Does Jesus want you to read the Old Testament?

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Radio Announcer: The Reconstructionist Radio Podcast Network presents the Moral Foundations Podcast with Reverend Jeremy Walker, where you will learn to teach the Bible line upon line and precept upon precept in a systematic and comprehensive manner.

Jeremy Walker: The Moral Foundations Podcast is brought to you by the GCS Apprenticeship Program. For more information, visit http://www.gcsapprenticeship.com.

Hi, and welcome back. My name is Reverend Jeremy Walker, and you are listening to the Moral Foundations Podcast.

Now, today we have some news to share with everybody. The Moral Foundations Podcast is designed to help people learn how to teach the Bible systematically, and this goes for parents, this goes for teachers, youth groups, pastors, whoever might need to learn to teach the Bible to someone else.

Now, on our website, which is actually changed, and that’s part of our update here today, all of our other podcast who’ve been pointing people to our website, moral-foundations.com, but our website has changed. It has been incorporated into our overall program, which is the GCS Apprenticeship Program, and this podcast is one of the productions of that program.

To find the Moral Foundations Podcast now, you just go to our website, which is gcsapprenticeship.com, and then you can click on the podcast link at the top and select Moral Foundations Podcast or for a more direct link, you can go to gcsapprenticeship.com/moralfoundations.

Now, to go ahead and get us started with this one, this is more of an update episode for people and just kind of give to some news and to tell people what to expect on upcoming episodes. Now, what we have been doing is producing lessons systematically through books of the Bible. We’ve done the Book of Jonah, and we’ve also done the Book of First John now.

If you go to the website, you’ll also find on there not only the podcast episodes that we’ve done for teaching tips and whatnot, but you’ll also find all the Bible study stuff that’s needed for the students and for the teachers, and that’s all up there. You can even go on there and download the PDFs, so if you did not want to view the lessons online, you can actually go there and click on the teacher’s PDF link and download that. You either save it to your computer or print it, and you can also do the same for the students as well.

This is just an update to inform you that we have had a slight change of where we have our stuff hosted, and so you can find all the materials for the Moral Foundations Podcast and the Bible studies that are systematic that we’re producing for you.

Now, something else that’s important that we’re going to be doing a little bit differently as well is we’re going to be producing the entire book at one time. You will see a little bit of a break as it were. The Moral Foundations Podcast episodes, the lessons we do, the short lessons we do for teaching tips and whatnot, will be being produced for every lesson that is with a specific book of the Bible like we did with Jonah and also First John.

The one we’re working on now is the Book of Judges. Right now, it’s going to have about 40 lessons or so, and with that, that’s 40 different episodes. That’s going to be 40 different lessons for teachers and students that are going to be being produced and are currently being produced, and we will have those once they are all completed. We’ll have those up on the website as well. It will also be then broadcasting those, like we did before, one a day until, of course, 40 lessons. We’ll do it like that, so it’d be more of series instead of a daily type thing as a norm, but once they are produced, we will put them out, and we will have them every day for people to listen to.

They’ll also be on the website, the gcsapprenticeship.com website. Once again, you can, I think it’s /moralfoundations, and you’ll find all these episodes, and of course, you’ll find all the systematic studies, PDFs and downloads will all be there. If you’d like to, once again, if you were a person who wanted to do it digitally from your smartphone or from your tablet, you can also do it from that as well because all the lessons will be up there for those people as well.

Now, that’s the kind of a basic update with what to expect and what we’re going to be doing, but in the meantime, while we are producing these series like right now, we’re working on the Book of Judges, which is actually going to be a very fascinating study. It’s really one of my favorite books of the Bible to go through, and it should be exciting for teachers. It should be exciting for parents because whenever you have in the Book of Hebrews, you have them talking about the heroes of the faith. These are the people that the Christians should look to as examples. People that were examples of great faith, people to mimic, people to uphold as somebody to be like.

If you’re a teacher, you can go to your students and say, “Here are people you should emulate, and this is what you should emulate from their lives.” If you’re a parent, you can do the same thing with your children. You take these characters we have, and they are examples of what we should see in our own lives as well. Whenever we have it pointed back, we have from the Book of Hebrews pointing to these heroes of the faith, most of them are all throughout the Bible, not just in the Book of Judges because we have Abraham and Jacob and Isaac and lots of other people as well. You also have Rahab, which is mentioned as well in the Book of Hebrews and many others. But then you also have people like Samson, and quite a few, in fact, in Hebrews, it said that the, didn’t have enough time to get to all of them.

