THE Story, OUR Story: The One to Come

Have you ever noticed how unbalanced the Bible is? Now, I don’t mean that the Bible has a bias like the news media. No, what I’m talking about is the comparative size of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, in comparison to the New Testament. The Old Testament has 39 books, and some of them are rather large. In fact, the Psalms and the Book of Jeremiah are in the running for the largest volumes in the Scriptures. What’s more, if you take the average Bible and hold it up, spread into its two main divisions, you’ll noticed how tiny the New Testament writings really are. Put simply, the Old Testament is more than seventy-five percent of the Bible by word count.

So, how is it that we Christians are so focused on the New Testament? How is it that we often lay aside or deem as irrelevant the overwhelming majority of the Bible? And we call it “The Old Testament.” Well, I’ve addressed this before, but it bears repetition: The Old Testament is from another time and another place that is almost unrecognizable to us in terms of culture and language. And what’s more, the Old Testament, in terms of time, is as distant from the time of Jesus as the time of Jesus is from us. When Jesus walked the earth, the traditions of the Hebrew Bible were already fading into distant memory. Even folks in Jesus’ day were debating how to interpret and apply them to their lives.

Some Christians through the years have basically tried to turn this foreignness into a license to neatly cut out the Old Testament from their lives. In the early church, a man by the name of Marcion did just that. He removed from the Bible everything that sounded remotely Jewish and that included the entire Old Testament—and a lot of the New Testament as well.

But hang on, the New Testament is a Christian book—why would Marcion want to remove big parts of it to get rid of the so-called “Jewish elements?” And here we get to the major point of today’s message. And that is this: you cannot separate the Old Testament from the New; they are one unified story. To separate the Old Testament from the New Testament Is to do violence to both. The New Testament without the old is a story that doesn’t make sense, it has no foundation. On the other hand, the Old Testament without the new, as I’ve said before, is a story with no ending. As a story, it is unsatisfying to the reader or here because it ends without any of the loose ends being tied up. And loose ends abound in the Old Testament. The Old Testament is made-up of thousands of threads of stories and people and places that weaved in and out of the text and formed this great tapestry. But it is a tapestry that is pointing somewhere. It is a tapestry that is preparatory to a momentous event.

As Christians, we know that that momentous event is the coming of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. We celebrated every year at Christmas time. The whole season of advent is for the church a season of preparation. The coming of the Christ child once again into our midst. And yet... Do we stop and pause and wonder... Do we stop and think of how strange a fulfillment of the Old Testament promise of a king to come this New Testament story of Jesus really is?

For when we speak of the Old Testament we must speak of prophecy. Now don’t get me wrong, the Old Testament is more than just prophecy. It contains narrative, stories of real people and real places in real time. It contains law, rules for the governing of god’s people. It contains poetry, some of the most beautiful and famous poetry ever to be written. It contains wisdom writings, words that were designed by the author to impart wisdom to a younger generation. But in the relation of the Old Testament to the New, we must speak of prophecy.

When we think of prophets and prophecy, we often think of those grand predictions of things to happen in the future. In our modern way of speaking, a prophet is simply one who tells us in advance what will indeed happen in the future. And as we mentioned when we talked about the prophets this is absolutely correct. But it is only a partial answer, right? We made a distinction between two things: foretelling—telling things that would happen in the future and “forth telling”—speaking into the contemporary culture and situation calling the people back to God’s law. Both are important to grasp the connection between the New Testament and the Old Testament. Because the prophets were not just fortune tellers, they were law-enforcement officers, not of civil law as we know it today. The prophets were not going to give you a fine according to the state vehicle code of Israel and measure the amount of cargo your wagon was hauling on the highway weigh station and fine you heavily if your logbook wasn’t up to date. No, instead, the prophets were engaged in a kind of discourse in which they pleaded, urged, begged, sometimes even berated and cajoled, threatening the people of Israel to turn from her wicked ways—to turn from idols—and come back again to God—or else.

And we now know what that “or else” ended up being. Remember the story of the Old Testament is a story of echoes. And the echoes begin right back in Eden. God gave Adam and Eve, the two humans in charge of his paradise, a very basic set of tasks and a law to keep. They were to tend and guard the Garden as a sacred space. It was where they met God, and so it had to be defended and kept pure. Their only restriction was to not eat from one tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This was the law: to respect the distinction, the boundary, the indelible difference between creature and Creator. Simply put, we humans are not God. Anytime we think too highly of ourselves and place our judgment over the Divine, we err like Adam and Eve. Their sin wasn’t so much eating the fruit—that was only the proximate evidence. That action revealed an attitude of the heart—a desire to serve self instead of God and others. Our actions are like windows into our soul. They reflect what lies deeply buried in our hearts. And the serpent, that crafty fellow, knew that the temptation to be like God was the place to strike at this primal pair. They had everything else they could need and want. And because they were loving children, it is understandable that they would want to be like their parent. But they took it a step too far and tried usurping God’s place in the story. They were to be co-writers in a story woven together in Divine-human partnership. But they wanted top billing. They wanted to write their own story and have God simply watch.

