Should Christians even bother with the Old Testament anymore?

I was having a conversation with someone recently and an article germane to the discussion was mentioned. At one point the author declared that a literal interpretation (of the passage under discussion) says , “Ignore the Gospel. Just rip the whole New Testament right out of your Bible.” And this would put us back under the Law. This nearly derailed the discussion!

I think many Christians are confused about the role of the Old Testament. I have a friend who asked his pastor why he didn’t preach from the Old Testament. The pastor replied, “We are a New Testament church. So I preach from the New Testament.”

We know that the Old Testament pointed to Jesus and that He fulfilled the Old Testament. Therefore, now that Jesus has come and instituted the New Testament, and we are under grace and not law, is the Old Testament of any further use for a Christian? Is there any point in even reading the Old Testament? Is there any benefit for a believer in Jesus in the Old Testament? After all, we have the New Testament, doesn’t it tell us all we need to know to believe in and live for Jesus?

Is there any value in the Old Testament? Yes. Yes! YES! Consider 2 Timothy 3:15-17
15 And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.  
16 All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:  
17 That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.

This was written about the Old Testament! There was no New Testament when this was written! The Old Testament was the Scriptures for Jesus. And the Apostles. And the earliest believers.

Is there any value in the Old Testament? Any benefit to be had in reading it? Uh, Yes!

† God is revealed in the Old Testament. It’s wonderful how fully He is revealed! We see His love, His grace, His power, His righteousness, His holiness. Maybe that is part of the our problem with the Old Testament – we’ve been spoon fed a one-sided view of God for so long that we no longer think of God as righteous and holy, as having wrath or even the right to judge. And the Old Testament reveals the Lord as a God who loves and redeems, who chastises and corrects, who has wrath and judges. We need this:
I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above it stood the seraphim: each one had six wings; with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.

† Jesus is in the Old Testament. Yes, in prophecy and in type. But also in person. You encounter the Son, the Word, all throughout the Old Testament. As in Isaiah 6 above. And Joshua 5:13-14:
And it came to pass, when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted up his eyes and looked, and, behold, there stood a man over against him with his sword drawn in his hand: and Joshua went unto him, and said unto him, Art thou for us, or for our adversaries?  
And he said, Nay; but as captain of the host of the LORD am I now come. And Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and did worship, and said unto him, What saith my lord unto his servant?

And so on all over the Old Testament. All through the Old Testament we meet Jesus!

† The Old Testament is full of stories of men and women walking with God. And through these we learn how to walk with God. Some may stumble over this, “But they were under law and we are under grace, how can we learn from those under law how to live under grace?”  The basics of walking with God are the same. The details are different, but not the fundamentals. Do you think that God does not expect and reward complete obedience under the New Testament? Or, was there no faith in the Old Testament? Did the saints then not walk by faith? Have you not noticed that whenever Jesus and the Apostles illustrated a gospel truth, they did so by mentioning someone from the Old Testament? Just consider Hebrews 11. As he exhorts us to live by faith, he presents examples of how this is done - all these people who lived and died by faith, in the Old Testament. Then he applies it, Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith. The great cloud of witnesses are all these people in chapter 11, who lived and obeyed and died by faith. They are witnesses that it can be done, this is their testimony.

Repentance, faith, salvation, backsliding, restoration, forgiveness, prayer, healing, obedience, sin. Stories of real people. We read about them and often hear from them. People often stumble over the Old Testament because the sins are so real. “How can this be a holy book when the people in it are such sinners?” Well, that’s the whole point! Abraham and Moses and David are not the heroes of the Bible. It's not about them. It's about God who rescues such sinners!

† You will never fully understand the New Testament until you know the Old. The New is an edifice built on the foundation of the Old. Nearly every truth of the New is presented in some relationship to the Old. “The New is in the Old concealed, the Old is in the New revealed.” The Old Testament is rich in itself, but, when you are armed with the New, what depths you find! what riches of graces and wisdom you mine!


I love the Old Testament. The power, passion, poetry; God, grace, gospel; prophecy, precepts, proverbs; Judah, Jeremiah, Jesus. Yes, Jesus. The Old Testament is a Jesus book! Yes, we should read the Old Testament. We should know it well. But now the question is, How should we interpret what we read?