Thursday, December 15, 2016

Yes, the Old Testament Matters

When someone has just given his or her life to Jesus Christ, one of the first things that the evangelist does is give them a New Testament with the recommendation of reading one of the Gospels. Then, keep going and get acquainted with other books in that volume. By all means, that's an excellent start.

While reading the New Testament is important, we cannot stop there. The Old Testament helps us further understand the work of Jesus the Creator.
Image credit: Freeimages / John Harris Pe
Unfortunately, some people stop there. Worse, some people are "Red-Letter Christians", who believe the red letter versions where the words of Jesus are in red, and only read those. The entire Bible is the written Word of God. To gain a fuller understanding of the work of Christ the Creator, we need the Old Testament, which points to him.
It is common today for pastors/ministers to focus mainly on the New Testament in their preaching and ministry while hardly citing the Old Testament. Even worse are superficial slogans such as ‘This is a New Testament church’ or ‘Just preach Jesus’.

Some of this can be due to either uneasiness or embarrassment about plain teachings such as six-day creation and the global Flood. This has become much more prevalent because many theological institutions—even conservative ones—deny, spiritualize or explain away these early chapters of Genesis as allegory or reworked pagan myth.

So it’s easy for a church leader to maintain or even promote the misconception that creation is an ‘Old Testament issue’. Thus it is one to be relegated to a much lower order of importance and priority. But as will be shown, Genesis creation is an important part of the “whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27).
To read the rest, click on "The importance of the Old Testament".