UNDERSTANDING THE OLD TESTAMENT: ISRAEL AND GOD’S PLANby Brad DuFault

Part 1- Why Israel?

When you try to read the Old Testament (the first three quarters of the Bible), do you ever feel like you are walking into the middle of a movie you’ve never seen before? What’s happening here? Who are these characters? This guy right here, Is he supposed to be a hero or a villain? It can be really frustrating, especially if you just flip the Bible open to a random page and start reading. Hopefully, you don’t turn straight to Job 2:9: “His wife said to him, ‘Are you still maintaining your integrity? Curse God and die!’”

Oops! That’s not such good advice, is it? It turns out we might not get a lot out of our reading by pulling out a sentence here or a paragraph there. Even whole books of the Bible can be confusing if you don’t know where that book fits in with God’s plan. The problem with many Bible readers is that we are trying to understand little bits of the story before we understand the overall plot. If we don’t understand the big-picture storyline of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, how will we make sense of the different events, characters, and settings we read about? You might read a portion of scripture and think, “Wow, God is speaking to me right now! He is telling me to do this or that.” That does happen, and it can be great, but how do you know you understood the passage correctly?

A lot goes into understanding what we read from the Bible, like praying, reading carefully, and having a right attitude toward God. In addition, it’s also really helpful if we understand the overall storyline of the Bible. That clears up a lot, especially when it comes to understanding the Old Testament. For instance, if Jesus is the main character, why doesn’t he show up until the last fourth of the book? What’s with all the weird rules? Am I supposed to follow all of those rules? What about the lists of names that go on for pages at a time? If God loves all people, why is Israel such a big deal? Why in the world does the Bible say more about Israel than about heaven?

Hopefully you’ve had some great experiences reading individual chunks of the Bible, and that’s awesome! But you might have had some frustrating times, too. I know I have! Even if you understand the message about Jesus really well, earlier parts of the Bible can be really hard to understand. Why does the largest section of the Bible, The Old Testament, have so much to say about a tiny little country called Israel, which is way out in the Middle Eastern desert? What does all of that have to do with me? What does it have to do with now? Believe it or not, it has a lot to do with you now! This is because Israel was a key part of God’s strategy for rescuing people through Jesus, and it still is. We’re going to have to explain the story from the beginning to understand why that is so. We’ll have to go all the way back to the very first people to walk the earth.

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A Lost WorldThere is good and bad news about early human beings. The good news is that God gave

them great power, responsibility and privilege, including the free will to choose whether they wanted to follow God or rebel against him. Tragically, they chose to rebel. That’s the bad news, and it’s worse than you might think. There were only two people at the time, Adam and Eve, and they were made to be close with God. Their lives were all about God, listening to him, getting cool things from him, hanging out with him, and life was wonderful! The world was interesting, exciting and safe for Adam and Eve, and they were given important responsibilities in taking care of our world.

Then in one move it was all lost. There was only one thing that they weren’t allowed to do, and they did it, even though God warned them that it would lead to their death. (See Genesis 3 for the details.)

What does all this have to do with us? Everything. First of all, as the only two people on Earth, the choices of Adam and Eve affected all of humanity. The decision to turn away from God transformed and twisted their nature. They changed what it meant to be human. Instead of people being naturally close to God, now people are naturally far from God. It is in our nature to sin, which is why it’s so hard to follow the rules! Why is it that when I’m told to do something, I just want to do the opposite? It’s because of the sinful nature we have inside our selves, and we got that from Adam and Eve. They passed a sinful nature onto their kids, who passed it to their kids, and on and on down the line until it got to you and me. Worst of all is that sin leads to death. People were originally made to live forever, but now mortality (the fact that we die) is a part of our nature because we all sin. We desire eternal life more than anything, which is why everyone is so afraid of death and aging, but our sinful nature leads to death: physical death, where our body winds down and eventually stops working, and spiritual death, where we are separated from God for all eternity and judged for our own wrong choices. People become something much worse than the amazing heights God intended for us. That’s why this event is known as The Fall of Man, giving us fallen humanity within us.

Unfortunately, the bad news continues. It was not just people that got messed up by Adam and Eve’s decision to turn away from God. As it turns out, the whole world got turned upside-down by the effects of sin! This is why we have natural disasters, food shortages, and disease. Adam and Eve were supposed to be caretakers of the world, so their choices affected the world itself. This is the human race is so out of sync with our own planet. Think about it: the earth itself often destroys human life with natural disasters, and human beings pollute and destroy the planet in a thousand different ways. It’s people against nature and nature against people. The natural world becomes something much worse than the wonderful home for us God intended it to be. That’s why The Fall of Man also gave us a fallen world.

Believe it or not, all suffering we experience goes back to those two results of the first human sin: we suffer because of the wrong choices that we or others make (because of our

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fallen humanity), and we suffer because random tragedies happen in the form of disease and accidents (because of the fallen world).

God’s Rescue OperationSo what is God going to do? Scrap the whole thing and start over? No, that would make

the whole thing a waste of time. Pretend everything is cool and just forgive everyone? No, God is too fair and just to allow sin to go unpunished. Should he just send us all to hell and call it a day? No, because in his mercy wanted to give us another chance. This is what God decided to do: come to earth himself and live the life we were supposed to live, die the death we deserve, and raise from the dead to defeat death. That is the Good News about Jesus and the main point of the Bible! Since he died for us, our sin can be taken away when we decide to receive Christ, which means to say yes to his offer of forgiveness. Since he lived a perfect life for us, he lets his goodness count for us so we become acceptable to God. Since he rose from the dead, he paved the way for us to be raised to eternal life in God’s Kingdom. All of that is what we get for receiving Christ now. In the future, Jesus will renew the whole world, reversing the effects of Adam’s sin, turning the world right-side-up again, wiping out all suffering for good. (In case you’re wondering, God was able to live a human life on earth as Jesus while he was also in heaven because he exists as three persons together, or a trinity: God the Father was in heaven, God the Son became a man, and God the Spirit was at work in the world.)

