[aron]

I would like to show the juxtaposition of OT & NT texts creating a novel portrayal of Jesus Christ.

We all know the longest book of the Bible. Psalm 119. Lee wasn't interested, nor, frankly, was I. But what does it say? Well it has several hundred lines, one of which says, "O how I love Your law; I meditate on it day and night". To me this says, "O how I [Jesus] love Your [the Father's] law; I [Jesus] meditate on it day and night." Jesus lived in the reality of the Father's speaking.

Now, NT: "Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. During supper, when the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, to betray him, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him." ~John 13:1-5 ESV

There is a knowing, described in John 13. There is a meditation on God's word, day and night, described in Psalm 119. Jesus is arguably the only person in the entire world who really got into the reality of the Old Testament. Jesus knew the Father's will, down to the jot & tittle, down to the punctuation. Jesus found the reality, here on earth. Jesus didn't bypass the OT, He fulfilled it. Now, we Christians don't know the Old Testament very well, nor truly can we (on several levels), but we can struggle to see Jesus fully inhabiting the pious declarations of generations of God-seeking people, expressed in holy scripture. They fully described the framework, and Jesus fully lived in it. They hoped, prayed, and fought, and Jesus fulfilled it all, at every level, both physical and spiritual. Note that Jesus and the NT writers kept saying, "As the scripture said", or "that the scriptures might be fulfilled." And nowhere do they say that it was just the section they cited. There was a larger narrative at hand, which was suggested but not comprehensively covered in the NT usage of the OT.

But I, as a Protestant Evangelical, including my tour of the LRC, treated the Old Testament as something to be conveniently mined, and just as conveniently ignored. Lee did likewise, as is common among Protestants. We have "grace" and "faith", right? Out with the Old, in with the New. No "works" for us. But Jesus did not ignore the Old Testament. He brought it into "all the reality." We thought because we had the New Testament that we could be ignorant of the Old. We were wrong.

Lee's treatment of the Old Testament was absurdly superficial. And to compound the problem he was full of pious declarations of NT zeal, "We must do this" and "we must do that". No, the only thing we need to do, is to see Jesus Christ. If you hear His voice, you will live. My question to the Lee-ites is: do you hear Him in Psalm 119? No? Why? Because someone told you not to? Because you are good Protestants and recoil from the word "law" (even though you create your own NT law)? Why are you afraid of actually looking at the text?

We don't love God's law; we cannot. But by faith we can see Jesus loving God's law; by faith we can see, and we can live. And it's right there in front of us, in black and white. If we would only look. I mean, who thought Psalm 119 was about love? But it is: Jesus loved the Father, and obeyed Him, our Father God loved the lost sinners, and sent His Son Jesus Christ, and Jesus loved the disciples, and laid down His life for them. How can we not desire to pursue deeper into this love? I strongly argue that it is there, and it isn't hidden. It is right in front of us, calling, compelling us.