Quotes About Old Testament

Still today the Old Testament book of Psalms gives great power for faith and life. This is simply because it preserves a conceptually rich language about God and our relationships to him. If you bury yourself in Psalms, you emerge knowing God and understanding life.

It appears that in order to win favor in the eyes of the God of the Old Testament, you have to be an obedient and heartless ethnic cleanser. Otherwise, step aside.

Massacring men, women, and children does not raise an eyebrow, but keeping a little war booty is "evil." Notice that throughout the Old Testament, "evil" and "wicked" are not moral judgments. Saul is called "evil" because he disobeyed orders.

When it comes to being eaten or slaughtered, the God of the Old Testament is egalitarian. Other than that, you are better off being born a male.

When Elizabeth Cady Stanton said that "The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation," she was obviously referring to the misogynistic God of the Old Testament.

Gladstone had read Weintraub's book, The Abraham Dilemma, in which he analyzed the relationship between a God who demanded the sacrifice of a son and the human race who agreed to it. Weintraub had reasoned that the Old Testament Jehovah had not simply been testing Abraham, but had communicated in the only language of loyalty, obedience, sacrifice, and command that humankind could understand at that point in the relationship.

Old Testament prophets. 'You savvy dis fetish thing?

As a child abuse and neglect therapist I do battle daily with Christians enamored of the Old Testament phrase "Spare the rod and spoil the child." No matter how far I stretch my imagination, it does not stretch far enough to include the image of a cool dude like Jesus taking a rod to a kid.

For Greek thought this was impossible since the essence of perfection is changelessness, and perfection cannot arise from the changes of human history. By contrast the Old Testament writers look forward to a glorious and terrible consummation of history. History has meaning in the sense that it has a goal.

The Old Testament contains fabulous elements. The New Testament consists mostly of teaching, not of narrative at all: but where it is narrative, it is, in my opinion, historical. As to the fabulous element in the Old Testament, I very much doubt if you would be wise to chuck it out.

Seventeen times in the New Testament, some variation of "Grace and peace to you" is used in expressing blessing to God's people. In bringing God's grace to mankind, Jesus also brought the peace every Old Testament believer had sought. The fact that grace is always used first indicates that grace is the root of what God did for us through Jesus, while peace follows as the fruit of His gracious work.

Still, while the Old Testament God of Genesis might well have used the sixth day of the week to create all the creatures that lived on dry land, in the contemporary epoch Fridays, surely, are more readily associated with winding down than embarking on bold new exercises in urban development.

as Childs points out, we first need to hear the "discrete voice" of the OT, we must then go on to read the OT from a post-Christ perspective.

The order of High Priests who were the descendants of Aaron offered the sacrificial rite as shown to us in the Old Testament, and the order of the priest 'Abijah' comes up as the eighth division.

Just as the High Priest performed the laying on of the hands on the head of a scapegoat to transfer all the yearly sins of the Israelites, as so vividly depicted in the Old Testament, likewise, John the Baptist passed-on the sins of this world onto Jesus by baptizing Him.

In the Old Testament, the sacrificial animal received the passing-on of the sins of people by receiving the laying of both hands (Leviticus 16:21).

On closer inspection, the hero status accorded to Abraham, Moses and David in the Old Testament (and echoed in the New Testament) is rooted not in their moral perfection but in their uncompromising dedication to the cause of Yahweh and their rugged trust in the promises of God rather than lapsing into the idolatry of many of their contemporaries.

Tackling Old Testament ethics is a challenge. Besides a lot of territory to cover, the ancient Near East seems so strange and even otherworldly! We need a good bit of background discussion to help make better sense of this world and of certain Old Testament texts.

An interpretation which confines itself to the moral teachings of the gospel deprives Christianity of its historical and theological roots. Christianity without the Old Testament ceases to be Christianity and becomes quite a different religion, as the Fathers saw when they condemned the Gnostics, Marcion and the Manichees. The continuity of Christianity with the tradition of the Old Testament and the conception of the Church as the new Israel is a fundamental part of the Christian faith.

It is a mistake to suggest that the difference between the Old and the New Testament is that the Old Testament taught that salvation came by keeping the law whereas in the New Testament it comes by grace. That is precisely the distortion of the Scriptures that Paul was combating.

It is instructive (and sometimes properly humbling) to give thought to that great stream of tradition within which we stand, rather than fondly imagine we are the first generation to face the challenge the Old Testament sets before us as Christians.

We tend to think the Old Testament ends with the book of Malachi. But Luke 16:16 says, "The law and the prophets were until John," which means that while the final official book of the Old Testament is Malachi, the period of the Old Testament ends with John the Baptist as the last of the prophets under the Law.

The Old Testament is the record of a nation; the New Testament is the record of a man, and that's what the Bible is really all about!

Donald W. Patten, Ronald R. Hatch, and Loren C. Steinhauer, The Long Day of Joshua (Seattle,WA: Pacific Meridian Co., 1973); Donald W. Patten, Catastrophism and the Old Testament (Seattle,WA: Pacific Meridian Publishing Co.