The Bible is God’s communication to mankind to let us know what is going on in our relationship with Him.  The Bible is divided into two main sections.  the Old and New Testaments.  The word testament is related to the word testify.  The idea is to give evidence of something that we know about.  In Jesus’ time the “Old Testament” was called the Scripture or Scriptures, the word means writings.  Peter includes the writings of Paul in this category when he mentions them in one of his letters (2 Peter 3:16).  So the New Testament is part of the “Scriptures”  too.  Through out the Bible it refers to it’s self as the Word of God.  Paul told Timothy that all Scripture was breathed out by God and that it is useful for making us ready to live for God (2 Timothy 3:16-17).  Peter told his readers that the meaning of the Scriptures is not up to men to decide because  it was not produced by men acting on their own.  He tells us that the men who wrote the various “books” of the Bible were moved by the Holy Spirit.  The idea is like a ship being moved by the wind.  In Paul’s second letter to the Corinthian church he talks about a part of the Old Testament and calls it  the Old Covenant (2 Corinthians 3:1-14).  A covenant is an agreement or contract.  The part of the Old Testament story he is specifically referring to is the story about Moses and the Law that he received on Mount Sinai (We will come back to this later in this article).  He also calls this Old Covenant a “ministry of death” and a “ministry of condemnation”.  The word ministry means “service”.  The idea is of a servant doing something for his master.  In this case it’s about Moses bringing God’s laws to the twelve tribes descended from Jacob (Who’s name is changed to Israel (Genesis 32:28)).  Paul also talks about a New Covenant in that same part of 2 Corinthians.  In 2 Corinthians 2:12-3:5 Paul is talking to the church about how he came and told them all about Jesus.  With respect to what he was doing he calls himself a minister of a New Covenant.  He says this New Covenant is “of the Spirit”and that the Spirit gives life (2 Corinthians 3:6).   He also calls his ministry a ministry of righteousness.  The author of Hebrews also talks about the Old and New Covenants in Hebrews 8-9.  In those chapters he tells us that God spoke to a portion of Israel’s descendants (Israelites) through Jeremiah (an Old Testament prophet) promising them a  new covenant.    According to the author of Hebrews a new contract was necessary because the Israelites had not lived up to their part in the contract.  Which leads us back to the Old Testament.

The Old Testament is the first part of God’s testimony to us about our relationship.  The Old Testament starts out in the very beginning of our story with God.  In Genesis God creates the whole universe and all that it contains.  As He creates the various part He tells us that they are good.  Not until He creates the first man, Adam, and his very necessary helper, Eve and places them both in the world created for them does God declare that it is very good.  Genesis 1 tells us that God had a job for mankind, to populate and rule the earth.  According to Genesis 2 God created a special place on the earth, a garden, and put Adam there and told him to take care of the garden.  God provided all sorts of food for Adam and Eve in the garden.  There was one tree however that they were not allowed to eat  from, the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  God told Adam that if they did eat from the tree that they would die that very day.

The Bible tells us that there are different parts of our being.  In Genesis  2:7 we get more details on how God made us.  It says He formed our bodies out of the “dust of the ground”.  But after He did that Adam was not alive.  God then “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”.  It was at that point that Adam became a living being.  The idea of life includes this idea of a union.  In the case of our physical life the union is between our bodies and our spirit or soul.  Keep this idea in mind for the next part of the story.

The Bible indicates that there are other beings in the universe which do not have a physical existence, they exist only as spirits.  They are called angles.  According to the Bible these creatures are created and originally lived with God.  The author of Hebrews calls them ministering spirits.  There also seems to be some rank among the angles.  At some point very early after the creation one of the high ranking angles decided he did not want to be a servant of God.  He convinced one third of the angles to rebel.  God banished them from living with Him.  The leader of the rebellion is identified several ways in the Bible.  He is called Satan (Job 1:6), the Serpent (Gen. 3:1), Star of the Morning (Lucifer; Is. 14:12), and the Devil (Mt. 4:1) to name a few.  According to Genesis 3 Satan wanted to spread his rebellion to mankind so he approached Eve in the garden of Eden and convinced her to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge.  She in turn convinced Adam to eat it.  After they ate it the Bible says that they realized that they were naked and covered themselves.  At this point in the story God makes his presence known in the Garden and Adam and Eve try to hide.  Although God knows where they are He calls out and asks them where they are and they come out of hiding.  God is a God of purity and rightness and justice and so God confronts them about their disobedience and lays out various punishments. The creation, God’s perfect environment for mankind will now wear out and require much more maintenance.  Childbirth will be painful.   And of course that original consequence, death.  In the story  it appears that Adam and Eve do not die that day, but that is because we associate death with our physical existence.  Their bodies did start to move toward physical death that day but we must keep in mind what life and death are.  Remember that Adam only came to life when his body and spirit were united.  In the same way physical death involves our spirits and bodies being separated.  The body then decays but the spirit of a man (or soul) continues to exist.  The death that Adam and Eve suffered that day is a much more important death, their souls (their existence) was separated from God.  They had lived face to face with God but now they were separated.   “Adam where are you?”.  God knew, that wasn’t the point.  The point was that they (and us) were no longer God’s friends.  Like Satan and his angles they (and we) were outcasts.  For what ever reason Satan and the his angles  were eternally banished for their rebellion, perhaps because they had lived with God in full view of all that He is, maybe for some other reason. Although God is just and wrong must be punished He is also a God of mercy, grace, and love and He had a plan to fix the situation for mankind.  At the time of the curse He promised Eve that one of her seed, her descendant, would eventually crush Satan.

