by Keith Bassham
This past summer, I was asked by my pastor to deliver a series of messages from the Book of Jeremiah for Wednesday evenings, and I am adapting some of that material for Tribune readers. Studying Jeremiah is especially appropriate these days, and parts of the text look as though they could have been generated yesterday afternoon. Read the following section from Jeremiah 5:
1 Run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, and see now, and know, and seek in the broad places thereof, if ye can find a man, if there be any that executeth judgment, that seeketh the truth; and I will pardon it.
2 And though they say, The Lord liveth; surely they swear falsely.
3 O Lord, are not thine eyes upon the truth? thou hast stricken them, but they have not grieved; thou hast consumed them, but they have refused to receive correction: they have made their faces harder than a rock; they have refused to return.
4 Therefore I said, Surely these are poor; they are foolish: for they know not the way of the Lord, nor the judgment of their God.
5 I will get me unto the great men, and will speak unto them; for they have known the way of the Lord, and the judgment of their God: but these have altogether broken the yoke, and burst the bonds.
6 Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them, a leopard shall watch over their cities: every one that goeth out thence shall be torn in pieces: because their transgressions are many, and their backslidings are increased.
7 How shall I pardon thee for this? thy children have forsaken me, and sworn by them that are no gods: when I had fed them to the full, they then committed adultery, and assembled themselves by troops in the harlots’ houses.
8 They were as fed horses in the morning: every one neighed after his neighbour’s wife.
9 Shall I not visit for these things? saith the Lord: and shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?
The sense of danger and doom is palpable. God appears almost puzzled (not that He is, of course) as He looks upon a world and nation of His own creation acting without sense and without moral compass, said creation having stubbornly rejected those things: “Surely these are poor; they are foolish: for they know not the way of the Lord, nor the judgment of their God.” Can one find a better description of our times?
Tragically, I could have opened my Bible almost anywhere in the book of Jeremiah and chosen any section at random, and the result would have been very nearly the same. Jeremiah is not known as a quick-pick-me-up section of scripture, and that is part of the challenge of the book. There are a few places where the heart soars and gains inspiration, but mostly the passages run like the one quoted and can be summarized: God’s judgment is coming — nothing will stop it, and you had better make things right while you can.
Well, now that I have introduced that little ray of sunshine, let’s talk about how I will proceed with the study.
First, rather than just jump into Jeremiah, I want to take some time to talk about the Old Testament in general. The reasons will become clear as we move on.
Before tackling a document like Jeremiah’s prophecies, we need to ask questions about how we should read and approach the Old Testament in which it appears, and the need for asking those questions. And then we will use the answers to those questions to create a map of some sort (not a geographic one, but rather a mind map); something to help us organize our thinking about the issues related to Jeremiah, his people, his times, and us. We will see how God shaped the map, and how Israel fits on the map, and how Jeremiah fits on the map, and finally how we fit on that same map. Using the map we focus our gaze on Jeremiah, the man, and how he related to God — Jeremiah reveals more about that sort of thing than perhaps any of the prophets. Only after that can we clearly see how God wants us to respond to what His prophet was saying to His people about 600 years before the birth of Jesus, and what those words say to us today.
So, what about the Old Testament? If we were to ask people who have no traditional Jewish or Christian backgrounds, “Why should someone study the Old Testament?” their answers would probably go in two basic directions. The more positive responses might be something like, “The Old Testament is an old book, but we should study it because there are still some things that are good for us today.” And the more negative responses would be something like, “Actually, the Old Testament is so old and irrelevant that it isn’t worth reading at all.” That sort of answer is what I would expect from people who have little or no interest in the teachings of the Bible.
However, I think that if church people were really honest, their answers would not be all that different. It’s not that we don’t value the Old Testament. As long as we stay with the familiar stories and characters, most people don’t have a big problem with the text. The creation story is familiar. And same for the flood. And the Tower of Babel. And then you have the main characters who show up often in our pulpits: Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, and maybe a prophet or two like Isaiah or Jeremiah, Elijah, and Daniel.
Such characters and stories give us the wherewithal to create and illustrate moral lessons such as “Thou shalt not kill or bear false witness.” David’s fight with Goliath teaches us about faith and courage. Daniel in the lion’s den teaches us much the same lesson. And I’m not forgetting the Psalms, but really we are generally familiar with only a fraction of them — the ones we hear read at funerals mostly. The sad truth is if you took all those stories and characters and sections that we are familiar with, you might be able to fill the pages of one of the longer books of the Old Testament, and that would leave a huge section of God’s inspired Word still largely unknown. Why is that?
