The Breakthrough That Helped Me Understand the Old Testament
Old Testament Interpretation
I have often had an uneasy relationship with the Old Testament. I have loved it for its wild poetry and intricate narrative. I have striven to see it as it came to Israel and was received in unfolding splendor. And so, throughout much of my Christian life thus far, while I have been able to see the Old Testament as God’s word to Israel and as a densely woven set of storylines and movements that find resolution in the New, I have had difficulty moving back from the New Testament to the Old.
When I saw the New Testament’s use of Old Testament passages, I became confused. I held the apostles’ interpretations at arm’s length because it seemed that they were seeing what was not there. I knew the apostles could not be wrong in their inspired writing, so for years I attributed this seemingly creative strand of interpretation to their role as prophets. Matthew was right to say that Jesus’s flight to Egypt and return as a child fulfilled the words of Hosea (Matt. 2:15, Hos. 11:1), but there’s no way we could have known that. God let them see what we otherwise could not. We should not go one letter beyond what they said and saw anew. How could we?
I had thought my problem was strictly with the New Testament and its ways of reading. In truth, I did not yet understand the Old Testament for what it really was. I had not yet learned to read the books of the old covenant as Christian Scripture.
As I studied the book of Hebrews for my doctorate, I was confronted again and again with the author’s way of interpreting the Old Testament Scriptures. Perhaps more than any other book in the New Testament, Hebrews represents a long and careful engagement with the words of the Old Testament. Every claim about Jesus, every argument about the responsibilities of the audience, and every statement about the new reality that has come after Jesus’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension is grounded in what God said in the Old Testament. Nothing is presented as an innovation, but rather the author repeatedly claims to be interpreting God’s word.
Songs of the Son
Daniel Stevens
Songs of the Son examines 9 psalms highlighted in Hebrews to reveal the preincarnate glory of Christ in the Old Testament.
He may see things that others had not seen before, but he is not reading them into the passages. Further, he expects his audience (and God expects us) to agree not just with his conclusions, but with his interpretations. That means in Psalm 2, we have the Father speaking to the Son (Heb. 1:5). In Psalm 45 and Psalm 102, we have what God says about the Son (Heb. 1:8-12). In Psalm 22, we have Jesus’s own words (Heb. 2:12). This is not a claim to prophetic new information, but rather, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the author of the Hebrews is reading the Old Testament and seeing what is really there. And the more we pay attention to how and what he does, the more we see that he is paying close and careful attention to the actual words of the passage. He is interpreting and showing us how to interpret.
That is, he reveals to us both how to read the Old Testament and what the Old Testament really is: God’s word, written for us. The one God who spoke to the fathers through the prophets has spoken to us in his Son (Heb. 1:1-2). But we see that speech to us in the very words of Scripture, both Old and New.
And once I saw this in Hebrews, I saw it everywhere.
God’s Word for Us
Paul tells us that the events of the Exodus took place “as examples for us” (1 Cor. 10:6), and that they “were written down” by Moses, so many years ago, “for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages had come” (1 Cor. 10:11).
Did you catch that? Why did God have Moses write the Pentateuch? One answer, and one which is most relevant for us, is that Moses wrote the Pentateuch to instruct Christians, we who live at the end of the ages between the first and second comings of Christ. This, Paul says, is what these things were written down for.
God spoke in the Old Testament, yes, and in that historical speech, God still speaks.
Similarly, in a well-known passage, on the road to Emmaus, Jesus speaks to the two disciples on the road and “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). Now, while this does not say that every verse of every passage is about Jesus, it does say that “in all the Scriptures”, that is, in every book, there are things about Jesus for us to find. These things are already there, and if we interpret as the resurrected Jesus taught his disciples to interpret, we will see them there.
In his earthly ministry, Jesus also taught and assumed that a right reading of the Old Testament would lead one not only to a vague understanding that Jesus would come but rather to an accurate knowledge of him. When confronting some Jewish leaders, he boldly told them, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness about me” (John 5:39). Or again, when speaking of his nearing betrayal, death, and resurrection, he asked in Jerusalem, “Have you not read this Scripture: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?” (Mark 12:10–11).
Notice again the precise wording: “Have you not read this Scripture?” He assumes that they should know about him, about his rejection by men but approval by God, from having read Psalm 118.
It is not just that the Old Testament historically led to the New Testament as a kind of prelude, but rather that the one God who speaks in both Testaments intended them to belong forever to the church as a single body of Scripture. That is, while it is important—necessary even—to read the Old Testament as that which went before the coming of Christ and his gospel in all its historical rootedness as God interacted with Israel, it is just as necessary to read it alongside the New Testament as God’s present word to the church. God spoke in the Old Testament, yes, and in that historical speech, God still speaks.
That is fundamentally what the New Testament authors knew; and that is the key to seeing, as they did, the many-splendored revelation of God in Christ that reverberates through every page of Scripture, Old and New.
The whole Bible is the word of God for us. It all speaks of Christ. It all speaks to us because in it God has spoken to us.
Daniel Stevens is the author of Songs of the Son: Reading the Psalms with the Author of Hebrews.
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