The next part of the story helps us understand that we really need God’s help to fix our broken relationship.  First one  of Adam and Eve’s children kills his brother.  Cain tries to come to God in his own way while his brother, Able, evidently honors God according to some rule that God had given.   When God rejects Cain’s offering and accepts Able’s, Cain kills his brother.  The killing and self will does not end there but grows and grows to the point that God destroys almost all of mankind in a global flood.  God’s love for mankind and His mercy toward us shines through as he saves one man, Noah, and his family from the flood. From these 8 people the world was repopulated.  More importantly Eve’s descendants were not completely wiped out.  The promise would continue.  But the “fix” would be according to God’s plan not man’s.

From the newly growing population God chose a particular man, not a perfect man but a man who would be faithful, Abraham.  Eve’s “seed” would come through Abraham’s family.  Although Abraham would trust God he also would take matter into his own hands at times.  When he did it caused trouble.  God passed on the promise made to Eve to Abraham.  After many years without having children with Sarah, his wife, Abraham and Sarah took matters into their own hands and Abraham had a son with one of his servant.  That son was Ishmael and his descendants would be trouble for the promised son and his descendants later in the story.  Eventually Sarah did have a son at 91 years old, his name was Isaac.  Eventually Isaac had twins, Esau and Jacob.  Jacob was chosen by God as the son to whom the promise would pass.  Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel (See “What’s in a Name”), eventually had twelve sons.  The descendants of these twelve sons are known as the twelve tribes of Israel, the Israelites, or sometimes Israel (See “The Twelve?”).

Eventually Jacob’s children wound up living in Egypt with one of the sons, Joseph, overseeing Pharaoh’s kingdom.  400 year went by and Jacob’s family grew to perhaps two million people.  Several Pharaohs or kings came and went and the Egyptian people began to resent the Israelites.  The Israelites were made slaves in Egypt.  God’s plan was moving forward and He chooses one of the Israelites to “set His people free”.   Because of the growth of the Israelite population Pharaoh had issued a command that all Israelite boys were to be killed at birth.  One mother though hid her son and then put him in a basket by the Nile River.  Pharaoh’s daughter found the baby and adopted him.  This child, raised in Pharaoh’s home, was Moses.  When he was about 40 Moses went out to visit his relatives, the Israelites, and killed an Egyptian who was beating one of them.  The next day he confronted two Israelites who were fighting.  One of them confronted him about the killing the previous day and Moses fled out into the desert.  While in the desert he married and had children.  After another 40 years God appeared to Moses and told him to return and lead the Israelites away from Egypt to a new and better place.  Moses did not want to go, he was afraid of Pharaoh.  God offered Moses the help of his brother Aaron and he  returned.  Pharaoh was reluctant to allow two million slave to leave his kingdom and God struck Egypt with 10 plagues.  The final plague involved the death of all of the first born in the kingdom, except the first born of the Israelites.   The Israelites were instructed to pack their bags and prepare a certain meal involving slaughtering a lamb.  The blood of the lamb was to be put around the doors of their houses.  When the angel charged with killing the first born came he would pass over the houses that were marked.  This was the beginning of the feast of remembrance called Passover and the lamb was called the Passover lamb.  Pharaoh let the Israelites go and they were led by Moses out of Egypt into the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula.  At this point God had Moses go up onto a mountain where He communicated to Moses all of the laws which Moses was to use to rule the Israelites.  The laws were in the form of a contract or covenant with various promises by God and responsibilities for the Israelites.  There were also consequences for breaking the rules, just like in the Garden of Eden.  A summary of the law was engraved by God on two stone tablets, the 10 Commandments.  When Moses returned he found the people making false gods.  After a confrontation Moses presented God’s contract to the people who agreed to be a part of it.  Moses then lead the people to the boundary of the land promised to them.  Although God had led them this far and provided for their every need they were afraid to take the land.  God condemned the Israelite to wander in the wilderness until all the people over 20 died.  40 years passed and that generation did die off.  Moses, now 120 years old, led the people again to the boundary.  He too was prohibited from entering, he passed off leadership to Joshua, and went to the top of a nearby mountain to die.

