Every time someone sends me quotes from the Old Testament I am reminded of the fact that the Temple Priests, the Scribes and Pharisees and the lawyers (the only profession He ever specifically denounced) knew those scriptures upside down. They knew them in Greek. They knew them in Hebrew. They could recite them backwards.
The greatest theologian outside of Heaven Itself is Satan.
Jesus went out among the people and said those total experts on the Old Testament did not UNDERSTAND what they knew by heart.
I am told the Jews are saved. What Jesus Himself said was:
“I am the way, the truth and the life. No man goes to the Father but by me.”
Did He say this to Buddhists because they did not know the Old Testament?
No. He said it to Jews.
In fact the first people to accept Christ, according to Matthew, did not know anything about the Old Testment. They were the Magi, which means that they were clergymen of Zoroastrianism.
And Jesus said over and over and over and over that He, not the Old Testament, was the Way.
But all the churches tell me that Jesus is a kind of asterisk at the end of the Old Testament.
The Reconstruction Church says, “The Old Testament is seventy percent of the Bible.” And then they call themselves Christians, though Christ’s words are nothing more than the words of the lowliest prophet, or the words of the snake in Eden, in their arithmetic.
They say that Jesus spoke in Old Testament terms.
No joke? Why on earth would Jesus speak in Old Testament terms when He was in Israel?
Maybe, just maybe, because He was in Israel?
I can’t understand why there is not a church that requires that you learn Aramaic if you are to be saved.
Jesus spoke Aramaic.
Now why on earth did he speak Aramaic instead of Hindi or Persian?
I would say that Jesus spoke Aramaic for the same reason He spoke in Old Testament terms. Nobody around Him would understand Him had he spoken Persian or Coptic.
But if you can only be a Christian if you speak in terms of the Old Testament, why can you be a Christian without speaking Aramaic? Why isn’t Aramaic essential to salvation?
Jehovists would reply that the idea that one has to speak Aramaic for salvation is silly. He has the right to say that to me.
On one condition:
That condition is that every time you spout the Old Testament at me, I have the right to say that the idea that one has to speak Old Testament for salvation is silly.
#1 by Don on 11/22/2004 - 5:01 pm
Whenever I think about Pharaoh’s daughter and Moses, I feel sad. Can’t these do-gooders ever leave well enough alone!
#2 by Don on 11/22/2004 - 6:44 pm
I view the Old Testament as the first edition of The Protocols.
#3 by Richard L. Hardison on 11/22/2004 - 9:58 pm
I’m not sure where you are coming from Bob. The churches I’ve been in could be justly accused of ignoring the Old Testament, actually reversing your accusation, viewing the OT as an asterisk before the NT.
Calvinists tend to have trouble with biblical christian life – one look at Calvin’s Geneva, which was a pretty grim place, is enough to turn anyone’s stomach. Calvin was an unchrstian tyrant, not to put too fine a point on it.
The OT/NT counterpoint is soemthing most theologians I know have trouble with. Christ said he came to fulfill, not destroy the law, and that one statement has caused a number of people to tie themselves in knots. Calvinists think there is only “THE LAW” which is indivisible and as such none of it is force as it was all nailed to the cross. When you ask them if adultery is OK in these NT times, none of them have an answer that is consistent with Calvinism.
In the final analysis, the law really is made of three components, 1. Moral which is still in force, 2. ceremonial law, which is impossible without the temple and functioning priesthood, 3. the civil law, much of which was cultic in that it applied only to the nation of Israel in terms of statehood. Only the moral law is of any significance now and it is interspersed, in scripture, among the other two. IN my opinion evangelical churches pay too little attention to the OT and Calvinists pay too much attention to certain OT characteristics of God. There has to be a balance point, but I’m not sure anyone has reached it simply becase I have too small a sample to judge from. The strict Calvinists haven’t found that point, and neither have the milder Arminian versions, i.e. the Southern Baptists.
I can say this, you don’t have to be able to speak/read Aramaic to be saved. You don’t have to be able speak/read Koine Greek to be saved either (although from what I’ve seen James White seems to think so). You don’t have to worship the “Holy Land” or think dispensationalism is correct, speak in tongues, or any other sort of things people think you have to do. All it takes is faith in Christ and his finished work on the cross. The rest is simply an outworking of that faith.
