With his reading bogged down, Joe cannot buck the growing conviction that maybe he was wrong after all about understanding the Word of God for himself. After a few more days of difficulty, he closes his Bible and puts it aside.

"Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, handling accurately the word of truth." – 2 Timothy 2:15 (NAS)

When poet Elizabeth Barrett became the wife of Robert Browning, her parents disowned her because they disapproved of the marriage. The couple soon moved to Italy. Elizabeth, however, wrote to her parents almost every week, telling them that she loved them and longed for a reconciliation. Then, after ten years she received a huge box in the mail. It contained all the notes she had sent. Not one had been opened! Although these "love letters" have become an invaluable part of classical English literature, it’s sad to think that they were never read by Elizabeth Barrett’s parents. Had they read and understood just one of them, the broken relationship with their daughter might have been healed.

Every human being on planet earth is alienated from God because of sin. But God has sent us letters in the hope of reconciliation. That collection of letters is called "The Bible." It expresses His earnest longing for fellowship with us. How sad it is, then, when people pay little or no attention to it. Sadder yet is when believers never read it, thinking that it is too difficult for them to understand. The person who ignores the Bible cheats himself or herself out of God’s benefits and blessings – perhaps forever.

Several Sundays ago I said some things aimed at convincing you that there is a basic simplicity found in the teaching of Christ that many people have overlooked. They’ve done this because they have concluded, erroneously, that God's revelation to them is far too complicated for them to grasp for themselves. This morning I want to continue that theme of simplicity in Christ by giving you some basic keys that will help you get a better grip on the Bible for yourself. Let’s begin with:

Let’s imagine an ordinary guy named Joe. Joe is a Christian. He has a wife, a couple of kids, a mini-van, a house in the suburbs, and a family dog. He decides that over the next year he would like to read the Bible completely through. He has heard of others doing this. He has one of the newer translations, along with what he considers average intelligence, so he figures it couldn’t be that hard. Oh he has heard that the Bible is difficult to understand but since he doesn’t know that from personal experience, there is no time like the present to find out for himself.

Joe sets a day to begin, and on that day he gets up early, before work, and begins his reading. He reads the opening chapters of Genesis. Having been vaguely familiar with the Creation story, he remarks to himself as he reads that it really isn’t that hard to understand. Yes, he knows there are those who contest the idea that the world was made in seven literal days. He doesn’t know what to think of all that. He simply decides to set aside the controversy and give the Bible a chance to speak for itself.

In the following days, during his period before work, he reads on. He goes through the interesting stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. While he doesn’t understand everything that he reads, and he puzzles a bit about some of the customs, he notes as he finishes Genesis that it wasn’t nearly as difficult as he expected. He actually understood a lot of what he read. He feels good that he is learning firsthand from the Bible and not secondhand from someone else. This isn’t hard at all!

With the book of Genesis under his belt, and the growing confidence that he is understanding the Bible, he boldly moves into the early chapters of Exodus. He’s making good progress. He recognizes the story of Moses, having watched an animated Disney version with his children about a prince of Egypt. He notes that the Bible story is a bit different than the video. "Oh well," he thinks. "That’s Hollywood." He presses on.

Again, as in Genesis, he doesn’t understand everything he reads, but to his increasing satisfaction, he finds he understands much of it. He’s also gathering some questions he wants to ask some friends who seem to know a lot about the Bible. One of his questions is that if Adam and Eve were the first people, where did their oldest son, Cain, get his wife? (Actually, he heard that question asked by one of his professors in college and he has never heard it answered.) Another of his questions has to do with Abraham. According to what he read in Genesis, Abraham married a woman named Sarah who was his sister. Joe thinks that this is strange since he had always heard that incest was against the law of God. While these questions puzzle our unflagging reader, they don’t stop him. As he comes to the 20^th chapter of Exodus, he’s still making good progress. As he reads that chapter, he recognizes the Ten Commandments. "So this is how they were given," he thinks to himself. "These are good laws. Too bad people don’t take them to heart more often. The world would be a better place."

It is beyond Exodus 20 though, that Joe begins to experience his first difficulty. As he reads he encounters a lot of rules and laws that don’t seem very relevant to him or the world he lives in. Things about sheep and oxen and sacrifices. Things about male and female servants and family inheritance. "How could any of this have any meaning today?" he wonders.

Finally he gets to Leviticus. With characteristic courage, he takes a deep breath and plunges forward. But it only seems to get worse. Sacrifices. Clean and unclean animals. Food prohibitions. Priesthood. A tabernacle. If he were to start living by all these rules, his life would change completely. And it wouldn’t make sense. Even his favorite breakfast food would be affected. No more bacon and eggs for him!

With his reading bogged down, Joe cannot buck the growing conviction that maybe he was wrong after all about understanding the Word of God for himself. After a few more days of difficulty, he closes his Bible and puts it aside. Even if he had made it beyond Leviticus by sheer strength of will, all that numbering in numbers, and that do-it-all-again in Deuteronomy, where much of Leviticus is repeated, would probably have finished off his enthusiasm.