Here’s how the Bible itself puts it. This is just one of many passages that clearly explain how we can be made right with God:

But now God has shown us a way to be made right with him without keeping the requirements of the law.... We are made right with God by placing our faith in Jesus Christ. And this is true for everyone who believes, no matter who we are. For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard. Yet God freely and graciously declares that we are righteous. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins. For God presented Jesus as the sacrifice for sin. People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed his life, shedding his blood. (Romans 3:21-25)

Praise God, what an awesome solution! God would rather suffer himself than see us suffer! He must love us like crazy! That is the climax to the whole storyline of the Bible: at the cross when Jesus died, God solved our biggest problems. He now offers us more than we could ever imagine (eternal life, happiness, meaning), and we receive all of it simply by faith. And if that weren’t enough, after we decide to trust Christ, we can live for him and see him work in our lives!

So, if that’s all you know, that’s good enough to get you to heaven! However, it’s not good enough to help you understand the whole Bible as you are reading it. After all, when we

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jumped from Adam and Eve straight to Jesus just now, we skipped about 800 pages and thousands of years! What was God doing in that time?

Where Jesus Came From: IsraelYou probably know that Jesus’ mother was a virgin, which means Jesus wasn’t brought

into the world by normal reproduction. He was in his mother’s womb by a miracle, so he didn’t really have a biological father unless you count God himself (which is partly why he is called “Son of God”). So, when we ask where Jesus came from, part of the answer is that he came straight from heaven, the result of a miracle birth.

However, there is another part of the answer. Jesus did not just come from God; he also came from Bethlehem, a small town in the nation of Israel. As it turns out, this nation was created special by God for this very purpose, to bring salvation to the whole world through Jesus. If we understand that, it will make understanding the Bible much easier.

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UNDERSTANDING THE OLD TESTAMENT: ISRAEL AND GOD’S PLANPart 2- The People and the Land

God brought the nation of Israel into existence to prepare the way for Jesus. This was God’s plan, and it was a good one. Why was it such a good idea? Because without Israel, it would be a lot harder for the world to understand what Jesus was all about. If we can understand these features of the nation of Israel, then we will understand most of what we read in the Old Testament:

The People The Land The Kingdom The Priesthood The Law

Like any other nation in the world, the first things Israel needed was people and land. The most important thing to remember is that God was working behind the scenes getting the people and the land together to create a new nation, Israel, with the special purpose of bringing Jesus into the world. The kingdom, the priesthood, and the Law were all features of Israel that made the Good News about Jesus clear to the world. Let’s take these five key elements in the history of Old Testament Israel and look at them one at a time to see how each one can help us understand our Bibles more clearly.

The PeopleAs you read your Old Testament, you might notice that it seems to make a really big

deal out of the specific families that make up the early nation of Israel. If you don’t believe me, check out 1 Chronicles 1-9, which is a list of names that takes up nine chapters! God, was this really that important that you wanted nine chapters from your word devoted to this list of names? Apparently, yes it is that important to God! Why is that? It’s because those list of names aren’t just the people who happened to live in God’s chosen country, they were the chosen people, the Jews.

What does it mean to be a Jew? It means lots of different things in today’s world. Today, Jewish religion, Judaism, is the belief in one God and belief in The Old Testament or just parts of it, but it does not include the belief that Jesus was the Son of God. (Some do believe in Jesus, and they would be Jewish Christians, but this is a small minority of people who claim to follow Judaism.) That’s the first definition of “Jewish” in today’s world: being a follower of the modern Jewish religion.

Jewish culture of today has to do with following the traditions of the Jews down through the centuries. Someone could believe in one God, many gods, or no god and still be a part of

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Jewish culture. That’s the second definition of what it means to be a Jew today: identifying with the culture of the Jewish people by following the traditional practices.

Lastly, being a Jew in the modern world could simply mean belonging to the Jewish people. This would be someone whose great-great-great-great (and so on) grandparents were part of the original Jewish nation in the Old Testament, the nation of Ancient Israel. Today, someone who calls herself Jewish could simply be part of the Jewish race, just like African Americans, Italians, or Japanese people are part of the race they are born into (although it’s usually not so cut and dry, since the races blend together).

Those are three very different definitions of what it means to be Jewish today: believing in the religion, identifying with the culture, and being a descendant of the Jews in Ancient Israel. This confusion makes it harder to understand what the Bible is talking about when we read it.

In ancient times, it was much simpler. The Jews were a specific extended family of people (the race) that shared the same culture and beliefs. They all lived in the same country too! These were God’s chosen people, chosen for the purpose of bringing the Savior into the world.

The very first Jew was a man named Abram, later renamed Abraham (so we’ll just call him Abraham so we don’t get confused). The book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, spends the first ten pages or so on very, very ancient history, and then it jumps ahead to about 2,000 BC (which was about 4,000 years ago) and introduces us to Abraham. Why the sudden jump through the centuries? Why Abraham? We find out in Genesis 12:1-3.

The Lord had said to Abra(ha)m, “Leave your native country, your relatives, and your father’s family, and go to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you and make you famous, and you will be a blessing to others. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who treat you with contempt. All the families on earth will be blessed through you.”

Wow, lots of great blessings there for Abraham! His family will become a great nation and God will be on his side! This passage is an agreement, or covenant, between Abraham and God. What does Abraham have to do? Go to some other land. What’s God’s side of the deal? Bless Abraham like crazy! You should definitely take that offer, Abe! Even if Abraham screws things up later, God has already promised he would bless him and protect him. God said “I will make you a great nation,” not “I might.” Abraham had God’s word on it. This nation that was going to be made up of Abraham’s descendants is the nation of Israel.

Did you notice anything in the passage above that seems far-fetched? Look back at the last line of God’s promise to Abraham. How in the world will all families on earth be blessed through Abraham? (The word “families” means extended families, like tribes in the ancient world.) We’re left wondering about that at this point in the Bible, but later we find out how

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Abraham and his descendants would touch all families on earth: Abraham would have many, many descendants down through the centuries, and one of them was going to be Jesus the Messiah, the savior and king of the whole world!

