Session Notes

What We Will Learn Today
  1. What We Call the OT, Jesus and His First Followers Simply Called the Bible
  2. The Torah as Scripture’s Christological Foundation
  3. Scripture as a Hyperlinked Text
  4. Different Approaches to OT interpretation
  5. The Emmaus Approach
  6. The Bible’s Opening Christological Word
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  1. Christ wasn’t to be read *into* the OT but read *out* of the text. The Scriptures testified of him.
  2. The Torah as the foundation of Scripture
    1. Torah = Teaching (or teaching of God)
    2. Everything after Deuteronomy is Inspired Commentary
    3. The entire Bible is already compressed into the first five books
  3. Rabbi Isaac said, “That which the prophets were destined to prophesy in every generation they received at Mt. Sinai,” (Exodus Rabbah 28:6)
  4. Luther, “Moses is the source from which the holy prophets and also the apostles, inspired by the Holy Spirit, extracted divine wisdom. This being the case, we shall not live up to our calling better and in greater harmony with God’s will than by leading our followers to this source and showing them in our own way the seeds of divine wisdom which the Holy Spirit, through Moses, has sown in such a manner that neither reason nor the power of human nature, if it does not possess the Holy Spirit, can see or understand them,” Preface to the Commentary on Psalm 90 (AE 13:75).
  5. “And here we challenge them to show us one word in all the books outside Moses that is not already found in the books of Moses,” Avoiding the Doctrines on Men (AE 35:132).
  6. The Christological Layers of the Bible:
    1. Torah
    2. Prophets
    3. Writing
    4. New Testament.
  7. Everything builds on each other
  8. Why wouldn’t Paul be quoting Christ?
    1. Because he didn’t have to, they were both quoting the Old Testament
  9. Scriptural archeology:
    1. Digging through the layers of the text the build off of each other
  10. Layers of the text:
    1. New Testament - like top soil, dig deeper and find;
    2. The Prophets, dig deeper and find
    3. The Psalms, dig deeper and find
    4. The Historical Books, dig deeper and find
    5. The Torah
      1. They all build off of each other
  11. When Jesus walks on water He is illustrating in action what all the Old Testament was leading up to.
  12. "And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters."Genesis 1:1 (ESV)
  13. "And the people of Israel went into the midst of the sea on dry ground..." Exodus 14:22 (ESV)
  14. "And all Israel was passing over on dry ground until all the nation finished passing over the Jordan." Joshua 3:17 (ESV)
  15. Approaches to reading the Old Testament
    1. A Museum
      1. Somewhere we can look around and then leave
      2. Somewhere to learn a few things
      3. Interesting, but not life changing
    2. A Spiritual gym
      1. A place to work on buffing up certain areas of your life
      2. Working to accomplish a goal
      3. Used as morality tales for what we should do
      4. Doesn’t lead us to ask “How is this story about Christ?”
    3. A Vast Desert With Occasional Oasis
      1. Long stretches of useless detail with the occasional messiantic prophesy
      2. Strips the OT of the Spirits power
  16. These all miss the point, Chrsit says,
    1. “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 (ESV)
  17. The Most Important Question:
    1. How in these words is Christ speaking of himself to the church?
      1. With this question, we are at last going in the right direction.
  18. The Bible is like a hyperlinked text in that verses from all throughout are connected and refer back and forth to each other.
  19. And he said to them, “O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?" And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” Luke 24:25-27 (ESV)
  20. Berashit = In the beginning
    1. This is the start, right?
    2. More than just a temporal marker
  21. be-rashit – rosh – head – beginning
  22. Proverbs 8:1 “Does not wisdom call out?”
    1. Hokma = Wisdom
  23. Wisdom is described as a person from the beginning
    1. Proverbs 8:22-23 “The LORD possessed me, [Wisdom], the beginning [raysheet] of his way, before his works of old. From everlasting I was established, from the beginning [mayrosh], from the earliest times of the earth.”
    2. The Targum, “In Wisdom, God created the heavens and the earth.”
    3. Col. 1:18, “He is also the head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning [arche], the firstborn from the dead.
    4. Rev. 3:14, “The Amen, the faithful and true witness, the Beginning [arche] of the creation of God.”
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