That’s not the way God works in our lives. That’s not the universe in which God lives and breathes alongside us. God instead wills that there be no universe outside of one in which the Creator an the creature cooperate. It is in the union of God and flesh that they mystery of all mysteries is revealed. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves though. Adam and Eve wouldn’t follow the script. They tried to write God into a bit part on the sidelines. And for that there was only one recourse. The Divine Parent had to set them free. They had to go into exile east of Eden and discover for themselves what life was like without God’s intervening and stabilizing presence.

That theme of exile permeates the story of the Old Testament. The exile of Adam and Eve is the theme of which the rest of the story is but mere variation on an even grander scale. As this pair were cast from paradise, their son Cain was to be sent forth for the first murder. Then God exiled the people at the Tower of Babel to the ends of the earth for conspiring once again to relate to Him on their own terms.

Even the story of Abraham and his descendants echoes this theme of exile and return. Abraham never settles down but travels to and fro. Jacob is sent away and then returns. Joseph is sold into slavery and through him God’s people end up in Egypt. And from Egypt the people are delivered from bondage to a land of promise.

But the people are stubborn, and they must wander in the wilderness for forty years before they get to the land. And then in the period of the Judges, they would enter a repetitious cycle of exile and return as they went alternately under the yoke and unburdened themselves from foreign oppression.

This early theme and variation were but preparatory to the climax of the Old Testament narrative: the Exile of Israel and Judah from the land. Do you remember? God promises that if the people of Israel kept the Law of Moses, they would receive abundance, blessing, and security in the Promised Land. That God would dwell among them, and a renewed Eden would become manifest in their midst. But if they disobeyed, they would receive curses. And at the center of those cursings was a departure of God’s own presence and the vomiting out of the people from the land.

Israel, the Northern kingdom met that fate in 722 BC at the hands of the Assyrians. Judah, their southern neighbors, went into exile just a little while longer in 586 BC. It seemed at that point that all was lost. That God had turned from God’s people and maybe they were finished.

But God is faithful to God’s promises. And God had promised to Abraham—unconditionally at that—that God would always be with God’s people. That God would establish a Kingdom on earth in which God’s will would always be paramount. So far, that doesn’t seem to be the case. And how could it when pagan oppressors scattered God's people to the four winds?

Enter the latter prophets of the Bible, those giants like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. They tell of a new day that is to come. They tell of a future where God's Law will be written not just on tablets of stone but engraved in the hearts of human beings. As much as the old covenant could, it kept the people in line. But ultimately it was external existing as a concept an idea a published document. But Jeremiah speaks of a new day, a new covenant, a new way of relating.

More than this though, the Old Testament speaks of a figure wrapped in mystery and awe. It speaks of “one that is to come,” it speaks of the Messiah. Now, at this point, it is all too easy to make the jump to Christmas. It is all too easy to jump to Advent, jump to shepherds keeping watch by night in their fields tending their sheep. To a little baby born in a manger. But let us not move quite that fast.

The story of God in the Old Testament ends 400 years prior to the birth of Jesus. The story is unfinished. And then, suddenly, it seems, in the New Testament a new story begins. At first glance, it doesn’t seem like the stories are mutually coherent. But that is mere appearance. But to understand how these stories are truly one, we need to go back and unlearn how we think of prophecy.

As I mentioned, people often think of prophecy as simply predicting the future in advance. And with Jesus, there is plenty of evidence of this. The Immanuel prophecies of Isaiah, for instance. And the great Servant Songs of the same book are key examples of this type of prophecy.

But there is more to prophecy than that, right? What about calling people back to God’s Law? Where is that in the Old Testament’s portrayal of the “One who is to Come?”

For that, we need to go back to Eden, right to the same chapter in which our first parents are sent away from Eden. In Genesis 3:15, God gives Eve a promise, often referred to as the Protoevangelion, the first Gospel—the initial promise of the Messiah. This passage states that one would be born of Eve’s line that would be bitten on the heel by the Serpent but ultimately that Eve’s great grandson would crush the head of that Serpent.

This is the story of Jesus in miniature. Jesus would undo the work of lawlessness in the world by calling all to himself. Calling them back to God and to the twin spokes of the Law of Moses: Loving God and Loving Neighbor, a summary of the Ten Commandments.

All throughout the Old Testament there are flashes and hints of this. Abraham is told that a Lamb would be provided for the sacrifice required by God—but what God actually provides is a ram. The Lamb would come later at Calvary. Zechariah tells of one who would be pierced and marveled at. This is the one who was nailed to Calvary to give us victory. And I could go on and on with connections. According to many scholars, there are at least 430 credible connections between the Old Testament and the New about Jesus’ messianic role. And we could get lost there.

But the purpose of those connections is what I want to leave us with today. The purpose of that connectedness between Hebrew Bible and New Testament is simply this: It’s ALL OUR STORY TOO. We have no license to ignore or discard the Old Testament. Maybe we shouldn’t even call it the Old Testament. Maybe we should call it Volume One of Our Story.

And when we view it that way, these thirty-nine books come alive. The characters become human, and we find ourselves in their stories. They really aren’t so different after all. They really aren’t so foreign. They are human like us, have flaws and foibles like us, and most importantly, are inhabiting the same sacred story. They too, like us, are moving on to perfection, moving on to the future in which God and humans would dwell together. As it was in the beginning, so it will be in the end. The Lord will do this, and it will be awesome in our sight. Amen.