What does Jesus think of the Old Testament?
For some, that sounds like a strange question. Yet, the record of the theological history left for us in the four gospel accounts—Matthew, Mark, Luke, John—records for us the actual words and deeds of Jesus Christ that God predestined for our benefit—and life. And significant within that record is what Jesus thinks of the Old Testament.
We are unpacking (slowly!) this statement about the unity and diversity of the Bible:
Our goal as Christian readers of the Bible is to use the God-revealed unity of the Bible as the lens through which we see the drama of the diversity of the Bible all in order that we might respond properly to the Bible.
We have considered the phrase, “Christian readers,” and now we are moving to “the Bible,” asking what the Bible even is. To put it directly: it is the word of God, or “all Scripture is God-breathed” (2 Tim 3:16).
In thinking about what the Bible is, what Jesus thinks it is becomes a crucial dynamic to consider. Abraham Kuyper summarizes what the gospel writers make cloudless-sky clear:
“…that which Jesus appears to have thought about the Old Testament, agrees with the conception which, before his appearing, was prevalent concerning the Old Covenant. He introduces no new way of viewing it, but seals the conception that was current, and characterizes himself only by the original, i.e. not borrowed, application of the dominant manner of view….To come to the point, we emphasize in the first place, that Jesus looked upon the several writings of the Old Testament as forming one organic whole. To Him they did not constitute a collection of products of Hebrew literature, but He valued them as a holy unity of a peculiar sort” (Kuyper, Principles of Sacred Theology, 1954, 430-431, 432).
Kuyper’s point is that Jesus connects his own ministry with the Old Testament, introducing no innovations to that religion, but only bringing to fulfillment that which the whole Old Testament pointed. His life and teaching fulfilled prophecy, his own work would establish that new covenant promised in the old (Jer 31:31-34; Heb 8). All that he said and did was connected to a properly understood Old Testament.
Jesus saw himself as the focal point of Old Testament prophecies:
Matthew 21:42, Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures: “‘ The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?
Ned Stonehouse profoundly reflects on this aspect of Jesus’ approach to Scripture:
“Regardless of what it might cost him in the way of humiliation and suffering, even if obedience to it marked out for him a course of action and submission from which his soul shrank with the utmost intensity of feeling, even if it demanded that he die the accursed death of the cross, he was resolved and determined that the Word of God declared in Scripture should be perfectly fulfilled in him” (Revelation and the Bible, 1958, 79).
Jesus looked at the Old Testament as written by God, something that Gordon Wenham calls, “the remarkable interchangeability of the terms ‘God’ and ‘scripture’ in certain New Testament passages” (Christ and the Bible, 27):
Matthew 19:4-5, “He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh’?
Did you catch that? Jesus equates “he who created them,” who is God, with the one who said, ‘Therefore man shall leave…” Moses is the author of Genesis, which Jesus will also affirm, and yet here Jesus is saying explicitly that God is the author of Genesis.
Another example of this will show Jesus seeing that what David the psalmist says is what God the Holy Spirit says:
Mark 12:36, “David himself, in the Holy Spirit, declared, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet.’”
One of the most famous passages in such discussions is the temptation of Jesus, where three times the devil confronts him with temptations precisely connected to his identity and work as the Son of God. We will use Matthew’s account:
1 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 3 And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” 4 But he answered, “It is written, “‘ Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (4:1-4).
In this first temptation Jesus, the God who provided the manna to an entire nation in the wilderness, is asked to provide food for himself, starving as he would be after 40 days of fasting. His reponse? “It is written…” Sinclair Ferguson draws out for us the significance of that phrase:
“Nothing is more characteristic of the New Testament’s appeal to the Old Testament as Scripture, and therefore characteristic of Scripture as a class, than the expression ‘it is written.’ The appeal is not the naïve one of ‘if it is in a book, it must be true.’ Rather, the phrase means: It is written in the document of divine authority, in the canon of the community of God’s people. Since what is written there is divinely inspired, appeal to it settles all discussion” (Inerrancy and Hermeneutic, 1988, 58-59).
This tempting will continue as the devil will again press Jesus, “if you are the Son of God” (v. 5), and then promise him “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory” if he worships him. Both times Jesus will respond as before, “it is written…” He will use exact quotations from Deuteronomy (8:3, 6:16, and 6:13, respectively).
For us this means definitively that Jesus saw the Old Testament as authoritative, as powerful, as the rule and order of his life. We close with a thought from Ned Stonehouse that captures all that we’ve said:
“Most important of all, nothing shows so unmistakably as our Lord’s use of and attitude toward the Old Testament that special divine revelation may be, and as a matter of fact is, scriptural” (Revelation and the Bible, 78).
So, let our view of the Old Testament be that of Jesus, that it is nothing less and nothing other than the very word of God. And let our attitude toward obedience to that word be that of Jesus, who gave his very life in obedience to the word of God.
Next time we’ll look at Jesus’ view of the New Testament.
DJB