But it is saying is this, is that we should be taking the Old Testament characters, taking their lives, the historical records that we have. They’re not just stories, they’re historical records. We should be going back, and we should be learning from their examples. The Bible does something that no one else does in history books. It does not edit to make you like someone. If you look at normal typical history, biographies, autobiographies, or just plain history books, everything is biased, and it’s biased because there’s certain things that they want to hide. There’s secrets that they don’t want to tell.

Now, you might get some people who are wanting to write a tell-all. There is some people who write autobiographies that just want to be sensational, and they’ll actually embellish or lie about their lives to make them sound better. Sometimes you do it for shock value, but for the most part, what happens is you will not find people telling the truth about themselves, especially the things that are not good, specifically when you’re dealing in the realm of religious beliefs and things like that.

One thing that the Bible does is it does not hide the bad things that people have done. It lays them out for all to see and says, “Here is what somebody did that was good, and this is what you can expect to happen to you.” You see the good things that happen to people when they did something good. It also lays out what happens when somebody does something wrong, and I think that one just pops out at me, but the story of King David and his problems that he had with Bathsheba and Uriah, her husband, and all the rest, and then of course, the fallout, the mini pains that he had after that the rest of his life. These are examples to us of what happens if a person decides not to obey God or His commandments.

These should be examples for us. This is why I think the Book of Judges is a fascinating study. It’s something that I think the listeners, if you’re a teacher or a parent, you should be excited about this type of study. If you haven’t gone through the Book of Judges with your children yet, you certainly should. If you haven’t gone through yet with your students, you very much should.

If you think you’ve read them yourself, wait until you teach them because there’s something different about reading the Bible yourself, just cursory reading, daily readings, whatever, and then there’s something else about teaching it. You do get a whole lot more out of it personally when you teach it because you really do have to understand the content and you have to be able to explain this to other people, and you have to put more thought into it, so teaching is not just for the student but for the teacher themselves.

I think the Bibles says it, “Teacher doth not thy teach thyself,” and so you will learn a lot by doing studies like these on your own, and of course, if you follow the Moral Foundations ones that we will be providing shortly, I definitely think you’re going to be getting a lot out of that. A lot more than you expected, at least.

But here’s the problem, and I think this is kind of an issue that I saw recently is that I saw an article, and the article said, “Is the Old Testament dead?” What it meant, really, was is the Old Testament dead for the modern Christian because they ignore it? They are ashamed of it.

The really interesting aspect to people that don’t like to read the Old Testament, people that don’t like to study it, they don’t want to talk about it, they don’t want to teach sermons on it, there’s an issue that they run into because every single person, if we want to take every single New Testament character, every one of them, all they had was the Old Testament. That’s it. That’s all they had. I mean, Jesus, whenever He was quoting scripture, what do you think he was quoting? He was quoting the Old Testament every time, because there was no New Testament. All there was, was Old Testament.

Whenever people abandon the Old Testament, they’re abandoning everything that Jesus was teaching about, where it came from, so they really a baseless people once they abandon the Old Testament. They have less than half Bible. I would venture to say that they have no Bible at all because they destroyed the base of where everything has come from, the history, everything that Jesus even taught about, like as we said, comes from there. Every disciple, every apostle, it all comes from there.

In fact, I remember, when I was going through the Book of Acts recently with our kids at home, and you had Ethiopian man and Philip was directed to the Ethiopian man, and he was sitting down and reading from the Old Testament, the Book of Isaiah. Philip comes up alongside of him, and he asked the question, he says, “Do you understand what you’re reading?” and the Ethiopian man asked him to sit with him and his carriage, and he says, “How can I understand unless someone teach me?”

Phillip, then, sat down, and he began to preach Jesus from the Book of Isaiah, laying out how the Old Testament foreshadowed Jesus and taught everything that Jesus was teaching. This was being done from, once again, the Old Testament. When people abandon the Old Testament, they abandon the Bible entirely, and so I think this is a vast mistake, but I think the main issue is that people are embarrassed by the Old Testament because the Jesus that they’re teaching about, the Jesus that they’re preaching about doesn’t exist. They’ve made up ideas about who their Jesus is, the things that their Jesus would do or the things that their God would do because whenever Jesus says to the Pharisees, before Abraham was, “I am,” and they, of course, became very angry and upset and wanted to kill them, they said, “Because thou being a man has made thyself God.”

