Dan: (00:01)
Hi, and welcome to training for life redeemed. I’m Dan, and each week I am sitting down with my dad, Dr. David Jackson. He’s going to hate that to examine various sections of the Bible this week. We answer the question. What use is the Old Testament today? But first, let’s get dad to tell us a bit about himself.

David: (00:43)
What do you want to know about me?

Dan: (00:47)
tell us a bit about how you became a Christian maybe, and then work your way through to going to college years as a pastor, and then you spent a long time in education. So you can tell us a bit about that.

David: (00:55)
Okay. Um, I was born in a family where I think my mother might’ve been a Christian. My dad certainly wasn’t. Um, I grew up in a world of, in the 1950s and sixties of, uh, where everybody went to church three times a year. All the kids went to Sunday school, uh, and the adults were engaged in adultery, domestic violence, alcoholism, you name it anything. But, uh, and everywhere I looked, I found my extended family. It was just a train wreck. Uh, and around the age of 14, my mother said, you’re going to get, go up to church and get done. And my minister was a godly man who preached the gospel. And so in the process of reading my Bible and thinking it through, I sat down and asked God to let the rot stop with me. I didn’t want to grow up to be part of that train wreck. And he said, yes, that’s what Jesus does for us. He takes a life, that’s a disaster and turns it into something wonderful. And he’s done that for me. So I went on to be a school teacher trained in America, in theology at Westminster seminary came back, passed a couple of churches and then moved into Christian schooling.

Dan: (02:08)
All right. And so just by way of being true to who I am, I’m Dan, I’ve been a teacher for quite a long time. Uh, I have two degrees in Theology as well, and obviously was brought up in a household where both of my parents had multiple theological degrees as well. So I quite enjoy learning about the Bible. And so I’m very much looking forward to making this podcast regularly because I just, uh, looking forward to picking my dad’s brain every week and getting to know more and more and learning from him as I’ve done my whole life. So, uh, dad, today, people tend to find the old Testament difficult when they’re trying to study it or learn from it. Why do you think that is?

David: (02:50)
Well, the easier answer to that is with looking at a book that was written, uh, up to 4,000 years ago, some parts of it, uh, in another place at another time in another language and another culture. Uh, so obviously that’s difficult. Um, and as we read through it, the, we get started. We’ve got the Genesis story, um, Noah and the flood, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the exodus, that’s all very exciting. And then suddenly we’re building a tabernacle, sacrificing animals, counting how many rings go on the curtain. Um, and we give up and I think at that point, uh, people then are looking at that going, I can’t see the use of this stuff. Um, the stories are great, but the rest of it is just somewhere between boring. And I have no idea what I’m reading.

Dan: (03:41)
All right. So then what do we do? So if I read the new Testament and then I go back into the old Testament, I find a little bit confusing, or I think it might even contradict some of the stuff I’ve just read in the new Testament. What do I do with that? Yeah.

David: (03:54)
I mean, you read the gospels, you think, Oh, I’m back in story. This is great. There’s Jesus, everything exciting is happening. I’ve got a plan of salvation. The gospel is clear. Uh, I’ve engaged with Jesus. I’ve become a believer, but I find Judas constantly using the old Testament and many times he’s turning around and telling us that he’s changing it. So then when I go back and I read the old Testament, I’m thinking, well, why don’t I just stick with the new Testament and just not bother it doing the hard work.

Dan: (04:24)
Okay. So then that gets us to our big question for this whole podcast. And that’s, what are we supposed to do with the old Testament? It’s it’s there, it makes up the majority of the Bible, really? What do we do with it? It’s meant to be God’s word. And yet we find it hard. We find it difficult. How do we go about approaching it in a way that actually can benefit us?

David: (04:42)
Yeah, well, I think at that point, uh, that if we read the Bible the way Jesus read the Bible, this stuff is really, really exciting stuff. As you watch Jesus go through, uh, talking to people, engaging with people, preaching from the old Testament in synagogues, arguing with the Pharisees who misunderstood the old Testament. You’ll find that he’s constantly driving his people back to the text, telling them how he is the fulfillment of that text, which is pretty exciting. And so to understand Jesus, I’ve got to understand the old Testament and I’ve got to see what he’s done to fulfill all that it said. But then there’s another side of that story that I think we miss out when God put down his words in writing, he was teaching us not only how we get saved, but what to do once you are saved. So he’s not just redeeming us so that we punch our card and get a ticket to heaven.

David: (05:39)
When we die, he’s redeeming the life we’re living right now. And as I opened my Bible at Genesis one, it’s telling me that God designed me, the world, me and everything in it to work. And the problem with sin is we, it up, we break it. So as soon as we step off God’s design for life, everything gets broken. Our relationships, our bodies, our health, our environment, we just smash everything. We’re the most destructive species on the planet. And yet the old Testament is there as our, like God’s book of instructions for how to put together your Ikea furniture. Um, this is my life, not a piece of Ikea. And if you’ve ever tried to put a bit of furniture together out of a flat pack, and you’ve got the three bolts left over at the end, you don’t know what to do with, uh, that’s a mini version of what we do with the life God gave us.