So, Abraham is chosen by God to have a bunch of grandkids and great grandkids and so on. Dozens of people became hundreds of people, which turned into thousands upon thousands after a few generations. And then, tada! God’s chosen people are on the scene! Abraham’s grandson, named Jacob, is given a new name by God when he finally becomes a follower of God (Gen. 32). That new name that Jacob receives is Israel. When Israel was an old man, the giant family was known as “Israel’s children,” or “Israelites.” (When “-ites” is at the end of the word, it means “comes from;” Israelites came from their father, Israel.) So, eventually, when they became a nation, that nation was simply called Israel. They also end up being called “Jews” and “Hebrews,” but it all means the same thing.

Some people wonder what was so special about Abraham and Israel that they were chosen. This is really missing the point. Israel wasn’t chosen by God because they were special, they are special because they were chosen by God. It wasn’t something about them that made God choose them, it was what God wanted to do through them, which was to teach the world about him and bring Christ into the world. God was going to bless the whole world by sending Jesus to rescue us from death, but he chose one nation to bring that blessing to the world.

To review: who are the people God chose to bless? Everyone, because Jesus died for all of us. And who are the people God chose to bring his blessings to the world? His Chosen People, the Jews that made up nation of Israel. Now that you get the importance of the Jews, it will be much easier to understand certain stories in the Old Testament. For example, you might read a story about Abraham or one of his descendants that had a really hard time having children. Why is that such a big deal? Lots of people can’t have kids, so they either adopt or just live a life of peace and quiet! Now that we know God’s strategy, we do know why this is such a big deal: because God’s plan for rescuing the world was based on this family tree. No kids would mean no family tree, which would mean God’s plan failed! But God’s plans never fail! He knows what he’s doing! In each of these stories, God comes through in the end. Sometimes it looks like the whole family is going to die out, but God steps in with a miracle to rescue them. Other times, God provides them with children to keep the family tree going by helping really, really old people make babies (yep, we went there).

The LandIf God was going to bring the Messiah into the world through a nation, that nation

would have to have land. God chose the land of Canaan. Later, it would be known as Israel, and today many people refer to it as Palestine. It’s all the same place. Here it is highlighted in red on a map of the Middle East, which is basically where Europe, Africa, and Asia all meet.

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Figure 1: Israel on Map of the Middle East

Having trouble seeing it on there? That’s probably because it’s tiny. According to mapflight.appspot.com, Israel is less than one fifth the size of Ohio. That means that you could take five Israels, chop them up like puzzle pieces to fit into Ohio, put them all in place, and you would still have room leftover!

What was special about this land? Nothing, aside from the fact that God chose it for his own purposes. It’s small and most of it is a desert. So, why did God pick here of all places? Why not Hawaii or something?

The Bible doesn’t say exactly, but there are a couple points the Bible does make that might help us answer the question: “Why here of all places?”

1. Before the Israelites got there, the people that lived there, the Canaanites, were extremely violent and cruel. They already were that way in the time of Abraham (see Genesis 19—yikes!), but God waited another 400 years to do much about it. He waited until the point that their viciousness got so bad that no one could deny that God would be fair in wiping them off the map. One example of their brutality is the religion of the people who lived there. Believe it or not, they tortured and burned their own kids to death to please the gods they worshipped! (If you want more examples of how terrible the Canaanites were and why God wanted them destroyed, check out chapter 15 of Paul Copan’s book, Is God a Moral Monster. Seriously, it will make you want to puke.) Even though God loved the individual people in Canaan, the society got so bad that the best thing God could do was take them out. It’s hard for us to accept the idea that God wanted a whole group of people put to death, and it’s okay if that bothers us! It was hard for God, too! He says, “I take no pleasure in the death of wicked people. I only

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want them to turn from their wicked ways so they can live” (Eze. 33:11). Although it saddened God, he did what he needed to do and sent in the Israelites to kill of the Canaanites. (It’s important for us to know that this was a special case—God never asked anyone else to do anything like this.) What does this have to do with the land? It could be that God brought Israel into that spot of land to accomplish two things at once: Israel needed a place on the map and Canaan needed wiped off the map! That might be part of why God picked that patch of land.

2. God may have chosen that area for Israel because it would be the perfect place for Jesus to be from. Have you studied the Roman Empire at school? You might not have known that the life of Jesus and the Roman Empire happened at the same time in ancient history, around 2,000 years ago. This huge empire made it so that people and ideas could travel great distances very easily. You could cross a border into neighboring lands without much trouble because pretty much everything was part of the same empire! Rome was definitely not kind or godly, but they built some nice roads! The transportation and common language (mostly Greek) of the Roman Empire provided a very good opportunity for the message of Jesus to spread. And since Israel sat right where Europe, Asia, and Africa meet, the Good News about Jesus was able to spread quickly into those lands. Jesus arrived at the right time and the right place to impact the whole world, and that might be why God chose this region for his people Israel.

3. God might have chosen that particular piece of land because he wanted the Jews to put their trust in him. How would land make you trust God? By being a wealthy, strong land? No. By being a terrible place to live? Absolutely. Israel was small, barren, and surrounded by strong enemies! The only thing they had going for them was Almighty God. When God brought Israel into their land, he told them that they would be prosperous, well-fed, and safe from attack if they followed him. How would they be prosperous and have a bunch of resources if they were such a tiny speck on the map without much there? Seems like God would have to provide for them! How are they going to be well-fed from their crops if they live in the middle of the desert? (“What’s for dinner, mom? Mmmm, sand!”) If they weren’t going to starve, then it would have to be God who provides a plentiful harvest, because it’s not going to come from anywhere else. How are they going to be safe from attack when they are so small and always surrounded by great world powers like Egypt, Babylon, and Greece? Their only hope of not getting exterminated by some huge army was that God would actually step in and protect them. When it came to resources, food, and safety, God was their only hope. Maybe he chose this land because he wanted it to be that way! This would help his people would learn to count on him rather than on material things, like their land.

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We can’t be 100% certain why God chose there rather than somewhere else, but these reasons described above are probably at least part of the answer. To review: God brought his people to the land of Canaan so they would get rid of the Canaanites, so they would be in a good position to spread the message of Jesus, and so they would learn to trust in God to provide for them.

