A Message from Dr. Van Pelt

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The official title of the course is Old Testament Survey. Yeah, it's about the Old Testament and yeah, we go through the whole Old Testament. All right. We go through it twice. One, we interpret the whole, then we back up and we read through it in light of that interpretation. So it's a twofold pass through the Old Testament, but that's just the veneer for getting at the core of it. Paul calls the Old Testament, the gospel promised beforehand, which is has been deposited in the scriptures by the prophets and is concerning Jesus, who according to his human nature, was a decedent of David. So this course really is... Ready? It is about Jesus. It's about his gospel, his kingdom, the kingdom of God, and all the covenants and his administrations that he fulfills in the new covenant. So your Old Testament is approximately 77% of your Christian Bible.

And my guess is, is that the vast majority of that material is either foreign or unknown to you just because it's ancient, it's different, it's Middle Eastern, it's not Western, it's written in a different language. And so you feel kind of like I'm lost. So you spend more time in the New Testament because it's a little more familiar and a little bit more recent and people talk about it more so you've got more context. But really the New Testament is just the fulfillment of all the promises and freight of the Old Testament. So if you really want to understand why the New Testament is so great, you've got to understand why the Old Testament is so great. 77% of your Bible, god knew what he was doing when he wrote the Bible. And if he decided the Old Testament should be that much, then he wants you to give at least a 50% of your attention to the Old Testament.

The New Testament is great, but the Old Testament is also super great that Jesus is there all the time. The second person of the trinity is Yahweh, the guy speaking on top of Mount Sinai is Jesus. Jesus is just as much present and working and acting in the Old Testament as he is in the New Testament. In the New Testament, he's the incarnate son of God so we can actually feel him, touch him, see him, but the reason that's so exciting is because of everything's gone on in the Old Testament. So the course is really about Jesus, his gospel, and his kingdom from the Old Testament perspective, leading up to the New Testament. So the more you understand that, the New Testament will become more exciting as well.

The people should take the course... Well, there are a lot of reasons. One, because we talk about Jesus to some degree. And I feel like if you encounter Jesus, that's a good thing. If you love Jesus more at the end of this course, then I've succeeded, no matter how many failures I've made in the context of it. But the one reason I think, the most important reason you should take it is because for the last 250 years, we have kind of disassembled our Bibles into a million little pieces and studied them atomistically. And we've kind of failed to see the beauty of the grand design and the big picture. How does the Old Testament relate to the New Testament? How does Genesis relate to Revelation? How does Moses relate to Jesus? How do those things work? What are the connections?

And my guess is, is that most people out there, if they're new to the Bible or even have been in the Bible a long time, don't realize how closely connected everything is. And one of the things we try to do in this course is show you that the Bible is really one plan, one message, one story, and that there's unity to it, but there's also diversity. And the question is, how do you balance the unity and the diversity and how do you make sense of it all?

And so I think in this course, I try to do that in a very unique way by talking about Jesus is the theological center, the kingdom of God is the thematic framework, which is governed by covenantal administration, and then the law, prophets, and writings as the covenant book, that is the covenant, the history of the covenant, and life in the covenant, both in the Old and New Testament. And so we've got some things here in this course that I don't think you'll see in any other survey courses. There are probably a lot of good survey courses out there, but I think the one unique thing that we do is we make two passes where we give you the grid to interpret the whole, and then we back up and work through that grid together.