Before the New Testament books were written, believers only had the Torah (the Old Testament) for instruction.

How can an individual professing faith, claiming to be a Christian, a true Christ follower, a believer, a pastor, a preacher, an elder, or anyone professing to be a faithful follower of God ignore, neglect, or dismiss the Older Covenant, from the SAME UNCHANGING GOD — the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. God is immutable. The Old Testament as we call it is all about the Lord Jesus Christ. All about faithfulness, rebellion against God, and obedience to God. It’s about Jesus!

Want to know Jesus better? Read the Old Testament.

Want to preach Jesus? Preach the Old Testament.

I cannot understand how anyone — there is no excuse that stands, there is no argument that will hold up as to why the Old Testament cannot be taught, preached, read, meditated upon by pastors, by individuals.

What have we become? Woe to us who discard or defame the whole Word of God in any manner — and neglect, refusing to read, study, meditate upon, preach upon, know, and understand the whole Word of God is an abomination!

What are we doing? Who do we think we are!?

Read, live in, spend time DAILY, NIGHTLY in the Old Testament. There is no division in God’s Word. Man-made the division. Not God!

Aye, yih, yih folks! Come on! Are you kidding!?

How can a person call themselves faithful true believers and omit the Old Testament?

That’s akin to calling yourself healthy, fit,  and you live on donuts and vodka!

Read on…

Ken Pullen, Wednesday, October 2nd, 2024

The importance of the Old Testament

First published: 18 October 2016
Re-featured on homepage: 1 October 2024

By Ron Neller

Reprinted from Creation.com

It is common today for pastors/ministers to focus mainly on the New Testament in their preaching and ministry while hardly citing the Old Testament. Even worse are superficial slogans such as ‘This is a New Testament church’ or ‘Just preach Jesus’.

Some of this can be due to either uneasiness or embarrassment about plain teachings such as six-day creation and the global Flood. This has become much more prevalent because many theological institutions—even conservative ones—deny, spiritualize or explain away these early chapters of Genesis as allegory or reworked pagan myth.

So it’s easy for a church leader to maintain or even promote the misconception that creation is an ‘Old Testament issue’. Thus it is one to be relegated to a much lower order of importance and priority. But as will be shown, Genesis creation is an important part of the “whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27).

For one thing, this is because the Bible in no way teaches that the authority and inspiration of the Old Testament is in any way inferior to that of the New—far from it, in fact.¹ So if inerrancy does not apply to one part of the Bible, it undermines the whole. And for another, Genesis creation is foundational to the New Testament’s Gospel message itself.²

In fact, a strong emphasis in many of our messages and articles is the New Testament evidence affirming Genesis.³ And, like the Old Testament itself, a good creation message, in addition to the science, will be very much Christ-centred. In short, showing how a historical Genesis is foundational to the Gospel message, and vital to its credibility, is a big part of what CMI does.

Nonetheless, the issue our ministry is ultimately very much concerned with is the credibility and authority of the much-maligned first 11 chapters of the Old Testament. So it is important to look at the New Testament’s attitude to the Old, to see if this prevalent trend of sidelining the latter, with its subtle implication that its credibility is of lesser importance, can be justified.

God-breathed Scripture

The classic text on inspiration is Paul’s statement in 2 Timothy 3:16 that: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” Note the opening words—all Scripture. Peter seems to corroborate Paul in his understanding that all of the Bible is indeed inspired by God: “For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” (2 Peter 1:21). Both Paul and Peter agreed that all—not just some—of Scripture was breathed out by the Holy Spirit.

Indeed, both Paul and Peter were simply echoing Jesus who said:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” (Matthew 5:17–18).

Note that Jesus refers to both ‘the Law and the Prophets’ in His speech, which His hearers, Jews of the day, would have understood as referring to the whole Old Testament.⁴ And after His resurrection, He likewise showed two downcast disciples on the road to Emmaus how “beginning with Moses and with all the prophets”, the OT pointed to Him (Luke 24:27).

Also, during His temptation in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1–11), Jesus repeatedly answered Satan with “It is written” as a final, unanswerable rebuttal—in each case He was referring to the Old Testament, of course.

But even if we recognize that the Old Testament is inspired, is it all that useful any longer, when we have the picture of Jesus in the New Testament in our hands? To answer, we turn our attention back to Paul’s education of Timothy, a younger man who, like the rest of us, never physically met Christ.

In his messages to Timothy, Paul makes regular mention of reading and doctrine. He encourages public reading and those who labour in preaching and teaching. Paul advises Timothy: “Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching” (1 Timothy 4:13). At the time Paul wrote, this would mainly mean the OT, since a few NT books were yet to be written.

Evangelistic tool

Evidence that the Old Testament was a powerful evangelistic tool in these early days can also be found in Acts. E.g. Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 cited extensively from Joel and the Psalms. In chapter 8, Philip explained to a high-ranking Ethiopian official how Isaiah 53 pointed to Jesus as the prophesied Lamb who died for our sins.

In short, during the most rapid period of growth in the Christian community the main source of literature was the Old Testament, supplemented with occasional components of what was to become the New Testament. Indeed, we can see from Paul’s letters, intended for reading in the churches, that he expected the congregation to have already been taught about the OT.⁵

The teaching ministry of CMI is very much about this whole issue of Christ within the Old Testament, in particular Genesis.^6,7 A full and complete picture of Christ is like a jigsaw puzzle—the pieces are derived from every book of the Bible. Martin Luther wrote that in the Scriptures, one “will find the swaddling cloths and the manger in which Christ lies.”⁸ It is the picture of God and how His plans (first laid out in Genesis) have been fulfilled (through Christ). This is why CMI’s mission is to support the effective proclamation of the Gospel by providing credible answers that affirm the reliability of the Bible, in particular its Genesis history.