One of the reasons the Old Testament intimidates modern readers is also one of the reasons it matters so much.
It is old, stubborn, strange, politically charged, morally unsettling, poetically dense, and deeply rooted in worlds most of us do not understand. It was not written in our language, for our institutions, or inside our assumptions. It comes to us from shepherds, kings, exiles, priests, poets, and survivors. It is full of wars, genealogies, lawsuits, songs, laments, proverbs, temple instructions, national collapse, and unresolved tensions.
But for those who believe it is part of a Divine Curriculum, it feels real.
That was one of the strongest impressions I took away from my conversation with Old Testament scholar Tremper Longman III on Created in the Image of God. Tremper did not present the Old Testament as a simplistic answer book dropped from heaven in modern categories. He presented it as a library of ancient texts written into real human history, to real audiences, facing real problems, and yet carrying more depth than even their original authors may have fully grasped.
That phrase stayed with me: they were often speaking better than they knew.
And that, to me, is one of the best reasons the Old Testament still matters.
The difficulty is the point
Tremper said something simple but important: for Christians, the Old Testament is often harder than the New Testament. It is more culturally distant. It comes from before Christ. It doesn’t immediately resonate with modern readers. Some people conclude from that distance that it must therefore be irrelevant. Others go the opposite direction and try to force every verse into immediate modern application, as though no time, culture, or covenantal development had passed at all.
He rejected both mistakes.
The Old Testament is neither disposable nor flat.
That matters to me personally because I come from a background that leaned hard into the Old Testament. We kept Passover and the holy days. We observed the Sabbath. We saw Jesus not as abolishing the law, but magnifying it and making it honorable. So I’ve spent much of my life wrestling with the exact question Tremper raised: what continues, what changes, and how do we read these ancient writings honestly without either domesticating them or dismissing them?
His answer, in essence, was that you have to respect the text enough to let it be what it is.
That means asking basic but demanding questions:
- What kind of text is this?
- Who was it written to?
- What problem was it addressing?
- What would its original hearers have understood?
- How does genre shape meaning?
- And only then: how does it continue to speak?
That may sound obvious, but it is astonishing how often we skip those steps.
A lament is not a legal code. A love poem is not automatically an allegory. A royal psalm is not a newspaper horoscope. Apocalyptic literature is not a timeline chart for cable news addicts. The Old Testament has structure, form, convention, and literary discipline. To ignore that is not reverence. It is carelessness dressed up as piety.
Speaking better than they knew
But if the first mistake is flattening the text, the second is reducing it to nothing but its immediate historical setting.
Tremper’s most interesting point, to my mind, was that biblical authors often wrote truly into their own circumstances while still saying more than they themselves fully understood. He used prophetic material to illustrate this, but the principle reaches more broadly.
Isaiah, for example, speaks to kings facing immediate threats. The Psalms were used in worship by people dealing with real enemies, real failures, real political hopes, real grief. These texts had meaning then. They were not empty placeholders waiting for a future code to unlock them. Their first audiences were not merely warming the bench for us.
And yet, over time, those same texts can reveal deeper layers.
That is where the Christian question of Jesus comes in, and I don’t think we should avoid it just because some people have handled it badly. Tremper’s point was not that the original Israelite worshiper reading Psalm 2 was consciously thinking, “This is explicitly about Jesus of Nazareth centuries from now.” His point was more grounded than that. The psalm may have functioned in its own day as a kingship psalm, perhaps tied to the enthronement of a Davidic king. It had immediate meaning. But when the monarchy collapsed, when exile came, when the actual kings failed, readers naturally began to hear more in the text than a single ancient ceremony.
The text deepened under pressure.
Christians then read that deepened expectation in light of Jesus. That is not the same thing as saying the original writer sat down with a fully developed New Testament theology in mind. It is saying that later readers, shaped by later events, recognized dimensions in the text that had always been there, though not fully exhausted in the first moment of writing.
That is a subtle but critical distinction.
Tremper also warned against illegitimate overreach. He used the Song of Songs as an example. Medieval interpreters often treated it as a direct allegory of Christ and the church, bypassing its plain reality as a collection of love poems. That kind of reading can become untethered very quickly. Once every breast, spice, or garden image becomes a coded theological secret, you are no longer reading the text so much as using it as raw material for your own imagination.
So there is a line here:
- a text may carry more than its first audience fully saw,
- but that does not mean it can be made to mean anything.
And that brings me to a very interesting tension with something Gary Rendsburg said in my recent interview with him.
“The text means what the interpreter says it means”
Gary Rendsburg, in discussing interpretation, gave a line that was memorable precisely because it is both true and dangerous:
“The text means what the interpreter says it means.”
