Daily Help Plus

Finding Jesus in the Bible…So We Can Follow Him in Life

Bible Reading Plans

• Plan One: New Testament Only
• Plan Two: New Testament + Psalms
• Plan Three: New Testament + History
• Plan Four: The Entire Bible – Year 1 of 3, Year 2 of 3, Year 3 of 3

Don’t know which plan? Go to A Christ-Centered Bible Reading Plan: Quick Start.

Extras

Verse of the Day, Audio Capsule, and Video Minute

Overflow

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(Today’s Book Installment)

Christ Is God

Chapter 15 – Keeping the Two Testaments Reconciled

As we’ve seen, the New Testament added profound revelations to those that had been given in the Old Testament. The major New Testament revelations we’ve singled out so far are:

• Messiah was more than a mere man.
• He was crucified and killed before He was enthroned as king.
• He was raised from the dead and seated at the right hand of God.
• Before the creation of the world, Messiah had been created by God.
• After God created Messiah, Messiah created everyone and everything else.

The visual of Messiah being right next to God both before the world’s creation and after His resurrection was doubly memorable. That image captured the imaginations, and guided the minds, of the followers of Jesus. They didn’t take this New Testament visual of a pairing to be a correction of the Old Testament visual of one God. Rather, they saw it as providing more detail to the visual previously presented to them in the Old Testament.

It was like the Old Testament gave them a picture of God from a distance, and the New Testament was giving them a close-up.

You and I need to be diligent to keep the Old Testament and the New Testament reconciled in this way. What helps us to do that is remembering that Jesus and His apostles had no New Testament. The only testament they had was the Old Testament. The New Testament is simply the record of how they taught the Old Testament.

The New Testament’s 27 texts weren’t fully collected and distributed until after the apostles had all died. This is why the Old Testament was the Bible as far as the apostles were concerned.

Think this through: Once Jesus ascended into heaven, the apostles were left with what they remembered of His teaching. And His teaching was from the Old Testament. He interpreted it in a way that no one ever had before. He saw truth in it that no one had previously seen. Now, realize that what His disciples learned from Him about the Old Testament is what we’re reading when we read the New Testament.

Below is a key verse from each testament – the first from the Old, and the second from the New – showing how the apostles incorporated what they learned from Jesus about His being God’s “right hand man.”

Deuteronomy 6:4 “Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one!

1 Corinthians 8:6 yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we exist for Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through Him.

(You may already know that when “LORD” – that is, all caps – shows up in the Old Testament, it doesn’t mean the word “Lord.” Rather, it means God’s Hebrew name: YHWH. More on this later in the book.)

The apostles’ close-up “photo” of God brought into view God’s right-hand man, Jesus – the Messiah. Jesus and the apostles weren’t promoting the idea of two Gods – they were promoting the idea that God had a servant above all other servants. As the good pharaoh had Joseph at his side, so God had the Messiah at His side…for the work of creation (reported in the Old Testament) as well as the work of redemption (reported in the New Testament).

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