Christians: Y U No Like Me Anymore?

Kaiser, in Preaching and Teaching from the Old Testament, writes on the problem of the Old Testament for today:
Instead of receiving the Old Testament with gratitude as a gift from God, all too many in Christ’s church view it as an albatross around the necks of contemporary Christians. They struggle with questions like these: What is the significance of the Old Testament for us today? Why should believers even bother with the Old Testament now that we have the New Testament? … Questions such as these ultimately raise the issue of the Old Testament as a major problem, if not the master problem of theology (p. 29).
Impact of the OT's exclusion today:
There are a number of doctrines that come to their fullest expression in the Old Testament text. Some of the ones that come to mind are the doctrines of creation (Gen. 1–2), the fall (Gen. 3), the law of God (Exod. 20; Deut. 5), the incomparable greatness of God (Isa. 40), the nature of the substitutionary atonement of Christ (Isa. 52:13–53:12), the new heavens and the new earth (Isa. 65–66), and the second coming of our Lord to the Mount of Olives (Zech. 14). The point is this: if we avoid the Old Testament and depend solely on the New Testament, we will be providing the seedbeds for tomorrow’s heresies, or in the merciful providence of God, an opportunity for a parachurch ministry to recover what others have neglected or deliberately bypassed (p. 40).

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