Sermon: The Bible's Big Picture: The Old Testament

Sermon 1: The Old Testament

Good morning. I was asked to come and speak for two weeks about the Bible. No big surprise there, I'm sure there are talks every week at this church that come from the Bible. The difference about my talks is they will not be focusing on a specific book or chapter of the Bible. Instead, I will be seeking to cover the Bible as one whole book. Now clearly, I will not be covering it in detail. There are 66 books of the Bible, and I will have about 66 minutes if I go a few minutes over time each week. That means I could spend a minute on each book of the Bible, and that would be next to useless. What is helpful, though, is to get an understanding of the big, important, recurring themes of the Bible, those ideas that pop up again and again, the main message the Bible as a whole book is seeking to tell us. That is actually more easily followed in one or two sermons on the whole Bible, instead of picking it out piecemeal from every verse and every chapter of every book separately.

Of course, I will be leaving a lot of stuff aside. But that doesn't mean that stuff is not important! The entire Bible is important, even if some parts of it are difficult, some might even say perplexing or impossible, to understand fully. And so, before we begin on the Bible's main message, I want to give you a few quick reasons why we need to read and understand the Bible ourselves. That way, you will understand the value of the message we will be looking at over the next two weeks. These are in a particular order, not of importance per se, but of understanding. The first builds a foundation for the next, and so on. You need to get the first one before you move onto the next.

Number 1, the Bible is a collection of reliable and accurate historical documents that claim a divine heritage. That is, the Bible itself claims that God guided the authors to write what they wrote, so that the Bible is not just a collection of historical documents, but it is given to us by God.

Number 2, the Bible is the primary source material for learning about God. I say primary, because it is the best, most detailed source for information about God. It's not the only source, but the Bible is the number one place to turn when you want to know more about God. The Bible does not record every single thing God has done – that would likely be impossible for us to read. Rather, it is an edited collection of information about God that he chooses for us to have.

Number 3, the Bible is the history of the people of God – and the people of God includes us! When we become Christians, we join the family of God, and we inherit all of this as our history. Having a history is very important, because it tells you who you are, it gives you an identity.

Finally, the Bible is a fundamental way God speaks to us. The Bible is not just a book we come to to find answers and information about God. It is a place where God comes to us, and speaks to us, and tells us what he wants us to hear from him today. It is the way he has chosen.

Those four reasons are worth keeping in mind, both as you read the Bible, and as you listen this morning. If we have a focus on what we can expect the Bible to give us, then we can look out for it and recognise it more easily when it comes. That is a fine platform for us to jump from as we start to fly over the Bible, getting a bird's eye view and being able to see the largest and most important themes it contains.

Let's start from as far away as possible, where we can only see the one big thing the Bible is about. From all the way over here, looking at the Bible as one whole book, we can see that its main character is God, and that its main topic is also God. This book is about God. It tells us who God is, what God thinks and does. But the other main character in this book is humanity, people. People feature in this book almost as much as God does. It tells us who humanity is in relation to God, what we are like, what we do. So fundamentally, the Bible is about God and people. Now, once we open up the Bible, things get a lot more complicated. But let's just keep a broad view for now. The Bible is split into the Old and New Testament, and since I have two weeks to preach, I will follow the same divide. Today, we will look at the Old Testament and what it has to say, and then next week we will look at the New Testament, an see that its themes and message are fundamentally the same – they form the one book, so that should not surprise us.

Turning to the Old Testament, then, we can look at it through the broad themes we have already seen the Bible covers – we can look at what it says about God, and what it says about humanity. I am going to suggest three things the Old Testament focuses on as key things it tells us about God, and three key things it tells us about humanity. These are big, important ideas – the vast majority of what the Old Testament says fits under one or more of these six headings. I put them here in steps, so we can see the link between what we learn about God, and what we learn about people. As might be expected, everything flows from God. Again, these are in a distinct order – each one builds on the last to give us a more complete picture of God and humanity. I think you will see that while these major themes may be more focused on in one part of the story than another, they remain important themes all the way through the Old Testament.

