Quotes about Old Testament

Among the Jews, especially in the Old Testament, teachings served not for the communication of religious truth, but rather to bring the one taught into direct confrontation with the Divine Will.

When Mark records the baptism of Jesus, he says that Jesus saw the heavens "splitting apart" (Mark 1:10 NLT). The Greek term for this word is the same used in Exodus 14:21 in the Greek Old Testament.* Exodus 14:21 is speaking about the "splitting apart" ("dividing") of the Red Sea at Israel's exodus.

The Old Testament begins with the Genesis of heaven and earth through God making all things. The New Testament had another kind of Genesis, in the sense that it describes the making of all things new.

There is no better story in the Old Testament, or perhaps the whole Bible, for depicting the difference between the ladder-defined life and the cross-defined life than that of the Tower of Babel.

That is a way of summarizing the main content of the Bible: "God is Lord" is the message of the Old Testament; "Jesus is Lord" is the message of the New Testament.

God, it would seem, did not communicate to His people an explicit and systematic form of doctrine; instead, He instructed them, mainly, through His providential dealings and by means of types and symbols. Once this is clearly grasped by us it gives new interest to the Old Testament scriptures.

In like manner, the word "know" is frequently used in the New Testament, in the same sense as in the Old Testament. "Then will I profess unto them, I never knew you" (Mat 7:23). "I am the good shepherd and know My sheep and am known of Mine" (Joh 10:14). "If any man love God, the same is known of him" (1Co 8:3). "The Lord knoweth them that are His" (2Ti 2:19).

But we must never read such promises, or anything in the Old Testament, as if Jesus had not come and the New Testament had not been written.

All the fullness of God is in Jesus (Colossians 2:9). All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are in Jesus (Colossians 2:3). Beyond what the Old Testament told us, whatever we need to know about God and how he relates to our lives we learn from what we hear and see in God's final, decisive Word, Jesus Christ.

Thus, see Old Testament texts like Pss 68:5; 103:13—14; Isa 63:15—16; Jer 31:9, 20, the famous avinu malkeinu ("Our Father, our King") lines in classic Jewish prayers, like Ahabah Rabah and The Litany for the New Year, and texts like 4Q372 fragment 1:16.

Second, there is a clear eschatological focus in the word "blessed."9 If a focus of the Old Testament was on present-life blessings for Torah observance, there is another dimension that deconstructs injustice and sets the tone for Israel's hope: the future blessing of God in the kingdom when all things will be put right; no text in the Old Testament fits more here than Isaiah 61.10 This second dimension shapes the Beatitudes because Jesus' focus is on future blessing.

the consistency of the Old Testament warnings for the covenant community formed a natural bridge to the New Testament warnings.