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

Welcome back to the podcast on this Monday. We’re going to start the week with a doozy of a question: Do we love God only by obeying him, or do we also love him verbally by using affectional language about him and to him? A hugely important question today that gets at the very heart of what we call Christian Hedonism.

The question is from an anonymous listener. “Pastor John, hello to you! My pastor recently admitted that he does not love God, or Christ, emotionally. He said he loves God, or loves Christ, by keeping his commandments. Obedience is love, he claims, returning often to 2 John 6 — ‘This is love, that we walk according to his commandments.’ And to 1 John 5:3 — ‘For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments.’ I’ve known many other Christians in my life who seem to have no place for emotional or affectional language for God. They like to relate to him merely in similar categories of obedience. Is this healthy? How important is it to cultivate affectional language for God as God? And what would you say to those who are uneasy with such language for their relationship with God and only ever use this obedience language?”

Okay, I hear three questions.

1. Is it healthy to relate to God only in categories of obedience but not affections? Answer: no, it’s not healthy. It’s confusing at best, deadly at worst. I’ll come back to that.

2. How important is it to cultivate affectional language for God? Answer: it’s very important. However, language is not the ultimate issue. The reality of our hearts’ affections for God is the ultimate issue. The language of affections is important only because the heart reality is important.

3. What would you say to those who are uneasy with affectional language for their relationship with God and only use this obedience language? I would say, “Get over your uneasiness with affectional language, because the Bible is full of it — full of it — toward man and God.” You’re uneasy with the Bible. That’s your problem. And I would say if your heart is really emotionally dead toward God, repent and cry out for life.

Confused or Dead?

Now, we need to be careful here with our words, because it may be that this pastor is not denying that he has real and strong affections for God; he’s just denying that he should call them love, maybe. Love for God, he’s saying, is something else — namely, love is obedience. Now, if that’s what he’s saying, then he may be a good Christian and just biblically confused. In other words, his heart may be right, but he’s naming things in unbiblical ways, and probably he’s confusing his people in the process. It sounds like it from this question.

“God commands that we feel affections for God.”

On the other hand — this is more scary — it may be that he really doesn’t have any affections for God, and in that case he needs to be born again. If there is not even a mustard seed of delight in God, thankfulness to God, hope in God, satisfaction in God, desire for God — if none of those emotions is in his heart for God and Christ, he’s not a Christian. So, let me try to address both of those kinds of people at the same time.

The first kind is the Christian who is confused about the affections that he genuinely has for God and simply doesn’t know whether to call them love or not. And second is the person who thinks he’s a Christian when he has no emotions in his heart for God and Christ at all; he’s just dead emotionally toward God.

Affections in the Christian Life

Now, here’s the main thing to say about the confusion of claiming to love God with obedience but not with heart affections: that’s like affirming fruit but denying apples. I’ve said this so many times. Affirming obedience and denying affections is like affirming fruit and denying apples, because obedience means doing what God commands, and God commands affections. It’s confusing, it’s contradictory, to say, “I obey God, but I don’t have any of the affections that God commands me to have.” That’s just really confusing and contradictory.

1. God commands affections.

For example, Psalm 37:4 says, “Delight yourself in the Lord.” Now, that’s a command. So, a pastor who says he’s obedient to God’s commands would be obedient to the command to delight himself in the Lord. Now, he might not call it love — though I think he should, but he might not. (And I’ll show in a minute why I think he should.) That’s not a deadly problem. To get your language confused is not a deadly problem. Not to have any delight in the Lord is a deadly problem.

But for now, whether he calls delight in the Lord love or not, he is commanded to have delight. And it is simply confusing and contradictory to say he obeys God but does not relate to God with his emotions, because those emotions are commanded. And if he doesn’t have them, he’s disobedient to the command. We can add to Psalm 37:4 the command in Psalm 32:11: “Be glad in the Lord.” And Philippians 3:1: “Rejoice in the Lord.” And many others.

