In this article, I want to share one key attitude, two fundamental commitments, and three basic presuppositions that are necessary to benefit from the Old Testament.

One Key Attitude

If you're going to benefit from the Old Testament, you need to approach it with humility.

We tend to feel like we are humble when we are by ourselves. We like our own opinions. We don't argue with ourselves. The real test of humility comes when someone tells us something we disagree with or don’t like. The Bible does a lot of that. We struggle with humility when reading the Old Testament in at least two ways.

Self-Centered Reading: When we read the Old Testament, we often want it to be about us. We lose interest if we don’t see a direct connection to ourselves. Abner Chou gives a helpful illustration: imagine going to dinner with a friend and only wanting to talk about yourself. If your friend brings up something else, you say, "No, let's talk about me." This self-centeredness can make it hard for us to engage with the Old Testament because it’s not always immediately about us.

Reading the Old Testament is like developing a friendship across cultures. There are barriers—language, education, life experiences—that can make it feel awkward or boring at first. Many people give up, thinking it’s too hard. But if you are patient and persevere these relationships can be some of the most life-transforming you will ever experience. The same is true with the Old Testament. With patience and humility, we can learn a lot from the Old Testament if we listen long enough.

A Superiority Complex: We are tempted to assume we know better than the writers of the Old Testament. We live in a time that doesn’t think much of the past. Living in a world with advanced technology can sometimes fool us into thinking we’ve advanced in every other area of thinking as well. As a result, we approach the Old Testament as if it were somewhat primitive and backwards. Ironically the very reasons we are tempted to look down on the Old Testament are because of values we received from it.

A superior attitude creates obstacles to benefiting from the Old Testament. You have a difficult time learning from something you feel superior to. While it’s true people in the Old Testament lived a long time ago and didn’t have as much revelation as we now do, that doesn't mean the Old Testament is beneath us. What God is teaching through these stories stands in judgment over us. If we humbly listen, the principles we learn can change the way we look at the world.

Let me give you one example. What are some of things people today think are evil? Idolatry might not be one of them. When we read the Old Testament however, we see that it is a big deal to God. People die because of idolatry. Israel goes into exile because idolatry. If we humbly read the Old Testament, it will cause us to reevaluate our attitude toward idolatry. If we don’t think idolatry is evil, something is wrong with the way we think about it and our attitude needs to be realigned with God's.

Two Fundamental Commitments

Dependence on God: When we open up our Bible we find God talking. He is talking about the most important subjects in the world. It’s obviously going to be deep. You've never had a professor who's smarter than God. Even if God is stooping down and using human language and human authors and human concepts, He's still somehow communicating His concepts through them. Those are going to be big thoughts for us to think about. The good news is that God is willing to help us. As we read, we have the Author ready to help. We need to continually be depending on Him by asking that He would enable us to understand what we are reading.

Willingness to Think: We often want answers that are quick and simple. The Old Testament doesn’t usually work like that. If you come to it pridefully, expecting to understand everything immediately without wrestling with the text, you’ll often get it wrong. Much of the Old Testament is written in a way that requires thinking deeply in order to understand it. Psalm 1 gives a picture of how we are supposed to approach it. It says, “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord. And on his law, he meditates day and night.” The word meditate literally means to mutter or to speak quietly. Imagine someone quietly reading the Bible out loud to themselves and then going and talking about it with their friends, pondering the puzzles, working at making the connections and slowly but surely discovering what it all means.

Instead of being discouraged by that, we should be grateful. Part of the glory of being a human is that God's given us the opportunity to think and to think big thoughts! To help us learn to do that, the Bible doesn’t only tell us what to think, it helps us learn to work at thinking. That means we have to come to the Old Testament humbly wanting to learn. If we are going to learn, we must admit we don’t have all the answers already. If we think we have all the answers before we come to the Bible, we are not going to benefit from the Bible. While we don't throw everything we have previously learned out every time we come to the Old Testament, we must come to passages recognizing there is always much more to discover, desiring to be taught.

Three Basic Presuppositions

The Old Testament Was Written to Make Sense: I didn't say it was written to be easy or it was written to be simple, but it was written to make sense. In the Old Testament, God's communicating a message through human words in a way that humans can understand the meaning, using the basic tools he gave us for communicating.

As we look at God speaking in the Old Testament, He assumed people could understand. For example, in Genesis 12:1, "Now the Lord said to Abraham, go to from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I'll show you.” What did He expect from Abraham once He said that? He expected that He would understand what he meant and go.

Later when God makes a covenant with Israel, He holds them accountable to that covenant. He assumes that he communicated that covenant in a way they could understand according to the normal ways that human communication works.

He not only expects we obey the Bible, He also condemns, twisting it or perverting it. In 2 Timothy 2:15, Paul says, "Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth." If you have to work at doing this rightly, you clearly can do it wrongly and if you do, you should be ashamed.What brings shame is that you can understand the Scripture.

I'm not saying, always. I'm not saying every passage is going be as easy as every other passage. And I'm not saying that you'll always have the same amount of certainty that you understand everything as well as you every other passage. But that doesn't mean you stop trying or that you can't understand. Struggling to understand something doesn’t mean we can’t understand something. You don't do that with other other relationships. For example, when you miscommunicate with your spouse, you don't say, “Well, we miscommunicate with each other all the time, so I guess we should never communicate.” You know communication is important and it is possible, so you keep trying. If communication is difficult between humans, why would we expect a human understanding God would be easier? It can be challenging. We won't always get it right and we won't always understand everything God's saying, but we still believe it's possible. The Old Testament was written to make sense.

The Author Determines the Meaning: The meaning of the Old Testament is determined by the author, not the reader. We assume this when we are speaking to others. We have a kind ownership over our words. When we speak, we expect they need to work at understanding what we actually mean. If they don’t, we realize it could be that we didn't communicate it as well as we should, but still they got it wrong. They're not right. People don’t get to take your words and make them mean whatever they want them to mean. As you study the Old Testament, you must let the author say what he means. It is not your job to tell him what you want him to say. It is to find out what he intended to communicate.

Understanding the Original Audience: To understand what God is saying to us today through the Old Testament, we need to first understand what He was saying to the original audience. The Bible was written for us, but it was first written to them. If I write something for someone, it's for that someone. If you write a love letter to your wife, someone else can't pick that up and say you love them. The letter is for your wife. The authors of the Bible wrote to a specific group of people, at certain times, for certain reasons. But praise God! They also wrote for us. If we want to understand what it says to us, we have to first understand what it said to them. That makes the study a little more difficult. But all the work is worth it. We can only know what it is saying to us once we know what it said to them. The good news is you have spent much of your life trying to figure out what others mean by their words. We're always communicating and we've been having to interpret communication for most of our lives. Some of us are better at it. Some of us are worse. But, if we use some basic principles, we can understand almost anyone. Those same principles will help us understand the Old Testament. It's literature. It's literature written by God, but it's literature. It's a form of communication. It is old, originally written in another language, has many literary styles and is long. We can expect that to make understanding what it is communicating more challenging. But, the basics of understanding what it is communicating are still pretty straightforward.

Conclusion

Benefiting from the Old Testament requires humility, prayer, and a willingness to think deeply. By depending on God, meditating on His Word, and respecting the original context, we can uncover the riches of the Old Testament and allow it to shape our lives today.