Why two testaments

Israel was the only nation that would have a special relationship with the Lord; they were His chosen people. They were to worship Him exclusively. Later in the history of Israel, God made a covenant with King David.

The Bible records it as follows:. In this covenant, God promised David that one of his descendants would build a house for the Lord and rule forever as king over the nation Israel. He is the one who built the temple for the Lord and ruled over the nation, but he certainly did not rule forever. Indeed, there are promises listed in this passage that go beyond that which was fulfilled by Solomon.

The agreement God made with David found its ultimate fulfillment in Jesus. The Bible records the visit of the angel Gabriel to the virgin Mary who explained how this covenant is fulfilled in Jesus. The Bible says:. Jesus is the ultimate fulfillment of the promise to David that one of his descendants would rule forever. This brings up an important distinction that we find in the Old Testament, or Old Covenant. This would occur by Him being an offering or sacrifice for sin.

Each of these purposes is seen in prophetic pictures in the Old Testament. The New Testament says part one was fulfilled at the first coming of Christ, while part two will be fulfilled at His second coming.

In the Book of Jeremiah we find a new covenant, or a new contract, promised to the people of God. It says:. The new covenant promised that the Law of God would be written on the hearts of the people.

The Lord promised that this new covenant would take the place of the old one making the old covenant unnecessary. The Gospel of Matthew records what took place. The Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians about the new covenant. He explained it in this manner:. The new covenant is based upon the death of Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary. Paul wrote about Jesus instituting it on the night in which He was betrayed. He said:. The bread and the wine are memorials of this New Covenant.

The wine represents the blood of the covenant. The Bible records Jesus saying:. This would remind the people of the words of Moses when God made a covenant with the children of Israel at Mt. The major theme of the New Testament is how God now deals with humanity through the new covenant.

In the New Testament, the Old Testament writings are called the old covenant. Paul wrote:. In the Old Covenant, with the old system, the sin problem was dealt with through animal sacrifices. These sacrifices are no longer necessary. The writer to the Hebrews stated:. God is now dealing with humanity through a New Covenant? Everyone who participates in the New Covenant must personally believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross for their sins and then rose from the dead.

This is the only way that they can have a personal relationship with God. There is another thing that should be mentioned about the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. Each covenant launched a great spiritual work of the Lord. The New Covenant extends to all people throughout the world. These covenants gave rise to a body of sacred literature. Once each covenant was instituted, a number of sacred writings were given by God to explain the meaning of the covenant.

Our Old Testament consists of the books of the Old Covenant, while the New Testament books are writings that are based upon the new covenant God has made with humanity. The writer to the Hebrews said that God would put the law into the hearts of people under the new covenant.

He wrote:. Under the New Covenant, God gives His people the ability to carry out the terms of the covenant. The token of this covenant is the Holy Spirit who lives inside each believer. He empowers believers to follow Christ and to obey the terms of the New Covenant. As we examine the various agreements that God has made with humanity, we find that God has always kept His part of the agreement. Unfortunately, the same thing cannot be said about the response of humans.

We have miserably failed. But sin and weakness and sadness clings. All this is why there are two Testaments. The New Testament tells us that plan has been decisively put into action, through a baby in a manger. This child would grow up and eventually be rejected and killed. But he went through death and out the other side, being given a body that ate fish John —12 and could be touched John , but which could walk through walls John and was often unrecognizable John And when believers look at that resurrected Christ, we see our future.

In him, the future has dawned in the present. And when sinners are united to him, we begin to experience that future now. The fundamental question, the question beneath every other question, the one that defines your existence above all else, is: What age do you belong to?

Dane C. For example, John 19 says Jesus is the greater Passover Lamb. Part of the presupposition of the Old Testament and New Testament writers is that there are two modes of prophecy, not just direct verbal prophecy but also what one might call "patterns of history" that point forward.