The first big theme of the Old Testament, the first thing it tells us about God, is that God is powerful over everything, not just Israel. This is something I think we just accept these days – the ideas of God being all powerful and all knowing and everywhere are commonplace now, and in fact the philosophical debate about God in the modern world usually assumes that whatever 'god' someone is talking about has these attributes. But once upon a time – and in some places in the world, even still today – people believed in gods that were tied to specific regions, things or people, and outside those regions, things or people, these gods had no power to act. This was the case in the ancient middle east – throughout the Bible we read of these local gods, like Amon in Egypt; Ashera, Ashtoreth, Baal of Caanan; Baal-Zebub and Dagon of the Philistines; Bel and Tammuz of Babylon; and Chemosh of Moab.

And you might think that the God of the Bible is the same, because isn't he just Yahweh of Israel? But Yahweh, the God of the Israelites, is different. When Yahweh first starts to make promises to his chosen people, they are not a people, they are only one man, who is too old to have children – his name is Abraham. Yahweh claims to rule over the whole earth, and over all people, and so he can make promises to Abraham about giving him a land somewhere else, somewhere that other gods claim right over. Yahweh can claim that all people will be blessed through his people, because Yahweh is the God of all people, not just Abraham. When Yahweh comes to the aid of his early nation Israel, they are slaves in a foreign land, in Egypt. Yet he can save them from that slavery, he can defeat the Egyptian armies and their pharoahs and their magicians and their gods. When his people march through the wilderness to get to the land he has promised to them, they defeat the peoples of Edom and Moab whose land they have to cross – because Yahweh has power over them and their gods. The promised land itself is held by the Caananites, but their people and their gods are no match for Yahweh – he empowers his people to push them out of the land he had promised – land that once belonged to other people with their own gods, whose detestable practices led to Yahweh judging them – because Yahweh stands in power over all people!

But the Old Testament makes it even more clear that God is the God of everything. In Genesis, we are told that it is through his power that all things are made – everything belongs to him, because he created it! All the earth, all the animals, all the plants, all the people. And that claim gets repeated in the psalms and the prophets and other places. The book of Job, which recounts the suffering of a man under God's will, shows that God has power over some man who lives in Uz – nowhere near Israel. It describes how God has power over this man's property, his family, his health. It also tells us God has power over Satan, that angelic accuser who points to our sin and says we should be judged and punished. When the prophet Jonah is told by God to go to Israel's enemy, Nineveh, to preach to them about God, Jonah tries to run – he takes a boat in the opposite direction, and heads for Europe. But Yahweh's power stretches even into the sea – which in ancient times was the embodiment of chaos and unruliness, which defied order – and so when God sends a storm, the sailors ask Jonah what's going on, and he says in Jonah 1:9, “I am a Hebrew and I worship Yahweh, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” In verse 10 it says “This terrified them,” and for good reason – this was a God that was powerful over the land and the sea!

In the prophets, God uses plagues, swarms of locusts, storms, droughts, fire from heaven, talking donkeys, children, oil, bears and foreign armies to provide warnings and blessings and judgment to his people – nothing is outside his power. God's people are threatened by foreign armies of huge nations – it would be like if China and Russia and America all attacked Australia with their combined military might – God still protects his people. But he also punishes them with foreign armies, so when God's people Israel are taken into captivity once more by Babylon, even when their temple is destroyed, and their holy city Jerusalem is sacked and its walls torn down, God does not leave them, and God is not powerless. When they are in Babylon, Daniel is protected in the lion's den, and is given dreams and visions. God has power over foreign kings, turning Nebuchadnezzar into a howling crazy man, using King Xerxes of the Medes and Persians to protect the Jews, using King Cyrus of Persia to rebuild Jerusalem and God's temple. God's power stretches across the world, across all peoples, kings, nations, and things. That is the God of the Bible.

Now in the face of this mighty God, what are people like? Well, the Old Testament tells us many things about people, but the major, important theme, the foundational thing about people, is that they are sinful. What does it mean to be sinful? I think the psalms give us a good definition, “The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on all mankind to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. All have turned away, all have become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one.” Those are the words of both Psalm 14 and Psalm 53 – so important it is repeated! The book of Ecclesiastes, a book of God-given wisdom, tells us in 7:20, “Indeed, there is no one on earth who is righteous, no one who does what is right and never sins.” From the very beginning, when God creates humanity, they turn away from him and do their own thing – and it never stops from there! Even some of God's greatest heroes of the Old Testament are sinful: Noah gets drunk and falls asleep naked; Abraham pimps his wife off to foreign kings; Jacob is a thief and a scoundrel; Moses is a murderer with anger problems; David is a murderer and an adulterer; Solomon has 700 wives and 300 concubines and worships false gods. And the people of Israel are no better! When Moses is on Mount Sinai with God getting the 10 commandments, Israel are cavorting and making false gods! When they get to the promised land, instead of worshipping God and following his laws, they worship the local gods! Again and again through the prophets God warns them, but they do not listen, and eventually he punishes them for it. In the face of an all-powerful God who rules over all things, we learn that people are sinful, disobedient, and selfish. That is human nature.