At one level, of course, that is inescapable. Texts do not speak in a vacuum. Human beings interpret them. Traditions form around them. Communities argue about them. Meanings are drawn out, contested, refined, abused, defended, and transmitted. Anyone who has spent serious time with scripture knows this. I didn’t have the time or the confidence, at the time he said it, to discuss this more deeply with Gary. I will definitely be inviting him back to do so.
Because in my own view this statement is only half the truth.
Yes, the interpreter matters. But the text matters too. Not to say Gary doesn’t also believe this, I just didn’t get the chance to understand more fully what he was getting at. In the absence of that, for now, I’ll share my perspective.
In my own trilogy and in my broader approach to sacred writing, I have tried to resist two equal and opposite errors. One is rigid literalism that acts as though interpretation is unnecessary and every passage simply means the most surface-level thing a modern reader imagines it means. The other is interpretive free play, where the text becomes a mirror for whatever agenda, ideology, or spiritual mood the reader brings to it.
I reject both.
My own view is something like this: a great sacred text is not infinitely malleable, but it is profoundly layered. It has structure. It has limits. It has original setting. It has literary integrity. But because it is dealing with realities larger than any single moment—God, justice, kingship, exile, sacrifice, longing, failure, mercy, order, chaos—it also exceeds the full awareness of any one human author or one generation of readers.
That is one reason I have always been drawn not just to doctrine, but to pattern.
In People of the Sign and the broader trilogy, I return again and again to the idea that history, symbol, ritual, and story are not random fragments. They interlock. Not always in the lurid, sensational way of popular prophecy teachers, but in the deeper way that recurring human realities echo one another across time. The Bible does not strike me as a flat rulebook or a pile of disconnected oracles. It strikes me as a layered witness to the structure of reality itself.
That means we should read with humility.
Not because meaning is arbitrary, but because it is deeper than our first glance.
Applied learning: how to read without pretending to be omniscient
So what do we do with this?
First, we stop treating ancient texts as either primitive embarrassments or instant validation for our modern opinions.
The Old Testament is full of grounded, gritty realism. It does not clean up its heroes. It does not avoid failure. It records political collapse, spiritual confusion, unjust kings, bad decisions, national trauma, and long periods where nobody seems to understand what God is doing. That alone should make it valuable to us in an age overflowing with propaganda, spin, and curated identities.
These texts know that human beings are not pure. Nations are not pure. Religious institutions are not pure. Motives are mixed. Outcomes are messy. And yet meaning is still there.
Second, we should remember that people often act, speak, and write from within a horizon they do not fully see beyond.
That was true of biblical writers. It is true of us too.
We say things whose consequences exceed our intention. We build institutions whose meaning becomes clearer only later. We participate in dramas we only partly understand while living them. Parents do this in families. Leaders do this in nations. communities do this in history. We are always, to some degree, speaking better than we know—or worse than we know.
That should make us slower to boast and slower to despair.
Third, we should become more disciplined interpreters of our own time.
If the Old Testament teaches anything, it is that immediate appearances are not the whole story. A king may look secure and be rotten. A people may look defeated and still be carried by promise. A lament may sound like despair and still be an act of faith. A national collapse may become the context in which deeper truths are finally heard.
We need that realism now.
We live in a culture of instant conclusions. But scripture, especially the Old Testament, trains us to live with long arcs, partial knowledge, unresolved tension, and meaning that ripens over time.
That is not evasiveness. It is maturity.
Finally, we should read these texts not as tourists, but as participants.
Not participants in the sense that we erase the distance between their world and ours, but in the sense that we recognize the same human drama is still underway: power and vulnerability, fidelity and compromise, memory and forgetfulness, law and mercy, pride and repentance, fear and trust.
The Old Testament still matters because we are still the kind of creatures it describes.
We still build towers. We still demand kings. We still grumble in the wilderness. We still write songs out of grief. We still mistake prosperity for security. We still hear only part of what is being said, even when truth is standing directly in front of us.
That is why these texts endure.
Not because they flatter us.
Because they know us.
And perhaps that is the best corrective to the idea that “the text means what the interpreter says it means.” Sometimes it does, in practice. But the best texts also push back. They resist us. They expose us. They outlast our theories. They continue speaking after our preferred interpretation has worn thin.
That is one mark of a real text.
And perhaps also of revelation.
Sneak Peek: What’s Coming Up on Created in the Image of God
Next on Created in the Image of God:
- Sunday, July 12 at 7:00 a.m. US Central time: I interview Graham Tomlin, theologian, author, and former Bishop of Kensington, on how Christians can engage culture with wisdom, conviction, and grace.
- Tuesday, July 14 at 8:00 p.m. Central time: I interview Vinoth Ramachandra, theologian, author, and international lecturer, on faith, justice, global culture, and the challenge of thinking beyond familiar assumptions.
From scripture to public life, from ancient texts to present tensions, we’ll keep asking what it means to live truthfully in a complicated world.
As always:
You are created in the image of God, and God loves His creation.
