Look to the Rock

Old Testament Background To Our Understanding Of Christ

Alec Motyer

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789740325
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

The Bible is one book, not two separate testaments; so the Old Testament is essential for understanding the New. In this stimulating book on the Old Testament background to Christ, Alec Motyer shows how Jesus is the king expected, who brings in the kingdom looked for in the Old Testament; is both the image and the Word of God; conquers sin and death, and brings the disordered creation to its prefect consummation. To neglect the Old Testament, the author maintains, is to have an impoverished view of the glory of Christ.

CHAPTER ONE

The master theme of the Bible

 

 

The division of the Bible into two books or Testaments is not really helpful towards a proper understanding. Once a unity is sundered it is not always a simple matter to restore the lost wholeness. But centuries of tradition, along with our own education from childhood, have drilled our minds into accepting a two-testament, instead of a holistic, model for the Bible.¹

MODELS OF UNITY

There are any number of ways of exploring the unity of the Bible and seeking to bring the two-testament model into a more helpful perspective.²

1. THE BOOK WITH THE ANSWERS AT THE BACK

The Old Testament does not bring all its teaching and evidence into a secure integration. We reach the end of Malachi with, for example, glowing expectations of the Messiah but without knowing how they can possibly be fulfilled: how can the son of David be David’s Lord? How can one with a plainly human ancestry be truly ‘the Lord our righteousness’? Such questions could be multiplied over the whole area of Old Testament revelation. They are not exclusive to the messianic theme. But they do suggest that we should see the Bible as the book with the answers at the back.

Like all attempts to reduce the huge question of biblical unity to a single model, this can be caricatured. For we are all familiar with mathematical textbooks where the answers to problems set en route are given in the final pages, or with introductions to biblical Hebrew or New Testament Greek where a ‘key’ to the parent book is provided in a subsequent volume. Needless to say the New Testament is not a set of ‘answers’ or a ‘key’ in quite that way! Maybe, therefore, a detective novel would be a better illustration, where problems and clues multiply in the course of the book and are solved in the final denouement. This offers a greater approximation to unity in diversity.

2. A TWO-ACT PLAY

John Bright wrestled penetratingly with ways to understand the place of the Old Testament in the Christian pulpit.³ He was determined to resist the concealed Marcionism of much of what is called the ‘liberal’ handling of the Old Testament for, as he understood it, ‘no part of the Bible is without authority’ and the Old Testament must be used ‘as a part of normative Scripture’ from which ‘the Church must never part’. In illustration of this view of the unity which binds the two Testaments he offered the analogy of a two-act play, pointing out that (a) without either act the play is incomplete; (b) that each act has something individual to say; and (c) that neither act can stand without the other. The fact that he proposed only two acts is a by-product of the dominance of the ‘two-testament’ model, and it is not altogether satisfactory to make the interval curtain fall between Malachi and Matthew. None the less the concept is useful and profound. As Act One unfolds, tensions begin to appear, for example, in the sacrificial system. There are sins which it does not explicitly cover and for which, since the Lord is a forgiving God, repentance must avail (Ps. 51); there is the basic inadequacy, discerned by Isaiah, that in the ultimate only a Person can substitute for people (Is. 53). Thus Act One awaits the denouement in Act Two. Yet the testimony of Act One is irreplaceably valid, that by the will of God the substitution of the innocent for the guilty is the divine principle for dealing with sin. Act Two sweeps in on the flood-tide of Act One: here is the human perfection of a willing Substitute: without the realities of Act One even the terminology of Act Two would be incomprehensible. But yet Act Two has something distinctive to say: that when the ultimate substitution was made, it was God himself who came and stood in our place.

3. DOCUMENT AND SEAL

If we prolong for a moment the artistic metaphor, we can move from the dramatic unity of a play to the visual-compositional unity of a picture which

. . . is the same kind of problem as unfolding a long, sustained, interlocking argument. It is a proposition which, whether of few or numberless parts, is commanded by a single unity of conception.⁴

Could the Bible be better described?

THE AUTHORITATIVE JESUS

In the final analysis, our authority for anything we believe is the Lord Jesus Christ. Our highest dignity is to be made like the Son of God in all things – and this includes how he thought and what he thought. The most blighting form that Marcionism can take is to pick and choose at the very heart of divine revelation: the person, work, life, teaching, example and directives of Jesus. We can put the same truth another way: the divine act of raising Jesus from the dead was an unconditional validation of everything he was in his incarnate life on earth. In a memorable passage, E. J. Bicknell says that the resurrection ‘was God’s public attestation of the claims of the crucified . . . the Amen of the Father to the “It is finished” of the Son’.⁵ But to what did the Father say ‘Amen’? Certainly to the saving work: that by his death on the cross Jesus had indeed saved eternally all those whom the Father had sent him to save. But the Old Testament insists that only the perfect can act as a substitute for the imperfect (e.g. Ex. 12:5; Is. 53:9): so the divine scrutiny prior to the great ‘Amen’ must also cover the moral character and life of the Lamb of God. Also, Jesus spoke of his sign-acts in the course of his ministry as works that the Father had given him to do, and it was his claim that he had finished this work (Jn. 5:36; 17:4): did he perform all the Father’s works and leave nothing undone or imperfectly done? And finally, was Jesus true to his vocation as the Word of the Father so that he declared all the truth the Father sent him to declare, left nothing half-said and taught nothing that had any admixture of untruth?

It is in this sense that the resurrection is an unconditional divine validation of the teaching as much as of the saving efficacy of Christ.

