In the opening, Pastor Andrew references several books in the church library or that can be purchase online or in a bookstore:
- Grasping God's Word by Duvall and Hayes
- Getting the Garden Right by Richard Barcellos
- The Right Doctrine from the Wrong Texts?: Essays on the Use of the Old Testament in the New by G. K. Beale
- Kingdom through Covenant by Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum (often assigned at Southern Baptist Church (SBC) seminaries)
Hello, welcome back to Good Theology from Good Books. I'm Andrew Bryant. And I've been sure. And today we're going to wrap up our Old Testament, Loving the Old Testament series. We could have spent a lot of time on a ton of books. So I'm going to mention several kind of harder books and then we're going to end with a favorite of mine. The first thing I want to mention is on our resource wall we have several resources that cover some topics touching on Loving the Old Testament. This one I'm holding in my hand is from the Nine Marks Church Question series. And it's called Does the Old Testament Really Point to Jesus? It's sitting out on our church resource wall. Get you a copy. There's several. I found it very helpful and short. There are some others though. If you're a high flyer, if you're somebody who really wants to dig in, there's a few books I want to mention that were helpful and instrumental in my life for Loving the Old Testament. The first one is called Grasping God's Word by Duvall and Hayes. It is a hermeneutics book but it teaches an interpretive method that's easily rememberable. And it goes through every genre of the Bible and helps us interpret it. Specifically in that preaching but it's really helpful for regular old people like me. And then there's another one that I want to mention is called Getting the Garden Right by Rich Barsellus. It's pretty well at a popular level but I found it hard at times but I also found it really helpful. And his point in that book is, well, it's in the title. We need to get the garden right and he's been some time on that. And that means Genesis. The Genesis Garden is what he's talking about. So I highly recommend those. They're all in the library. So if we're going to check those out. The one I want to mention today though is called The Mystery of Christ, His Covenant and His Kingdom. It is a book that I was told to read by a friend of mine because I was struggling through kind of understanding how the Bible is knit together. How does the Old Testament and the New Testament kind of work together? There's some other good books on that like essays on the New Testament use of the Old or the dictionary on the New Testament use of the Old. These are really great books, thicker books, harder books. I really just wanted somebody to lay out a system for me. A simple system that I could understand. And this one here kind of makes an attempt at that and I think it was on a different podcast. I heard about it the first time. It was when the author was interviewed by Tom Askel for the Founders podcast and Founders is actually the one who publishes this book. It was in 2020 that that happened that I heard about this book. Anyway, so the idea behind this book is that we can see the various covenants of the Bible revealing step-by-step and he would say from shadow to substance the New Covenant. That comes from our confession of faith, the 69, the historic Baptist confession that says that by further steps, by further steps, God revealed the covenant of grace or the New Covenant. Okay, so this is kind of how it's laid out. We're going to, it talks a little bit about hermeneutics. That means interpreting the Bible. Typology, he talks a lot about typology, which is things in the Old Testament that reveal Jesus in the New. And then he jumps into how the various covenants are working in the Bible, what their purpose is. Let's just take the Noeic covenant or the Noah covenant, the one with the rainbow that we're familiar with. He will direct our minds to the kind of concept that that is not itself the covenant of grace. Nobody's saved in heaven because of the Noeic covenant. And yet it's God's mercy that points forward to God's mercy in the New Covenant. And so people could respond to that and be included in the New Covenant. So he talks a lot about those sorts of things. But the covenants working in the Bible are the way that I now see the Bible working together. And that is highly important for interpreting the Old Testament. So that's kind of the overview. Yeah, same, same Renaissance book. I call this a desert island book. If I were on a desert island and somebody said you can take one book besides the Bible, this is at least on the short list of books I would take. I love this book. I think it's really simple. And here's one of the best parts about it. He doesn't strive to argue against other views, like the Presbyterians or the dispensationalists or your more contemporary New Covenant theologians. He doesn't really spend much time on that because he wanted to positively lay out for us a system. Just like I was saying, I was looking for a system of thinking about how the Bible works together. Its own system is what he's going to put forward. And I think he nails it. I think he gets it. I think we need to remember too that he's coming from the point of view of just Baptist reformed covenant or really Baptist covenant theology. That's what he's purporting here. Yeah, his first work was called From Shadow to Substance. And he studied in his dissertation the early Baptist views on covenants. And he comes up with that he thinks and he has some good evidence that it's true, that his view that he puts forth in here is the one held by some of the early Baptists. Sure. And he's, like you said, he's not the first one. He'll go back and use John Owen and some of the Puritans, which is not surprising because of founder's ministry association. But again, he's not the first one making this claim, but he's putting it together and easy to read method. Yeah. Yeah. And you can see here, Ben, it's not very long. It's kind of a short little book. I think it's like 200 pages. Yeah, not too bad at all. Yeah, just write out 200 pages and develop several concepts that I think are important. So I'm just going to open to the table contents. One of the things that I found really helpful was the first chapter on biblical theology, systematic theology, and covenant theology. I had studied some biblical theology at this point. When I encountered this book, I had studied some systematic theology. Never had anybody told me how to put those together. And that's not the point of this book. And it's one of the most happy things that I got out of it was how we can understand a comprehensive system of Bible doctrine. Again, Baptists have been doing that forever, but it was helpful for me. In the second chapter, he spent some time, a lot of time on typology. Typology is, like I've mentioned before, it's when something in the Old Testament happens, or a character does something, and it prefigures Christ, or it shows something that's true about Jesus, or something