Once when speaking to a small group of college students in a
dorm, I asked to borrow a Bible. A
student handed me a New Testament, and I responded that I wanted a Bible. The student replied that it was a Bible. “No,” I said, “that’s just a portion of the
Bible. I’m looking for a copy of the
entire Bible.” This exchange highlighted
a viewpoint that pervades the church today.
We tend to neglect the Old Testament, as if it were irrelevant to the
people of God and the life of the church today.
We think that because we live in the age of the New Testament, we can
find everything we need in that portion of Scripture.
Augustine, who said that “the new is in the old concealed,
and the old is in the new revealed,” found continuity between the Old and New
Testaments. There must be come
difference between them because we distinguish between them. At the same time, although the New Testament
possesses a certain newness, it grew out of the Old Testament and remains
forever linked to it. We dare not
overlook the element of continuity between the two testaments. We cannot understand the New Testament apart
from the Old, in which God disclosed his character and nature.
The heretic Marcion produced the first New Testament
canon. His New Testament eliminated any
reference to the God of the Old Testament, because Marcion believed that God
was an ill-tempered demiurge or subdeity.
Christ, he thought, came to reveal the true God. Marcion excluded all passages in the New Testament
linking Christ to the Old Testament God.
He excluded from his canon Matthew, Hebrews, and a few other books. Against the Marcionite heresy the church was
awakened to the need to delineate carefully all the books to be recognized as
belonging to the canon of the New Testament.
The church was concerned not only to give us the right
number of books, but also to speak to this heretical view that had Jesus at war
with the God of the Old Testament.
Although that was many centuries ago, Marcionism continues to raise its
head. In every generation the church has
to deal with subtle attempts to undermine the Old Testament’s importance.
The history of redemption did not begin with the birth of
Jesus. In a sense Jesus’ birth was the
culmination of all the promises that God had made over the centuries.
Sproul, R.C. Truths
We Confess. Phillipsburg, New
Jersey: P&R Publishing. 2006. PP.
219-220
