Ep. 67 | 8 Reasons the Old Testament Should Matter to Moms Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Laura: Welcome to another episode of Risen Motherhood. I have my beautiful sister-in-law, Emily Jensen, here with me. You’re looking good, Emily, eight months pregnant, or whatever you are. [laughter] We are excited to be here today, we are going to be talking about the Old Testament and why moms should love it.
Emily: We hope this is a super fun show, although the title sounds kind of heavy. But you grow up and you hear a lot of stories from the Old Testament, and maybe you can recall some of the narratives - whether that’s Noah’s Ark or Jonah, or things about David. But when you get to be an adult, you’re like, “I have no idea why this matters to my faith.” [laughter] It’s really easy to sit really comfortable in the New Testament, and then it can feel really, really disconnected in the Old Testament.
Laura: I had the exact same thing happen, Em, where I felt like they were—maybe not intentionally—but they were set up as moral examples, more than it was the way that we’re going to talk about today; looking at the Old Testament as a way to point to Christ - the whole picture of the Bible, and what it means. But especially in motherhood, when we don’t take time to invest in biblical literacy – and when we say that we mean the whole Bible, not just half of it, not just the New Testament, [laughter] that will help us to be able to apply scripture rightly. If we don’t read the whole Bible and strive to interpret it and see what God’s word says, it really handicaps us in our ability to interpret God’s word. Also, we need to be doing it so that we can train our children, so that we understand how to talk about the New Testament. We need to rightly understand how to read the Old Testament so that we can pass that on to our children as well.
Emily: As many of you have already noticed, a lot of stories that you’ll read to your kids—if they’re biblically based children’s stories—have these Old Testament accounts in them, as part of being able to connect Jesus. Today we are going to fly over these eight reasons, and we’re going to try and spell them out for you clearly, so you can follow along.
Number one. We need the Old Testament to understand the big story of the Bible, which is basically what we’ve already been saying.
I don’t know if there’s any Harry Potter fans out there?
Laura: Oh yes, right across the computer screen from you, Em. But yes, listeners!
Emily: Just by way of an analogy, don’t carry it too far: Harry Potter and analogies with the Bible don’t go very far [laughter]—but you would never start on book four or book five and expect to fully understand the plot and the characters. Just using basic literacy principles, God sovereignly ordained that every book and every word would be included in the Bible, as a whole story for us to understand. So it doesn’t really make sense for us to just say, “I’ll just pop into the New Testament,” and not understand the whole background. It all matters to the greater picture of the story, and we need to help our children understand that too.
Laura: You’ll hear us say the word, “metanarrative.” It’s a bigger word, but basically it just means “the big story.” It means the entire story: God’s big plan, from the garden, all the way until he comes back someday. It’s the full Genesis to Revelation story. That’s what metanarrative means when we say that; taking that zoomed out picture of the scriptures.
Emily: In the show notes we’ll include a couple of children’s Bibles and books that actually carry out that metanarrative for your children. If you can even just read that along with them, it’s a lot easier to understand the big story.
Laura: The second thing is, we need the Old Testament to give us knowledge of who God is. So again, taking the Harry Potter analogy, we don’t want to drop in halfway through. We’d be wondering who the characters are, and we wouldn’t even understand the decisions they make, or understand why they are, like they are. When we read the entire Bible, especially the Old Testament, we see the character of God. There’s so much information about his attributes. We see God’s mercy, his justice, his sovereignty, control, creativity, holiness, and on and on. So we need the Old Testament to give us that knowledge about who exactly God is, and what his attributes are, what attributes are imparted to us, and what things are different than us.
Emily: As Jen Wilkin says—which, I love this quote±—“The heart cannot love what the mind does not know.” So if you’re missing out on a huge portion of scripture, you can love those aspects of God without knowing about them. To piggyback off of that, number three is: We need the Old Testament to give us wisdom about God’s design, and his purposes for creation. So just like we see character qualities of God in the Old Testament, we also see a lot of plans laid out. The foundational structure of things, like his plan for men and women, his plan for families, his plan for the church and the people of God. Even just the foundational plans are laid for Christ coming, and all of that is spelled out in all these details, which is sometimes hidden in things that take some more study to understand. But there is so much structure there that still applies, and you almost need that to understand the way it fleshes out in the New Testament.
