Old Covenant

In CT magazine, writer Dikkon Eberhart shares his personal testimony of progression from theological drifter to Orthodox Jew to a born-again experience with Jesus Christ:

I grew up in the Episcopal Church. But in my high teens and young twenties I drifted. At seminary in Berkeley, California, during the 1970s—I created my own religion. I called it Godianity. Certainly, I believed in the existence of God, hence the name of my religion. But I didn’t know much about that Son of God fellow, and the little I did know seemed impossibly weird.

Then something happened. I married a Jew who was an atheist. Then my wife became pregnant and nine months later, our first daughter squirmed in her mother’s arms. Here’s the sudden realization of an atheist: Such a perfect and beautiful creature must be the gift of God, not the product of some random swirl of atoms. My wife’s atheism bit the dust. Her new God belief was Jewish. My Godianity should have taken notice. “Listen up!” it ought to have heard. “You’re in trouble, too.”

That trouble came five years later. Our daughter and I were swinging in a hammock under a tree on a windy day. Normally an eager chatterer, our daughter fell silent and then said, “Daddy, I know there’s a God.” I was enchanted. “How, sweetie?” She pointed at the tree and its leaves. “You can’t see God. He’s like the wind. You can’t see the wind, but the wind makes the leaves move. You can’t see God, but you know he’s there, because he makes the people move, like the leaves.”

My heart swelled with love for this perceptive child, but then she crushed me. She continued, “Daddy, what do we believe?” Really, what she was asking was, “Mommy’s kind of Jewish. You’re kind of Christian. So what am I?” And despite my three advanced religious degrees and seminary employment, I couldn’t answer.

In that instant, I shucked my Godianity. Right away, my wife and I retreated into an urgent executive session. She was a Jew who was no longer an atheist. We resolved, we shall raise our children as Jews. And we did—as Reform Jews. Yet I still teetered on uneven ground, conscious of being an outsider. Then something else happened. During services on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, God spoke to me: “If you should desire to come to me, my door is open to you.” Right away, I knew I needed to become a Jew myself, and three years later my conversion was complete.

For some time, my wife and I had noticed something: While Reform Judaism respects Torah, many Reform Jews themselves were selective in their adherence to its strictures. But we objected. We wanted a faith that wasn’t in the habit of accommodating itself to the surrounding culture.

Across our rural road, there happened to be a small Baptist church. Some of our neighbors had invited us to visit, in case we Jews should ever want to know more about Christ. We realized that—oddly—these neighbors seemed concerned for our souls.

More than a year later, desperate for direction, I crossed the road to the church one Sunday morning. That day, the pastor was preaching from 1 Timothy. I was astonished to hear a Baptist preacher using Old Testament references within his message—and with accurate Hebrew nuance. The pastor and I began meeting each week and my wife frequented the women’s Bible study. She and I began devouring book after book, faster and faster, thrilled by each new discovery of seemingly impossible truths that were actually true.

Even as a Jew, I knew the Passion story. But it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, that story might be real—and if it were, then everything would need to change. Our Torah-based lives would be as dead and ineffectual as Godianity. Instead, we would give our souls to the personal love of the Incarnation, the God-man who dwelt among us. We realized that the Old Testament begged for the climax of the New Testament.

It took nine months, an appropriate duration for re-birth, before I committed myself to Jesus. My wife did the same three months later. Our younger two children followed soon thereafter. When God spoke to me in the synagogue all those years ago, inviting me through his open doorway, I had assumed he was summoning me into Judaism. Little did I know he was actually calling me to Christ.

Here's an example of how a Christian might use the Old Testament law as the basis for ethical reflection. In Deuteronomy 22:8, Moses instructs the people, "When you build a new house, make a parapet around your roof so that you may not bring the guilt of bloodshed on your house if someone falls from the roof." A parapet is an extension of the exterior wall above roof level, resulting in a solid protective wall for anyone standing on the roof.

In ancient Israel the typical home had a flat roof on which lots of living took place. Occupants might sleep on the roof during the summer months, worship there, separate grain from chaff, or socialize. The practical function of a parapet is obvious, given the architecture and lifestyle of the Israelites.

