Slogging through the Old Testament with your “daily reading program” sure makes you familiar with it, but those Christians brave enough to actually read it often find themselves wondering what on earth is going on. “Just keep reading your Bible” our pastors tell us, but do you ever get the feeling they don’t have a big grip on it either? “Just stick to the basics. The rest doesn’t matter.” It would sure be easier if pastors actually taught the Bible.

The Bible isn’t boring. I’ve posted this quote before, but it’s worth using again:

Preach from the Bible, and from the Bible only. Again, does this need to be said? One thing’s for sure. The Bible is fascinating, disturbing, offensive, sweet, alarming, comforting, stretching, shocking, controversial, caressing, strengthening. No way are you and I that interesting. Let’s put the Bible front and centre and let it be itself and do its thing, whatever the impact. Submerging the Bible for the sake of our cool personas isn’t really cool at all. It’s a way of avoiding risk, chickening out. —Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr.

The Bible isn’t boring. But it’s written so that it can only be understood in community, even if that only means getting help from dead people by reading commentaries. We are all Ethiopian eunuchs when it comes to the Scriptures, and both the quality and quantity of teaching in churches lets us down severely. The academy has failed us. Faithful men go in, and come out defiled with large doses of scholarly unbelief. Either that or they don’t realise that the reason the Bible is so strange to our culture is that it is actually the tool given us to change the culture. [1]

Thankfully, there are some fantastic resources available today. The one that opened up the Bible for me like never before was the lectures of James Jordan. A few years ago, I discovered this not-very-well-known theologian. I didn’t understand everything he said, but I did recognise that this was partly because he spoke just like the Bible: matter-of-fact, flesh-and-blood, and every now and then, outright bizarre. [2] That was a good sign. Jordan never chickens out. He tackles the toughest sections of Scripture and turns them into an intoxicating feast for the spiritual senses.

Jordan does take a bit of getting used to, but there is a reason he has been called the best Bible teacher on the planet. Listen to his lectures and you will never find the Bible a boring slog again. Even when translated into English, the Bible speaks its own, extremely consistent symbolic language. It’s time you learned it.

Complete lectures are available here. The set is worth every penny.

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[1] See Tools for Change

[2] Jordan’s hermeneutics are often criticised, but from my experience, those who insist that such-and-such can’t be the meaning of the passage never tell you what it does mean. Over and over again, I have found that Jordan will say something that sounds bizarre, but I will later find that it plays out in the Bible many, many times, and unlocks some of the most apparently impenetrable and mysterious concepts and passages.

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“…preterism is not merely a way of interpreting New Testament prophecy but also provides a framework for understanding New Testament theology as a whole.”

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The Bible was written for us, not to us. This includes the New Testament. We have evangelicals who take both Old and New Testament prophecies concerning Israel and mistakenly apply them to modern Jews (dispensationalism). But then we also have evangelicals who think that the imminent predictions of judgment throughout the New Testament are still somehow “imminent.” This includes most conservative Christian theologians (even smart guys like D. A. Carson), who treat the epistles as though they were written to us. They make the same error as the dispensationalists, albeit on a smaller scale. This misreads the New Testament. It replaces interpretation with application, and unwittingly makes many verses unnecessarily mysterious to modern Christians. Some quotes from Peter Leithart:

“…preterism is not merely a way of interpreting New Testament prophecy but also provides a framework for understanding New Testament theology as a whole. In part, this is nothing more than an effort to understand the New Testament in its historical context. The issues and debates that dominated the New Testament era were largely about the relation of Jews and Gentiles, and derived directly from the gospel’s announcement of a new people of God, within which circumcision and uncircumcision are equally meaningless. Preterist interpretation means trying to understand the New Testament in light of this struggle without retrojecting post-Reformation debates into the text. Further, an important goal of preterist interpretation is to reckon with the influence that the threat and promise of Jesus’ imminent coming, which affects nearly every book of the New Testament, had on the shape of New Testament theology. For example, a preterist framework generates such questions as “Is it possible that the typology of the church in the wilderness (in Hebrews, for instance) had specific reference to the first-century situation?” and “What is unique about the organization, worship, and life of the church in the period between A.D. 30-70?” and “What unique role did the first-century church play in redemptive history, and how is this related to the fall of Jerusalem?” (The Promise of His Appearing, pp. 1-3, emphasis added.)“Paul’s discussion of the future of Israel assumes Jesus’ predictions about the coming destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. This is what he’s talking about when he talks about “vessels of wrath prepared for destruction” and when he quotes from Hosea and Isaiah in 9:25-29. In 9:27, the “remnant” does not refer to the Jews who have responded in faith to the gospel, but to the Jews who have survived God’s judgment. Unless the Lord showed mercy, the Jews would have been as utterly destroyed as Sodom and Gomorrah (9:29). But they are not destroyed; God preserves a remnant of Israel through the judgment, who will be delivered from the catastrophe that awaits Jerusalem. These, perhaps, are the “all Israel” that shall be saved, just as the restoration community after the exile was “all Israel” preserved through exile and delivered from captivity.” Romans and AD70

So, a couple of major tips on reading the New Testament, that in my experience make a world of difference:

1. The “coming of Christ” refers to the end of the Old Covenant. Note that it does not refer to the final judgment and resurrection but it does prefigure it.[1] The references to the “revelation of the sons of God”, and James’ call to the rich to “weep and howl” refer to first century events and people. We can draw applications from them, of course, but when do you ever hear Christians speak this way?
2. When you read the New Testament, every time you see the word “earth” (the Greek word ge) replace it with “Land.” All the tribes of the Land would mourn. Much of the New Testament is about the end of the Old, including Revelation 1-19.

