Understanding the Old Testament An Overview of Genesis to Joshua David Gooding A Myrtlefield House Transcript www.myrtlefieldhouse.com Contents 1 Genesis 3 2 Exodus 13 3 Leviticus (1) 22 4 Leviticus (2) 30 5 Numbers 35 6 Deuteronomy 43 7 Joshua: an Introduction 51 Appendixes 1. New Testament Doctrines Based in the Old Testament 55 2. The Book of Exodus 56 3. Understanding Leviticus 58 4. Reading List 59 David Gooding has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Copyright © The Myrtlefield Trust, 2018 Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the English Revised Version of the Holy Bible (1885) or are Dr Gooding’s own translations or paraphrases. Scripture quotations marked ESV are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Holy Bible. This text has been edited from a transcript of four talks given by David Gooding at the Pillars Conference in Belfast (N. Ireland) during 2010 and 2011. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to reproduce this document in its entirety, or in unaltered excerpts, for personal and church use only as long as you do not charge a fee. You must not reproduce it on any Internet site. Permission must be obtained if you wish to reproduce it in any other context, translate it, or publish it in any format. Published by The Myrtlefield Trust PO Box 2216 Belfast BT1 9YR w: www.myrtlefieldhouse.com e: [email protected] Myrtlefield catalogue no: ot.004/pb 1 Genesis The topic for this series of talks is ‘Understanding the Old Testament’; more particularly the relationship between the New Testament and the Old Testament. For this first session we will be considering the book of Genesis. Trust the professor, or trust Christ? Let me begin by recounting to you an experience I had in my youth that has been formative ever since in my reading of the Old Testament. As a student, I studied Greek and Latin and, when I had finished the course, cash came unexpectedly in which I saw I could spend by attending a year’s course on Hebrew. So I went to listen at the feet of the professor of Hebrew. He not only tried to teach us Hebrew, but in addition gave us the benefit of his thoughts about the Old Testament. He told us, for instance, that it was quite impossible to think that Moses wrote the first two chapters of Genesis. I was all ears, of course, to find out what the reasons were, and he said, ‘That first chapter of Genesis is plain, straightforward monotheism. It preaches one God who made the whole universe. It’s impossible that Moses wrote that.’ ‘Why impossible?’ we wondered. ‘Well, you see,’ he said, ‘religion has evolved like the whole universe has evolved; so religion evolved. The first people were animists, like the modern Japanese Shintoists are animists. They felt that the tree was alive—it had a spirit in it, or the mountain had a spirit in it, and so they personalized all the features surrounding them. That’s how they began.’ I don’t know who told him, but that was his official verdict. And then he added, ‘Then, it evolved a bit further, you see, and they came from animism to polytheism. Polytheism means ‘many gods,’ and they deified what they saw: the sun god, and the moon god, and the storm god; and there are water gods, and the gods of the crops, and all these things. And then, of course, evolution being unstoppable, they proceeded to the next stage which was henotheism. Henotheism means that each nation had its own particular god. So, for instance, in Athens they appropriated Athena as the great goddess of Athens. From this henotheism, they then evolved to monotheism, the idea that there was one God of the whole universe. And that being so, Moses could not have written Genesis 1, the early stories of creation, because they presume just one God, and people hadn’t evolved that far in those days. It was not until after the exile, when the Jews were taken to Babylon and they mixed with the other nations, that they came gradually to the idea that there was one God among the many.’ Understanding the Old Testament P a g e | 4 How Jesus talked about the Old Testament I listened to this; it was all new to me, and he was after all a professor. It got a little bit at my faith, and disturbed me. And then I came to a decision. I would study what Christ, our Lord, said about the Old Testament, and if there were to be a conflict between him and the professor, I would choose to trust Christ. I hadn’t been long searching through the New Testament—I began at Matthew—before I came across a very interesting statement by our Lord. It is given in Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 19, at which point our Lord was discussing the question of divorce with various Jewish rabbis. At that stage in my life, I wasn’t considering divorce, so I was not interested in the matter! But I was interested in how he talked about it. In verse 4, we read, ‘And he answered and said, Have you not read, that he which made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and the two shall become one flesh.’ I found that intriguing. First of all, our Lord’s challenge to the rabbis, ‘Have you not read?’ The challenge comes to us still, doesn’t it? It would be embarrassing if our Lord said to us this morning, ‘Have you, Bob, and you, Jean, have you read this particular part of the Old Testament?’, and you had to say, ‘Well, sorry, Lord, I didn’t think that was important, so no, I’ve never read it anyway.’ ‘Have you not read?’ Christ is expecting us to be conversant with our Old Testament. ‘Have you not read,’ says he, ‘that he which made them’—that is God— ‘made them from the beginning male and female, and said’—God said it, the creator of heaven and earth said it—‘For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, that the two shall become one flesh.’ Here is our Lord affirming the written record of Genesis that it was God the creator who made this remark. Let’s look back at Genesis and see what the remark was. This is Genesis, chapter 2, and this chapter has told us about the creation of woman from the side of man, and how God brought her to Adam. Then in verse 23 we have Adam’s response: ‘And the man said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’ Thus far, we have Adam’s response to this lovely apparition who was Eve, but notice the next verse. That couldn’t have been said by Adam, could it? ‘Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother,’ for Adam didn’t have a father and a mother. So, we conclude in the first place that verse 24 must have been penned by the inspired writer of the book of Genesis. Let’s call him Moses; Moses said it: ‘Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.’ ‘Ah, but,’ says Christ, ‘since that was the inspired writer of the Old Testament who said it, it was in fact God our creator who said it: ‘He which made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, “For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother”’ (Matt 19:4). And you will say to yourself, ‘What on earth was a twenty-year-old student thinking about divorce for?’ Ah, but it had an impact in such a detail to have the authoritative word of our blessed Lord Jesus, that behind this verse stands God, the maker of the universe. This put me in the position where I had to decide. Should I trust the professor, or should I trust Christ? I’m glad I learned to trust Christ. I have since discovered over many years that what the professor was saying bordered on factual nonsense. I’m glad I trusted Christ, and learned not only to trust Christ, but his inspired apostles, whom he inspired to write the New Testament. Understanding the Old Testament P a g e | 5 The book of Hebrews says, ‘By faith we understand the worlds were made by the spoken word of God’ (11:3). It is interesting how the writer uses the plural ‘the worlds,’ if you like, ‘the ages,’ our present world. But it tells us this; that in the creation of the universe, each stage was initiated by the spoken word of God. There are two words in Greek for what, in English, becomes our English word, ‘word.’ This particular phrase in Hebrews 11 uses the Greek for a spoken word, and, of course, it agrees exactly with the account given in Genesis 1, where each stage of the creation is initiated by a spoken word of God.