The only deliberate attempt at comprehensiveness was in the use of the books of the Bible. The rest of the Bible story is essentially the story of how God did it.
THE COVENANT OF FAITH
The stories of the Fall, of Cain and Abel, of the Flood and the Tower of Babel all show some aspect of the havoc that man has wrought upon his world. Paul insists that faith, of the quality of Abraham, is the only necessary ingredient of the religious life, the first and fundamental condition for it.
THE COVENANT OF LAW
The basis of the covenant that was now established was the Law of God, to which Israel promised faithful obedience. Commandments, found in one form in Exodus 20:1-17 (also in Deut. 5:6-21), can be understood as typifying the essential requirements of the Law.
THE PROMISED LAND
Jericho, was chosen for reading simply because it is typical of the stories in this book. Undoubtedly, the capture of the city was achieved by more conventional means than the current story suggests.
THE FOUNDING OF THE KINGDOM
The establishment of the kingdom was another major turning point in the developmental history of the people of God. The story becomes tragic in the strict sense of the word, rightly hinting at the downfall of a great man due to a single fatal weakness.
DAVID—THE MESSIAH KING
The connection between David and the idea of the Messiah is much more direct than the connection between Saul and the idea of the Kingdom of God. It was David's skill as a poet, together with the apparent sincerity of his religious faith, that eventually led to the tradition that he was also the author of the book of Psalms.
SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY
To the uncritical eye, Solomon's reign was bathed in glory, as we can see from the description of the luxury of his court in 1 Kings 4:20-30; The glory of the Old Testament is not the glory of Solomon, but the glory that consists of a passion for righteousness and righteousness and concern for the poor and needy.
A HOUSE DIVIDED
Jeroboam, the hero of the rebellion, was consecrated king over the tribes of the North. One of the unchanging beliefs of biblical religion is that God. desires the unity of His people.
ELIJAH—THE TROUBLER OF ISRAEL
The problem of the unity of God's people is still present both in the political and in the church life of our modern world. Even later they believed (just as now among orthodox Jews) that he would one day return to prepare people for the coming of the Lord (Mal 4:5-6).
ELISHA AND THE GREAT REVOLT
But one also feels that it is an authentic reflection of the long and ultimately victorious struggle of Elijah and his followers with the powers of. The career of Elisha is the direct continuation of that of Elijah and the lives of the two men were so closely related that it is impossible to think of one without the other.
AMOS AND HOSEA— HERALDS OF JUDGMENT
Both talked about the sins of the nation, but approached it from different angles. The kingdom of Israel to which they had preached was destroyed by the Assyrian conqueror and disappeared forever among the nations of the earth.
ISAIAH—PROPHET OF FAITH
In this experience undoubtedly lies the germ of the great doctrine of faith in God, which was Isaiah's most important contribution to his people and to the world. One of the ultimate results of the faith Isaiah preached was the hope of the coming of a Messianic king.
JEREMIAH AND THE NEW COVENANT
The final vindication of Isaiah's faith is, of course, found in the New Testament, and Matthew 1:18-23 reminds us that the full force of the words "God is with us" only became apparent with the coming of Jesus Christ. . Paul's account of the Last Supper (1 Cor. 11:23-25—the earliest we have), Jesus speaks of the shedding of his blood as the means by which he would make the New Covenant.
EZEKIEL AND THE EXILE
33 the mood of the prophet changes and the rest of the book consists of oracles. In our last passage (Luke 3:1-6), the evangelist uses some of the prophet's most famous words as a.
AFTER THE RETURN— NEW TROUBLES AND NEW HOPES
One result of the narrowing and impoverishment of Jewish life was an increased devotion to the traditional written law. For the most part, the history of the last five centuries before the Christian era is a sad and uninspiring one.
THE AGE OF THE MACCABEES
To understand the teaching of our Lord, one must first understand the central meaning of the idea of the Kingdom. The final establishment of the Kingdom could be centuries in the future, but the foundations had been laid and the energies required for its completion were already at work.
JESUS—HIMSELF THE KING
In this series we see that he was not only the herald of the coming kingdom, but was to be the king himself. In the beginning, Jesus did not preach his kingship, but only the fact of the Kingdom.
THE CRUCIFIED MESSIAH
The passage (which actually begins in 52:13) is one of the poems of Second Isaiah, composed in Babylon for the assembly of the exiles. As Paul tells us, the earliest preachers of the gospel did not find many receptive to the message of the cross (1 Cor. 1:18-24).
THE RISEN LORD
Part of its special appeal is that it is a parable of the experience of the Church in later centuries. The last selection, Romans 6:4-11, reminds us that the resurrection should become a part of every Christian's life.
THE BIRTH OF THE NEW ISRAEL
The prophets told of many signs that would accompany the beginning of the Kingdom of God. But there is one more feature of the Church that should also be noted—that of a.
ST. PAUL—THE MISSIONARY
The rest of the Acts of the Apostles is taken up with his account. His own summary of the hardships of those days, in 2 Corinthians 11:24-33, is the best testimony to the extent of his achievement and the price he was willing to pay.
