Bible Studies

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE OLD AND THE NEW TESTAMENTS?

The answer in one word is ‘Jesus’.
The Old Testament says ‘Someone is coming’. The New Testament says ‘Someone has come’. The O.T. looks for completion. The N.T. gives it.

HEBREWS 1. 1-3. The O.T. revelation was partial, fragmentary and incomplete.
1. Scholars speak of the Old Testament as ‘progressive revelation’ meaning one of two things:
a) God revealed Himself bit by bit. He revealed Himself and His will gradually just as far as people could take and understand until He was able to reveal Himself fully in Christ. (cf. John 16.12).
b) It wasn’t that God revaled Himself bit by bit but that the understandin of Him and what He was saying grew bit by bit, beginning in a primative way and growing until Christ was able to come and be understood.
2. The O.T. prophets used many methods – speech, dramatic action, etc. Only Jesus could reveal God by just being Himself. It is not just what He said or did that reveals God to us. It is what He was. The prophets were His messengers but Jesus was God.
3. Some parts of the O.T. rise very nearly to the N.T. level and all of it looks forward to the N.T. but is, at best, fragmentary. Amos sees and proclaims the justice of God, Isaiah the holiness of God and Hosea (out of his own painful experience) the love of God. None of them are able to grasp all the aspects of the truth. With Jesus it is different. He not only has the whole truth. He is the Truth (John 14.6, John 1.1-18).
4. Consider the pattern of Scripture: Genesis, the need of salvation. The rest of the O.T. the preparation for salvation. The Gospels the coming of salvation. Acts, the spreading of salvation. Epistles, the application of salvation.

MATTHEW 5.17 and 38-47. The contrast betwenn the O.T. Law and the revelation of Jesus.
1. Jesus says God’s law is eternal. Paul says ‘Christ is the end of the law’ (Rom.10.4. etc). Can both be true? Jesus again and again broke the Jewish speaking of is the law of God, not the highly complicated laws that had and shows what God meant by them not what the Jews had made of them.
2. The heart of O.T. law is the 10 Commandments – good but external. When Jesus comes to live within by His Spirit they become personal and internal. (Jeremiah 31.31-34).
3. Jesus had the authority to take the old laws and change them – showing the heart of what had been dimly perceived. (Matthew 5. 21, 27, 33, 38, 43).

QUESTIONS:
1. Should we include the O.T. in our Bible at all? Why?
2. What does Paul mean by Romans 7.1-14 and Galatians 3.21-25?
3. For a new conver with no Bible, would you give him a Bible or a N.T.?
4. Is it alright to have several wives and keep slaves? Why not?
5. How do you understand the fact that God told the Israelites to slaughter the tribes in Canaan, men, women, children and babies. Would Jesus say that?
6. What do you make of the anthropomorphisms of the O.T.? (Genesis 3.8; 11.5 etc.)
7. In secular history the reign of Omri in Judah was great, long and glorious. Why do you thin the Scripture writes it off in so few verses? (1 Kings 16. 21-28)
8. The O.T. is all about Israel and God. What has it to do with us?
9. Read Psalm 137.8-9. Is this the Word of God? If not, what is it and how do you treat it?
10. In O.T. times it was always assumed that goodness and wickedness would always be rewarded physically and in this word (e.g.Psalm 37. 18-29). Is that true?
11. God ‘sacked’ Israel (Matthew 21.33.-43) and called the Church to be the new People of God (1 Peter 2.9-10). What lessons can we as the New Israel learn from the old Israel?
12. ‘Between the O.T. and N.T. there is both ‘continuity and descontinuity’. In what way?

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