Which might make our next point about God rather strange, but it is true nonetheless: the next major theme about God is that he seeks to have a relationship with humanity. He wants to make for himself a people, and to relate to those people as their God. Right from the beginning, God shows kindness to people. Humanity is created in God's image, likely why he cares so much about us. He clothes the naked Adam and Eve after kicking them out of the garden for their sin. He chooses Noah, a righteous man and his family, to save from the flood. He blesses Abraham, and promises to turn him into a nation that God will further bless. He saves Israel from slavery in Egypt. He gives them a rich promised land, and he also gives them his holy law to follow, so they are not just a richly blessed people, but they are his richly blessed people. When Israel turns its back on God and worships other gods, he sends them warnings, he sends them prophets to do crazy things to get the people's attention, like marry a prostitute, or lie on one side and cook their food over manure - he makes it clear he will not put up with their sin and he will punish them. And like a loving father with a child running riot, he does punish them, but he never leaves them - even when they are robbed of their holy land and their temple, God does not leave them. The psalms are full of songs and poems written by people about God, about this relationship they have with God, about the relationship God wants from them. Song of Songs is a love song between a husband and a wife, that represents the love between God and his people. He calls his people ever back to him, giving them so many chances, he exceeds the patience and forgiveness of even the most devoted parent.

But God does not just want a single race to be his. No, God wants to call a people for himself made up of all the nations of the world. God's promise to Abraham is that through him all nations will be blessed. When God saves Israel out of slavery in Egypt, he says to them at Mount Sinai, in Exodus 19:5, “Although the whole earth is mine” - claiming his vast power - “you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” He wants Israel to act as his priests to the rest of the world, to stand out as mediators between God and the nations. In the laws, God makes it clear that someone who follows the laws is part of his people, even if they are not born an Israelite. God adopts Rahab the prostitute into Israel when she helps the spies who cross into Jericho. He adopts Ruth into Israel through Boaz, even though she is foreign, and even though Israelite men were not meant to marry foreign women, because she wants to be righteous. The prophets have repeated references to Jerusalem, and its spiritual version, Zion, being a place where all the nations come to worship and honour God.

The prophets also have repeated calls to God's people, and through them to all people, to be holy, and be that light to the nations, to show them what God wants of them. And this is the next point that the Old Testament tells us about humanity. Humanity needs to be holy, because God is holy. It says exactly that in the book of Leviticus, repeated over and over, “Be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy.” Now, holiness is a hard concept to get your head around. We had a sermon series on Leviticus recently at Waitara Anglican, and Mark, who spoke on this, put it pretty succinctly – the things that make God the most different from other gods, and God's people the most different from other people, are love and righteousness.

And that's what the law is essentially all about. Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbour as yourself. That is true holiness. And that means being different from other people without being isolated from them, because you cannot show true, godly love to other people from a distance. You have to be fair with them in your business dealings, you have to show compassion on their poor, you have to welcome them into God's people. You have to be loving and righteous, just as God is loving and righteous. You may have heard the current pope, Pope Francis, call out for a global economic system that puts people at its heart, and not “an idol called money”, because he says the current system does not show love to people – it is built on greed and selfishness, which is why it works, because people are sinful! But just because it works doesn't make it right. When you worship money and let it do what it wants, it destroys people. Money worshipped is an idol of greed. How different is Yahweh's love for people, and so how different should God's people be from the norm!

The third big point about God in the Old Testament is God's ultimate goal – he wants to free people from their sin, he wants to exalt the righteous and punish the wicked. The Old Testament makes it clear that this has not yet happened. Ecclesiastes 8:14 tells us to look around, and we will see “the righteous who get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked who get what the righteous deserve.” God makes a lot of promises in the Old Testament, but every time you think he has fulfilled them, it turns out there is still more to be done. After they sin, God promises Adam and Eve that their children will crush sin – but their son Cain kills their other son Abel, so clearly that promise awaits fulfilment. God promises Noah after the flood that he will not destroy the world with a flood again to punish sin – but sin does not disappear. God tells the people of Israel that in the promised land, they will receive rest, and that he will live with them there, and that he will send them a prophet even greater than Moses to lead them. But they continue to sin, and even at the end of Deuteronomy it says that there has never since been a prophet so great as Moses. When they settle in the promised land and the people ask for a king, God not only gives them King David, but he also makes great promises to David – that one of his descendants will sit on the throne over God's people forever. David's son Solomon sits on the throne, and he is a man of great wisdom and he builds the temple for God in Jerusalem – but he is also an idolater and greedy, and rather than sitting on the throne forever, he in fact starts the beginning of the end of Israel's golden days.

