Why read the Old Testament today

🎯 Objectives

By the end of this lesson you will be able to:

• explain why the Old Testament is indispensable for a Christian today too;
• describe how the 39 books of the Old Testament are organized;
• recognize the thread that unites the whole story, from creation to the hope of the Messiah.

📖 Receive

Read these two passages slowly:

“For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.” — Romans 15:4 (KJV)

Then open 2 Timothy 3:14-17. Paul reminds Timothy that from childhood he has known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make him wise unto salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. Pause on one detail: when Timothy was a child, the New Testament had not yet been written. The Scriptures that led him to Christ were the ones we now call the Old Testament.

🔍 Examine

The Bible of Jesus

Imagine sitting in a synagogue in Nazareth on a Sabbath in the first century. A young rabbi stands up, takes the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and reads: the Spirit of the Lord is upon me… Then he rolls up the scroll and says that today this Scripture has been fulfilled (Luke 4:16-21).

That rabbi is Jesus, and the book in his hands is the Old Testament. Jesus prayed with the Psalms, answered the tempter by quoting Deuteronomy, and explained his death and resurrection starting from Moses and the prophets. After the resurrection he tells his disciples that everything written about him in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms had to be fulfilled (Luke 24:44).

Here is the first reason to read the Old Testament: it is the Bible Jesus loved. We cannot truly know him if we ignore the Scriptures he read, quoted and fulfilled.

“Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.” — Matthew 5:17 (KJV)

Written for us too

The Old Testament was not written to us: its first readers were Israelites in the wilderness, inhabitants of Jerusalem, exiles in Babylon. But, as Paul reminds us, it was also written for us, for our learning (Romans 15:4; 1 Corinthians 10:11).

What does it give us, in practice?

• The roots of faith: who God is, who man is, why the world is marked by evil.
• The vocabulary of the Gospel: words like covenant, sacrifice, redemption, Messiah are born here. Without the Old Testament, the New remains partly incomprehensible.
• A faith that prays and suffers: the Psalms, Job and Lamentations teach us to bring joy, pain and questions to God.
• God’s faithfulness in history: centuries of kept promises help us trust him today.

How it is organized

Opening the table of contents of your Bible you find 39 books, written by many authors over a span of about a thousand years. Protestant Bibles group them into four sections:

Section	Books	Content
Pentateuch	Genesis – Deuteronomy (5)	The beginnings, the patriarchs, the exodus, the Law
Historical books	Joshua – Esther (12)	Israel’s life in the land, the kingdom, the exile and the return
Poetic and wisdom books	Job – Song of Songs (5)	Prayer, wisdom, love
Prophetic books	Isaiah – Malachi (17)	God’s voice to his people, judgment and hope

The Jewish tradition preserves the same texts in a different order, in three parts: the Law (Torah), the Prophets (Nevi’im) and the Writings (Ketuvim). This is the division Jesus alludes to in Luke 24:44.

An important detail: the order of the books is not chronological. The books are grouped by genre, not by date. For example, many prophets preached during the years recounted in the books of Kings: Isaiah and Micah in the time of King Hezekiah, Jeremiah in the last years of Jerusalem. In the same way, many Psalms are linked to the life of David, whom we meet in the books of Samuel. In the third lesson we will build a timeline precisely to put each book back in its place in history.

You don’t need to learn everything at once. To find your way, it is enough to remember the four sections: they will help you understand what kind of book you are reading, so that you don’t confuse a prayer with a law, or a prophecy with a chronicle.

Many books, one story

With so many authors and genres, the Old Testament might look like a disorganized library. In reality it tells one great story, which we can summarize in five words:

1. Creation: God creates a good world and man in his image (Genesis 1-2).
2. Fall: man rebels and sin enters the world (Genesis 3).
3. Promise: already in the garden God announces that the seed of the woman will crush the serpent’s head (Genesis 3:15).
4. Covenant: God chooses Abraham in order to bless, through him, all the families of the earth (Genesis 12:1-3).
5. Expectation: prophets, kings and priests keep alive the hope of a Messiah who will bring the promises to fulfillment.

You can picture this story as a single path that moves forward, stage after stage, toward a precise point:

flowchart LR
  A["Creation"] --> B["Fall"] --> C["Promise"] --> D["Covenant"] --> E["Expectation"] --> F(["Christ"])

The diagram shows two things. First: each stage prepares the next. The promise makes sense only after the fall, and the covenant with Abraham is the concrete way in which God begins to keep that promise. Second: the path does not close inside the Old Testament but remains open. The last page of the prophets ends with expectation, not with an ending. It is like reading a novel that breaks off at the most important chapter: the reader knows something is missing and that someone has yet to arrive.

It is no accident that the New Testament opens by presenting Jesus as the son of David and the son of Abraham (Matthew 1:1): it picks up exactly this thread.

Two mistakes to avoid

First mistake: the “God of the Old Testament”. People say that in the Old Testament God is harsh and vengeful, while in the New he is loving. But already to Moses God presents himself as merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth (Exodus 34:6). And the New Testament speaks seriously about judgment. It is the same God, holy and full of love, who reveals himself progressively all the way to Christ.

Second mistake: a collection of moral stories. David and Goliath, Daniel in the lions’ den, Jonah and the great fish: we often reduce them to examples of courage. The stories also contain moral lessons, but their main protagonist is God, who saves his people and carries his plan forward. Always ask yourself: what does this story reveal to me about God?

🔗 Connect

The Old and New Testaments are not two separate books but two parts of a single revelation:

• Luke 24:27, 44-45: Jesus opens the disciples’ minds so that they understand that the Scriptures speak of him.
• John 5:39: Jesus declares that the Scriptures testify of him.
• Acts 17:2-3: in Thessalonica Paul reasons with the Jews out of the Scriptures to show that the Christ had to suffer and rise again.
• Hebrews 1:1-2: God, who had spoken many times through the prophets, has in these last days spoken through the Son.

It is often said that the New Testament is concealed in the Old and the Old is revealed in the New. Throughout this course, every time you come across a promise, a sacrifice or a king, ask yourself how it prepares for the coming of Christ.

🙏 Apply

Take a few minutes, on your own or with your study group:

1. How much room does the Old Testament have in your Bible reading? Are there books you have never opened?
2. Have you ever caught yourself thinking of the “God of the Old Testament” as a different God? What changes when you read Exodus 34:6?
3. Choose an Old Testament book to read during this course: Genesis, Ruth or a group of Psalms are a great place to start.
4. Thank God for his faithfulness through the centuries and ask him to open your mind to the Scriptures, as he did with the disciples on the road to Emmaus.

📚 Go Deeper

• Read Luke 24:13-49 and note every time the Scriptures are mentioned.
• Leaf through the table of contents of your Bible and try to divide the 39 books into the four sections of the table.
• If you haven’t done so yet, the course “How to Study the Bible” gives you the tools to read every passage with the BereaWay Method: receive, examine, connect.

In the next lesson we will open the map: we will visit the lands and peoples of the Bible, because geography explains many pages of the Old Testament.