“For whatever was written in the past was written for our instruction, so that we may have hope through endurance and through the encouragement from the Scriptures.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

A famous preacher generated some national controversy a few years ago for saying that believers today need to unhitch themselves from the Old Testament. His choice of words seems like it was intended to be provocative…and it worked. He generated a firestorm of responses, some thoughtful, others, not so much. Language choice aside, I think he was right in the main. We are not liable for keeping the old covenant laid out in the Old Testament. But then what’s the point of the Old Testament? Paul gives us an important clue here. Let’s take a look.

Now, if you are already starting to react a bit to the idea that we are not liable for keeping the old covenant as laid out in the Old Testament, turn your ire first on the author of Hebrews. In Hebrews 8:13, the author declares that the old covenant—that is, the Law of Moses including things like the Ten Commandments—is obsolete. He describes it as aging and about to disappear. His point in context is that Jesus came bringing with Him a new covenant that God was making with people to replace the old one He had made with Israel. In doing this, God wasn’t simply throwing out what was old because it failed. Rather, it served its purpose, Jesus fulfilled it entirely by keeping it perfectly, and, having been fulfilled, it was replaced with something new.

With the old covenant on the outs, all of its rules and regulations no longer applied to Jesus’ followers. Those who were willing to accept His offer to live under the authority of the new covenant He made were thus no longer under the authority of the old covenant. What the author of Hebrews describes as obsolete and about to pass away is not something that believers today need to concern themselves with trying to obey.

The danger, of course, in making this point (beyond triggering a whole bunch of conservative pastors and theologians), is that what people will often hear is that Christians today are no longer required to keep any of the commands regarding human morality in the Old Testament. Yet while that is technically true, that doesn’t mean that we can now change our position on any of those things to finally start running hard in the other direction, completely throwing off the restrictive moral restraints of the Old Testament in favor of the free love and grace proclaimed in the New Testament. It doesn’t mean that at all, in fact.

The new covenant is deeply informed by the old. The old may not have authority over us as followers of Jesus who are living under the authority of the new covenant, but it is nonetheless true that the old laid the foundation on which the new is built. Jesus may have overturned all of the dietary laws of the old covenant, for instance, but every single one of the theological and moral commands of the Ten Commandments make an appearance in one way or another in the New Testament where a handful of Jesus’ followers unpack what living under the new covenant actually looks like.

Speaking of those authors, their entire worldview was defined and shaped by the old covenant. It formed their entire frame of reference. The New Testament does not make any sense apart from the Old Testament. Well, it doesn’t make all of the sense it should make without that context. You can read nothing but the New Testament—nothing but the Gospels—and come away fully and rightly convinced that you need to be a follower of Jesus. But when you want to actually dig into what following Jesus looks like and how and why to do it, you will struggle mightily without the context of the Old Testament. When the authors of the New Testament make their points, they nearly always justify their arguments by citing the Scriptures, which for them solely consisted of the Old Testament. You can’t fully appreciate the New Testament apart from the Old.

But again, if we aren’t liable to keep the commands we find in the Old Testament any longer (we are liable, however, for keeping the commands we find in the New Testament, which pick up all of the key themes and ideas of the Old), what is its purpose? As I said a second ago, that’s what Paul is pointing to here. And let’s be clear: Paul was one of the loudest voices against the idea that the old covenant still has any authority over followers of Jesus. He was absolutely insistent that trying to keep the old covenant was not only inconsistent with living under the new covenant, but was actually an impediment to it. Paul argued that if you want to try to live under the authority of the old covenant, that’s fine, but you’ll do so at the expense of living under the new. If you want law, then law is what you’ll have, but don’t expect to receive grace if you have opted for law. If you want grace, on the other hand, Jesus and His new covenant is alone where you’ll find it.

Okay, but why the Old Testament? “For whatever was written in the past was written for our instruction, so that we may have hope through endurance and through the encouragement from the Scriptures.” Got that? What the old covenant offers is instruction and encouragement. But wait, doesn’t instruction imply commands that need to be followed? Is that what a history professor offers? Not at all. This is instruction in the form of helping us to understand the historical and cultural foundations of the new covenant. The Old Testament tells the stories of people who followed God courageously and faithfully in the past. It reveals how God was working behind the scenes of history to guide things to where He wanted them to go. It shows how people were willing to be faithful even when it cost them dearly, and even though they didn’t immediately—or even during their lifetime—see the results of their efforts to advance God’s kingdom.

We need to know and see things like that. We need those stories to give us hope through endurance. More specifically, we need them to give us hope by seeing the faithful endurance of God’s people in the past, and how God advanced His purposes through their faithfulness even when things immediately didn’t seem to go their way. He was working toward something that was entirely larger than just their lives, and they were willing to commit themselves to that in the hope that their sacrifices would enable and empower the kingdom betterment of future generations.

In this, what the Scriptures (which, again, for Paul meant what we call the Old Testament) give us is encouragement. They give us the encouragement to stick with God’s plans even when we can’t see how they are going to turn out for the good. They give us the encouragement to trust that God will be faithful to His covenant no matter what. They encourage us to pursue the righteousness of God because we can see the ugly results of when that didn’t happen. They give us the encouragement that God always keeps His promises.

All of this is why the Old Testament matters. Yes, we need to unhitch ourselves from it in the sense that we need to not try to put ourselves under both its authority and the authority of the new covenant. We need to not try to live by both law and grace. That doesn’t work. And that’s not just me speculating, that’s Paul emphatically thundering the point. But in spite of this, we need the Old Testament. We need the whole Bible. God preserved all of it for us on purpose. Our grasp of the Christian worldview will be incomplete without everything He guarded for us down through history. We need the instruction. We need the encouragement. We need the context. You need to make sure you are supplementing your diet of New Testament with Old Testament. All of the Scriptures are indeed God-breathed, and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness. Let us be a people defined by God’s entire word, all received and understood properly for what it is. That’s where life will be found.