God makes this clear, by sending prophets with the message that his plan is still to free people from sin, to punish the wicked and to exalt the righteous – it is still coming. He says things like Jeremiah 31:33, “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbour, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.” In Isaiah 13:11, “I will punish the world for its evil, the wicked for their sins. I will put an end to the arrogance of the haughty and will humble the pride of the ruthless.” In Zephaniah 2:3 he says, “Seek the Lord, all you humble of the land, you who do what he commands. Seek righteousness, seek humility; perhaps you will be sheltered on the day of the Lord’s anger.”

And this leads us to our last major point about the Old Testament, our last big theme about people: people have a choice to make about where they stand with God. Throughout this whole story, and at every stage, one thing that is startlingly clear about people is God always gives them a choice about where they stand with him. Adam and Eve have a choice about whether to eat the fruit. Israel's people are given the choice again and again as to whether they want to follow God and his commands, and be his people, or not. Job has the choice of whether to praise God in his suffering, or to curse God. When the Jews are freed from Persia to return home to Jerusalem, they do not have to return, they can stay in Persia. It's true, the choice is often between a good and a bad option – between a blessing and a curse from God, a forgiveness and a punishment. But given how many times people seem to choose the curse and the punishment – or say they will choose the blessing, but then in their actions choose the curse – it seems only having to choose between a good and a bad option doesn't stop people from choosing the bad option – what with people being sinful and all. But God does not force the issue – he allows a choice, and allows people plenty of chances to change their mind and make the right choice when they go wrong.

Those are the main themes of the Old Testament – God is all powerful, people are sinful; God wants a relationship with people anyway; people need to be holy because God is holy; God will deal with sin, exalt the righteous and punish the wicked; and people have a choice about how they relate to God. In all this, I haven't mentioned the New Testament or Jesus at all. That's for next week. But during the early church time, the only Scriptures they had were the Old Testament. When they talk about the gospel as it appears in the Scriptures, they are talking about the Old Testament – they are talking about these themes! It was clear to them what God is like, and what people are like. It should be clear to us too. The Old Testament is the foundation of our faith – not the Jewish faith, not the Christian faith in some esoteric, remote sense – this is the foundation of our faith! What we believe about God and the world and each other hinges on the Old Testament.

Read the Old Testament for yourself, and you will see it all fits quite neatly into one or more of these six big themes. And the question then becomes, what do we do with this message? Well, really, it should be obvious. God tells us he is powerful, not just in the Middle East, not just over Jews, but over all people everywhere. That includes us. He wants a relationship with humans, and humans includes us. Yes, we're sinful, but he says he has a plan for that. He will take care of it – what he wants from us is to take his offer seriously, and to be holy – to love God and to love each other. And we have to realise that what we choose to do has consequences , because God is going to exalt those who do what is right, but he is going to punish the wicked. The Bible does not argue about these first five points. It just states they are what they are. The only one we get a say in is our choice, how we respond to it all. Have you chosen to ignore God, to not take him seriously, to just not think seriously about God? Then the Bible says that is your choice. It's the wrong choice, but it's a choice God allows you to make. However, it also says that you have another chance, you can change your choice – God is very patient, very forgiving, and he actually wants to have a relationship with you, on his terms.

Have you made that choice to follow God, to be one of his people, but found it's really hard, and that living as if you had chosen the other option is much easier, or sometimes very tempting? If so, then this is your history - you fit right in with the rest of the people of God! The Old Testament tells us that God's people made the wrong decision again and again, even though they knew it was wrong. We are talking about people who saw God's fire descend on a mountain, and then instantly turned around and started forging false idols. That is human nature. But God drives us to keep choosing him, over and over to keep coming to him, to keep being his people, to keep making the right decision. That is God's nature. So don't give up. Let's pray.