All of a sudden it makes sense that the past exodus referenced in Hosea is seen as an event prefiguring a greater exodus, Jesus coming out of Egypt. I think a number of the contributors would say the more Hebrew exegesis you do in the Old Testament, the clearer the use is in the New Testament. That's immediately a problem. There's such specialization in all fields today.

What is the most popular Old Testament passage or theme for New Testament writers? Beale: Probably the Old Testament passage quoted and alluded to most is Psalm , where it says, "The Lord says to my Lord: 'Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. You and Dr. Carson describe how this commentary's contributors adopted an "eclectic grammatical-historical literary method.

Beale: Historical-grammatical exegesis traditionally has been used to exegete a Hebrew or Greek paragraph. You try to interpret it contextually in the book, using word studies, grammar, and syntax. You try to understand the logical development of thought within the paragraph, historical background, and theological or figurative problems. You check for parallel texts. It's a whole array of things you bring to bear on a particular paragraph.

Eclectic and literary [method] extends grammatical-historical exegesis from just looking atomistically at the paragraph in the context of its book. In my view, part of exegetical method has to do with how the passage fits into the corpus of the author, how it fits in the New Testament, and how we relate it to the Old Testament.

One would especially want to pay attention to Old Testament allusions and quotations, going back to see what's happening in the Old Testament. You might call that a biblical-theological perspective that really goes beyond the traditional understanding of grammatical-historical.

I like to use the phrases "narrow-angle exegesis" and "wide-angle exegesis," letting Scripture interpret Scripture, or "canonical-biblical exegesis. They tend to be sensitive, when quoting one text, to other developments of that text in the Old Testament.

That's a wider consideration than just looking at your paragraph in the New Testament book. You have to do both. The books of the New Covenant tell how the Son of God came to do this and set forth the implications of this New Covenant. Both collections alike speak of Christ; it is He who gives unity to each and to both together.

The former collection looks forward with hope to His appearance and work; the latter tells how that hope was fulfilled. The books of the Old Covenant open with a summary of the early days of men in Western Asia which forms an introduction to the story of Israel, the people whom God chose for Himself and with whom He entered into covenan—relationship. God's choice of Israel was no act of favouritism——He is no respecter of persons or of nations, either ——but He selected this particular nation in order that the knowledge of Himself and of His will, revealed to them, might be communicated by them to other nations; and He chose them most of all in order that they might be prepared as the nation in which, when God's time was ready, the Saviour of the world might be born.

The history of this preparation is the chief concern of the books of the Old Covenant. God prepared this nation to be the vehicle of His purpose by revealing Himself to them in mighty works and by the words of His spokesman the prophets.

Through out this period prophets and righteous men in Israel looked forward to the accomplishment of God's purpose in the promotion of which they played their allotted parts, and they 'died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them and greeted them from afar' Heb. The promise was carried out and the period of fulllment dawned when Christ came.

So He could say to His disciples: 'Blessed are your eyes, for they see; and your ears, for they hear. For verily I say unto you, that many prophets and righteous men desired to see the things which ye see, and saw them not; and to hear the things which ye hear, and heard them not Matt. A question which naturally arises here is this.

Since the New Covenant fulfilled and, indeed, superseded the Old, and since we now have in our hands the books of the New Covenant, why should we trouble any more about the books of the Old Covenant? Does not the New Testament render the Old obsolete? As it introduces a covenant of grace and not a covenant of works, does it not, indeed, contradict the Old Testament? Why, then, does the Christian Church continue to include the Old Testament among her sacred books? Wherefore they are not to be heard, which feign that the old Fathers did look only for transitory promises.

From time to time, however, men have risen in the Church to argue that the Old Testament is so thoroughly superseded by the New that it should no longer be ranked among the canonical writings of the Church. One of the earliest of these was Marcion, who flourished in the second century A. His distinctive doctrine was that the Old Testament was inferior to the New and had been rendered obsolete by Christ. Marcion stressed the contrast between the two Testaments so far as to say that the God revealed in the one was quite a different being from the God revealed in the other.

