“Should I burn the Old Testament?”

Steve Brown:
“Should I burn the Old Testament?” The answer to that and other questions, on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
Welcome to Key Life. Our host and teacher is Steve Brown. He’s no guru, but he does have honest answers to honest questions about the Bible. God’s grace changes everything, how we love, work, live, lead, marry, parent, evangelize, purchase, and worship. So, here’s Steve and Pete Alwinson from ForgeBibleStudy.com with street-smart Bible teaching for real life.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Hi Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
Hey man. Happy Friday.

Steve Brown:
No, no. Happy Thanksgiving.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
You know, we’re not going to see each other until after Thanksgiving.

Pete Alwinson:
I know.

Steve Brown:
That’s next week.

Pete Alwinson:
I know. You going to have turkey or ham or what are you going to have?

Steve Brown:
Both.

Pete Alwinson:
All right. Wow.

Steve Brown:
Or maybe crackers and, who knows?

Pete Alwinson:
Crackers and cranberry juice.

Steve Brown:
You know, I was just working on a Thanksgiving, Steve’s letter that we send out. And every good and perfect gift comes from God, the Father of Lights. And there’s never been a perfect turkey.

Pete Alwinson:
Wow.

Steve Brown:
So, what he gives has got to be something other than that.

Pete Alwinson:
Okay. All right. Yeah.

Steve Brown:
I just am saying.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s profound, but I have met some perfect turkeys, and I don’t mean of the animal variety.

Steve Brown:
That’s Pete Alwinson, and I tell you this all the time. Be sure and go to ForgeTruth.com dynamite podcasts, lots of teaching and video, a deep website that can make a difference in your life. It’s designed particularly for men, which makes it rather sexist. But if you’re not of that gender and you have not identified with that gender, you still can learn some good stuff. And it’s ForgeTruth.com as you know, Pete comes in on Fridays, and we’ve been doing this for years, and we answer the questions that you ask, and we love your questions. You can, in fact, pick up the phone and call 1-800-KEY-LIFE, 24 7, follow instructions and give us your question, and we will maybe put your voice on the air. Or, if you want to send your question, you can send it to

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or you can e-mail your question to [email protected] and when you do that, remember we have bills to pay, and if you can help, we sure would appreciate it. Not all of you can, and if you can’t, we understand. But if you do, I promise we’ll be as faithful with your gift as you were in giving it. We’ll squeeze every dime for the glory of God. If you can’t say a prayer for us, couldn’t hurt. Pete, why don’t you lead us in prayer, and we’ll get to these questions.

Pete Alwinson:
You got it. Let’s pray together. Our Father, we do come into your presence today, our great God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And in this Thanksgiving week, we honor you. We thank you for life itself. We thank you for the redemption that we have in Jesus. We thank you for how you provide for us, protect us, how you even turn bad and difficult situations, hurtful situations. into opportunities that we actually can grow through and thrive in. And so, Lord, you know us, you know us better than we know ourselves, and we give you great praise and thanks and ask that your gospel, the grace that we have in Jesus, would become more and more real to us, even this Thanksgiving, as we thank you consciously for what you have done for us. We pray, Lord, for our leaders who this week-end will be standing before us and leading us in worship and teaching us from your Holy Word. We pray you would give them the words to say, but Holy Spirit, we ask that you would give them the power in which to say it. Open our eyes to your truth and we thank you now for this Q&A time. We commit it to you and pray that you would be honored. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Steve Brown:
Amen. Pete, let’s go to our phone lines.

Caller 1:
I’ve been hearing people say, Oh, that’s in the Old Testament. You know, we don’t go by that anymore. You know, everything’s in the Good News, the New Testament. That’s what you need to go by. God’s promises and so forth. How’s anybody supposed to read the Bible and fully take it on faith when there’s all these questions about it? And as a believer, how are you supposed to point to it and say, Oh, yeah, I believe everything the Bible says. You can’t take one thing out of the Bible and not believe the rest. You have to take it all.

Steve Brown:
Well, you kind of answered your own question, but, and you were right on, by the way. Listen, there will always be people in the church, and they probably belong to us. I wouldn’t have chosen, but I didn’t, I was not the one to make the choice, who are part of the Christian faith who say really dumb things. And there’s a lot going around, even by some leaders, that the Old Testament is no longer relevant. That is, just so you know, heresy. And for 2,000 years since the Canon was formed, the church has said that the Canon is the Canon. It’s the 66 books that are there. They’re all from God. They’re all inspired. They’re all for you and your life and how you live it. And when you take a part of it out, you’re doing a really dumb thing. Okay, Pete, that’s how I feel.

Pete Alwinson:
Wow. I love it. It was, that’s great. And I love how you couched the celebrity pastor who we’re talking about there because there is, I mean, influences a lot of people. And that that’s really important. Jesus said in Matthew 5.

