Dever The Message of the Old Testament

Promises Made
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-4335-9927-9
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 1096 Seiten

A Big Picture Overview of Each Old Testament Book  The Old Testament is the story of God's promises to his people. Below its somewhat obscure surface is hidden magnificent truth about the love and power of God. Throughout its pages the reader can find promise after promise from God, all of which are fulfilled in the New Testament-in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Based on sermons in the early years of Mark Dever's ministry at Capitol Hill Baptist Church, The Message of the Old Testament explores the Old Testament as a glorious whole so that readers are able to see the big picture of the majesty of God and the wonder of his promises. - Big-Picture Analysis: Covers each book of the Old Testament concisely and accurately  - Appeals to Pastors and Laypeople Alike: A helpful resource for gaining a deeper understanding of the Bible or preaching an overview sermon to a congregation  - Written by Mark Dever: Based on 28 sermons taught at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC - Replaces ISBN 978-1-58134-717-3

Mark Dever (PhD, Cambridge University) is the senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, and president of 9Marks (9Marks.org). Dever has authored over a dozen books and speaks at conferences nationwide. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Connie, and they have two adult children.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dever, Mark

Leseproben

The Whole Bible

What Does God Want of Us?

The Big Picture1

The Bible has been the subject of numerous and varying opinions.

Many people have not liked it. The great French philosopher Voltaire predicted the Bible would vanish within a hundred years. He said that more than two hundred years ago—in the eighteenth century. His kind of skepticism may have been rare when he lived, but it became more commonplace in the following century. One historian writes, “By the nineteenth century Westerners were already more certain that atoms exist than they were confident of any of the distinctive things the Bible speaks of.”2 By the twentieth century, great sections of the formerly “Christian” parts of the world had fallen into official skepticism about the Bible. A Dictionary of Foreign Words, published by the Soviet government about fifty years ago, defined the Bible as, “A collection of different legends, mutually contradictory and written at different times and full of historical errors, issued by churches as a ‘holy’ book.”

At the same time, many people have had a very high opinion of the Bible. Ambrose, bishop of Milan in the fourth century, described the Bible beautifully when he said, “As in paradise, God walks in the Holy Scriptures seeking man.” Immanuel Kant once stated, “A single line in the Bible has consoled me more than all the books I have ever read.” Daniel Webster said of it, “I pity the man who cannot find in it a rich supply of thought and of rules for conduct.” Abraham Lincoln called it, “the best gift God has given to man.” He also claimed, “But for it we could not know right from wrong.” Theodore Roosevelt said, “A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.” Certainly one of the most profound understandings of the Bible comes from the great Greek scholar A. T. Robertson, who attested, “Give a man an open Bible, an open mind, a conscience in good working order, and he will have a hard time to keep from being a Baptist.”3

Some people believe they have great faith in the Bible, yet their sincerity is no guarantee of understanding. King Menelik II, the emperor of Ethiopia a hundred years ago, had great faith in the Bible. Whenever he felt sick, he ripped a few pages from the holy book and ate them! This was his regular practice, and it never did seem to harm him. He was recovering from a stroke in December 1913, when he began to feel particularly sick. He asked an aide to tear out the complete books of 1 and 2 Kings and feed them to him page by page. He died before he could eat both books.

Whether you like the Bible or not, it has certainly been popular. It is an all-time best-seller. Polls show that Americans generally say they believe the Bible.

Yet the book is probably more purchased than read. Most Americans may not have the gastronomic fervor of King Menelik, which is just fine, but they may also have less knowledge of the Bible than he did. Pollster George Gallup reports,

Americans revere the Bible, but they don’t read it. And because they don’t read it, they have become a nation of biblical illiterates. Four Americans in five believe the Bible is the literal or inspired Word of God, and yet only
4 in 10 could tell you that it was Jesus who gave the Sermon on the Mount and fewer than half can name the Four Gospels. . . . The cycle of biblical illiteracy seems likely to continue—today’s teenagers know even less about the Bible than do adults. The celebration of Easter . . . is central to the faith, yet
3 teenagers in 10—20% of regular churchgoing teens—do not even know why Easter is celebrated. The decline in Bible reading is due in part to the widely held conviction that the Bible is inaccessible and less emphasis on religious training in the churches.4

It is exactly such ignorance we hope to help remove with this study. You or I may not be able to learn everything about Christianity in one fell swoop. In fact, I am certain we cannot. But I do hope to bring your attention to the overarching theme of the Bible as well as the basic message of Christianity or what is called “the gospel.”