ST. PAUL—THE PASTOR
What is important is the fact that his great battle for the universality of the Gospel was won and the work of preaching to the nations would be continued in his spirit by an innumerable army after him. A passage from Galatians is a good example of the warnings he sometimes felt compelled to give.
THE END OF THE STORY
It was this vision that sustained them through the difficulties of life in the present order of the world. Those who will be counted worthy to share in the glory of the Kingdom are those who have willingly given themselves to serve them.
The Design of the Scriptures - A First Reader in Biblical Theology by Robert
Dentan
Doctrine
GOD THE CREATOR
The speaker in this passage is "Wisdom," a personification of the concept of order and purpose. Our understanding of how the world was created has changed greatly since the days of the ancient Hebrews, but our doctrine of creation is identical to theirs.
GOD THE ALL-POWERFUL
Many stirring passages of the Old Testament bear witness to the continued centrality of this sense of the power of the Coda. In this passage the sense of God's power is expressed in terms taken from two of the most astonishing phenomena of the physical world—a storm (v. i6) and a volcanic eruption (i8).
GOD THE ALL-KNOWING
This was the aspect of God's omniscience that seemed most important to men in the Bible. To realize this, even for a moment, is to experience something of His cleansing power.
GOD THE INESCAPABLE
In the book of Jonah, the vehicle of doctrine is a parable; in the psalm it is a prayer. What the Old Testament says about God the Father, the New Testament also says about the Son.
GOD THE RIGHTEOUS JUDGE Genesis 18:23—33; II Samuel 12:1—10;
In the Old Testament we learn of the inevitability of God; From the New Testament we must also learn of the inevitability of the cosmic Christ, whose Church it is. Here the prophet appears as a minister singing the sentiments of God to His people, representing Him as a farmer addressing his own.
THE GOD OF LOVE
In much of the Old Testament, it seems as if the emphasis is more on God's justice than on His love, because this was the lesson that the people of Israel most needed to learn. From these words we naturally go to our Lord's parable of the prodigal Son (Luke where the meaning of God's Fatherhood is displayed more clearly than anywhere else in Scripture.
MAN AS A SINFUL CREATURE
The preaching of latter-day prophets is filled with condemnations of man's sinfulness and incorrigibility. The author of the Book of Job puts a similar thought on the lips of one of his characters (4:17-21, RSV is best).
THE UNITY OF MAN’S NATURE
Anyone who reads the Old Testament is aware of how freely Hebrews describes rewards. Zech shows that at least the greatest men of the Old Testament were aware that the problem was not only in
MAN’S NEED OF A REDEEMER
It is strange that this pleasing portrait is nowhere cited in the New Testament as a prophecy of the Christ. The answer was given in terms of the Old Testament passage we have just read.
CHRIST OUR BROTHER
Countless other stories in the Gospels testify to Jesus' humanity, none perhaps more attractive than that of feeding the multitude (Mark 6:30-44). This is what the writer of Hebrews tells us.
LIFE THROUGH HIS DEATH
The resurrection of Christ is a central article of biblical faith, and when grasped, it throws new light on the rest of Scripture and on the whole meaning of human life. The central role of belief in the resurrection in early Christian thought is illustrated by a passage from the First Letter to the Corinthians (15:12-19).
THE KINGSHIP OF CHRIST
This was precisely the function that the temple performed in the lives of the people of the Old Testament. Here is a solid New Testament basis for the extraordinary claims of the Nicene Creed.
SALVATION BY FAITH
The third selection of the Old Testament (Hab. 2:1-4) is one of two crucial passages (Gen. 15:6 being the other) on which the New. There is no better illustration of how justification by faith actually works than in the story of the penitent thief in Luke.
THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
The New Testament regards the age of the Spirit as already present and sees it. The Christian—the new man of the new age—as one who lives in the joyous consciousness of the possession of the Spirit.
THE HOLY TRINITY
The Father's voice claims the Son as his own (v. 17), and the Holy Spirit (16) secures the bond of unity between them. Here again there is no doctrine of the Trinity, but the triune God is clearly present.
THE CHURCH
The statement that the New Testament nowhere explicitly formulates a doctrine of the Trinity may seem to be contradicted by 1 John 5:7 in the King James Version. The true foundation stone of the Church is not Peter, but the faith he expressed.
THE SACRAMENTS
According to Exodus 12:21-28, it is described how in the time of Moses, the religious life of Israel was strengthened by the introduction of a memorial holiday - the Passover - to remind the people that among the terrible events that preceded the crucifixion, During the Passover it was difficult for Christians to avoid associating Christ's death with the slaughter of a lamb and to see it as his sacrifice. The most extensive account of the celebration of the Lord's Supper in the early Church is in I Corinthians 1 1:17-34.
LIFE AFTER DEATH
Then death became a problem, especially in light of the obvious inequalities of life in the present world. For Christians, the goal of living in communion with God is much easier than for the men in the Old Testament.
Part Three: Life
LIFE UNDER JUDGMENT
He is the author of The King and His Cross; Preface to Old Testament Theology; The Holy Scriptures: A Survey (volume in Seabury Press Church’s Teaching Series) and The Apocrypha, Bridge of the Testaments. The wall of the prophet's vision is, of course, the life of the people of Israel, and the vertical line is intended to determine the measure of their conformity to God's will.