They understood that Jesus was saying, “I’m not just a man. I’m not just a prophet. I’m not just some good guy. I am the literal God of the Old Testament,” meaning, I am the creator of the universe, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God that brought the Israelites out of Egypt, the God that gave the 10 Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai. This is the God that Jesus was saying He is and was.

This is a problem people also have is that their Jesus did not flood the world. Their Jesus isn’t the one who sent the plagues in Egypt. Their Jesus isn’t the one who sent the Judges like Samson in to fight and to kill. Their Jesus isn’t the one who sent in Joshua and Moses and told them to eliminate the inhabitants of Canaan and not to make friends with them and as a form of judgment. Their God isn’t the one that would the Israelites and make them walk around the desert for 40 years until they all died.

That is the main reason why people dislike the Old Testament because it doesn’t equate or it doesn’t resemble the God or the Jesus that they’re hearing about from the pulpits on a daily basis, and that’s a major problem. But there’s no problem with the Bible. There’s a problem with the teachers. There’s a problem with the churches. There’s a problem with the pastors, and of course, in this case, there is a problem with the parents that don’t teach the real Jesus, they don’t teach the real God, and they don’t teach the real Bible.

If you’re going to be an effective teacher, if you’re going to be an effective parent, you’re going to have to make sure that you do something, is that you actually take the Bible seriously, the Old Testament and the New Testament. You cannot abandon the Old Testament because otherwise, you’re abandoning, well, everything Jesus taught. You can’t claim to say, “Well, I just believe what Jesus taught.”

Well, Jesus taught the Old Testament. He didn’t have a New Testament to teach. In fact, He is the God of the Old Testament. All the things you read about when it says, “God said this, God did that,” it’s talking about Jesus. Jesus made it very clear. I think the only people that it’s not clear to, once again, are the people who aren’t reading the Bible. They have a made-up Jesus that is not the one depicted in the Bible itself.

I’m hoping that people will get a lot out of this upcoming Bible lesson, which will be the Book of Judges.

Now, while we’re waiting for that to happen because that is in production right now, we will be producing, every week, a small episode, 10 or 15 minutes like this one, and what we’re going to be doing is just giving basic Bible tips. Hopefully, if someone listens to this and you have a question, you can send us an email about it. Our email is, let’s see here, I think it’s gcsapprenticeship@gmail.com, and you can just put on there that you have a question for the Moral Foundations Podcast and send that to us. You can even title that to Jeremy Walker if you like.

But we’re going to be covering lots of basic common problems people have with teaching the Bible. We’ll be doing short episodes about that, I think good teaching tips as we go. I think we’ll touch on, as well, something specific. I saw a video floating around recently about how to teach the 10 commandments, and I have some very specific ideas about that that I think will very much so help you because whenever, like me, you teach young children from the ages of two and up, you have to really know what you’re talking about because you have to break down what it means to covet.

I mean, what does that mean? What does it mean to steal? What does it mean to bear false witness? What does it mean to take God’s name in vain? You can’t just say that to a child. They won’t even understand it. In fact, I would say most parents and adults and pastors don’t understand what those things mean, so I think we’ll touch base on some of those ideas of how to teach those commandments and what they mean as well.

Hopefully this update is going to be beneficial to you. It’ll let people know what to expect. We will be having one weekly episode going out of these general Bible tips. If you have any questions, something specific, maybe you ran up against something that you’re unsure of how to explain, maybe it’s something you heard and you would like to teach it but you’re unsure of, or it’s some kind of a Bible question that your, maybe your kids or your students posed a question to you and you’re really unsure of how to answer those.

I can honestly tell you, my children do it to me all the time, and thus, so you really don’t realize how little you know until you are sitting in front of children. They are like the gauntlet, they’re firing questions at you, and you find out that you have to go back and study something. Very interesting. Good for us to learn.

I’ll wrap up this episode of the Moral Foundations Podcast. Remember, we did change our web address. You’ll find us at gcsapprenticeship.com/moralfoundations. You can also find us just from the main website, gcsapprenticeship.com and go to the top, go to podcast, and then select the Moral Foundations Podcast as well.

Until next time, I’ll talk to you next week, and it’ll be more of a general Bible tips, things that I think will be helpful to you. If you have any questions or something that you would like us to address specifically, once again, just let us know. You can send us an email at gcsapprenticeship@gmail.com.

Thank you, and we’ll talk to you next time.

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