I have a brother in Christ whom I care for and respect. We recently got into a discussion about the nature of the Old Testament; his position is that it is perfect and sufficient in an of itself – mine that without the New Testament, the Old Testament is incomplete and imperfect. As we are both believers, this isn’t a question of whether one of us is in error and needs to repent and be saved. It is, I think, a question of semantics: We are seeing the truth from different angles, and those angles can and should be clarified and reconciled.
The first step, therefore, is to define our terms. I had said in one of my followup posts that there were different ways of using the word “perfect”, and that the Old Testament is “perfect” in some definitions but not in others. The definitions (copied from dictionary.reference.com) by which the Old Testament is most assuredly perfect include
• conforming absolutely to the description or definition of an ideal type
• exactly fitting the need in a certain situation or for a certain purpose
• entirely without any flaws, defects, or shortcomings
• accurate, exact, or correct in every detail
• pure or unmixed
• expert; accomplished; proficient
The definitions by which the Old Testament – from the temporal perspective of our side of the Cross and Jesus’ sacrificial atonement for sin – cannot be said to be “perfect”, are these:
• excellent or complete beyond practical or theoretical improvement
• thorough; complete; utter
• unqualified; absolute
In grammar, there is an interesting way of seeing the word “perfect”: noting an action or state brought to a close prior to some temporal point of reference, in contrast to imperfect or incomplete action. The important qualifier here, and the crux of the disagreement, in my opinion, is the temporal point of reference.
Similarly, there is the concept of being “complete”. The Old Testament is to a degree complete:
• finished; ended; concluded
• having all the required or customary characteristics, skills, or the like; consummate; perfect in kind or quality
But it is at the same time not “complete” from the perspective of this side of the Cross:
• having all parts or elements; lacking nothing; whole; entire; full
• thorough; entire; total; undivided, uncompromised, or unmodified
Or again from a grammar perspective: having all modifying or complementary elements included.
I made two additional complementary statements: first, that the Old Testament saints were aware that the Old Testament was “incomplete”, and second, that the promised Messiah would bring and be the completion that was missing.
God made the original covenants. God chose when and where to make a new covenant that replaced the old. Some covenants, like the one with Abraham, were unconditional – He promised that the whole world would be blessed through his offspring (Gen. 22:18). Some were conditional; much of the blessing promised to the nation of Israel within the Mosaic Covenant was only available if they obeyed. In every case, God was the mediator, and He was the one who set the terms.
Deuteronomy 18:15-19 reads “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your fellow Israelites. You must listen to him. For this is what you asked of the LORD your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly when you said ‘Let us not hear the voice of the LORD our God nor see this great fire anymore, or we will die.’ The LORD said to me, ‘What they say is good. I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their fellow Israelites, and I will put my words in his mouth. He will tell them everything I command him. I myself will call to account anyone who does not listen to my words that the prophet speaks in my name.’” Moses himself recognized that one would come whose words would supersede his. In Acts 3, Peter identifies this future prophet as being Jesus.
Jesus really got on the nerves of the Jewish religious leaders. He was pretty equal opportunity about offending them – Pharisees, Sadducees, priests, you name it, at one point or another, Jesus called them out for being all about the show and not about the substance. That was the crux of the need for a new covenant. Because the people God entrusted with His Law were in large part not obeying it, He called for something new. The old was a shadow of the things to come.
The book of Hebrews goes into a lot of detail about the old covenant being a shadow of the new. Chapter 8 quotes Jeremiah 31 by saying “The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they did not remain faithful to my covenant, and I turned away from them, declares the Lord. This is the covenant I will establish with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” (vs. 31-34). Hebrews 8 identifies Jesus as the high priest of the new covenant, and while verse 6 says that the new covenant is superior, verse 13 says “By calling this covenant ‘new’, he has made the first one obsolete; and what is outdated and obsolete will soon disappear.”
Chapter 9 goes on to describe Jesus’ sacrifice as being the once for all atonement for our sin – to seal the deal, as it were, by “purifying” the realities in heaven of which the old covenant trappings were but copies and shadows. Chapter 10 goes on to say that the law is the shadow, not the reality, and that Jesus’ sacrifice cleanses sin once and for all. The latter part of chapter 10 is a warning – that those who are the recipients of the grace of God for salvation need to cling to it and not reject it. One who turns back from grace to the bondage of the law has “trampled the Son of God underfoot [and] treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace” (verse 29). The call to perseverance in chapter 10 is followed by the “roll call of faith” in Hebrews 11 – all of whom were “still living in faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth” (verse 13).
Jesus himself said that He had come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17). He even did things like get baptized (to the offense and annoyance of the Jewish leaders) in order to “fulfill all righteousness” (Matthew 3:15). When Jesus declared “It is finished!” on the cross, He was saying that the old covenant had been perfectly fulfilled and He had mediated the new one.
At the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, James quotes Amos 9:11-12, using it as a proof text that the Gentiles would become believers in God. But when they come, they weren’t becoming Jews. They were still Gentiles, not bound by Jewish customs. The fact that the Moses was being preached in the synagogues meant that these Gentile believers would be trying to get along with Jewish believers who still held to the customs including the vows, the sabbath, etc. In an attempt to foster peace between the groups, and to stop the ones who said the Gentiles would have to follow the Mosaic Law, they came up with the four rules of thumb that would make them minimally more acceptable: don’t get tangled up with idols by eating meat that has been sacrificed to them; don’t eat meat with blood in it; don’t eat meat from strangled animals; and keep away from sexual immorality. The Pauline letters go into far greater detail as to how these details and others were to be worked out in the churches. Nowhere do they say that the old covenant was a requirement for the Gentiles. And even the Jews who became believers were free to stop following the Jewish customs. The first and most glaring example was Peter, who would associate with Gentiles even though Jewish custom said they were not allowed to because Gentiles were “unclean”. When he started shying away from the Gentiles because he was trying not to offend the Jews (not necessarily Jewish believers), Paul called him out on it.
I deliberately kept Paul out of much of this discussion because I didn’t want to base my reasoning solely on his interpretations, as good as they are. Even Peter acknowledged that Paul’s letters counted as scripture (2 Peter 3:15-16) and that Paul wrote with “the wisdom God gave him”. There is ample evidence, however, outside of what Paul wrote to support the idea that God used the new covenant to supersede the old, and that He made it known even before the Messiah came that it would happen that way.