David: (06:35)
We absolutely destroy it and just fool around with it, making it up. As we go along, God gave us his words to teach us how to make the, how to get life, right. Uh, and we need to go back to Genesis one, one, and work our way through those difficult passages. They’re there for a reason. And they explained to us how to get life, right? Once you commit to Christ and he is Lord, we live under his Lordship and then things start to work. We can start to fix what was broken. We heal the relationships. Would you undo some of the damage we’ve done to the planet? And we start to undo the damage we do to our life story. We start to live lives of eternal significance, but to do that, we’ve got to train for it. And I don’t think Christians are good at training. And then you’re a PE teacher. You can tell us about training. They’re definitely.

Dan: (07:33)
I look to, I like the fact. So you’ve said that when we’re reading the old Testament, Jesus fulfills it. And so as you read a passage, it should be looking at how Jesus might fulfill that passage. You’ve also talked about how the old Testament is like an instruction book for how we should be living our lives as redeemed people following Jesus. Uh, I’d also add a third thing there. I find the old Testament also is very revelational in the sense of showing us who God is, what he’s like, and just revealing his character in that as well. Do you have?

David: (08:03)
Yeah, well, the way he designed the world to work and the way he designed us to work as God’s image, we reflect his character. So sometimes I think when we go back and we’d read the old Testament, there’s lots of laws and instructions. There’s a bunch of Hebrew words there. These are commands, judgments, precepts, um, the case study decisions, uh, all designed to show you how to make the right choice to get life. Right. That right choice is a reflection of God’s character. People used to wear little wristbands that said, what would Jesus do? And my problem with that was, I don’t think they had a clue what Jesus would do because they were making it up as they felt like he would do rather than consulting the word of God. And they certainly, I didn’t find a lot of the people consulting the old Testament for that.

David: (08:52)
They’d go to the new. But when you go to the old Testament, you wrestling with his instructions, man, do they change the culture? I’ve got a young lady coming, hopefully tomorrow to do some carpentry work for me, she’s an apprentice. She’s going to be working here at an hourly rate. Leviticus 19 tells me, pay that woman on the day she does the job. Don’t make her wait for you to pay the invoice. There’s a way to get life, right. Uh, and it’s in Leviticus. It’s, there’s stuff there about how you, how you use your word, how you relate to people, um, how you spend your money. It’s all stuff that reflects the character of God. And it’s the way he designed life to work. And I don’t want to, I’m scared if I break that I break me and everybody around me and that that’s terrible. That that creates great pain.

Dan: (09:45)
Yeah. And I know that you’re actually been working really hard on this over the last probably two years. I think it’s been, um, where you’ve, you’ve noticed people who’ve really struggled with the old Testament. And so you started creating a little mini series where you’re going through writing small little kind of snippets chapters. If you want that kind of summarize particular pieces of the old Testament, I’m going to be working our way through a lot of what they say in this podcast series. But you want to say anything about how you do that.

David: (10:13)
I think when you opened the old Testament, the first thing you noticed is that the first five books of the law of Moses, we think of law as rules. And when we think of rules, we remember school and school uniform, and we think that’s dumb and stupid and frustrating. We finished year 12 and burned the uniform and got on with life. And then as laughing, we will tell that story later, but the joy of it is these instructions that we’ve got in the Torah. Then you’ve got to work out how to make it work. If God says, um, you know, pay the lady on the day she does the work. Uh, what happens with people who want to issue you with a 30 day invoice? Um, w w how does this work when you’re using a credit card, we’ve got to sit down and work out how life works by applying Torah.

David: (11:03)
And so we have the wisdom literature and the prophets who come along like a life coach, giving you a poke in the ribs when you get it wrong and a Pat on the back, when you get it right, and pointing you back to the Torah and explaining how to make it work. And it’s, it’s some people look at it and say, this is hard work, and I don’t want to do it. But if you get into it, it’s fun because suddenly it starts to your life starts to get back together again. And that’s really, really exciting. And as a high school teacher, I’ve had the great privilege of watching so many kids walk in the door whose entire life up to that point was a complete smash up, and then watch those lives transformed. As they sat there and looked into the character of God in the old and new Testament and started to live it.

David: (11:54)
And the number of kids have come up and tapped you on the shoulder years later and said, you know, I was that kid that you expelled. I got into drugs, I got into this, that, and the other. And I sat on my knees and said, I’d give up. The only time life made sense was sitting there opening a Bible. I want to be a Christian. I want to follow Jesus. And we’ve had so many of those emails over the years. We need to go back and do this thing. And it’s, it is training. It’s not easy. If God says I got to live a different way than the one I’m doing, that’s like changing a habit, like giving up smoking. It’s a hard decision, but you’ve got to stick to it.

Dan: (12:32)
Well, thanks for listening. You can grab the show notes and get a copy of the introduction to David’s. Mini-series at trainingforliferedeemed.com/ep1. Leave us a comment or a question that you might want to answer there as well. And if you enjoyed today, please take a moment and leave us a review. We would really appreciate that and make sure you tune in next week, when we dive in to Genesis chapter one,