This great Lord Jesus came from outside and voluntarily and deliberately attached himself to the Old Testament, affirmed it to be the word of God and set himself, at cost, to fulfil it (e.g. Mt. 26:51–54).⁶ This fact of facts cuts the ground from under any suspicion that the doctrine of biblical authority rests on a circular argument such as, ‘I believe the Bible to be authoritative because the Bible says it is authoritative.’ Not so! It was Jesus who came ‘from outside’ as the incarnate Son of God, Jesus who was raised from the dead as the Son of God with power, who chose to validate the Old Testament in retrospect and the New Testament in prospect, and who is himself the grand theme of the ‘story-line’ of both Testaments, the focal-point giving coherence to the total ‘picture’ in all its complexities.

There is an old jingle which is certainly simple and verges on the simplistic, but our forebears were fundamentally right when they taught that: the Old Testament is Jesus predicted; the Gospels are Jesus revealed; Acts is Jesus preached; the Epistles, Jesus explained; and the Revelation, Jesus expected. He is the climax as well as the substance and centre of the whole. In him all God’s promises are yea and amen (2 Cor. 1:20).

CHAPTER TWO

Christ as fulfilment: The themes of King and kingdom

We begin our studies on the Old Testament background to our understanding of Christ by considering the themes of ‘king’ and ‘kingdom’ starting, perhaps surprisingly, with the book of Judges.

WHY WAS THE BOOK OF JUDGES WRITTEN?

It is not intended to be frivolous to give the obvious if silly answer that Judges was written to fill a gap that would otherwise exist between Joshua and Samuel. Certainly, the continuation of the history of the people of God is one of the functions of the book. Those who used to see Judges as exemplifying the same ‘documentary’ structure as the Pentateuch and Joshua,¹ along with those who now advocate the notion of a ‘deuteronomistic history’,² are essentially subscribing to a ‘gap’ theory of the composition of Judges, for neither view can offer an explanation why it ever came to be seen as an individual book with an individual title: it simply fills in years that would otherwise be left blank in a sweeping historical review.

But another group of writers have, more recently, advanced a more perceptive understanding of Judges.³ Barry Webb can speak for them all when he describes his work as ‘an exploration of the meaning of the book of Judges considered as a whole, and as distinct from what precedes and follows it in the canon’.⁴ He was responding to a call issued in 1967 by J. P. U. Lilley for ‘a fresh appraisal of Judges as a literary work starting from the assumptions of authorship rather than redaction’.⁵

When Judges is approached along this avenue, its coherence as a work of literary art and also its central thrust – the purpose of the author in writing, what he would have said in an ‘Author’s Preface’ had this convention existed – are alike plain. Without entering into minutiae, the historical content of Judges looks like this:

Great leaders	Great failures
(3:7–16:31)	(3:11, 30; 5:31; 8:28 – 9:57; 10 (passim); 12:7; 16:31)
Great problems	The great solution
(17:1 – 21:25)	(17:6; 18:1; 19:1; 21:25)

There were two sides to the history of the people of God. What captured the headlines (Jdg. 3:7 – 16:31) were the scintillating deeds of a great line of charismatic men and one woman. These were the Judges, the divinely raised up Saviour-Rulers, whose activity in deliverance was the outreaching of divine mercy to an undeserving and recalcitrant people. Nevertheless, the Lord’s agents though they were, they were essentially episodic and ultimately failures. They came, they delivered, they went, they achieved no permanent blessing or security; they interrupted but did not change the deadly sequence of apostasy and captivity. The coda to the story of the first judge, Othniel, can be allowed to speak for them all: ‘the land was at rest for forty years’ (3:11, lit.). That is to say, limited relief was achieved but with no permanent solution.

AT GROUND LEVEL

Meanwhile, among ordinary people, out of the limelight of great deeds, things were very far different. One would need to be remarkably lacking in literary appreciation if one failed to feel the enveloping darkness and to catch the smell of corruption as soon as one enters the final section of the book. Religiously (17:1–13), politically (18:1–31), morally (19:1–30) and socially (20:1 – 21:25) Israel is in disarray – and for all the mighty deeds of derring-do at the top, this is what life was like at the bottom, a situation which the judges did not manage to touch or influence at all. Gideon, the most lovable of the judges, left a disastrous legacy of religious falsehood and social disruption; Samson, the great buffoon, created havoc wherever he turned and the book of Judges comes to a climax in a howl of despair. The noble Othniel, the impressive Deborah, the attractive Gideon, the blunt, honest and confused Jephthah – and the host of semi-unknowns – all alike left things as they found them. And if such people, God-given and God-endowed, failed, what was there to be done for ordinary folk in a collapsing society?

THE GREAT SOLUTION

Point by point, as the book traces the religious, political, moral and social collapse of Israel, it announces its remedy, and does so in a balanced form, evidence of the author’s sense of the wholeness and perfection of the solution he offers:

17:6	In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.

18:1	In those days Israel had no king.
19:1	In those days Israel had no king.

21:25

In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.

THE MONARCHIC IDEAL

Thus Judges trumpets its monarchic ideal and prepares for the request for a king in 1 Samuel 8. It is as if it were saying to us: ‘Why be surprised that things have come to such a pass – we have no king! It stands to reason that unless we have a king no aspect of national life is as it should be.’⁶

1 Samuel offers a complex but coherent account of how monarchy was actually instituted in Israel. Our unders...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chief abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The master theme of the Bible
• 2. Christ as fulfilment: The themes of King and kingdom
• 3. Christ as climax: The themes of covenant, grace and law
• 4. Christ as revelation (1): The theme of the image of God
• 5. Christ as revelation (2): The theme of the word of God
• 6. Christ our life (1): The theme of sin
• 7. Christ our life (2): The theme of death
• 8. Christ our Hope: The themes of creation and consummation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of authors
• Index of Scripture references
• Index of selected topics