In North America, we typically do not hang out on the rooftops. Most homes do not have flat roofs, and the only occasions on which we climb our peaked roofs are to clean out the gutters (or eaves troughs, for my Canadian hearers), or to replace the shingles. In these cases a parapet would merely get in the way. However, the principle of God's instruction is clear: the safety of the family and visitors to the home is the responsibility of a homeowner. Modern-day equivalents might include railings for our staircases, covers for our electrical outlets (if we have small children), and bracing for furniture such as dressers or bookcases so that they do not tip over. We could even extend our application of this command to clearing snow from our sidewalks so that passersby do not slip and fall on the ice. The point is that as members of the covenant community, it is our duty to look out for the well-being of those around us.

As a young Christian, pastor and author Tim Keller said, "I found the Old Testament to be a confusing and off-putting part of the Bible." But while he was at a study center someone asked the great Bible scholar Alex Motyer a question about the seeming disjointedness between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Keller writes:

I will always remember his answer … [Dr. Motyer] insisted that we were all one people of God. Then he asked us to imagine how the Israelites under Moses would have given their "testimony" to someone who asked for it. They would have said something like this:

We were in a foreign land, in bondage, under the sentence of death. But our mediator—the one who stands between us and God—came to us with the promise of deliverance. We trusted in the promises of God, took shelter under the blood of the lamb, and he led us out. Now we are on the way to the Promised Land. We are not there yet, of course, but we have the law to guide us, and through blood sacrifice we also have his presence in our midst. So he will stay with us until we get to our true country, our everlasting home.
Then Dr. Motyer concluded: "Now think about it. A Christian today could say the same thing, almost word for word."

My young self was thunderstruck. I had held the vague, unexamined impression that in the Old Testament people were saved through obeying a host of detailed laws but that today we were freely forgiven and accepted by faith. This little thought experiment showed me, in a stroke, not only that the Israelites had been saved by grace and that God's salvation had been by costly atonement and grace all along, but also that the pursuit of holiness, pilgrimage, obedience, and deep community should characterize Christians as well.

To illustrate the 400-years of silence prior to the coming of Jesus, Del Tackett compares it to the Apollo 13 incident. On the evening of April 13, when the crew was 200,000 miles from Earth and closing in on the moon, mission controller Sy Liebergot saw a low-pressure warning signal on a hydrogen tank in Odyssey. Alarm lights lit up in Odyssey and in Mission Control as oxygen pressure fell and power disappeared. The crew notified Mission Control, with, "Houston, we've had a problem."

For re-entry to the earth's atmosphere, there would be a blackout period, lasting a few minutes. During the silence, Mission Control petitioned, "Apollo 13, this is Houston, do you read me?"

Tackett comments:

The Apollo 13 blackout lasted only a few minutes. Imagine 400-years of silence. Then the silence was broken. At the right time, God brought forth his Son, born of a woman and fulfilled all the promises and the prophesies. For unto us a child is born, to us a Son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulders; and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor; Mighty God; Everlasting Father; Prince of Peace.

The nominally Jewish writer A. J. Jacobs spent a year working on an unusual experiment: he tried to put into practice everything he read in the Bible. The resulting book was called, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. For example, on Day 62 of his experiment he tried to put into practice the command to stone an adulterer. So he records wandering into Central Park and meeting a mid-70ish man sitting on a park bench. Jacobs told the man, "I'm trying to live by the rules of the Bible. The Ten Commandments, stoning adulterers …" Jacobs records the rest of the conversation:

"You're stoning adulterers?" the man asks.
"Yeah, I'm stoning adulterers."
"I'm an adulterer," the man replies.
"You're currently an adulterer?"
"Yeah, Tonight, tomorrow, yesterday, two weeks from now. You gonna stone me?"
"If I could, yes, that'd be great."
"I'll punch you in the face. I'll send you to the cemetery."

He is serious. This isn't a cutesy grumpy old man. This is an angry old man. This is a man with seven decades of hostility behind him. I fish my pebbles from my back pocket.

"I wouldn't stone you with big stones," I say. "Just these little guys." I open my palm to show him the pebbles. He lunges at me, grabbing one out of my hand, then flinging it at my face. It whizzes by my cheek.