Laura: Number four. We need the Old Testament to show us and our children how offensive sin really is to a holy God. We also can understand how the law is so insufficient to save us. Let’s be real, the Bible’s kind of bloody. [laughter] There is a lot of intense judgement actually, in the Old Testament, which we see. So common examples that we often share with our kids, actually show how a holy God cannot stand unholy people: banishing Adam and Eve from the garden, wiping out the rest of the world in Noah’s day, the plagues in Egypt. Or just the destruction that God sent with armies, to destroy whole people groups. Those things can be really hard for us to reconcile and understand, if we’re not looking at God’s grand plan, or understanding his design and his inability to be around sin. We see that God set up the law, and we see the covenants that he made for the Israelites—how they are his, set apart as his chosen people. But they’re still not sinless. We see all of these things at play in the Old Testament, especially at the very end of the Old Testament where it feels depressing. It’s very bleak, and people are in big trouble. It’s very clear that we’re in need of a savior, that we need ultimate atonement, and that all of these small animal sacrifices, these small atonements are just not sufficient. That sin is really, really bad. We need the Old Testament to understand just how bleak our plight is, and then it launches us into gratefulness for Christ’s atoning work on the cross.
Emily: That is a point that should not be understated. [laughter] But moving on to point number five, which is that the Old Testament reminds us that God still uses normal, sinful people to advance His plan for salvation. This is a really common thing we see in your average Sunday school curriculum or children’s storybook. You see the main character built up as this hero, like, “Oh, David stands up to the bad guy Goliath,” or, “Look at how Joseph forgives and provides for his family.” What’s really interesting is, as you’re looking at the Old Testament, you realize all these people are really big sinners and usually like one or two chapters after they’ve done something great, they do something pretty bad. But overall, that’s encouraging, and we can use that to encourage our children to be like “Look, all of these guys that had faith in God, and women too that had faith in the Old Testament, they were still fallen and broken and they did awful things. But because they had faith in God’s plan for salvation, God still used them to advance his kingdom.” That can be a hope in our family life.
Laura: The next one is: We have a few books right there towards the end of the Old Testament, the Book of Proverbs, the Book of Psalm, these are the wisdom books. What is great about these two books is that they teach us how to walk in the spirit, how to put on a new self. So we learn things like, “the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.” There is a ton of stuff in there for us as moms, as parents, to raise our children. Things about, how to speak, managing money, doing business, dealing with hurting people. The Psalms express our human emotions so well, from the high highs that we have to the low lows. Then the Proverbs, again, provide a lot of those teaching the ways to live a life that models the gospel.
Emily: Number seven here - speaking of modelling the gospel—we need the Old Testament for all of these stories and examples of things that point our children to Jesus and the gospel. For instance, let’s take the book of Hebrews. Laura, did you study this recently? Like in the last year?
Laura: It was two years ago.
Emily: Okay, two years ago.
Laura: But I can try to dredge up, but like two falls ago. [laughter]
Emily: In Hebrews, there’s a lot of explanation for how some of the Old Testament stories, and again, the structures and the things that God set up in the Old Testament were really big billboard signs pointing to the coming savior. Jesus even calls that out and He says, “All the things that you read in the scriptures, and the law, and the prophets are about me.” Laura and I will include a really good book in the show notes called Show Them Jesus which I highly recommend. It helps teach you how some of these structures and stories in the Old Testament are actually pointing to the person and work of Jesus. It just brings a lot of relevance to those stories.
Laura: A quick point of terminology again especially that we use in the inductive Bible study method is, we talk about looking for themes in scriptures. One of those is “types of Jesus,” or “types of Christ.” A “type” is what theologians use as a word for a shadow of Jesus, or someone that’s pointing towards Jesus. That’s one of the things that we lay out, at least in the method that we use, to look for. You can find Jesus in every story of scripture in one way or another. We can give some practical examples on stories this week because this can be something that is a skill to learn how to do. But once you do it, it’s really fun because you start seeing this connection and that connection. So we’ll try to show you guys a little bit of it. We’re not really Bible teachers, [laughter] so it makes me a little nervous.
Emily: We’ll do some of the basic ones, like Noah’s Ark or something.
