- This spoke to my heart about life change.
- Lessons about the character of God.
The following is an excerpt from William Lasor's "Old Testament Survey" (page 590):
To understand the Old Testament as Christian Scripture, one must see it through the eyes of Jesus and his apostles. They were especially inspired by God's Spirit to grasp the meaning of God's revelatory words and deeds and the directions in which they were moving.
Yet at the same time, the modern reader must try to see the Old Testament passages on their own terms. We must sit with the hearers in the marketplace, city gate, temple, or synagogue and try to understand God's words as they heard them. We must see God through their eyes and discern God's purposes as they did. In other words, we must be sensitive to the original context of an Old Testament passage. Only when we begin to understand the intent of a passage for the author's own times, can we seek the full significance of the passage for Christian faith and life. The Old Testament context will not tell us all we need to know about the meaning of the passage. But unless we start there, we can easily twist the Scriptures to our own purposes. The intention and meaning of the individual authors must be grasped if we are to capture the meaning put there by the overall author, the Spirit of God. We hear God's voice through all of Scripture. That voice gives the whole Bible its authority for us as God's people.