Reasons Why Sunday-Schools Should Study the Old Testament.
By Howard Crosby
1. The New Testament cannot be understood without a knowledge of the Old. It is not merely nor chiefly that the Old Testament is quoted in the New, but the whole thinking of the Old Testament is inwoven into the New. The inspired authors were all (except Luke) Jews. They had been brought up on the Old Testament. With all but Paul and Luke, it had been the one only book of their library, and with Paul it had been the subject of profoundest study. The New Testament, therefore, like the Old, is a Jewish book. It is not a Roman, Grecian, or Egyptian book. It is a book that forms part of the one stream of revelation, and that is Jewish. Allusions to Jewish history and Jewish ecclesiastical customs, abound in it, and often lie hidden from the eye of the reader who is not familiar with the Old Testament. Hebraisms also are many in both style of sentence and style of thought in the New Testament, which need the Old Testament for an interpreter. 2. The Old Testament is a part of the gospel. The good tidings came to Adam and cheered the Old Testament Church in its patriarchal and Israelitish forms. These tidings came in prophecy and type. Our Lord said of the Old Testament Scriptures, "They are they which testify of me." John 5:39. The law was a pedagogue to bring men to Christ. This pre-Christian testimony and guidance is not to be set aside because Christ has come. It is full of illustrative power regarding all the gospel truth revealed in the New Testament. Not only does the New Testament illuminate the Old, but the Old illuminates the New, making the gospel all the clearer, and enabling us the better to define the Christian doctrines. 3. The Old Testament is God's revelation to man, and, therefore, demands every man's study. The idea that the Old Testament is a collection of old myths and the crude writings of semi-barbaric ages, is an idea begotten of infidelity and born in carnal ingenuity. Time is wasted that is taken to meet such learned folly. The principles of the divine government are unfolded in the Old Testament history and biography. Man's sinfulness and God's combined justice and mercy are set forth in attractive lessons, by the side of which, all human philosophies are distorted and impotent. God speaks in the Old Testament as much as he does in the New. The church in all ages is one, and the revelation is one. The church of to-day is the same which God led out of the land of Egypt, the same which God preserved in the ark. We cannot sunder the Old Testament from the New, without mutilating God's revelation and shriveling the church.—Howard Crosby, in O. T. Student.