that's true about the church and the New Testament. And the, obviously, Jesus is better, and the church is better than the thing happening in the Old Testament. So he lays out kind of an understanding to ground us, because one of the dangers with interpreting things with typology is that somebody will see something that kind of resembles something in the New Testament, and they'll just make a flying leap across the testaments. And people are afraid of that. They call that allegorizing, allegorizing the text. And there's, there is a real danger in that, in us understanding the Bible in allegorical way. So he kind of lays out a system for what typology is, how it works, how it works, it functions on two levels, he says, that they terminate in there, or they end in their anti-types. So it's prophecy fulfillment, but instead thinking of it, and as God pre-acting, or acting in the first place, so that we'll understand the second time he does it. It's really good. It's a typological principle of hermeneutics. Again, I felt freed up when I read that chapter, because I went, this is what I've been looking for, somebody to lay out exactly this stuff. This is what I was kind of understanding from just reading my Bible. And I think you, you, as Baptist listeners, I, I think probably also have these kind of presuppositions and feelings when you read your Bibles. But he just says them. And I thought that was really helpful, clarified a lot of things in my mind. When he talks about covenant in kingdom, there's another really great book. It's bigger, called Kingdom Through Covenant by Peter Gentry and Steve Wellam. I think it's huge, really great book, really important book. A lot of us of our seminaries are assigning that book for our seminary students in the SBC. Wonderful thing. I think it's too big for the average reader. This chapter is what? 20 pages. And it talks about almost the same things. So worth, worth looking into there. And then the last thing I want to mention before we kind of wrap on this is his development of the various Old Testament covenants. We have the covenant of works. Some people get uncomfortable by that, but that's just meaning at the state Adam was in. And then we have the no way at covenant next, Noah, and then Abraham at covenant, which then turns into the mosaic covenant. So you can even see how human and then creation post flood and then Abraham and then Moses. We're kind of narrowing down. We're kind of revealing over time that all these covenants actually have to do with one another. And so that's one of the on Davidic, even more narrow down. And then we get Jesus, right? So we actually need a progressive understanding of the covenants, the covenants working together and developing from shadow to substance for the Bible to kind of work on its own terms. And then the last thing we have is the kingdom of Christ, which doesn't really touch on what we're talking about for this study, but it's very helpful because it shows the termination of the types. So if all those Old Testament covenants are meant to point to Jesus, which I believe that they are, then their termination is somewhere in the New Testament. So that means this. It means that if you're going to love your Old Testament, you're going to need your New Testament to love your Old Testament. That's that was a challenging concept for me. But I think I think any Christian kind of has that intuitively in their bones. What's his name? Austerbeg says, it's important to read our Bibles backwards because we need to understand the end if we're going to understand the beginning. How do you feel like he approached baptism in the Lord's Supper in terms of that King potentially New Testament covenantal language? Yeah, yeah, he does mention that. He spent some time on it in the chapter 12 that he spends some time on it. But that's really not the main focus of his argument. So he does mention it, but it's not like a central part of his thesis. And so he doesn't spend a lot of time on baptism in the Lord's Supper. He just uses it to kind of undergird. I think there's, to your point, there's a lot more work needing to be done on that books, theology work done on the covenantal significance of the baptism in the Lord's Supper and how they relate to their types in the Old Testament. Because we've not really spent much time on that in our Christian writings. So you're exactly right. Work needs to be done. And this was not the book for that. But I'm sure there is time for a book for that. We need a book on that. Yeah, the other thing that I want to like the question I had going into it was, is it a good thing to try to systematize these things that are not systematized in the Bible, right? The Bible doesn't sit around and list the entire comprehensive what it is that we're supposed to believe about hermeneutics. But another lecture that I was in once kind of took Luke 24, the road to Emmaus, and developed Jesus actually said this. Jesus said that the Old Testament was about him. And if we're gonna believe Jesus's words, then we have to believe that. So I think that was simple. And I think like Stephen Sermon too, how often in the New Testament is Jesus telling them about the Old and linking everything together to where they're at today as part of that. Exactly. Opening their eyes. Yeah. And every time it says the scriptures in the New Testament, what's it talking about? It can't be talking about the New Testament because it didn't exist yet. It has to be talking about the Old Testament. So then the Bible's own words of itself is the Old Testament's important. So we got to take that. We got to take our Old Testaments. And I hope this series has kind of developed that that you can love your Old Testament. Baptists need to be reminded that their Old Testaments are important, not just important, you can love them. And it's a good thing to love them. The stories that we all know and love, right? The Noah and the Ark, the Daniel and the Lions, Dan, David and Goliath, these are all stories that we can love, not because they're just good stories or because our Sunday school teacher liked to tell us about them, but because of what they teach us about Jesus. Jesus is there. He's not just there in some flying way. He's there in type, in proto form. He's hidden in the entirety of the Old Testament for us to see revealed in the new. And so we need, I would claim, we need our Old Testaments, not just to see how God did what he did, but to shed some light on who Jesus is in the new, to see him in his full picture, to have revealed for us the details of who Jesus is and what he's done. We need our Old Testaments. That's why God gave it to us. So that's loving your Old Testament. I pray that you'll pick up at least one of these books we've done in this series and learn to use your Old Testament, learn to love it deeply, learn to see how the Bible fits together. And again, I highly recommend the mystery of Christ has come into his kingdom by Sam Renahan. Thank you. We'll see you next time.
Andrew and Ben discuss The Mystery of Christ; His Covenant & His Kingdom by Samuel Renihan.