It seems likely to me that experiences similar to Joe’s are fairly common. Maybe they’ve even been shared by some of us here.

What Joe needs to understand is that in the course of the Bible’s history, God has spoken to different people in different ways. In fact, the Bible can be clearly divided into three parts. These correspond to three great periods in the history of God’s dealings with man. While it is good to know what happened during these three periods, only the last one is immediately relevant to people living today. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me go back and explain.

Since Joe made it through the Ten Commandments and the Law given through Moses on Mount Sinai in Exodus 20, he has already covered the first period, that is, everything from Adam to Moses. And it is at that place in the Bible, during the life of Moses, that the God places a very conspicuous marker.

The early part of Exodus describes how Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt and up to Mount Sinai where God gave them the Ten Commandments and the rest of what is referred to as the "Law of Moses." Two Bible books later, in Deuteronomy, just before he died, Moses repeated these commandments and laws to a new generation of Israelites. As He assembled all Israel to hear his rehearsal of God’s Law, he said these important words, recorded in Deuteronomy 5:2-3:

Let’s spend a few minutes with these verses. Notice that word "covenant." A covenant is an agreement. It is sometimes referred to as a "testament." In this case it was an agreement between God and the ancient nation of Israel. Its terms are summarized in Exodus 19:5-6, where God, speaking to Israel, says: "If you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be My own possession among all the peoples, for all the earth is Mine; and you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation."

Have you ever heard of the phrase, "chosen people?" The concept comes from these verses. Israel would be God’s "own possession among all the peoples." But notice that this privilege had a responsibility linked to it. "If you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant…." Covenants almost always have terms that bind parties on both sides.

Now look back at the verses we read in Deuteronomy 5:2-3. Verse 3 says, "The Lord did not make this covenant with our fathers, but with us, with all those of us alive here today."

The "fathers" Moses referred to were all those guys Joe read about in Genesis, including Adam, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. Moses says here that God didn’t make the Sinai covenant with them. He made it with the nation of Israel, a generation of which was standing before Moses when he spoke these words..

What we have here is a great and important dividing line – a marker if you will - between two major Biblical periods: The period before Mt. Sinai and the period after Mt. Sinai.

Since Moses referred to God’s dealings with the "fathers" of Israel in Deuteronomy 5:3, we refer to everything before Mt. Sinai as the "Patriarchal" period. The word "patriarch" means "father-rule." Joe noticed as he read through Genesis that God dealt with people by speaking to the patriarch or father of the family. It was the patriarch’s responsibility to guide his family in the ways of God. During this early period, God did not deal through nations, but through families headed by patriarchs.

Since God gave His Law to Israel through Moses, we refer to the things that followed after the covenant at Mt. Sinai as the "Mosaic Period." Here is a diagram of what I’m saying:

(See Figure 1)

Had Joe known these simple facts about the Bible, he might have been able to answer some of the questions he wondered about earlier. For instance, his question about Abraham marrying his sister would have been answered in the realization that God’s commands against incest were not given to those living in the Patriarchal period. They were given later, to Israel, through Moses. Thus Abraham could marry his own sister and not break God’s law. Knowing this might also have helped him understand that Cain, the first son of Adam and Eve, probably married his sister as well. From Cain’s perspective, God’s ruling about incest wouldn’t come for thousands of years into the future.

In fact, had Joe known these simple truths, he might have recognized that many of the "difficulties" and some of the so-called "contradictions" of the Bible could be explained by simply knowing which period they came from.

Moving on, you might recall that a few minutes ago I said that the Bible can be divided up into three periods. We’ve only seen two. What is the third?

To get our answer, let’s look again at Exodus 19:5-6 where God says to Israel:

Question: Did Israel obey God and keep the covenant He made with them through Moses at Mt. Sinai? Had our friend Joe continued reading through Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Kings, Chronicles and onward, he would have learned that Israel broke the covenant again and again. He would also have learned that God was merciful to them, giving them chance after chance to get it right. Ultimately though, something had to be done. That’s when God began to reveal that He would make a new covenant, not only with a certain nation, but with people all over the world. Many of the prophets of Israel began to mention it but perhaps Jeremiah is the easiest for 21^st century people to understand. Jeremiah lived in a period of Israel’s history when God was about to allow Israel’s enemies to conquer them and carry them away into a seventy year captivity because of their unfaithfulness to the covenant of Moses. In Jeremiah 31:31-34, he said,

Jeremiah said that sometime in his future (He lived about 600 years before Jesus was born) God would make a new covenant. (If you are familiar with the modern designations, "New Testament" and "Old Testament," you now know at least one place where we get those designations. Jeremiah, speaking for God, said, "I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel…." When you pick up your Bible today and turn to its later pages, you are turning to this new covenant of which Jeremiah spoke.

Jeremiah also said that this new covenant would be a different covenant. He says here, "…not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand and led them out of the land of Egypt…."

