Sermon Illustrations on the old testament
Background
Ancient Cosmology
The cosmology of the ancient world was dramatically different from the way that we think of ours. Scholar John Walton writes in The Lost World of Genesis One, “Old world cosmic geography is based on what they could observe from their vantage point,” just as ours depends on our scientific understanding of the world. Because water comes down from the sky and wells up out of the ground, there must be waters above us and below us. That requires a firmament above to keep the water from falling down all of the time and something to keep the dry land in place. Their neighbors saw these realities as reflecting episodes in the lives of the gods. The Israelites told the story differently. The one God was responsible for setting things in their place in the functional system they lived in. Still, they shared with their neighbors a basic view about the shape of the cosmos.
William Rowley (See John Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One (IVP, 2010).)
Israel Was Part of The Ancient World
The [Mesopotamian ancient texts] serve as sources of information for us to formulate the shape of each culture’s ways of thinking. In most areas there is more similarity between Israel and its neighbors than there is between Israel and our twenty-first century Western world… The views of deity in the ancient world served as the context for Israel’s understanding of deity. It is true that the God of the Bible is far different from the gods of the ancient cultures. But Israel understood its God in reference to what others around them believed… We simply recognize the common conceptual worldview that existed in ancient times. We should not therefore speak of Israel being influenced by that world—they were part of that world.
John Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One (IVP, 2010).
The Story of Joseph & High and Low Cultures
We individualists generally belong to what anthropologists term low-context cultures. That means that when we communicate, we assume a low level of shared information. We therefore assume it is good communication to spell things out. Not everyone thinks this way. The Bible was written in high-context cultures. People in these cultures assume there’s a high level of shared information between them and their audiences. This means they don’t feel the need to state everything explicitly. They take it as a given that everyone knows how things worked—and at the time, they did. This is not a sign they were bad low-context communicators, but rather that they were very good high-context communicators.
This is because the entire story of Joseph is actually about Joseph’s family and how God reconciled them. For collectivists, it is not a story about how God advanced Joseph’s career. It is not an urban-migration success story. Rather, Joseph angered his brothers, who respond badly, and Joseph becomes estranged from the family. Some collectivists might say it is Joseph’s fault. He should have known better than to anger his brothers.
My Mediterranean friends who are careful readers of the Bible place the blame somewhere else. Not on the brothers, not on Joseph. To them, most of the blame lies squarely with their father, Jacob. He is the father of all the brothers. As the head of the (ancient) household, it would have been his job to sort out disagreements and tensions like this one.
Taken from Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes by E. Randolph Richards and Richard James. Copyright (c) 2020 by E. Randolph Richards and Richard James. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com
Seeking a Spiritual Home in the Bible
Many people these days feel an absence in their lives, expressed as an acute desire for “something more,” a spiritual home, a community of faith. But when they try to read the Bible they end up throwing it across the room. To me, this seems encouraging, a good place to start, a sign of real engagement with the God who is revealed in Scripture. Others find it easy to dismiss the Bible out of hand, as negative, vengeful, violent.
I can only hope that they are rejecting the violence-as-entertainment of movies and television on the same grounds, and that they say a prayer every time they pick up a daily newspaper or turn on CNN. In the context of real life, the Bible seems refreshingly whole, an honest reflection on humanity in relation to the sacred and the profane. I can’t learn enough about it, but I also have to trust what little I know, and proceed, in faith, to seek God there.
Thinking with Your Gut
If cosmic geography is culturally descriptive rather than revealed truth, it takes its place among many other biblical examples of culturally relative notions. For example, in the ancient world people believed that the seat of intelligence, emotion and personhood was in the internal organs, particularly the heart, but also the liver, kidneys and intestines. Many Bible translations use the English word “mind” when the Hebrew text refers to the entrails, showing the ways in which language and culture are interrelated. In modern language we still refer to the heart metaphorically as the seat of emotion. In the ancient world this was not metaphor, but physiology. Yet we must notice that when God wanted to talk to the Israelites about their intellect, emotions and will, he did not revise their ideas of physiology and feel compelled to reveal the function of the brain. Instead, he adopted the language of the culture to communicate in terms they understood.
John Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One (IVP, 2010).
The Two Main Barriers to Reading the Old Testament
My brother, who attended a Bible College during a smart-alecky phase in his life, enjoyed shocking groups of believers by sharing his “life verse.” After listening to others quote pious phrases from Proverbs, Romans, or Ephesians, he would stand and with a perfectly straight face recite this verse very rapidly: At Parbar westward, four at the causeway, and two at Parbar. 1 Chronicles 26:18.
Other students would screw up their faces and wonder what deep spiritual insight they were missing. Perhaps he was speaking another language? If my brother felt in a particularly ornery mood, he would quote an alternative verse: O daughter of Babylon…
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. Psalm 137:9. In his sassiness my brother had, quite ingeniously, identified the two main barriers to reading the Old Testament: It doesn’t always make sense, and what sense it does make offends modern ears. For these and other reasons the Old Testament, three-fourths of the Bible, often goes unread.
