Quotes about Old Testament

Everything bad in the Old Testament (and there's a lot) is there to point out our sin, while everything good in the Old Testament is there to point us to our Savior.

the whole Scripture of God is divided into two parts: precepts and promises. The precepts certainly teach us what is good, but what they teach is not forthwith done. For they show us what we ought to do, but do not give us the power to do it. They were ordained, however, for the purpose of showing man to himself, that through them he may learn his own impotence for good and may despair of his own strength. For this reason they are called the Old Testament, and are so.

The New Testament picks up from the Old the theme that God intends, in the end, to put the whole creation to rights.

In Genesis, and indeed for much of the Old Testament, the controlling image for death is exile. Adam and Eve were told that they would die on the day they ate the fruit; what actually happened was that they were

This pattern—God intending to live among his people, being unable to because of their rebellion, but coming back in grace to do so at last—is, in a measure, the story of the whole Old Testament.

The New Testament, true to its Old Testament roots, regularly insists that the major, central, framing question is that of God's purpose of rescue and re-creation for the whole world, the entire cosmos.

I found it (the word 'mercy') occurs 261 times in the Bible-and seventy-two percent of them are in the Old Testament. That's a three-to-one ratio. Then I studied the word 'love' and found it occurs 322 times in the Bible, about half in each testament. So you have the same emphasis on love in both.

Thus, when we interpret the Old Testament correctly, without allegory or artificial manipulation but in accordance with Jesus's own teaching, the central message on every page is Christ. That does not mean that every verse taken by itself contains a hidden allusion to Christ, but that the central thrust of every passage leads us in some way to the central message of the gospel. II.

To see what Paul sees, Christians today are summoned to join Paul: the reality of Jesus demands that the Old Testament be read not by the book, but against the grain.

Walter Brueggemann calls these parts of the Bible Israel's "countertestimony" . . . This spot-on term to name the dark side of the Bible, and which calls into question Israel's main storyline, comes from Walter Brueggemann's Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy.

And here is the absolutely vital and life-changing take-home point for us: ancient and ambiguous laws, in order to remain relevant, needed to be adapted—which results in the diversity of the laws we see in the Old Testament.

The story of Adam and Eve is a preview of Israel's long journey in the Old Testament as a whole.