How does knowing about the land of Israel help us understand our reading of the Old Testament? The land was essential to God’s plan because his plan was to work through a nation, and a nation has to have land to exist. Where else are they going to live? Without a place, there would be no Israel, and there needed to be an Israel so they could fulfill their mission: teach the world who God is and bring Jesus into the world. If you didn’t know that the land was important for God’s plan, you would probably scratch your head in confusion when you’re reading the Old Testament. Why is it making such a big deal about where people live, where they move to, where they are buried? Can’t God work anywhere? Yes, and he did all sorts of miracles in places outside of Israel, but the land was important for God’s mission of rescuing the world through Jesus. His chosen people, the Jews, had to escape slavery in Egypt in order to get the land. After they were out of Egypt and in their own place, they had to keep the land by worshipping God and staying under his protection. Towards the end of the Old Testament, the Jews lost the land because they worshipped other gods and didn’t take care of the poor. Then, they had to get back the land. Stories about the Israelites getting, keeping, losing, and getting back the land make up a lot of what you will read in the Old Testament. An interesting side note is that the Old Testament predicted that they would lose the land again, get spread all the way around the world, and eventually come back again. That’s exactly what happened in 1947, after the Jewish people spent nearly 2,000 years without a country of their own. God said it, and it came true!

At this point, God has his special people and his special land. It’s good for us to remember that whenever God blesses us, his purpose is for us to spread that blessing to others. The Jews were no different. They didn’t exist to be “a light to themselves.” They weren’t supposed to just sit around and enjoy being so holy. Their purpose was to bless the everyone else by showing people what the true God is like and by bringing humankind’s savior into the world.

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UNDERSTANDING THE OLD TESTAMENT: ISRAEL AND GOD’S PLANPart 3- The Kingdom, the Priesthood, and the Law

Any nation on the planet would have to have people and land to exist. As we have seen, God chose a specific group of people and a specific piece of land to make the nation of Israel. If we know that God was using this nation to bring Jesus into the world, then we know why the Jews and the land of Canaan are so important in the Old Testament. In addition to 1) the people and 2) the land, there are three more important features of Israel that help us understand the whole Old Testament: 3) the kingdom, 4) the priesthood, and 5) the Law.

The KingdomGod did not leave the Israelites to fend for their selves, but promised to be with them.

They needed direction, because otherwise they were “like sheep without a shepherd,” as Jesus said in Matt. 9:36. Who is worthy to be the ruler of God’s people? The answer is obvious! God himself would lead them. This is what he did for a little while, giving people guidance through prophets, or people who speak for God. The prophets spoke for God and helped solve court cases, but it was God that was in charge.

One of these prophets was named Samuel. It was during his time as a prophet in Israel that everything changed:

Finally, all the elders of Israel met at Ramah to discuss the matter with Samuel. “Look,” they told him, “you are now old, and your sons are not like you. Give us a king to judge us like all the other nations have.”Samuel was displeased with their request and went to the Lord for guidance. “Do everything they say to you,” the Lord replied, “for they are rejecting me, not you. They don’t want me to be their king any longer.” (1 Samuel 8:4-7)

Notice what God says? The Israelites want a human king so that God would not “be their king any longer.” This means that God had been their king before that, but now there would be a human king.

How do you think a human king will do compared to God himself? As you might have guessed, they don’t do too well. In fact, the only kings who are successful are the ones who truly worshipped God and served him. When the human king put God first, this put God more in charge than the human king, since the king would do whatever God led him to do. Whenever the king turned away from God and went his own way, the people suffered.

So, a human king could be great for Israel as long as he allowed God to be the real king by doing whatever God commanded. However, it usually didn’t happen that way. Most kings focused on what they wanted rather than what God wanted, and the results were disastrous. Israel only lasted through two kings until they had a massive civil war that ripped the country in

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half. Then the kings of one half of the country (the northern part, called “Israel,” “Ephraim,” or “The Northern Kingdom”) worshipped other gods and eventually got kicked off of their land. The other half (called “Israel,” “Judah,” or “The Southern Kingdom”) did a little better. They had a few good kings who followed God, but eventually they got so far away from following God and loving others that they were taken out as well. After they got kicked off of their land, they were eventually allowed to come back, as God had promised centuries before:

[W]hen you are living among the nations to which the Lord your God has exiled you, take to heart all these instructions. If at that time you and your children return to the Lord your God, and if you obey with all your heart and all your soul all the commands I have given you today, then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes. He will have mercy on you and gather you back from all the nations where he has scattered you. Even though you are banished to the ends of the earth, the Lord your God will gather you from there and bring you back again. (Deut. 30:1-4)

This doesn’t seem like a very good system. What, are they just going to keep rebelling against God, getting destroyed, turning back to God, and coming back to the land? Wouldn’t they just rebel again and start the whole process over? Yes, and that is exactly what happened for many years (see figure 2). A lot of what you read in the Old Testament is about that process. If the part of the Bible you are reading talks about a King of Israel, Ephraim, or Judah, then pay attention to what they do. If they serve God and protect the poor in the land, then they are keeping their land under God’s protection. If the king is worshipping other gods and mistreating the people, then he is taking them one step closer to destruction. Each of the 40 or so kings you will read about in the Old Testament is either pushing God’s people toward him or away from him.

What is God going to do about this situation? If you guessed that God’s solution has something to do with Jesus, then you’re starting to catch on! Jesus is the answer: the human

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Figure 2- Israel’s cycle of rebellion.

king who is also God himself! One of the greatest prophets, Isaiah, spoke these words about Jesus before he lived on earth:

For a child is born to us, a son is given to us. The government will rest on his shoulders. And he will be called: Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. His government and its peace will never end. He will rule with fairness and justice from the throne of his ancestor David for all eternity. (Isaiah 9:6-7)

What do you notice about this king described in this passage? He will sit on the throne of Israel (David’s throne—David was one of the great kings of Israel). He will rule forever and be fair and just. He is actually God himself!

