The more I study the Old Testament the more I find it speaks about the same God as the New Testament. He is a God of unspeakable grace preserving a remnant for his purposes despite their constant failure and the constant attacks from the enemy.
“ But this is one of the rewards of reading the Old Testament regularly. You keep on discovering more and more what a tissue of quotations from it the New Testament is; how constantly Our Lord repeated, reinforced, continued,refined, and sublimated, the Judaic ethics, how very seldom He introduced a novelty. This of course was perfectly well-known–was indeed axiomatic–to millions of unlearned Christians as long as Bible-reading was habitual. . .” C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms
The problem is we allow the religious leaders the Sadducees and Pharisees, to interpret the Old Testament for us. This seems odd since they are the most criticized group in scripture and the literal foes of Jesus. We don’t know the Old Testament so we assume that Jesus’ criticism was of the Old Testament. It was not, he repeatedly criticized the abuse of the Old Testament by these religious teachers.
The religious leaders took the easy way out. They created an easy to follow formula rather than comparing the story of scripture with their story. This happens much the same way today. It is almost guaranteed in academia and is present in most seminaries. Truth is boiled down into simple labels and systematic compartments that substitute for actual knowledge or experience. One’s ability to regurgitate these labels is the mark of true knowledge. Meanwhile they never apply any of these systemized theories to real life. They are untested and dangerous. When they do take hold in the real world millions of people tend to die, like Naziism, Communism, or any of a host of other ‘ism’ with only slightly less obvious consequences.
Magdalen at the House of the Pharisees, Jean Béraud, c. 1891 The painter put the scene in his own time and made it so vivid. You can see the hypocritical judgement in their faces.
One of these bad ideas was the hyper mono-thesism that the religious leaders practiced. Many Jews to this day recite the Shema, the first part of which is “Hear, O Israel the LORD our God the LORD is one.” It comes from Deuteronomy 6:4-9.
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates -ESV
Click for further insanity.
Now God was not telling them to literally take this verse and repeat it over and over, and glue it on their forehead and paint it on everything. But they did. He was trying to use metaphors to explain to them the importance of his laws. This wasn’t a competition to see who could extract 613 rules and then follow them the best. This wasn’t about hiding systematic theology in a boring book. This is a story, the God of the Universe giving his children instructions to care for them in a world of sin. But they just saw a system. God has to be smacking himself in disbelief, which I guess you can’t do if you are wearing one of these crazy things. And we are the student of these fools when we write the Old Testament off as a system. We are their students when we do the same thing to the New Testament. Not sure if this clip is more absurd than the reality. But it makes the point, humans are dumb.
The Old Testament is full of references to the trinity. Here is a brief list I borrowed from an apologetics site geared towards Islam.
- The word Elohim is used thousands of times for “God”; Adonai is used hundreds of times for “Lord”; both of these words are plural nouns in Hebrew.
- A number of passages speak of the “faces” or “presences” or “persons” of God (Exodus 33:14; Deuteronomy 4:37; and Job 13:8).
- God refers to Himself as “Us,” “Our,” and “We” (Genesis 1:26, 2:18, 3:22, 11:7; Isaiah 6:8, and Isaiah 41:21-24), a phenomenon that is reflected in virtually every English translation.
- The OT says of God, “they caused me to wander” (Genesis 20:13), “they appeared” (Genesis 35:7), “they drew nigh” (Deuteronomy 4:7), “they went” (2 Samuel 7:23), and “they judge” (Psalm 58:11).
- The OT calls God our “Creators” (Ecclesiastes 12:1), “Makers” and “Husbands” (Job 35:10; Psalm 149:2; Isaiah 54:5).
- The OT says that God is “holy” (Joshua 24:19; Proverbs 9:10, 30:3), another plural
In addition there are many instances of the other parties in the trinity. The word for ‘spirit’ and ‘breath’ or ‘wind’ are the same in Hebrew. So in Genesis 1:2 the Spirit of God, in Genesis 2:7 you have God breathed into Adam, in Exodus 15:10 your wind, in Job breath Job 26:13, 33:4, 32:8 in Ezekiel 37:4-14 it is breath, in Isaiah 11:2, 61:1 it is Spirit, in Joel 2:28,29 the wording sounds like the New Testament. In addition the pillar of fire by night and the pillar of cloud that led Israel through the wilderness is the same idea of God’s wind directing them. Mark and other gospel writers make this connection when they say the Spirit directed Jesus into the wilderness, as he walks through their narrative.
Abraham and the Three Angels, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 18th century
There are also many instance of the second person of the trinity or the pre-incarnate Christ. The phrases ‘angel of the Lord’ or ‘angel of God’ are most likely references to the second person. I won’t recount them here for there are many. But the most vivid instance is probably the story of Abraham told in Genesis 18. The Lord came to Abraham with two men to discuss Soddom and the promise made to Abraham. These were real men, Abraham offered them bread and washed their feet. Oh can you see the imagery as Christ gave his disciples bread and washed their feet in the upper room? Or there was Jacob wrestling with God Genesis 32:22-32
The point is that these are not rare instances, they are common in the Old Testament. Now it is clear that there were a number of mysteries which were not given to men before Christ Colossians 1:26. But this didn’t have to be one of them. The first chapter of Mark is just pregnant with meaning.
Jacob’s Fight with the Angel, Andrea Brustolon, c.1710
Every word is an allusion to a whole Old Testament world. Promises of God, passing through water, entering the wilderness, and conquering of the land. Christ retells the story of Israel. And the the baptism was further reiteration of Old Testament truth. The three persons of the trinity united on earth in this predicted moment. All those image are brought together before their faces. But the religious leaders were willfully ignorant. Don’t fall into the same trap and turn the New Testament into systematic theology. Don’t try to see through the story to the real Jesus or the historical Jesus or whatever crackpot idea is going around. Read the story, and seek others who can help you. Then let it write the story of your life.