I didn’t come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.

Steve Brown:
Yeah.

Pete Alwinson:
And so, the Old Testament is fulfilled in Christ. It contains at bare minimum, the moral law of God that could never possibly go away. So, the Old Testament always has for us truth that points to Christ, points ahead. And we need the Old Testament to understand the New and the New to see the fulfillment of the Old.

Steve Brown:
That’s true. And all of it is relevant

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
every bit of it.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
Don’t let anybody tell you different. You know, Richard Pratt is a friend of both you and he’s my friend too.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
Has his PhD from Harvard and if you haven’t discovered Third Millennium Ministries, that is an incredible, they are teaching seminary students all over the world.

Pete Alwinson:
It’s incredible. Yeah.

Steve Brown:
Not a hundred or two hundred, but hundreds of thousands and they’re doing it free.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
ThirdMill.org I think is the website.

Pete Alwinson:
ThirdMill.org

Steve Brown:
Check it out and you’ll see, but anyway, what I was saying before I interrupted myself is that Richard is an Old Testament scholar. Has a doctorate in Old Testament. And he says that the New Testament is God’s addendum to his book. That’s a good way to put it. It is sort of that. It’s how all of this works out. It makes sense. It makes things work. It’s that final chapter that you put in the book when everything comes together and works. If you read novels, don’t go to the final chapter first because you take the fun out of it, and you miss what it’s all about. And it’s the same way with the Bible. And if anybody tells you different, don’t listen to them.

Pete Alwinson:
Amen. Amen. We need the whole thing. All Scripture is inspired of God, Paul said in II Timothy 3:16. And he’s speaking about the Old Testament.

Steve Brown:
Yeah. The New Testament hadn’t been formed yet.

Pete Alwinson:
And so, it applies to the words of the apostles and the gospel writers too, but that’s what he was thinking.

Steve Brown:
Okay. Now we’ve settled that once and for all. Let me ask you another question. What does it mean that we’re not under the law anymore?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. Good, good point. It does not mean that we, that the law is not important because Jeremiah 31:31 says

That there would come a day when the law would be put on our hearts.

Well, that day has come in Christ. And so, the law of God reveals the will of God for us. It’s still important for us, and now we’re able and desirous of being obedient to the will of God.

Steve Brown:
Yeah. That’s true.

Pete Alwinson:
It doesn’t have the Old Testament sacrifices, that part, the sacrifices, that’s fulfilled.

Steve Brown:
And it, absolutely.

Pete Alwinson:
Ceremonies are fulfilled in Christ. That’s over. But the moral law is still in place.

Steve Brown:
Yeah. It’s how to live. It’s how the world works. I used to say, and I still do on occasion, if you’re not a believer and you’re here at this conference or you’re at this church. It’d be a shame for you to leave without learning something that would help you. So, listen up and I’m going to help you. Read the Bible, especially the law, and do your best to live by it. And you say, but I don’t believe the Bible. It doesn’t matter. Do your best to live by it, and you will be thinner and happier and better off than you are right now. Don’t thank me. I was here to help. But the law is something we can’t live.

Pete Alwinson:
Can’t do it. It reminds us how much, it points us to the fact that we need a Savior who did fulfill the law. And then, like you said, it shows us how to live, but only by the Spirit, once we become Christians.

Steve Brown:
Okay.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
Here’s an e-mail. What does our reward? What about our rewards in heaven? I’ve been told that if you aren’t serving the Lord, using your spiritual gifts, etc., your rewards won’t be great. You know, that is a kind of conundrum, because, you know, we talk about crowns, and it sounds kind of like works. You know, if you hustle and you’re really faithful and obedient, you get crowns. If you don’t do those things, you don’t get any crowns and it seems like a reward for doing good. And that kind of violates the whole basis of the gospel of the New Testament. What are crowns?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, I see crowns as rewards, right? That we get. I think the basic issue there and see if we get this right. That really this is, we are motivated by rewards, but that’s not the ultimate motivation. The ultimate motivation to serve and to do good works and to do good deeds is to glorify God because he redeemed us. And so, rewards are there. Now, how do you put that together?

Steve Brown:
Well, I kind of go at it a little bit different because I think the rewards go to Jesus. And you said it’s about glorifying God. You say, the crowns are not given when we’ve been good. The crowns are given so we’ll be surprised that we were, and Jesus will get the credit. And we’ll sing a praise song in heaven.

Pete Alwinson:
Ultimately, I agree. He’s getting all the glory.

Steve Brown:
That’s true. That’s what it’s all about. And when you get to heaven, you’ll know it for absolutely sure. Guys, we’ve got to go. But first, Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.