.

Resist the Urge to Quit

Now, here’s my exhortation. One of the reasons we don’t move from the part to the whole in reading the Bible is because it is very hard work. It is hard work to fit all the midsize pieces together so as to see the whole. For most of us, and I certainly include myself here, we simply cannot do this in our heads. There’s where people run into trouble. They’re reading devotions, and they’re trying to do this in their head.

Well, I can’t even begin to do this in my head. We have to do it on paper. We have to write it down. We have to jot down the main point: “The red-and-gold midsize unit means ‘robe over the arm of a throne’” — that kind of a thing. And then we jot down the next main point of the next midsize unit, and so on, until we’ve got on our piece of paper six, seven, eight sentences, each one now summing up the midsize unit in the chapter, in the larger unit we’re trying to understand. Finally, we try to go about seeing how those midsize units relate to each other.

And my exhortation is simply this: Don’t give up on that. Use a pencil and a paper. Draw lines between them. You just have no idea how they might all fit together. You’ll be amazed at what you’re able to see by trying to fit those midsize units and their main points together to make the larger piece.

Unpacking Psalm 8

Now, I’ve been baffled over the years by the main point of Psalm 8. It seems like the main point is the phrase “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” because it begins with that and it ends with that (verses 1, 9). That’s a wonderful structural thing to see.

But in the middle, you have these babies who cry out, and God who gets victory over his foes through the mouth of infants (verse 2). So, I jotted that down: “Okay, so the meaning of the first part of the psalm, just the first couple of verses, seems to be that God gets victory over his foes by babies saying things.” And I have no idea how that works — none. That’s just what it says, so I jotted that down.

And then I move on to the next unit, which seems just totally different: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers . . . what is man that you are mindful of him?” (verses 3–4). And through this man, who’s just “a little lower than the heavenly beings,” God governs the whole world filled with fish and birds (verses 5–8). Now, what’s the main point? I’ve put a few pieces together here. I wanted to jot down on my piece of paper the main point of this midsize unit, so I jotted down, “God exercises dominion over his earth through insignificant man, who, compared to the stars, seems like nothing.”

And as soon as I wrote it, I thought, “Oh, I get it. The babies are insignificant, and God works his victories through babies. Man is insignificant, and God exercises dominion through man.” And the psalmist ends by essentially saying, “How great is his glory and his majesty?” Surely, then, the point is this: one of the peculiar aspects of the majesty and glory of God is that he gets his victories, and he exercises his dominion, through the use of weak and insignificant things.

Amen. Praise God. And that’s exactly the use that Matthew makes of it on Palm Sunday, as Jesus enters the city where the babies are crying out, “Hosanna!” (Matthew 21:15) — and he’s on a donkey, of all things.

Look, Write, Pray to See

So, the point is to look at the pieces very carefully, to fit them together in midsize units, to jot down the main points of the midsize units until you have them all on a half sheet of paper, and then to think and think, and pray and pray, and think and pray and think and pray, and to organize and draw lines, and to try to fit them all together until they fall into place and you see how these five, six, seven, eight, nine points of the midsize units are in a flow that make one big overarching point. You will be surprised, if you take up pencil and paper and do this, what you will see.