Did you notice the part where it said this man/king/God would die for our sins and rise from the dead? Take a closer look back at it... it’s not there! Why does it say that Jesus is going to show up and rule the world? The answer is simple: because Jesus is going to show up and rule the whole world. Many passages in the Old Testament talk about God reigning as a mighty king in Israel, ruling over the whole world from there. These promises refer to Jesus. They just happen to be about what Jesus will do the second time he shows up on earth. That’s right, Jesus did live 2,000 years ago, and he’s going to come back, maybe very soon. The first time he came, he hung on a cross to save the world. Next time, he will sit on a throne to rule the world.

If Jesus had wanted to, he could have showed up the first time, destroyed all evildoers and set up his righteous kingdom right then and there. He’s so powerful, he could have done that without any trouble at all. There would only be one problem: he would be the only one in his kingdom! Remember the problem with humanity we talked about earlier? We are all sinners! If Jesus wiped out evil, there would be no one left to enter his kingdom. So, he decided to do something unthinkable: even though he was the righteous, mighty king, the glorious creator of the world, he showed up as a man to be punished and killed so that we could be forgiven! Now that there are actually some people who are forgiven and don’t need to be punished, Jesus can show up and set up his kingdom! And all of us who have put our faith in Christ get to be a part of it! How awesome!

One of these days, and no one knows exactly how far off it is, Jesus will show up, slay the wicked who remain unforgiven, rescue the sinners who are forgiven (like me!) and bring us into his Kingdom. His kingdom will be global, over the whole earth. But guess where the center of his rule will be? Right smack dab in the middle of the original chosen land, Israel! The weird part is that most people that live there right now don’t even believe in him! I bet they’re going to be pretty shocked when he shows up....

Before that day comes, we have a chance to expand Jesus’ kingdom by telling other people about how they can be saved like us. Everyone we reach with the Good News has a chance to enter into God’s Kingdom by putting their faith in Jesus. This spreads God’s kingdom, not just his salvation, because we become “citizens of heaven” when we receive Christ (Phil. 3:20). We can also live kingdom-style lives, where we allow Jesus to be king of our hearts and

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make a difference here on earth through us. The Kingdom of God is any place where what God wants to happen is happening. When Jesus comes back, he’s going to take everything by force, taking control of the world that rightly belongs to him. (He did create the world, after all.) Before that day, we can choose to let God’s kingdom have an impact in us and around us by putting ourselves under God’s control. This is how Christians can bring love, peace and equality to the world around them.

How does knowing about the kingdom in Israel help us understand the Old Testament as we read it? First of all, it helps us understand why the actions of the king are so important. He is in charge, and he is supposed to give that control over to God by giving his life to God. When he does, good things happen. When he doesn’t... you guessed it: disaster. That is the storyline of a lot of the Old Testament, like a couple hundred pages of it. It’s really helpful to read these stories because they help us to see our own need to closely follow our king, Jesus Christ. We don’t need a little bit of Jesus to make life better: we would be best off if we put Jesus first in every decision, treating him like the King he is.

Another benefit we get from understanding the kingdom is that we appreciate Jesus more. It’s not just that we see his great power and glory as a king, although that is really cool. It’s also that we start to appreciate how amazing it is that a king died for me. Jesus wasn’t just a savior. That was the king of Israel that hung on the cross, the king of the world that bled and died for me! God paid an incredible price to save me! My salvation “was not paid with mere gold or silver, which lose their value. It was [paid with] the precious blood of Christ, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God” (1 Pet. 1:18-19).

The PriesthoodOne of the most difficult parts of the Bible to understand is the religious practices that

God calls Israel to do in the Old Testament. He tells them specific things to wear and to eat, certain materials you could build with, and all sorts of strange hoops to jump through in order to worship God. He even has them sacrificing animals! (Usually, they would still use the meat and everything, so it’s not that much different than a butcher shop... but still it seems a little weird to modern readers.)

What was God trying to show them with all of this stuff, and why don’t we see people following these same practices today? The answer is that God was teaching them about how holy and unreachable he is, so that when Jesus came they would realize how amazing it is that God would accept them. The temple in the Old Testament was where people went to worship God, to draw near to him. But what the Israelites learned there is that God is actually very far away. So far away, in fact, that the people could not even worship God directly at the Temple. Sure they could study the scriptures, pray, and serve others—those practices have always been important. But they could not worship God themselves at the Temple: they had to rely on priests to approach God for them.

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The basic idea is that God is so much better than humans that we need a priest as a go-between to be able to communicate with God. Another word for this go-between is mediator. If two people are in a disagreement and can’t see eye to eye, they might get a mediator to help them communicate, someone to stand between the two people and bring them together.

What was the job of this priest, this middle-man between God and the rest of us? Part of his job was to represent God to the people, teaching the people what God says and what God wants them to do (see figure 3). But really, anybody who knew the scriptures could do that.

The biggest job that the priest had was not to represent God to the people, but to represent the people to God (see figure 4). The priest would go to God and say, “Here is what the people have to say to you and what they have to bring to you.”

The rest of the people were far too lowly and sinful to be able to worship God directly, right? They were too lowly, too weak and small and insignificant to barge into God’s house and dig through the refrigerator, so to speak. God wanted them to understand that he is WAY up there and people are WAY down here. One passage tells us that he “lives in light so brilliant that no human can approach him” (1 Tim. 6:16). All of the little rituals that the Jews had to do would help them remember this point. There are dozens and dozens of ways that the Jews could become “unclean” by doing normal, day-to-day things. Being unclean was not the same thing as being sinful. If you were unclean, that meant you would have to do some special washing, where a special outfit, see a special person, and possibly wait a certain amount of time before you could even come close to the temple! That’s how low the Israelites were compared to God: unless they took extremely careful measures, they could not even come near him.

What’s the point? What is God telling the Israelites? He’s telling them that he is not their bro. He is not their equal. “’I am a great king,’ says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, ‘and my name is feared among the nations!’” (Mal. 1:14).

And it’s not just that he’s so big and they’re so small. It’s also that he’s so righteous and we’re so evil. In another passage a prophet is speaking to God and describing him: “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing” (Hab. 1:13). That’s

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Figure 3- Priest represents God to the people.

