How are we to understand the Old Testament?

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Christians have often been troubled by the question, How do we rightly read the Old Testament? Thankfully, the book of Hebrews provides us with important directions on how to interpret the Old Testament rightly, now that Christ has fulfilled all things. However, the history of theology and the history of the church demonstrate that there are disastrously wrong ways to read the Old Testament.
The first major error made in approaching the Old Testament comes down to reading it as if it is a book that does not belong to the church. 
This way of reading the Bible assumes that the Old Testament belongs to the Jews, whereas the New Testament belongs to the church. Sometimes the way we describe our congregations can unintentionally lend to this type of understanding. For example, Protestants are very concerned about ordering their church life so that they are legitimately a “New Testament church.” 

By this, we mean that we are seeking to follow the ecclesiology modeled in the New Testament by the apostles of the Lord Jesus. Of course, this is certainly right and good, but we must be careful that when we describe ourselves as a “New Testament church” we do not give the impression that our Bibles begin in Matthew as opposed to Genesis. 

Instead, the Old Testament Scriptures belong to the church because they bear witness to and provide the redemptive-historical context of the gospel of Christ (Rom 3:21).

Marcion, a famous heretic in the days of the early church, epitomized the worst form of this type of Old Testament interpretation. He posited that the God of the Old Testament was not the same as the God of the New Testament. He ultimately tried to do away with the Old Testament and almost everything in the New Testament that was in any way favorable toward Judaism. 

The early church quickly smelled the scent of heresy in Marcion’s teachings—the stench of deadly error. Many of Marcion’s heresies, however, are perpetuated in modern liberal theology, which asserts that the Old Testament portrait of God is crude and rudimentary. Regrettably, this way of thinking often sinks into certain sections of churches as well.
A similar though less pernicious version of this error, perhaps more common within evangelicalism, is simply to ignore the Old Testament. 

The temptation to ignore it is quite strong for many Christians. Many simply do not understand the Old Testament because it seems so alien to our culture and difficult to comprehend. Anchoring our quiet times in Philippians is easier than trying to focus them on Leviticus. Yet, as we discover in the Book of Hebrews, the Old Testament cannot be ignored, for it provides us with the theological and redemptive-historical context for understanding the gospel. Author: Al Mohler

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