For the last several weeks I have been preaching on the Old Testament witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Our church is a fairly typical Evangelical group – which I suppose makes it increasingly atypical! Because our church has been growing fairly fast (we have about doubled in attendance in the last 7 years) we are a mixed bag of old Baptists, generic Evangelicals and brand new baby Christians. It is hard to “pin down” what we believe on a wide variety of issues and I am often surprised to discover what some of our members believe about certain Biblical doctrines. Whether as a residue of faded 20th century Dispensationalism, or under the influence of on-line Messianic teachers, there are more than a handful of folks who were labouring under the impression that there are separate prophetic tracks within the Bible, some dealing with the church and some dealing with ethnic, national Israel. Far from adhering to the Christocentric Hermeneutic of the Protestant Reformation, several good hearted folks actually had a Bible reading scheme which seemed to prioritize rebuilt temples, political progress, land rights and Jewish interpretive practices. As I tried to puzzle my way through these several and strange points of view, it occurred to me that there was one error at the root of all the others. These folks were reading the Bible in the wrong direction. They were using Old Testament prophesies as a grid for reading the New Testament. They were reading the Bible exactly wrong. In response to that, I wrote the following article on the importance of reading the Bible the right way – that is, reading the Bible backwards.
Reading The Bible Backwards
Jesus said that the Scriptures speak about him. He understood himself as the centre and cipher of all Biblical revelation. He would often say “you have heard it said, but I say to you”. In most of the cases where we have a saying like that Jesus is correcting the dominant Jewish interpretation of the Old Testament. “The scribes have told you that this text means so and so, but I tell you that it means this.” Jesus clearly expected his followers to accept his interpretation of the Old Testament as THE interpretation of the Old Testament. He extended this same interpretive authority to his Apostles and promised the help of the Holy Spirit towards that end. The New Testament is thus, in some respect, an inspired and authoritative commentary on the Old Testament towards the end of bringing final clarity to God’s great plan of redemptive centred upon Jesus Christ. With that it mind, we must never read the Old Testament as if Christ hadn’t come; we must never interpret the law or the Psalms or the prophets as though the New Testament hadn’t been written.
Greg Beale, the co-author of the very useful Commentary on the New Testament Use Of The Old Testament says, “the Old Testament authors did not exhaustively understand the meaning, implications, and possible applications of all that they wrote”.[1] Commenting on this insight, Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum write:
“It is for this reason that the New Testament’s interpretation of the Old Testament becomes definitive in helping us interpret the details of the Old Testament, since later revelation brings greater clarity and understanding. In other words, we must carefully allow the New Testament to show us how the Old Testament is brought to fulfillment in Christ. In this way, as Beale rightly acknowledges, the New Testament’s interpretation of the Old Testament may expand the Old Testament author’s meaning in the sense of seeing new implications and applications.”[2]
The movement in your Bible is from promise to fulfillment, from anticipation to realization and from shadow to clarity. This is referred to by scholars as “progressive revelation”. The mistake many Evangelicals make is that they read things in the Old Testament insisting that there can be no development in the meaning of the text. They will insist that it must mean forever what it most probably “meant” to the original author. That sounds faithful and it even sounds like a good corrective towards the excesses of the post modern crowd who complain that we can never really know what it “meant” and therefore should only ask what it means (to us now). If I had to choose between bad Evangelical hermeneutics and good post-modern hermeneutics, then sign me up for bad Evangelicalism! Thankfully, we don’t have to make that choice. We can and should always adopt proper Evangelical hermeneutics which involve allowing the meaning of a text to grow through the inspired expansions of the canonical authors. Let me provide an example in case you are struggling to understand what all the fuss is about.
Consider Amos 9:11 and following:
Amos 9:11-12 (ESV)
11 “In that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen and repair its breaches, and raise up its ruins and rebuild it as in the days of old,
12 that they may possess the remnant of Edom and all the nations who are called by my name,” declares the LORD who does this.
In the time of Amos (around 760 BC), the most common sense reading of this text would be to understand it as referring to a restoration of the Davidic monarchy after the coming judgment and exile of God’s people. Of course that never happened in a literal sense. After the exile of the southern kingdom the Davidic Kings were never again installed as rulers in Israel. This prophesy stood as an open wound in the Jewish consciousness. Consider how it is reinterpreted in Acts 15. In Acts 15 the church has met to consider the issue of Gentile inclusion in their fellowship. Must Gentiles become Jews in order to become Christians? This was a pressing question in the early church. James, the brother of the Lord, after hearing testimony from Paul and Barnabas and Peter, stood up to offer this concluding word:
Acts 15:14-21 (ESV)
14 Simeon has related how God first visited the Gentiles, to take from them a people for his name.
15 And with this the words of the prophets agree, just as it is written,
16 “‘After this I will return, and I will rebuild the tent of David that has fallen; I will rebuild its ruins, and I will restore it,
17 that the remnant of mankind may seek the Lord, and all the Gentiles who are called by my name, says the Lord, who makes these things
18 known from of old.’
19 Therefore my judgment is that we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God,
20 but should write to them to abstain from the things polluted by idols, and from sexual immorality, and from what has been strangled, and from blood.
21 For from ancient generations Moses has had in every city those who proclaim him, for he is read every Sabbath in the synagogues.”
James has taken the quotation from Amos 9 (in the Greek LXX translation) and added a few words from Isaiah 45:21, Zechariah 8:22 and Jeremiah 12:15 and has taken them collectively to mean something far greater than they originally “meant”. Whereas the earthly, political dynasty of David was originally foregrounded in Amos 9:11-12, James transposes this prophesy to a new and higher key. Now it is about Jesus and the church which is the new temple and which includes the people of God from every tribe, tongue and nation. G.K. Beale says:
“All this makes it clear that the restored temple is in fact the Christian community… The use of the citation establishes that the Gentiles do not have to become Jews in order to join the eschatological people of God and to have access to God in the temple of the messianic age”.[3]
If we were to read the prophesy of Amos 9 as though Jesus had never come and James had never spoken, we might assume that the Bible promises a Davidic King and a rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem with geo-political advance for the modern day nation of Israel. However, reading the Bible backwards we receive the much better news that Jesus HAS COME and the CHURCH IS BEING BUILT and people from every tribe, tongue and nation are being included by grace, through faith in Christ. These are the follies avoided, and the benefits gained by reading the Bible backwards.
SDG
Paul Carter
[1] G.K. Beal, “Did Jesus and His Followers Preach The Right Doctrine from the Wrong Texts?”, 1994.
[2] Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum, Kingdom Through Covenant (Wheaton: Crossway, 2012), 85-86.
[3] G.K. Beale and D.A. Carson, Commentary On The New Testament Use Of The Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 592.