Laura: Easy ones, yes. [laughter]
Emily: Number eight. We need the Old Testament to sweep up our children into something much bigger than themselves, or even their own little nuclear family. Something that can happen—we’ve talked about this in other episodes —is when we take our shopping cart to the Bible and just go straight to the New Testament and pop things in, feel good to us. We can lose perspective about the fact that this is the whole Bible. About God. It’s his story, and it’s his plan, and it’s about his kingdom and his glory. Looking at the whole scripture, Old Testament included, helps our children get swept up in that too. Remember that we need to live in awe of who God is, and what he’s doing. It’s things like, we get excited as adults about these big, epic stories, like Chronicles of Narnia, and I know people are big fans of Lord of the Rings. There’s something inside of us that God created—that we long to be part of something that’s not about us, and the Old Testament really reminds us of that.
Laura: I would just encourage you too, if you have never read through it, you will be shocked at what you find. I remember the first time I came across, is her name Jael, I think, Emily, where it’s the woman who drove a peg through a dude’s head? [laughter] I read it aloud to my husband, and I was like, “Did you know that was in there?” This was fairly recently as I was reading through. There are some harder parts to trudge through, but there’s just tons of fascinating, interesting things that you’re like, “Even the movies cannot come up with this stuff!” [laughter] It is exciting, and it is epic. I like those words for the Old Testament, so hopefully as you listen to this, you have some new ideas for how to look at the Old Testament. Hopefully it gets you a little bit excited about studying it, and just knowing the importance that it should have in your life, as a mom, and in your ability to enjoy and know God, and to communicate that to your children.
But how do you do that?
Emily: Where do you begin, because honestly, it’s really hard to just say, “Oh yeah, I’ll just open up the Bible, and start reading these Old Testament narratives,” like this story Laura just shared. We have to probably be a little bit more intentional with the Old Testament, otherwise it is really hard to understand. So first of all, just praying, as you’re reading through the Old Testament, and using some of these resources that we’ve already shared about in the show, and that we’ll include in the show notes at risenmotherhood.com. Like the Show them Jesus book, or even the Jesus Storybook Bible. Read through that a few times and you’ll start to get a feel for the rhythm of how all of these pieces fit together. There’s another book called Crosstalk, that we’ll include in the show notes, that’s really helpful, just from an adult perspective. Like how do I understand this and apply it to my life? So resources can really help.
Laura: Then studying it; simply digging and reading, re-reading it like Jen Wilkin talked about on the show she did with us here at Risen Motherhood. Going through it and reading it like a book. Start out trying to comprehend it for what it is, but then also taking deeper studies. We have a few that we really like by Nancy Guthrie, Jen Wilkin has a few. We can link to those, but then also, use that inductive study method we talked about, that we have at risenmotherhood.com. You can also read the Bible through in a year for comprehension, but especially the Old Testament. If you’ve never been in there, just take a year to read that. Or take the time and just read Deuteronomy, and see what it says.
Emily: Then, this is kind of a different idea, but consider serving in a Sunday school classroom in your church. Especially in the pre-school, or young, elementary age and practice this, week in and week out. Or maybe you do it once a month or once every few months, of getting in front of a group of kids, and trying to explain how to see Jesus and some of these Old Testament narrative stories. I feel like almost being a Sunday school teacher has helped me tremendously in being able to talk to my own preschool age children at home about Jesus and the Bible. So, lots of ideas there, just get started. [laughs]
Laura: Just practice.
Emily: Yes, practice, practice, practice.
Laura: We have said this a few times on the show, but practice—it’s not going to make perfect—but, especially those of you moms with little kids that are listening, this is the time to do it. They’re not going to remember all the weird things that you said, the times that you stuttered, the times that you said “Umm,” the times that you were looking for the right answers. Practice this, and know that God will use what you say. With the right heart, he will use it. You will get better at it. I can promise, just from my own personal experience, and I know Emily has grown in this area too. There are so many other reasons to love the Old Testament, and we want to make that clear as well, that there are not just eight. We really had to narrow it! [laughter]
Alright, that wraps up for today. If you’re looking for these resources that we keep talking about, we will link them on our show notes, at risenmotherhood.com. Come find us over on social media, @risenmotherhood.