I am stunned for a second. I hadn't expected this grizzled old man to make the first move. But now there is nothing stopping me from retaliating. An eye for an eye. I take one of the remaining pebbles and whip it t his chest. It bounces off.

"I'll punch you right in the kisser," he says.
"Well, you really shouldn't commit adultery."

Possible preaching angles: (1) Interpretation; Old Testament—This story illustrates the need to carefully interpret the Scripture and what they mean for us today. (2) Judging Others; Rebuking others—In a humorous way, this story also shows the futility of trying to change others' lives by judging their behavior.

The entire Old Testament is pregnant with the message of the Bible. In other words, we could say that the Old Testament is pregnant with the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is round with the gospel …. Granted, in the earlier stages of salvation history … the gospel is more difficult to detect, but as salvation history progresses the shape of and the promise of the gospel becomes more evident. So as we look throughout the Old Testament … we see it is increasingly easy to detect the specific contours and the specific content of the gospel …. The gospel is [in the Old Testament] in utero.

Haddon Robinson writes about something the apostle Paul could certainly identify with, namely, the tendency of the law to put ideas in our heads:

The law can prompt us to sin. I am told that several years ago a high-rise hotel was built in Galveston, Texas, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, they sank pilings into the gulf and built the structure out over the water. When the hotel was about to have its grand opening, someone thought, What if people decide to fish out the hotel windows? So they placed signs in the hotel rooms, "No fishing out the hotel windows." Many people ignored the signs, however, and it created a difficult problem. Lines got snarled. People in the dining room saw fish flapping against the picture windows. The manager of the hotel solved it all by taking down those little signs. No one checks into a hotel room thinking about fishing out of the windows. The law, although well-intentioned, created the problem.

The Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England is famous as the location of the prime meridian. It is a remarkable location. People often take pictures of themselves straddling the meridian, each standing with one foot in the Eastern Hemisphere and the other foot in the Western Hemisphere.

However, the prime meridian itself is not physically impressive. In fact, you would not realize it was there at all if it were not for a bold line cut across the pavement. The demarcation is, in fact, of human invention. Prior to the International Meridian Conference of 1884, each local region kept its own time, a system that, if continued, would have rendered impossible our current arrangements for trade and commerce. While the meridian is humanly derived, its relation to the stars is not, and that heavenly correspondence allows us to find our place on the map and in the world.

The prime meridian came about through the work of John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, who made it his life mission to produce a proper navigational chart of the heavens, mapping the location of thousands of stars. Eventually, based on Flamsteed's work, scientists were able to help people find their position on the planet, allowing them to answer that fundamental question of philosophy and physics: Where am I?

The power of the prime meridian is that it is a fixed position through which our knowledge of time and place can be understood. This is a metaphor for the effect of the Bible in human life. The Scripture is our meridian. It is the fixed position, given by God himself, through which we can understand who we are, where we are, and where we must go from here.

In Newsweek, Rabbi Jacob Neusner writes about how he would respond to Jesus had he met him personally 2,000 years ago:

I can see myself not only meeting and arguing with Jesus, challenging him on the basis of our shared Torah, the Scriptures Christians would later adopt as the "Old Testament." I can also imagine myself saying, "Friend, you go your way, I'll go mine, I wish you well—without me. Yours is not the Torah of Moses, and all I have from God, and all I ever need from God, is that one Torah of Moses."

We would meet, we would argue, we would part friends—but we would part. He would have gone his way, to Jerusalem and the place he believed God had prepared for him; I would have gone my way, home to my wife and my children, my dog and my garden. He would have gone his way to glory, I my way to my duties and my responsibilities….

Only the Torah is the word of God. I think Christianity, beginning with Jesus, took a wrong turn in abandoning the Torah. By the truth of the Torah, much that Jesus said is wrong. By the criterion of the Torah, Israel's religion in the time of Jesus was authentic and faithful, not requiring reform or renewal, demanding only faith and loyalty to God and the sanctification of life through carrying out God's will. Jesus and his disciples took one path, and we another. I do not believe God would want it any other way.