Many people are surprised to hear that the Bible has any sort of over-
arching theme. It is well-known as a collection of books. As one Bible scholar put it,

No less than sixty-six separate books, one of which consists itself of one hundred and fifty separate compositions, immediately stare us in the face. These treatises come from the hands of at least thirty distinct writers, scattered over a period of some fifteen hundred years, and embrace specimens of nearly every kind of writing known among men. Histories, codes of law, ethical maxims, philosophical treatises, discourses, dramas, songs, hymns, epics, biographies, letters both official and personal, vaticinations . . .

Their writers, too, were of like diverse kinds. The time of their labors stretches from the hoary past of Egypt to and beyond the bright splendor of Rome under Augustus. . . .

We may look, however, on a still greater wonder. Let us once penetrate beneath all this primal diversity and observe the internal character of the volume, and a most striking unity is found to pervade the whole. . . . The parts are so linked together that the absence of any one book would introduce confusion and disorder. The same doctrine is taught from beginning to end. . . . Each book, indeed, adds something in clearness, definition, or even increment, to what the others proclaim. . . .5

Clearly, the Bible is made up of many parts. Yet this book is one whole: “utter diversity in origin of these books, and yet utter nicety of combination of one with all.”6

Have you heard of the Above series of large coffee-table photography books? There is Above Washington and Above London and Above Europe and many others. I enjoy the series because of the sweeping panoramas it provides. The plans of the original city planners, hidden when walking down the streets with building tops high overhead, suddenly become visible as the pictures let us rise up and look down on the whole. The aerial photographs provide a sense of perspective and interrelatedness, and we see what the planners envisioned in their minds and blueprints. Clearly, the sense of the whole is important for understanding and for planning. Some people suggest the ecology movement did not begin until the first pictures of the whole earth, taken from space, were published around 1970. Wasn’t it on the cover of the old Whole Earth Catalog? Seeing a photograph of the earth, I think, jelled our understanding of the world as a whole and galvanized certain individuals to action. In the same way, we want in this sermon to pull up and get an “Above the Bible” or “Whole Bible” view all at once.

Or we might consider the concept of time-lapse photography. In time-lapse photography, the photographer positions the camera to take a shot of the same location multiple times over the course of a day. That allows him to see the changes that occur in one place over a long period of time in just a few moments of flipping through pictures. Reading through the Bible has the same effect. The Bible is, of course, much briefer than what it records. I know it would take you a long time to read it, but it would take you much less time to read it than it took to write it, and it took less time to write it than it took for the events to happen. So the text of Scripture itself is already like a time-lapsed series of photographs, and in the course of this study we will try to flip through an even more condensed series of pictures that present the message of the whole.

The story line we will follow, and the outline of this study, is the story of promises made and promises kept. God makes promises to his people in the Old Testament, and he keeps his promises in the New Testament. This message of promises made and promises kept is the most important message in all the world, including for you. Maybe you will “get it” in this study. Or maybe it will get you. As Martin Luther said, “The Bible is alive, it speaks to me; it has feet, it runs after me; it has hands, it lays hold on me.” I pray that happens to you.

Before we continue, let me mention several good resources for helping you understand the Bible further. First, J. I. Packer’s God Has Spoken7 will help you understand why you should study and read the Bible as a Christian. Second, whether you are a Christian or a non-Christian, Chris Wright has written a great little book called User’s Guide to the Bible8 that will help you know what the Bible contains. It has pictures and timelines and bright colors, and it is so very thin! It is a wonderful resource. Finally, Graeme Goldsworthy’s little Gospel and Kingdom, which comprises the first of three works in his Goldsworthy Trilogy, 9 is one of the best treatments of the story line of the whole Bible. In all of Scripture, Goldsworthy contends, God is bringing his people into his place under his rule.

Promises Made: The Message of the Old Testament

Not everyone who reads the Bible regards it as one whole. Some ignore the...