The righteous God, the Creator, Israel's Jehovah, revealed in the Old Testament was a different and inferior deity to the good God revealed by Jesus under the name 'Father'; This, Marcion thought, was rendered sufficiently obvious by the fact that it was the worshippers of the righteous God of the Old Testament who sent the Revealer of the good God to His death.

Marcion, therefore, repudiated the authority of the Old Testament, and defined the Christian canon as consisting of one Gospel and a collection of ten Pauline epistles. Paul, to Marcion's way of thinking, was the only real apostle of Christ, who had remained true to His mind and revelation. The Church, as a whole, he maintained, had followed in the error of the Judaizers, among whom the original apostles of Christ were to be reckoned-Peter, John and the rest.

Marcion stated his view of the opposition between the two Testaments in a work called the Antitheses, where he collected a number of contrasts between the revelation of the Old Testament and that of the New. Marcion's dualism between the righteous God and the good God has often been reproduced, though not usually in such a thorough—-going form. We still find people drawing a contrast between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New, although they do not, like Marcion, regard the God of the Old Testament as having an independent existence, but regard Him as a developing idea in the minds of His worshippers, which reached full growth when it attained the measure of the stature of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Others make the contrast between the attributes of God——His righteousness and His mercy——as though the former were characteristic of the Old Testament revelation and the latter of the New Testament revelation, whereas in fact both coexist in harmony throughout the whole Bible.

One illustrious Marcionite of comparatively recent times was the great German church historian Adolf von Harnack, who was himself no mean authority on Marcion. Practical difficulties in the use of the Old Testament arise in various places and times, but these difficulties are to be surmounted by further teaching about the preparatory character of the Old Testament revelation, not burked by throwing the Old Testament overboard.

Gibbon[ 6 ] reports that when Ulfilas, the apostle to the Goths, translated the Bible into the Gothic language about A. Whether this was so or not, we are told that similar difficulties arise in Africa, where converts to Christianity find in the Old Testament too much that reminds them of their ancestral practices and beliefs——too much, for example, to confirm them in their polygamous customs.

How far this representation is exaggerated can be ascertained from missionaries. On the other hand, the contrary difficulty is experienced in India, one hears, where the Old Testament is uncongenial to the intellectual heritage of educated Hindus.

Hindu thought is abstract, impersonal and static, whereas the Old Testament outlook is concrete, personal and dynamic. The Indian sometimes says that the Old Testament reflects a morality and a conception of God which is lower than that of the best Indian religion, and asks why the ancient literature of his own people should not play for him the role of Gospel—preparation which the Old Testament plays for others.

A cursory comparison of even the earliest and purest literary monuments of Indian religion with the Old Testament may well fill one with surprise that such an idea could ever be entertained; but it certainly has been and still is entertained, and not by Indians only. Perhaps it all depends on what one means by 'morality' and 'religion'. The sect of 'German Christians' 'which flourished in Germany under the Hitler regime urged a similar argument. Why should Nordic Christians cherish a volume of Jewish religion and history when they had the sagas and beliefs of their own pre—Christian ancestors?

These latter should serve as the proper introduction to 'German Christianity' as they understood it, instead of the Hebrew Scriptures. An adapted edition of the book of Psalms appeared in these circles during the thirties of the present century, entitled Divine Songs for Germans , where the historical and personal references in the Psalms were replaced by others drawn from Germanic and Indo—European history and mythology: for example the place names of Psa.

In the early days of the Church difficulties were felt in connection with the Old Testament even among those who repudiated Marcionism and maintained the apostolic faith. The Greek Fathers, especially those of Alexandria, found the concrete realism of the Old Testament uncongenial to their heritage of Greek philosophic thought, and they had large recourse to the method of allegorization. In this they had a predecessor in the Jewish scholar, Philo of Alexandria c.

The allegorical treatment was carried to absurd lengths but the Alexandrian Fathers held, as some Christiatis do even to—day, that where the literal sense is plainly impossible that is to say, impossible in their eyes , the text must be interpreted allegorically.