Why a new and different covenant? Because Israel broke the covenant given to them on Mt. Sinai! Jeremiah put it this way: "‘My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,’ declares the Lord."

The writer of the New Testament book of Hebrews quoted this passage we are reading - Jeremiah 31- to his readers, just as I am quoting it to you. Only he was an inspired writer who took it much further. After citing Jeremiah nearly word for word in Hebrews 8:8-12, he concluded this in verse 13:

"When He [Jeremiah] said, ‘A new covenant,’ He has made the first obsolete. But whatever is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to disappear."

The first covenant Jeremiah spoke of, the one God gave to Israel when God led them out of the land of Egypt, according to the writer of Hebrews, was growing "old." It was becoming "obsolete." In the days when Hebrews was written, with the destruction of the Jewish Temple and center of worship just a few years away, it was indeed "growing old" and was "ready to disappear."

Question: Why did our Bible reading friend, Joe, conclude, as he read through Exodus and Leviticus where the Law of Moses is recorded, that what he was reading just didn’t fit our world today?

Answer: Because it is obsolete! Who says so? God says so through the writer of Hebrews!

A Model A Ford was quite a car in its day – a solid piece of engineering that changed our world forever. But it’s a death trap on today’s modern freeways. It can’t keep up. It’s obsolete. The Old Testament Law was the best law that man had ever been given in its day, but today it’s obsolete. God has given us something better. Even our uninitiated Bible reader, Joe, could instinctively see that! What he was reading in Leviticus just didn’t seem to fit. But he didn’t know why. Now you know why.

So when did this New Covenant come into force? When did things change from the Old Testament to the New? We know that the Old Covenant, the one given through Moses, came into force when Moses received the Law and the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai. When did the new one become binding and make the old one obsolete?

We need not speculate. God has placed another conspicuous marker. Just a few verses after the Hebrew writer quoted Jeremiah, in Hebrews 9:15-17, he wrote:

"And for this reason He [Christ] is the mediator of a new covenant, in order that since a death has taken place for the redemption of the transgressions that were committed under the first covenant, those who have been called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance. For where a covenant is, there must of necessity be the death of the one who made it. For a covenant is valid only when men are dead, for it is never in force while the one who made it lives."

You already understand the principle behind this. If you have a "Last Will and Testament," when does it come into force? When you die! It is never in force while the one who made it lives. If your heirs try to inherit what you have while you’re still living, you say, "Wait a minute. I’m not dead yet!" The New Covenant came into force at the death of Christ. Jesus was born, lived, and died under the terms of the Old Testament. Yet he taught of things regarding the coming of the New Testament.

So let’s finish our diagram. Here is what we had before:

(See Figure 1)

Now let's add to what we've learned.

(See Figure 2)

So here is the big picture:

(See Figure 3)

The first period of Bible history, named because God worked through the fathers of families like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is called the Patriarchal Period. It takes in everything From Adam to Mt. Sinai. The second period, the Mosaic period, began with the giving of the Ten Commandments and the Law on Mt. Sinai. It was replaced at the death of Jesus when he became the Mediator of the New Covenant. The third period, the Christian period, began at the death of Christ and continues yet today.

Had Joe understood these things and continued to read his Bible, he would have learned that there will be no other covenant made with man on earth that will replace the New Testament. Had he finished reading the Bible, while he would not have understood everything he read, he would have known, of all the commands of God he read, which ones we are under today – and which ones we are not. He would have been better equipped to answer the objections of skeptics who say that there are contradictions in the Bible, many of which go away with a proper understanding of these three periods of Bible history. In short, Joe would have been well on his way to getting a grip on the Word of God.

There is one passage in the book of Hebrews that summarizes the meaning of all this to you and me living today. It’s in Hebrews 1:1-2:

What "last days" was the writer of Hebrews referring to? Obviously he was referring to his own day because He says to his readers in the first century, "In these last days…." But he was also referring to our day, which continues in the final period of God’s dealings with mankind. He was referring to the Christian period. Christ and His teachings are what we must be concerned about today.

Christians living today are living under the terms and provisions of the New Testament. While the Law of Moses and the descriptions of the Patriarchal period can help us understand how we got where we are, and also provide a background for understanding some of the things in the New Testament, Christians today are not under the Law of Moses. We are under the New Testament.

Perhaps if we told Joe about this, we could convince him to go back and try again.

No, actually, "Joe" isn’t a real person. But you are. And so am I. Armed with this knowledge, any one of us can go back and try again to read and understand the Bible for ourselves. We can discover that we have a better grip on the word of God.

Dave Redick is Minister of the Hwy 20 Church of Christ in Sweet Home, Oregon and Editor of The Preacher's Study. He may be reached at pstudysupport@comcast.net.

Copyright © 1996-2008 by The Preacher's Study. Permission is granted to subscribers to use this document in total or in sermon preparation in the context of the local congregation only. Publishing it in a book, on the Internet, or anyplace beyond the local congregation is prohibited.

All Scripture quotations and references are from the New American Standard Version unless otherwise stated.

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