Some thoughts from Calvin on the importance of the Old Testament
In the last few years, I have read a growing number of supposedly “evangelical” communicators advocating that greater “relevancy” demands eliminating sermons that touch the Old Testament.
It’s hard to understand, they say. It confuses the “loving” God of the New Testament with a “harsh” God of the Old Testament. The sum result? The need for what they term relevance trumps actually representing what the Bible says.
At the very least, the story line of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is distorted. At worst, they are close to falling into the heresy of the Marcionites. “Marcionites held that the God of the Hebrew Bible was inconsistent, jealous, wrathful and genocidal, and that the material world he created was defective, a place of suffering; the God who made such a world is a bungling or malicious demiurge.”
The Biblical Gospel demands a whole exposition of the Bible. The mysteries are uncovered as inspiration rolls out the whole of God’s revelation, including the law.
John Calvin comments, “but they are principally employed, as I have said, in showing that in the person of Jesus Christ has been fulfilled what God had promised from the beginning. They had no intention or design to abolish by their writings the law and the prophets; as some fanatics dream that the Old Testament is superfluous, now that the truth of heavenly wisdom has been revealed to us by Christ and his Apostles. On the contrary, they point with the finger to Christ, and admonish us to seek from him whatever is ascribed to him by the law and the prophets. The full profit and advantage, therefore, to be derived from the reading of the Gospel will only be obtained when we learn to connect it with the ancient promises.”
(Excerpt From Commentary on Matthew, John Calvin https://books.apple.com/us/book/commentary-on-matthew/id987151947)
Be careful about what you hear. There are no new heresies. But, an amazing number of the first heresies in the Church are resurfacing.
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