The Israelites took the land but they did not drive out all of the inhabitants who lived there as they were told by God.  For many years they lived in the land half conquered.  Their hearts were only half conquered for God too.  They went through many cycles of rebellion and repentance.  Eventually they begged God for a “king like the nations” to lead them.  He gave them a king, who rebelled, Saul.  Then a king who loved Him, though not perfectly.  God promised this king, David, that one of his descendants would be the one who crushes Satan.  After David his son Solomon became king of the twelve tribes.  Upon Solomon’s death the kingdom was divided.  10 tribes to the north came to be known as Israel and 2 tribes to the south came to be known as Judah.  Sometimes the title Israel is applied to both together.  The northern kingdom soon turned it’s back on God.  The main place to worship and honor God in the united kingdom was in the capital at Jerusalem.  Jerusalem was in Judah’s territory and the northern kings felt they would lose power if their people worshiped there.  The Northern king made a new place to worship God but it was not in Jerusalem where God had said he should be worshipped.  The northern people started out worshipping God but not in God’s way, kind of like Cain.  They also were influenced by the people that had been allowed to stay in their midst, so they also worshiped idols.  After about 200 years of spiritual decline God used the nation of Assyria to judge Israel (the northern kingdom).  The Assyrians took many Israelites captive and spread them throughout their empire.  They also brought in more foreigners to intermarry with the remaining Israelites.  the descendants of these families came to be known as Samaritans in Jesus day.  the people of the southern kingdom, Judah, came to be known as Jew’s.  to the “pure” Jews of Jesus day the Samaritans were “half-breeds” and were often called “dogs”.  The Jews were disgusted by them.

The southern kingdom, Judah, did not stay spiritually true either.  After about another 100 years they too were judged by God for their unfaithfulness.  The southern kingdom was conquered by the Babylonian empire.  The Babylonian’s however kept the people together and move them to another part of the empire.  After 70 years of “captivity” the Babylonian king sent them back to the land and had their temple rebuilt.  God’s plan for Eve’s offspring, Abraham’s seed, David’s son was still on track.

The Babylonian empire was conquered by the Persians.  The Persians were conquered by the Greeks.  The Greek empire was divided and then taken over by the Roman empire.  At the time of Jesus the Romans were ruling over the Jewish people.  the Jewish people had not forgotten the promises however, though they preferred to focus on the promises to David about his kingdom being ruled by one of his sons forever.  The Old Testament called this promised coming king the Messiah, chosen one. At the time of Jesus there were many groups watching for this Messiah.  There were some men claiming to be him.  There were groups that resented the Roman rule and wanted to overthrow the Roman occupation.  The Zealots were one such group.  But of course God’s plan wasn’t just about a physical kingdom for a few families on the earth.  God’s promise to Abraham was that in his one seed all the families of the earth would be blessed.  This seed would crush Satan’s head and provide whatever was necessary to restore mankind’s relationship with God.  The price, spiritual death, that started with Adam’s disobedience would be paid, physical death would be conquered, and creation would be restored.  All would be made right again.

The Old Testament shows us God’s love and concern is for each individual. It also gives us a picture of God’s holiness or purity.  God will not look the other way at rebellion and disobedience.  God’s holiness demands that the price for disobedience (sin) be paid, his love and mercy provide a way for it to be paid for us.  The Old Testament also teaches us that man cannot keep a good relationship with God.  Adam and Eve had a perfect life and turned away from God.  After them mankind, left on it’s own did, not follow God but went their own way.  Even with all of the rules and regulations of the Law the Israelites could not keep a good relationship with God.  Paul wrote to the church in Rome that the Law does not make us right with God it just shows us how badly we fail (Rom. 3:20)  That is why the Old Covenant is a covenant of death.  Jesus, the Messiah, the coming one, was the offering for our sins.  Isaiah 53:6 says that all our sins would fall on the Messiah.  Paul told the Corinthian church that the message that he was bringing about Jesus was the “fragrant aroma” to God.  A fragrant aroma in the Old Testament was an offering of incense to God.  The death of Jesus for us is what pleased God.  The Old Testament helps us see that we need someone to take our place and that we need help.  It teaches us that we are sinners in need of a savior.  That is the Old Testament Connection.