2. The godly model affections.

Not only are affections for God commanded, but that way of feeling in the heart is held out to us as an example — not just a command, but an example — of how godly people relate to God. For example, in Psalm 43:4: “I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy.” Or Psalm 84:2: “My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.” Or Psalm 63: “O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you. . . . Your steadfast love is better than life. . . . My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food . . . when I remember you upon my bed” (Psalm 63:1, 3, 5–6).

3. We are to pray for affections.

And not only are affections for God commanded and given as examples of how godly people relate to God, but we are taught to pray for those affections. This is what we ought to do if we don’t have them. Psalm 90:14: “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love.” This is a cry to God to give us the affections for him that we ought to have and may not at the moment have.

And on top of all that, Jesus warns against outward obedience where the heart feels nothing. Matthew 15:8–9: “This people honors me with their lips,” — so, lips are moving; that’s outward obedience — “but their heart,” he says, “is far from me; in vain do they worship me.” “In vain”: that’s a big, terrible, horrible statement. Without heart, our outward obedience is nothing.

So, I conclude that it is confusing and contradictory to say that you obey God’s commands, but that you don’t pursue the very affections for God that he has commanded.

Love Worthy of Christ

Now, one last thing. Why should we use the word love for these affections for God? Now, I’m not saying that love for God is only affections. The Bible talks about love in a very broad way. But I am saying that love for God is not less than affections for God. Now, why would I say that? And I’ll give just one reason: because of Matthew 10:37. Jesus said this: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

Now, in that sentence, love for Jesus cannot mean obedience to Jesus’s commands, because he’s comparing love for Jesus with love for our children. “Whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” Love for our children does not mean obedience to our children. So, the point is, we must love Jesus with the kind of love we have for our most precious family members — only more so — and that is an affectional love.

So, I hope the pastor who said, “I love God by keeping his commandments, not with my affections,” will realize that God commands that we feel affections for God. And I hope that this is just a confusion of language and not a case of real deadness of heart.

Audio Transcript

Each of us is a Bible interpreter. Each of us is trying to interpret and understand the meaning of God’s word accurately. So how do I know if my Bible interpretation is accurate or if it is false? It’s another great question from a listener to the podcast. This listener did not give us his or her name. But here is the email: “Pastor John, hello! Paul tells us ‘the law is good, if one uses it lawfully.’ That’s 1 Timothy 1:8. So the Bible is good if one uses the Bible biblically. So how can I know if I’m using my Bible biblically or using the law rightly?”

I would say that there are two ways to go about answering this question. One is you could gather together — and I will gather together — some biblical pointers that give guidance to how the law, or biblical teaching in general, is to be handled. That may be what they’re asking: “Show me some biblical pointers for how to handle the Bible or the law.”

Secondly, the other way to answer this question is to realize that there are people who insist that even the pointers that I give could be questioned, and then we’d have to deal with that problem. I could give, for example, five biblical pointers to how the Bible says we should handle the law. And a certain kind of person could say to me, “But how do I know that I’m reading those pointers correctly?” And I could give an explanation of the pointers and how they work. They could say, “But how do I know that I’m interpreting your explanation correctly?”

Then a Roman Catholic might chime in and say, “You can’t. You can’t be sure of any of those things, which is why Protestants are so divided. You should let the church, the Pope, ultimately decide what everything means and let him instruct you.” To which the person could consistently say, “But then how do I know when I’m reading what the Pope wrote in his encyclical that I’m interpreting the Pope correctly?” And so on, ad infinitum.

“There are spiritual and moral preconditions for a true handling of God’s word.”

There is a kind of person that is like that. You can see that those are two very different kinds of problems. The first person is simply asking, “Could you give me some biblical guidance for how to understand the law in the Bible and to help me know I’m interpreting it correctly?” The second person has a much deeper problem and is basically calling into question whether a human being can know anything. There are skeptics like that. They’re wired to be so suspicious and so skeptical about their own interpretations that they never come to a knowledge of the truth.

Handling the Law

Let me take these one at a time. Here’s the first one: What are some biblical pointers for how to handle the law — I’m thinking Mosaic law first and then Old Testament more generally — correctly?