#4 by Bob Whitaker on 11/22/2004 - 10:12 pm
Richard, you can’t tell where BOB is coming from?
Wow!
Jesus said “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” If He had not said that, He would have been crucified earlier.
What if He had said, right there in Israel, “I come to remake The Law in my own image.”
What if He had said, “Nothing belongs to Caesar. All belongs to God.”
What if He had spoken Hindi instead of Aramaic?
Jesus said he did not come to destroy the Law. The Jehovists disagreed. So He was crucified.
So many who call themselves Christians agree with those who crucified Him. They say He came just to fulfill the Law of Moses.
Like those crucified Him, they just ignore all the things He said that kicked The Law in the teeth. I am MYSTIFIED as to why no one seems to understand this.
#5 by H.S. on 11/22/2004 - 10:42 pm
“…they just ignore all the things He said that kicked The Law in the teeth.” –Bob Whitaker
He never said anything that kicked His Law in the teeth. He said much that condemned and judged and sentenced all those in any position of authority (power) over others for misstating, misusing, misapplying, misrepresenting, misappropriating, ad nauseum, what He had righteously put in place over an unregenerate creation. The Law is today what it always has been. The demarcation of what is and what is not acceptable – absolutes. Because it is impossible to live by it, nor do we even care to know or live by it, and since we will be judged by it in the end, our only hope is Jesus who did. The bridge of the cross. His Spirit, cojoined with our spirits through faith which only comes by His Word, bridges that gap and gives us power to work out that faith = GRACE. Those humble before the real Jesus will be the only ones to bridge the gap of judgement. Babies in the faith don’t know all that O.T. and N.T. doctrinal-theological stuff. Babies choke on meat. Meat is for the mature. But those babies in the faith are saved – no matter how young or undeveloped they are. “I am the way, the truth and the LIFE. No man comes to the Father but by me.” –God the Son
#6 by Jimbo on 11/23/2004 - 1:54 am
Bob,
When you get on religion, you start acting like a liberal in that you set up a strawman and then knock him down. That is easy to do, but beneath someone of your intelligence.
The points you try to make about these things don’t require a dismissal of the OT. Christ condemned the hypocrisy of the religious leaders of his day whose job who made the laws of God “of none effect” by their doubletalk and blind “traditions”. He didn’t just quote the OT because that was what was around him, but showed how he fulfilled the prophecies contained in it. The pharisees knew who he was, which was why they killed him.
Most of our preachers today have twisted the OT and NT to fit in with the zeitgeist of equality and other leftist poison, many probably unaware of how far off they have gotten. Zionism and Bush worship are cases in point.
Race-mixing is clearly condemned in the OT, in no uncertain terms, yet most of the churches preach the opposite. Dueteronomy Ch. 28 outlines the judgement to befall those who turn from God’s laws, and describes our situation in America to a T.
The NT and OT are seminal to our entire civilization, and deeply shaped the Southern heart and mind.
As CS Lewis once wrote about people who dismissed the Bible as silly nonsense, people who don’t understand books written for adults shouldn’t talk about them in public.
Your readers expect a higher level from you, Bob, consistent with many of your other insights.
#7 by Horace on 11/23/2004 - 8:36 am
I enjoyed the story of the Egyptian Army chasing the children of Israel until the part where they escaped.
#8 by Horace on 11/23/2004 - 8:39 am
The Old Testament Egyptians had Joseph. We have Wolfowitz and Perle. Don’t things ever change?
#9 by Horace on 11/23/2004 - 8:46 am
Too bad Moses didn’t climb Mount Everest to get the Ten Commandments. Then they could have found his frozen remains 4000 years later.
#10 by Don on 11/23/2004 - 9:20 am
I have a brother who is a theologian. He is the black sheep of the family.
#11 by Horace on 11/23/2004 - 9:22 am
Wouldn’t a sample of Jesus’ DNA be fascinating. One part human, one part Holy Ghost.
#12 by Horace on 11/23/2004 - 9:25 am
I heard there was a Virgin Birth in Pulaski, Tennessee. Turned out the Holy Ghost was a Klansman in uniform.