Give it a try! I dare you. You will find that many puzzling verses suddenly fall into place.

Peter Leithart again:

(On II Peter 3 and AD70)
“A significant shift in orientation and context is, I believe, necessary to make sense both of 2 Peter and of New Testament eschatology generally. The sort of shift I hope for can be easily stated: I offer a preterist reading of 2 Peter and hope that this book will contribute to making the preterist framework of interpretation a more reputable player in New Testament studies. Preterism is the view that prophecies about an imminent “day of judgment” scattered throughout the New Testament were fulfilled in the apostolic age by the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, the event that brought a final end to the structures and orders of the Old Creation or Old Covenant. Within this framework, Peter is dealing with issues facing the churches of the first century as the day approaches when the old world will be destroyed. Jesus said, “Truly I say to you, there are some of those who are standing here who shall not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom” (Mt. 16:28), and I argue that Peter wrote this second letter to remind the readers of that specific prophecy of Jesus and to encourage them to cling to that promise of His appearing. ” (The Promise of His Appearing:, preface)

His book is available online in its entirety, here. Any questions, please feel free to contact me.

WARNING: These views are very unpopular amongst mainstream evangelicals, who will give you strange looks unless they have read some N. T. Wright.

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[1] I have a number of articles on this site concerning the “hyperpreterist” view that all of Bible prophecy was fulfilled in AD70 under the category “Against Hyperpreterism“.

It even includes the Ten Words, pot of Manna and Aaron’s rod, so you can teach Word, Sacrament and Government.

How many theologians could take the book of Judges and write a commentary that is critical of secular humanism like James Jordan did? How many used the Law as the basis for a working theory of biblical economics like Gary North? How many see the outworking of the Trinity in the structures of family, community and church government like Peter Leithart and Doug Wilson – or in the Land-splitting, saint gathering, sin expelling events in Zechariah 14 (AD70) for that matter? How many theologians see both the Creation week and the history of the first century church in Leviticus 1? (Jordan)

Disengaged from all the Scriptures, our ruminations are disengaged from reality. Such true contemplation of God eventually brings dambusting consequences to culture. But if we won’t reject the pop-science/pop-history foundations of secular humanism, we have no hope of thwarting it. We waste our time attempting to accommodate the Bible to current ephemera. The Bible doesn’t work that way. It comes in like a sword and violates our thinking until we think the way God does.

The anti-intellectualists’ faith is limited to their ‘heart’. The academics’ gets limited to their heads. It’s just philosophy, and it’s just as sneaky. That’s not how God works in the history He gave to us. We say we want to explore Him but won’t read the map.

Time to truly engage with the text – all of it. The so-called ‘Christ event’ echoes right through the Bible back to Eden in manifold colours. We can only understand Him truly with a biblical theology that is both historical and typological. That is how Christ has revealed Himself.

These are the things the best theologians are tackling. Anything we come up with outside of that is short-lived twaddle, the rubber sword of the gnostic.

I guess my point is that we say we start with Christ, but we have tunnel vision when it comes to the Bible.

“I began writing this book some ten years ago, although my interest in Hebrew literary structure goes back a decade before that. My fascination with the subject was kindled when I began teaching Old Testament courses in seminary. At that time I was struck by the apparent lack of order within many of the biblical books. Jeremiah seemed hopelessly confused in its organisation; so did Isaiah and Hosea and most of the prophets. Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes appeared to be in almost complete disarray, and even the more orderly historical books, such as Joshua and Kings, showed signs of strangely careless organisation. Why did the biblical authors write like this? I would never write a book, an article, or even a private letter with such carelessness of arrangement.

I was intrigued by the possibility that the Hebrew authors might have organised their compositions according to literary conventions that were different from ours. I began to discover, over a period of years, that several structuring patterns rarely used by us were remarkably common in the books of the Hebrew Bible, particularly chiasmus (symmetry), parallelism, and sevenfold patterns. I was increasingly struck by how often these patterns had been utilised to arrange biblical books…

It was my mother who gave me a love for literature. She read to my brother Stephen and me regularly, from as early as I can remember. I still have many fond memories of those wondrous bedtime stories, whose structures — like the Bible — were designed for the ear, not the eye.”

David A. Dorsey, The Literary Structure of the Old Testament, p.9-10 (Preface).

“Recovering the Old Testament as a text in which Christians live and move and have their being is one of the most urgent tasks before the church. Reading the Reformers is good and right. Christian political activism has its place. Even at their best, however, these can only bruise the heel of a world that has abandoned God. But the Bible—the Bible is a sword to divide joints from marrow, a weapon to crush the head.”

–Peter J. Leithart, A House For My Name, p. 40.