Figure 4- Priest represents the people to God.

bad news for me! I do wrong all the time! That would mean I could not approach God unless I had some kind of priest, some mediator between God and myself.

Part of the picture God wants the Israelites to understand is that their wrong deeds deserve punishment. This is where the animal sacrifices came in. In Leviticus 16, God describes to Moses the process of making sacrifices for the people’s sin. The basic idea is that the people can either be punished for their own sin and suffer their own death, or else they can bring God a substitute, someone or something that can die in their place. The passage says that the priest “will lay both of his hands on the goat’s head and confess over it all the wickedness, rebellion, and sins of the people of Israel. In this way, he will transfer the people’s sins to the head of the goat” (Lev. 16:21).

Do you see any problems with this way of being made right before God? I see at least two big problems, and they are described in detail in the book of Hebrews in the New Testament:

1. How is a priest any better than anyone else? If the point is that people are too lowly and sinful to approach God, how is another person, the priest, going to help that at all? The priests are going to be just as lowly and sinful as anyone else!

2. How is an animal going to be a fair sacrifice in place of a human? They aren’t even close to the same!

Yes, there were serious problems for people who wanted to be made right with God by a human priest through animal sacrifices. The problem was that it wouldn’t work! That’s not how you are made right with God! We learn that from the story of Abraham, which tells us that Abraham was made right with God when he believed what God said (Gen. 15:6). Even in the Old Testament, they were saved by faith. What is God up to, here? Did God screw up? Why is he having priests make sacrifices for the people when faith is the real answer? In the book of Hebrews, we learn that God didn’t really desire sacrifices and offerings. Even the Old Testament tells us that this whole priestly sacrificial system was temporary and not as important as having a right attitude toward God (Hos. 6:6).

So, why did God appoint priests if they were not actually able to be the go-between between God and people? And why did God have them sacrifice animals if those sacrifices weren’t able to pay for their sins? The priesthood with its sacrifices existed so that when Jesus, the real priest, showed up, we would be able to understand what Jesus was all about. The Bible tells us that all of the rules about the temple, the sacrifices, the washings, and the rituals only existed so that they could be replaced by Jesus:

For that old system deals only with food and drink and various cleansing ceremonies—physical regulations that were in effect only until a better system could be established. So Christ has now become the High Priest over all the good things that have come. He has entered that greater, more perfect [holy place] in heaven, which was not made by

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human hands and is not part of this created world. With his own blood—not the blood of goats and calves—he entered the Most Holy Place once for all time and secured our redemption forever. (Heb. 9:10-12)

Jesus was meant to be the real priest, not other people! Jesus was meant to be the real sacrifice, not some animal! This explains John the Baptists weird greeting when he sees Jesus walking up: “Look! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29)! Basically, the priesthood taught the people that they were far from God and something big needed to happen in order for them to enter God’s presence. They were too small and insignificant to approach God. They were too corrupt and sinful to escape God’s judgment. How could they ever enter the presence of a holy God? The only way would be if God became one of us, sacrificed his life for us, and rose from the dead to be the go-between priest between God and people. And that’s exactly what he did for us! Jesus is our priest, which means we don’t need other human priests anymore.

What was the point of all of those rules and rituals then? They showed the Jews that approaching God was a really big deal. You have to say, do, eat, and wear the right things to go into the Temple. That showed the people what their biggest problem was: they were far from God. But with Jesus, we are brought near! Hebrews 4:16 tells us that we can “come boldly to the throne of our gracious God.” If we have received Christ, we are brought so near to God that we can march right up to his throne! Two chapters before that, it even says that Jesus calls us his brothers and sisters! And the priesthood system shows us how crazy it is that we get to just talk with God and hang out with him. We should have to be separated from God and go through all of these crazy steps to be able to approach him, but Jesus took all of that distance away when he took away our sin on the cross.

Now that we understand what all the weird rituals, holy places, priests, and sacrifices are about, we should be able to understand the Old Testament much more easily. First of all, we’ll realize that we don’t have to follow all of those rules just because they are in the Bible! They existed for a little while, and they served their purpose. Since the whole point was to prepare people for the coming of Christ, we don’t use them anymore. Second of all, understanding the priesthood will help us be really thankful that we don’t have to jump through any hoops—we can just talk straight to God because we have Jesus as our priest, which gives us forgiveness and closeness with God. So, as you read your Bible, watch for little comments or descriptions from before Jesus came that talk about how distant God seems, and see if those things change after Jesus comes.

The LawThe last major feature of Israel in the Old Testament is the Law. Every nation has to

have some kind of law, and God’s chosen people, the nation of Israel, were no different. Do

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you remember learning about the United States first becoming a country in school? One of the first things they did was write a constitution, which listed off all of the rules and laws the people and the government had to follow. Israel had a constitution, too, but since they were God’s chosen people, God wrote their constitution. A shortened version of it is the book of Deuteronomy, the fifth book in the Bible. “There is one God and one Mediator who can reconcile God and humanity—the man Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 2:5).

A constitution is really an agreement between people. For example, there are laws in our constitutions that have consequences. If you steal, you go to jail. If you drive too fast, you pay a fine. If you make money here, you have to pay taxes. If you build a building in a way that helps the environment, you can pay less taxes than everyone else. An agreement between two people or two groups is called a covenant. (Remember God’s covenant with Abraham?) If you are going to understand the Bible, you have to understand covenants, because God makes covenants with people all the time. It simply means there is an agreement between us and God.

The Law was one of those covenants. The New Testament books refer back to the Law as the Old Covenant, an old agreement between God and the people of Israel. What did that agreement say? It had all sorts of commandments that they were supposed to follow. If they followed the Law, they stayed on God’s good side. If not, they would be punished by God and he would stop protecting them from their enemies (Deut. 28).

What kind of rules did they have to follow? First of all, there were rules about how they were supposed to worship God at the Temple, such as instructions for what the people are supposed to do there and what the priests’ duties were, like we talked about in the “priesthood” section above.

