Tony Evans Teaches Old Testament SurveySample

 Most of us have a junk drawer in our house. Inside is a collection of random items. Pieces of this and pieces of that. Pencils, pens, paper, parts of furniture, odd tools, loose batteries and other items that don’t have a proper “home.” You throw them in the drawer because you don’t quite know what to do with them, but you know that you don’t want to throw them away. Of course, the plan is to eventually organize it. But the reality is that most of us never get around to organizing all the junk in the drawer.

Unfortunately, many people treat the Bible this way. We accumulate random biblical knowledge in much the same way that we collect random stuff that we toss into the junk drawer. There are memorized verses, familiar Bible stories, well-known characters and scraps of sermons that we retain in our memory. However, we tend to leave this material unorganized in the junk drawer of our minds because we don’t understand how it all fits together. We must understand that each book of the Bible fits into one larger, unified story. They don't exist in isolation. And I would like to suggest to you that Jesus is the thread that knits the Old Testament together. 

If Jesus is the central figure of the whole story, that truth should cause us to read the Old Testament differently. While we might not find His name on the pages of the Old Testament, we can still find Jesus in every book of the Bible because it all points to Him. If you leave out Jesus, then the Old Testament becomes isolated, non-connected stories that do not have a historical goal that ties them together. Include Jesus, and now you have the thread the knits the whole Old Testament together, as well as the New Testament.

How should the reality that all of Scripture points ultimately to Christ shape the way we read the Old Testament?

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