NEWNESS OF LIFE
The visible symbol of the Christian's new character is the act of baptism with which his life begins. In the paradoxical words of a modern writer, he asks them "to become what they are." The implications of the opening clause.
LIFE IN CHRIST
A third characteristic of the way of life taught in the Bible is that it is a life lived "in Christ." This is the most essential feature of all, though in the nature of things it is only defined in the New Testament. The passage ends with a complex picture of the harmonious interrelationship between the Body, its members, and the life of Christ, which is its animating principle (16).
WORSHIP
The first part of the psalm calls them to worship God (for what He is) and to give thanks (for what He has done). There are numerous short passages in the New Testament that give us images of the early Church during worship.
HEARING THE WORD
He, his apostles and the servants of his church are the ones who sow the seed of the Word. Luke's Gospel f) provides further illustration of the importance that Jesus attached to the idea of listening to God's word and obeying it.
COMMUNION
Christian commentators have always seen a faint foreshadowing of the act of union in the Old Testament story of the manna in. The other is 1 Corinthians, in which, surprisingly, Paul also uses the story of the manna in the wilderness of the Old Testament.
WORKING FOR GOD
The story of the tiles is reminiscent of the way cathedrals were built in the Middle Ages, with every citizen helping out. The work of a single individual in such circumstances can be very small, but the collective achievement is enormous.
THE MORAL STRUGGLE
The soldier is a common image for the character of the Christian in the New Testament. Thus we are brought back to the theme of the choice that each person must make - the way of life or the way of death, service in the army of God or in that of His enemy.
STUDY
The whole of Psalm 119, which is from a much later period than Deuteronomy, is about the study of the written Law of God and the benefits it brings. There is no more charming image in the Gospels than that of the boy Jesus in the Temple (Luke.
PRAYER
That prayer is one of the basic activities of a religious person is a claim that does not need to be proven. Particularly striking is his comparison of his own ascending prayers with the incense that ascended to God from the altar of the temple (2), a.
FAITH
In Hebrews 11:22, Joseph is singled out as one of the great heroes of faith (although the case cited there may seem rather trivial). The poet was evidently in serious trouble due to the malicious conspiracy of his enemies (4).
HOPE
Because "faith" must be based on faith, it is not difficult to understand the insistence of Jude's little letter on it. The next selection (Jer. 32:6-15) is another good illustration of how hope works in the life of a man of God—this time in the career of man.
LOVE
It leads the pious child of God to look to the future - the future that a merciful God is creating even now - as expectantly as a weary watchman, after a long night's service, looks forward to the coming of day (5f). The part of the New Testament where love is most consistently the dominant theme is the so-called Johannine literature - the Gospel.
PENITENCE
It is primarily this sense of common sin that is expressed in the liturgical general confessions of the Church. Throughout the history of the Church – both in the Old Testament and in the New – the call to repentance has always been directed even more towards those who believe they are righteous and need no repentance than towards those who are admittedly sinful , even in their own eyes.
THANKFULNESS
In the selection from 2 Isaiah (Is. 51:1-3), the great prophet of the Babylonian captivity first looks to the past and invites it. The story was no doubt preserved by the early Christian church to remind its members of the.
HUMILITY
Since pride was—and is—the cause of man's alienation from God, the humiliation of pride and the destruction of its monuments must be the decisive act in the establishment of God's kingdom. The great teachers of the Bible had no doubt that the future does not belong to the proud, but to the humble.
WISDOM
The man of the Bible is unrelenting in his admiration for this kind of life. The later Hebrews' passion for justice may well have its historical source in the example and teaching of Moses.
TEMPERANCE
We have previously noted that one of the requests of the Lord's prayer ("give us this day our daily bread") is based on vv. Ecclesiastes is the only book of the Old Testament that closely approximates the pagan idea of moderation without improving upon it. .
FORTITUDE
II Peter 1:2-7 contains a list of such virtues found in many of the New Testament letters. On the other hand, courage is one of the characteristic signs of a righteous man.
MARRIAGE
The most poignant statement about the fortitude of the men of God is that found in Hebrews 11:32-12:2. It should be an example of self-sacrificing love on the part of the husband (vv and the feeling of joy and happiness).
FAMILY LIFE
The attitude of the Old Testament towards the state is necessarily somewhat different from that of the New Testament because of the different. So the question of the Old Testament's attitude toward the state really becomes a question of its attitude toward the king.
CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY
There are two little books in the Old Testament devoted entirely to the passionate condemnation of a particular nation. The poem - one of the most magnificent products of the Hebrew poetic genius - rises above the level of mere.
SOCIAL JUSTICE
The New Testament, as we have noted, has less to say about social responsibility and national justice, because Christians of New Testament times were a small group that had no control over the activities of government. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus (although Luke is told to teach another lesson, shows Jesus'.
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Then he knows that the foundation of his atoning work has been laid and the gathering of the nations has begun. The rest of the New Testament takes it for granted that the work of Christ has obliterated for Christians all distinctions of nation, race or culture.