Well, for one thing, there is a huge distance between us and the world of the Old Testament. Granted, it’s a long way from here to the ancient New Testament world of Greece and Rome too, but we have much in common with those societies. They are a primary source of our Western world politics and philosophy. What do we know of Babylonians and Assyrians, or what commonalities do we share with Egyptians and Philistines, with Hittites and Hivites and Edomites and the hundreds of tribes and families that make up the Old Testament story, or with Israel, the center of the Old Testament story for that matter?
And here is the problem with contenting ourselves with knowing a few familiar things, and reading a few familiar stories, and thinking about a few familiar characters. The thing we need to understand is this: God was making Himself known, and He did it through the languages and literatures and cultures of the people of the Near and Middle East, and they certainly understood what He was saying. So, despite the cultural, language, and theological distance between us, we have to make that trip and get as close to them as we can if we want to have a good grasp of the whole of God’s mind, and not just a part of it.
A good place to start the journey for a Christian way to think of the Old Testament I think is to discover what Jesus thought about the document. Read Matthew 5:17-18:
“Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”
These words raise all sorts of practical questions that we cannot go into here, but a couple of things are certain. Jesus did not believe the Old Testament was irrelevant, and we can be certain he had no intent to make it irrelevant with what he did and taught. In fact, he intended that we learn and teach it if we expect to be what he calls “great in the kingdom of heaven.”
And that’s just the start. Remember how Jesus spoke with Moses and Elijah on the Mount of Transfiguration in Matthew 17? He did not think those two Old Testament characters had nothing to say to those of us in the New Testament era. Think then of all the many passages from the Old Testament quoted in the New. One of the most well-known statements, the phrase in Romans that many believe was the basis of the Reformation: “The just shall live by faith.” Paul did not coin that phrase. It did not originate in the New Testament. It is Habakkuk 2:4.
And there is more. The Gospels point out the many Old Testament prophecies Jesus fulfilled. The book of Hebrews is filled with relevant quotations from the Old Testament. And then we have this explicit statement about the value of the older testament from Paul the Apostle: Romans 15:4 — “For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.”
Further, there is the key passage that teaches us about the nature of the Bible and its origin and purpose: 2 Timothy 3:16 — “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.”
Taken together, those two passages tell us a great deal about our relationship with the Old Testament. The passage from Romans tells us that the Old Testament is essential for Christians to develop and to maintain a Christian hope — “that we might have hope.” You read the stories, and the psalms, and the promises, and even all the in-between stuff
from the prophets and the history sections, and your hope in Christ will grow, Paul is telling us. Why should we purposely ignore or limit our exposure to those tools for our Christian development?
The second passage is a clear affirmation of the relevance of the Old Testament. If you read both letters to Timothy you will see numerous references to the “Scripture” and “Scriptures.” What Scriptures could Paul be referring to if not the Old Testament texts?
And there is another passage affirming the need for a familiarity with the Old Testament: 1 Corinthians 10:11 — “Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come.”
The context informs us that Paul was referring to the story of Israel’s Exodus from Egypt, and at least three things are going on in this verse. First, he says those events were recorded, written down. Second he said they were written for us, that is at least for Paul and his fellow Christians at Corinth. And third, he said of himself and those early Christians, that for them the ends of the world are come, and by doing this he includes us in that group. And finally, he is saying that even though we are living in different times and in different places, that the stories and lessons and values passed on in the Old Testament continue to have value and application for us even in our modern world.
So, if the Old Testament is not irrelevant, and if we see the New Testament filled with references to the Old Testament, and if we believe with Jesus and Paul that we should learn and practice the things we learn there to help us in our walk with God, and if we can overcome the distance and learn its content, then we need to read and understand it.
So how do we do that generally, and how do we do that in more specific ways, such as when we are assigned to study an Old Testament prophet? How do we get into Jeremiah’s world and into the world of the people he spoke to, and then make the proper application of those words he spoke?
First, proper application of the Old Testament to today involves leaving our own world behind, and unpacking our bags a little. You can’t really do this perfectly, I know, but you have to understand that what was written and said to people who lived thousands of years ago was tailored for them, and not us. The Bible is God’s Word of course, but you have to come to terms with the notion that, in the Old Testament especially, we are not hearing God and his inspired writers speaking directly to us; we are overhearing them, and looking at those words over the shoulders of those who first read and heard them. The church is not identical to Israel, let alone our own country. The words, “If my people …” (2 Chronicles 7:14), and the instructions following were intended for a specific people in a specific situation. While a general application can be made to establish a need for prayer and dependence upon God, I would hesitate to take it much beyond that.