1 Timothy 1:6–11

Let’s start with the context of the text they’re asking about, 1 Timothy 1:8, where it says this:

Certain persons, by swerving from [a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith], have wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions. Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless . . . [to indict] whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine, in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted. (1 Timothy 1:6–11)

Here are some pointers for how to handle the law in that context:

Don’t swerve from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith because there are spiritual and moral preconditions for a true handling of God’s word.
The prohibitions of the law are not mainly for people whose hearts are right with God and are led by the Spirit under the law of love.
The law is mainly for the lawless who need to be shown that there’s an authority outside of them to which they will give an account.
A right use of the law accords with healthy doctrine, which, Paul says in 1 Timothy 1:11, is in accord “with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God.” Make the gospel of Christ crucified the touchstone for the right use of the law.

Romans 3:19–20

Here’s a second cluster of pointers from Romans 3:19–20. Paul says,

We know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

Here we get pointers like these:

Though the law is given to Israel, it stopped the mouth of the whole world.
It will never be the instrument of justification. No one gets right with God by law-keeping.
Through the law comes the knowledge of sin. That is, the law confronts us with our sin. It’s not the solution to the sin problem. It points away from itself to Christ. If we read the law rightly, we will see that the law points away from the law to Christ.

Matthew’s Gospel

Here’s a third cluster of pointers from Jesus. He says, for example, in Matthew 5, that the law is misused by the Pharisees because they don’t take it deep enough. “The law says, ‘Don’t kill.’ ‘Don’t commit adultery.’ But I say to you — and I’m getting at the real purpose of the law — ‘Don’t get angry’ and ‘Don’t lust.’” There are clues for how you handle the law in Matthew 5 (see Matthew 5:17–48).

“If we read the law rightly, we will see that the law points away from the law to Christ.”

Or another example is when the Pharisees condemned Jesus and his disciples for eating with tax collectors and sinners (Matthew 9:10–13), and when they condemned them for plucking some grain on the Sabbath and eating it as they walked along (Matthew 12:1–8). In both these cases in Matthew, Jesus said that the problem is the Pharisees don’t know how to read; they don’t know how to read their Bibles. He quoted Hosea 6:6: “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.” Then he said, “If you knew what this means, you would not have condemned the guiltless. You wouldn’t have used the Old Testament that way. If you knew what Hosea 6:6 meant, you wouldn’t have used the Old Testament to condemn us.”

In other words, there are key interpretive passages in the Old Testament that give guidance for how to rightly handle the law. There are many, many more pointers in the Bible to the right handling of the law. Just one example would be the book of Hebrews. Oh my — almost every page of the book of Hebrews is written to help us understand the limits of the law and the right use of it.

But How Can We Know?

Let me close by saying a brief word about this other kind of person who responds to virtually every effort you make to explain the Bible or help them understand the Bible by saying, “But I can’t really know if I’m interpreting you or the Bible rightly. How can I know?”

Now, Jesus has something to say about that person and to that person. His claim was blunt and unsympathetic. He said, “You don’t live that way.” That was his answer to people like that. “You don’t live that way. Your life shows that you really do live on the basis of your confidence in your interpretation of things. Yes, it does. When you talk that way, you’re a hypocrite.”

Here’s where I’m getting that. Listen to Matthew 16:1–3: “The Pharisees and the Sadducees came, and to test him they asked him to show them a sign from heaven.” They needed more signs. “We can’t understand what you’re doing. We don’t know where your authority comes from. We don’t get it. We need signs.” Here’s what Jesus said: “He answered them, ‘When it is evening, you say, “It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.” And in the morning, “It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and menacing.”’” To which Jesus says, “You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.”

In other words, they were saying they could not know how to interpret Jesus and his words and ways. “It’s all so uncertain. Who can know? We need more signs, more explanation.” But when it comes to their livelihood, they trusted their powers of interpretation just fine. “Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning. Red sky at night, sailors delight. We can tell the one from the other, and we’ll stake our lives on it. We’re not going fishing today — there’s going to be a storm.” They were hypocrites. They were just plain outright hypocrites.

So I would say this to the person who is claiming not to be able to know how to read anything with confidence: you are probably inconsistent, and you may be a hypocrite who is just using feigned helplessness to avoid the clarity and conviction of Scripture.