Hello everyone. Well, it's, it's certainly not easy to apply all of the New Testament to our lives, but it's certainly easier than trying to apply to our lives all the things that we read about in the massive Old Testament. So what role does the Old Testament play in our Christian lives?

That's the question today. And it comes from a listener named Sarah. Hello, Pastor John. Thank you for your ministry faithfulness over the years to this podcast and for fielding my question, generally speaking, the Old Testament is still very valuable to us, obviously, but to what extent now that the new covenant has arrived, God doesn't require animal sacrifices for our sins.

So what are the best uses of the Old Testament for giving shape to our Christian lives today? Let me begin with the recommendation of a book. Jason Deroushi, D-E-R-O-U-C-H-I-E, published a book called How to Understand and Apply the Old Testament. It has a huge section in it on the practical uses of the Old Testament for our day.

Jason is the professor of Old Testament at Bethlehem College and Seminary, and I just listened to a message of his just a few days ago about how the Old Testament is not just turned into useful Christian scripture for our own Christian living, but was intended by God and by the authors themselves of the Old Testament to be used that way beyond their own day in the distant future, including our time.

You can probably find that message, by the way, at the audio or video section over at Bethlehem College and Seminary website. This is a huge issue that Sarah raises, but I think I can say just two or three things that will help her feel how precious and wonderful and useful the Old Testament is for our Christian life today.

The first thing to say is that when Jesus Christ came into the world as the long expected Messiah of the Old Testament, a profound and dramatic change happened in the way we handle Old Testament scripture. And this is because Jesus was the fulfillment. That's the key New Testament word, the fulfillment and the goal of so much Old Testament religion.

For example, Jesus was the fulfillment of all the Old Testament animal sacrifices, which were offered as a temporary way of pointing to the way God covers sins. So the entire sacrificial system comes to an end in Jesus. Doesn't need to be done anymore because Jesus was the decisive sacrifice of himself.

He also is the high priest, the final, decisive, finish it high priest who mediates between man and God so that the sacrificial system and the priestly ministry of the sacrifices go away. We have a high priest that takes us right into the throne of grace personally. And that means that the ceremonial laws surrounding that entire system also undergo a dramatic change because Mark says in his gospel, Jesus declared all foods clean.

So you can see how the ceremonial law that we're attaching to those processes, those ceremonies, are also altered. And when the gospel spills over to the banks of the Gentile world and not just ethnic Israel, so that the Gentiles are now included in the Abrahamic people of God, that ethnocentricity and earthly political theocentric approach of the civil government in the Old Testament, that undergoes a dramatic change because the church today is not one ethnicity with an earthly homeland with its own form of civil government.

Instead, the church is a scattered people who are exiles and sojourners among all the nations of the world, functioning as refugees in all kinds of alien political systems, as representatives of the true heavenly citizenship. That's a radically different form of being a people of God than the Jewish people were in the Old Testament.

So you can see from just those few examples, and there would be others, that when we read the Old Testament, we are, by its own intention, as Jason Deroshi showed me so well a few days ago, we are making the necessary changes of application for our day. But nothing I've said in all that should be construed to imply that the Scriptures are not profoundly useful today.

All of them. All of them. Second Timothy 3.16, all Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for Christians, he says. Not just a few scattered nice points like Isaiah 53. All of it is profitable. And there are two reasons for that that I'll mention. There are others, lots of others, probably.

One, God has not changed. Therefore, wherever we rightly understand His character and His ways in the Old Testament, we are learning something true about the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who loved us and sent Christ to die for us. Number two, when Christ died, His blood secured for us a joyful participation, a full participation as Gentiles in all the promises of God in the Old Testament.

This is one of the most important truths that Sarah, in asking this question, should take hold of with all her might. It's certainly the one that means most to me. Here's the way Paul expresses it in 2 Corinthians 1.20. All the promises of God find their yes in Jesus.

That is why it is through Him we utter our amen to the glory of God. That is an absolutely glorious, amazing, wonderful, stunning, precious sentence. When you read the Old Testament, there are promises upon promises upon promises made to God's people, and in Christ they are yours. You're now grafted in, in Christ, into the seed, Paul says in Galatians 3, and as the seed of Israel, you benefit from all the promises made to Israel, you become part of the Abrahamic hope of the world.

Here's one example, maybe two examples of how this works. So Hebrews 13, verses 5 and 6 says, "Keep your life free from the love of money. Be content with what you have." And here's how he argues. "For He has said," and then he quotes Joshua 1.5, words given to Joshua, "I will never leave you or forsake you." And then he continues, "So we can confidently say," and then he quotes Psalm 118, verse 6, "The Lord is my helper.

I will not fear. What can man do to me?" Do you see how he's doing this? This is what we do. We hear the command, "Be content, keep your life free from the love of money." But how can I answer, "Go to Joshua, go to the Psalms, and you'll hear promises that will steady your heart and make you peaceful." That's amazing.

Here's one more example from Romans 12, 19 and 20. Paul is arguing that Christians should not return evil for evil. How does he argue? Here's how he does it. Verse 19 of Romans 12, "Beloved, never avenge yourselves. Leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written." Where?

Deuteronomy 32, verse 5, "Vengeance is mine. I will repay, says the Lord." Then he continues, only this time without even telling us. He's quoting the entirety of Proverbs 25, 21, and 22. "To the contrary, if your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he's thirsty, give him something to drink.

By so doing, you'll reap coals of fire, burning coals upon his head." And on and on it goes in the New Testament. So my limited, but I hope significant and helpful suggestion for Sarah is that two glorious uses of the Old Testament today are these. One, meeting God for who he really is so that we can know him and worship him since his character was revealed as truly in the Old Testament as in the New.

That's first one. And two, letting the hundreds of promises in the Old Testament wash over you as your blood-bought birthright in Christ Jesus so that every day you set yourself free from sin by the superior pleasures of the promises of God. Amen. Amen and amen. Thank you, Pastor John, for modeling this earnest reading of the Old Testament over the years and for seeking to find glimpses of God's revealed glory in Scripture and so often capturing the promises and then sharing those things with us all on Twitter, where a lot of those discoveries find a home.

Thank you for modeling this very approach to the Old Testament. And thank you for listening and making the podcast a part of your week. You can subscribe to our audio feeds and you can search our past episodes in our archive, even reach us by email with a question you may be having, even questions related to better understanding our Bibles and how to read them with better profit.

Like this very good question today from Sarah. You can do all that through our online home at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn. Well, we're going to return on Friday and I'm not sure what we're going to be talking about, but we'll be talking. We'll be fielding another one of your very excellent questions.

Please keep those questions coming into us. We appreciate each and every one of them. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you on Friday. Bye. Bye.