Second of all, there were some rules that were simply there to make Israel different from other nations. There were certain things they weren’t allowed to do or eat that had nothing to do with anything that God really cares about, like love and justice. These laws also had nothing to do with right and wrong. They existed simply to make Israel weird. For example, they could eat fish but not shrimp. They could eat beef, but not pork. They were allowed to wear any kind of fabric, but they could not wear anything that had two different types of fabric stitched together. Why did God care about these things? It was because he wanted Israel to be different. They were his special people, so they weren’t like everyone else. Their weird clothes and weird diet would remind them that they are different, that they were never meant to blend in with the other nations. A lot of these weird practices helped them to keep living like Israelites even when they weren’t living in Israel, like times when Israel was destroyed and they were kicked out of their land.

The third type of rule that we find in the Law is the most normal kind: rules about right and wrong. These rules taught them how to live godly lives and how to treat people well. Many of these rules focus on being kind to poor and hurting people, like orphans and widows.

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Remember, these rules came from God himself, so his definition of right and wrong is correct! This is because he is completely righteous and good. And he’s strict, too, as you’ll see if you read the laws!

Since Israel was a nation, breaking the law was not just a bad thing to do, it was a crime. There were punishments laid out for the different crimes, just like the laws in any other country. You might not think it’s a big deal to break one of Israel’s laws because you don’t live in Israel, but remember that the laws reflect what God says is right and wrong, and there are punishments! This is bad news for us because we all sin: “For all sin and all fall short of God’s glorious standard” (Rom. 3:23). What is God’s “glorious standard” that we are supposed to live by? It’s the rules and commandments that God gave to Israel, things like treating other people how we want to be treated, helping the poor, and loving God completely. What happens to us if we don’t follow the law? Again, the Book of Romans has the answer for us:

He will judge everyone according to what they have done. He will give eternal life to those who keep on doing good, seeking after the glory and honor and immortality that God offers. But he will pour out his anger and wrath on those who live for themselves, who refuse to obey the truth and instead live lives of wickedness. There will be trouble and calamity for everyone who keeps on doing what is evil...” (Rom. 2:6-9).

So, if we are righteous we get life and God’s blessing, but if we are evil we get death and God’s anger. But wait a second! We already saw that “all sin and all fall short!” So, how can we be made right before God by following the law? The Bible’s answer is crystal clear: we can’t! None of us can, because of our sinful nature! Remember Adam? He’s still affecting us today since he gave us a sinful nature, which means we choose against God’s ways all the time. So, what’s the solution? You guessed it! It’s Jesus again! Once again, Romans 3:20-25 is so helpful it deserves to be repeated:

For no one can ever be made right with God by doing what the law commands. The law simply shows us how sinful we are. But now God has shown us a way to be made right with him without keeping the requirements of the law, as was promised in the writings of Moses and the prophets long ago. We are made right with God by placing our faith in Jesus Christ. And this is true for everyone who believes, no matter who we are. For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard. Yet God freely and graciously declares that we are righteous. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins. For God presented Jesus as the sacrifice for sin. People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed his life, shedding his blood.

Jesus’ sacrifice for us covers the fact that we fail to keep the law! If we have put our trust in him, Jesus has got us covered because he already died for us and lived a perfect life. In

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other words, he followed the law for all of us. This is what Jesus meant when he said he came to “accomplish the purpose of the law” (Matt. 5:17). Now we are free from the law, as the New Testament tells us in a dozen different ways (like Romans 6:14). Praise God that we don’t have the law hanging over our heads anymore! We now relate to God with what Jesus calls “The New Covenant,” where we receive grace from God because of what Jesus did, not because of what we do. (“Grace” is an important word that means “free gift,” or “getting treated better than we deserve.”)

So, if Jesus fulfilled the Law already, does that mean we should rip that section out of our Bibles? Absolutely not! Just because we don’t have to follow those rules to be on God’s good side, that doesn’t mean the Law is useless to us. In fact, the Law has two very important uses.

First of all, the Law helps us understand what is right and what is wrong. We usually know the difference between right and wrong already. The hard part is doing it, not knowing it! However, there are some areas that really are confusing, so it’s good to have God’s law to let us know what is right and wrong in different situations. For example, some people honestly believe that it is okay to refuse to share their money and possessions if they worked really hard to earn them. If people who believed that read God’s law, they would learn that they were wrong—it doesn’t matter how we got our money and possessions, the right thing to do is to be generous, no matter what.

Unfortunately, learning what is right and wrong doesn’t make doing the right thing any easier. If we want to live right, we’ll have to turn to God himself for help, not to the commandments. The law is like a hurdle: it shows you how high you are supposed to jump, but it doesn’t help you jump any higher! This brings us to the other reason that the law is useful: the Law helps us see that we can’t do it on our own and we need God’s help. Before someone puts their faith in Christ, they might feel like they are a decent person and they don’t need any forgiveness from God. However, if they read God’s Law, they would learn just how much they do need forgiveness! You don’t get how hard it is to live a righteous life until you really try to do it right. Learning what God commands in the Law will make you want to give up and put your trust in Jesus instead. As Galatians 3:23-24 says: “The law was our guardian until Christ came; it protected us until we could be made right with God through faith. And now that the way of faith has come, we no longer need the law as our guardian.”

So, the commandments in the Law are so hard to keep that they help non-believers turn to Jesus and put their trust in him. But what about us that already have received Christ? The Law can do the same type of thing for us. In Romans 7, Paul talks about wrestling with sin in his life. He knows what the law commands and he wishes he could follow it, but he keeps on sinning! Do you ever feel that way? I do pretty often, and it’s no fun! Thankfully, instead of just giving up, Paul shows us the way out of that struggle. We have to realize we aren’t good enough to live a godly life on our own, so we desperately need God’s help. Instead of just

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trying to follow all the rules, we try to develop a closer relationship with God, so that he will transform us. Then, we’re letting God do the work instead of trying to do it on our own. The Law helps us realize it’s too hard, and we need Jesus’ help every day. Here’s how Paul puts it: “This power [of sin] makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death? Thank God! The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 7:23-25).