The World of the Old Testament (Can Seem a Bit Edgy)
The Old Testament portrays the world as it is, no holds barred. In its pages you will find passionate stories of love and hate, blood-chilling stories of rape and dismemberment, matter-of-fact accounts of trafficking in slaves, honest tales of the high honor and cruel treachery of war. Nothing is neat and orderly.
Spoiled brats like Solomon and Samson get supernatural gifts; a truly good man like Job gets catastrophe. As you encounter these disturbances, you may recoil against them or turn away from a God who had any part in them. The wonderful quality of the Old Testament is that it contains those very responses as well! God anticipates our objections and includes them in his sacred writing.
The Worldview of the Old Testament
The Hebrew cosmology represents a revolutionary break with the contemporary world, a parting of the spiritual ways that involved the undermining of the entire prevailing mythological world-view… The presence of this or that biblical motif or institution in non-Israelite cultures in no wise detracts from its importance, originality, or relevance. The germ of the monotheistic idea may, indeed, be found outside of Israel; but nowhere has monotheism ever been found historically as an outgrowth or development of polytheism. Nowhere else in the contemporary world did it become the regnant idea, obsessive and historically significant. Israel’s monotheism constituted a new creation, a revolution in religion, a sudden transformation.
Nahum Sarna, Understanding Genesis: Through Rabbinic Tradition and Modern Scholarship, xxviii
Stories
The Two Main Barriers to Reading the Old Testament
My brother, who attended a Bible College during a smart-alecky phase in his life, enjoyed shocking groups of believers by sharing his “life verse.” After listening to others quote pious phrases from Proverbs, Romans, or Ephesians, he would stand and with a perfectly straight face recite this verse very rapidly: At Parbar westward, four at the causeway, and two at Parbar. 1 Chronicles 26:18.
Other students would screw up their faces and wonder what deep spiritual insight they were missing. Perhaps he was speaking another language? If my brother felt in a particularly ornery mood, he would quote an alternative verse: O daughter of Babylon…
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. Psalm 137:9. In his sassiness my brother had, quite ingeniously, identified the two main barriers to reading the Old Testament: It doesn’t always make sense, and what sense it does make offends modern ears. For these and other reasons the Old Testament, three-fourths of the Bible, often goes unread.
Who Were the Amelekites Anyway?
The experience of Barry Taylor, former rock musician and now pastor, suggests a reason. He told me, “In the early 1970s my best friend became a Jesus freak. I thought he was crazy, so I started searching the Bible in order to find arguments to refute him. For the life of me, I could not figure out why God was concerned with the bent wing of a dove, or why he would give an order to kill, say, 40,000 Amalekites. And who were the Amalekites anyway? Fortunately I kept reading, plowing through all the hard books. When I got to the New Testament, I couldn’t find a way around Jesus. So I became a Jesus freak too.”
Analogies
A Christian Alzheimer’s Disease
Two-thirds of the story of redemption is known to Christians as the Old Testament. Yet in the decades that I have been teaching Bible, I have found that most Christians, if allowed to answer honestly, might be tempted to dub this section of the Bible the “unfortunate preface” to the part of the Bible that really matters. But the reality is that the Old Testament is the bulk of redemptive history. And the church’s lack of knowledge of their own heritage renders much of the wealth of the New Testament inaccessible to them.
One of my dear friends and colleagues, Mary Fisher, refers to this widespread condition as a sort of Christian Alzheimer’s disease. I realize that this is a painful metaphor for many of us, but it is, unfortunately, appropriate. The great tragedy of Alzheimer’s disease is that it robs a person of themselves by robbing them of their memory of their experiences and relationships. Hence, an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s can watch her own children walk through the door and need to ask their names. (As a mother, I cannot imagine the agony of such a state.) The church has a similar condition. Just as the Alzheimer’s patient must ask the name of her own children, the church watches her ancestors walk through the door with a similar response. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are unknown and unnamed. The end result? The church does not know who she is, because she does not know who she was.
Taken from The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament by Sandra L. Richter Copyright (c) 2008 by Sandra L. Richter. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Humor
The Two Main Barriers to Reading the Old Testament
My brother, who attended a Bible College during a smart-alecky phase in his life, enjoyed shocking groups of believers by sharing his “life verse.” After listening to others quote pious phrases from Proverbs, Romans, or Ephesians, he would stand and with a perfectly straight face recite this verse very rapidly: At Parbar westward, four at the causeway, and two at Parbar. 1 Chronicles 26:18.
Other students would screw up their faces and wonder what deep spiritual insight they were missing. Perhaps he was speaking another language? If my brother felt in a particularly ornery mood, he would quote an alternative verse: O daughter of Babylon…
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. Psalm 137:9. In his sassiness my brother had, quite ingeniously, identified the two main barriers to reading the Old Testament: It doesn’t always make sense, and what sense it does make offends modern ears. For these and other reasons the Old Testament, three-fourths of the Bible, often goes unread.
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