A Faithful God
So over the last few months I’ve been reading through the Old Testament and something really profound happened to me… Now don’t get me wrong I’ve read the Old Testament before, and really loved it. But I had never read the entire Old Testament without reading some of the New Testament as well. This was perhaps the first time I’ve read the entire Old Testament non-stop. And during this process I learned something, and perhaps it was profound simply because I didn’t realize I was learning it at the time.
As I read those pages, I began to see stunning highs with Yahweh God establishing a covenant with Abraham and the people of Israel. David being anointed as King of the people, and the crushing lows of unfaithfulness, rebellion, exile and 400 years of silence. Highs that would rival or surpass any in our life, and lows that would break our hearts. And in the midst of this a faithful God, in spite of continued unfaithfulness on the part of His chosen people.
Yet so often as a “New Testament” church we are so prone to want to toss out the Old Testament. That somehow it no longer applies to us. That God is somehow no longer the God of the Old Testament. But the only problem with that is that Malachi 3:6 states that I am the Lord and change not. So did God magically change? Or have we thought, learned, or been taught wrongly? If then we have been wrong then how do we approach God’s covenant? Perhaps it would be better to view God as a God of continual faithfulness even though we are not. And if this is the lens we begin to view God through then our view of both the Old and New Testaments would change as well. If we view the entirety of the Bible as the story of One Faithful God to a continually unfaithful people, I think we would be more prone to see the wondrous stories found in the Old Testament.