So, how does understanding the Law of Israel help us avoid being confused when we read the Old Testament? When we realize that Jesus fulfilled the Law, we are free from feeling guilty about all the things we do wrong. Sometimes it’s hard to read the Bible because every new chapter I read is like a list of fifty things I’m not doing right! That’s why it’s so important to remember Jesus when you are reading passages in the Bible that give lots of commands. Yes, they do tell us the way we are supposed to live, but they also tell us the way Jesus lived for us, doing everything we need in order to get us on God’s good side. He accomplished the Law, so it’s no longer up to us to do so.

Also, understanding the different purposes of the law will help us with some confusing questions. You might read a passage from the Old Testament where God tells the people of Israel to do something. You might ask yourself, “Is this something that I am supposed to be doing too, or is this only something just for ancient Israelites and not for modern Christians?” That is a very good question! We are getting into some advanced Bible reading here, so if you find it confusing, that’s okay!

When you read the Law, if you want to know if you are reading a command that we should still follow today, you should try to figure out the answer to these questions:

1. Is this a commandment just telling Israel how they are supposed to be different? If the answer is “yes,” then it’s not something we should try to follow today. Some of these are really obvious, but others are hard to tell. One easy one is the command for the Israelites to let their sideburns grow really long (Lev. 19:27). How is that the right thing to do? Obviously, it’s not right or wrong. God just told them to keep their hair like that to help them to be different from the other nations. One that is a little more difficult is the very next verse, which commands Israelites not to get tattoos (Lev. 19:28). Was that just for Israel to be different from their neighbors, or is it actually wrong to get permanent drawings on our bodies? Christians disagree about this. Personally , I believe that it was merely a way to make Israel unique and not something God doesn’t want people to do today, but some Christians disagree.

2. Is this commandment directly telling me what is right or what is wrong? If the answer is “yes,” then it is something that we should try to follow today, with God’s help of course. Here are some examples of commands in the Law that tell us what is right for everyone, not just ancient Israel:

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Deut. 6:5 “And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength.”

Ex. 20:13 “You must not murder.” Deut. 16:19 “Never accept a bribe.”

3. Is this commandment about something specific for Israel that still has a lesson to teach us today? If the answer is “yes,” then we should pray and try to figure out what we could learn from this commandment. These commands are difficult to understand, and it is hard to see how they apply to my life today. However, if you really use your brain, you might see an important lesson in something that God told the Israelites to do. Here are some examples of commands given to an old situation that might still have some fresh lessons for us:

Deut. 22:8 “When you build a new house, you must build a railing around the edge of its flat roof. That way you will not be considered guilty of murder if someone falls from the roof.” You might be wondering, why in the world would God care how they built their houses? Why did it matter what was on their roof? The answer is that back in the day, people would hang out on their roofs all the time! God was concerned with their safety, and he made the person building the house responsible. It was the builder’s job to make it safe. If the builder didn’t put a railing on his roof and someone ended up falling off of it, he couldn’t just say, “It’s not my problem—they should have watched their step!” God commanded that they build it in such a way that they are thinking about the safety of others. Does this mean we should put railings on our own roofs? Of course not! Why not? Because we don’t hang out on our roofs nowadays. It wouldn’t make sense to follow that commandment word-for-word. However, do you see any ways that people could still follow the lesson inside that commandment in today’s world?

Lev. 3:6 “If you present an animal from the flock as a [sacrifice] to the Lord, it may be a male or a female, but it must have no defects.” Clearly this command is not one that we are supposed to follow word-for-word today, because we don’t make animal sacrifices any more. However, is there a lesson inside this command to offer only animals that are healthy and strong? Consider what God says about it later when his people are not following this command: “Cursed is the cheat who promises to give a fine ram from his flock but then sacrifices a defective one to the Lord. For I am a great king,” says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, “and my name is feared among the nations” (Mal. 1:14)! What is God so upset about? He is bothered that they are not treating him as the king he is. They think they can give God their second best and it’s no big deal. “Who

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cares?” they were probably saying. “We’ll keep the fine animals for our flocks and sacrifice the crappy ones to God—I’m sure he won’t mind.” As it turns out, God did mind! He was very angry that they did not want to offer him the best they had. Get the picture? Do you see any way that we could still follow the heart of this commandment, even though we aren’t going to follow it word-for-word?

Understanding the role of the Law and the way that God set up his commands to his people Israel will bring much clearer understanding to your personal time reading the Old Testament.

Conclusion and ReviewWhat have we learned about God’s chosen people, the nation of Israel? First and

foremost, their job was to prepare the way for Jesus. All along, they were to “become a great nation” so that “all families on earth will be blessed through them” (Gen. 12:1-3). We saw five features of the nation of Israel that God used to bring the savior into the world:

1. The People- Abraham’s kids: the family God chose to teach the world about God and bring Jesus into the world.

2. The Land- The Land of Canaan: A place for the chosen people to live, and the place where God’s kingdom is centered. Why? Because that’s where the message of Jesus started when it spread to all the world, and that’s where Jesus’ throne will be when he comes back.

3. The Kingdom- God was supposed to be their king: When human kings turned away from God, disaster followed, but Jesus who is both God and a human king will rule over everything perfectly.

4. The Priesthood- The go-between between God and the people of Israel: The Israelites learned that they were so far from God that they needed weird rituals and sacrifices, until the real priest, Jesus Christ, showed up and brought them near to God.

5. The Law- God’s rules for Israel: When the rules were broken, punishment had to follow. Jesus followed the Law perfectly and took our punishment, leading us to trust in the God who wrote the rules, rather than trusting in the rules themselves.

Pretty much everything you read in the Old Testament will have something to do with one or more of those five features of Israel. So, don’t be afraid to crack open that Old

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Testament! Keep these ideas in mind, be ready to think hard, and ask God to teach you something new. You will be shocked at how much you get out of it! In the New Testament, we are taught that “All Scripture is inspired by God.... God uses it to prepare and equip his people to do every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16). Sometimes we forget that this includes the Old Testament! God has given us this awesome, huge book in order to make our lives better and help us serve him. Let’s make the most of it by trying to understand it clearly, keeping in mind God’s plan through the centuries of using the nation of Israel to prepare the way for Jesus.

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