This works both directions, by the way. The Old Testament believers knew very little if anything about Jesus Christ. Even if they understood all the prophecies, there was still a lot of information they could not have put together the same way we can. We have a much better understanding of so many things concerning New Testament truths than most anyone in the Old Testament.
On the other hand, there are some connections that exist, and those connections will help us. After all, Paul did say that those things written in the Old Testament were written for us, that is, they were given with us in mind even if we aren’t about to cross Red Seas or get the tablets of the Law from Mount Sinai.
One of the connections is God Himself. We serve the same God as they did in the Old Testament. That means we serve Jeremiah’s God, and what he learns and teaches about God instructs us. And Jeremiah learns about God’s plans, and he comes to know those plans are sure and steady. That means the Old Testament and New Testament are two phases of one unified divine design. One does not replace the other, and one does not contradict the other. They work together to accomplish God’s purpose.
Another connection is that both Jeremiah and his people lived on the same planet you and I occupy, and we therefore share some history. These are not fairy stories. The events did not happen in another universe. We know when and where Jeremiah lived, and the people he knew.
1 Kings 6:1 – And it came to pass in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month Zif, which is the second month, that he began to build the house of the Lord.
This is such an important passage for learning about Israel’s history. We know from secular sources the dates of Solomon’s reign — you can look it up in an encyclopedia — and by using this passage you can go back to determine the date that Moses led the nation of Israel out of Egypt — and you can go forward to see when the nation of Israel split after Solomon. And then you can calculate when the kings of the northern kingdom lived and died, and the same with the southern kingdom, which is where Jeremiah comes in. And we can learn from that the names and dates associated with the rise and fall of dynasties and pinpoint with some accuracy when Jeremiah lived, and who was in charge, and who the enemies of the people of God were. These things happened in real time and real space right here on our planet with a real people named Israel and Judah.
And we know that God created the ancient nation of Israel to accomplish certain things, including taking care of the sin problem of the world. When they fail, God judged them and punished them by sending them into exile, and that’s a big part of the story behind Jeremiah. However, in that story, He also reveals a plan to restore them, and that gives the background for the message that Jesus proclaimed, that he would set the captives free, and their restoration was a kind of coming back from the dead, and that is the background for understanding the resurrection.
Another connection we have with the Old Testament, aside from the same God and the same world, is that we are the same kind of people. We, like the people of Jeremiah’s time, are human beings made in the image of God, but we are fallen into sin, and because of that sin we are not in a relationship with God. What God wants to teach us through Jeremiah and the other prophets, is that though we sin, God wants us to return to Him. Much of the time Jeremiah is telling people that God wants them to repent and to return to Him.
A second principle we observe as we try to apply the Old Testament is to realize both testaments are necessary to make up the entire story of God at work in the world. They work with one another.
Let me show you how that works, and why it is important. Romans 1:1-6:
Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God, 2 (which he had promised afore by his prophets in the holy scriptures,) 3 concerning his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh; 4 and declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead: 5 by whom we have received grace and apostleship, for obedience to the faith among all nations, for his name: 6 among whom are ye also the called of Jesus Christ.
What we learn from this is that the coming, the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ was a continuation of a story that began in the Old Testament. The same truth is given in Hebrews 1:1-2: “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, 2 hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds.”
Even in 1 Corinthians 15:1 and following, which is where many Bible students and preachers go to get a capsule definition of the gospel, there the formula goes like this: Jesus died according to the Scriptures, was buried, and rose the third day according to the Scriptures. And as we pointed out earlier, when Paul refers to the Scriptures in his epistles, he must be referring to the Old Testament Scriptures since the New Testament was still in process at the time.
Now, this tells me that if I want to truly understand the New Testament and its teachings, I am going to need some understanding of the Old Testament part of the story because that’s where the story begins. This second principle, both testaments tell one story, is perhaps the most important idea to grasp as a Bible student prepares to study and to understand the Old Testament.
Jesus himself says as much in Luke 24, where we see and hear a resurrected Jesus declare to believers, downhearted at the events of the crucifixion, these great truths: “Then he said unto them, O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken: ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory? And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.”
It really is one story. That one story, according to the texts quoted above, is the story of a God who is faithful to His promise to provide a Deliverer who would save sinful humans and eventually rule the universe. This thread runs from Genesis to Revelation, and a key to understanding the Old Testament is to pick out this thread as it winds its way through the texts.