Twenty Principles We Can Derive from the Old Testament of the Bible

XI. A. Recap: what did we learn from the Old Testament?

 HOW DID WE GET HERE? OUR^* CHURCH IN THE 21^ST CENTURY

*Mennonite/Anabaptist

The Story of the Bible Becomes the Story of Our Church

2016 11 13 Review

If I were to ask you, what are some of the key things that concern you as a member of your church today I think one of them would be, How do we do church? Another would be, How do we turn seekers into disciples? We might also ask, What does it mean to be the people of God, the Church?

Now, there are others in our modern world who are concerned with these topics and have even written books and give speeches and hold workshops and conferences, teach courses, on contemporary applications of them. However, sometimes I think we do well to look at the past and see how things were done then, what worked then.

When I started teaching the class which forms the background to these blog installments, one of my aims was to re-visit the origins of the people of God, the church, going all the way back to the beginning, to creation. Then I wanted to move forward through time, coming eventually to focus particularly on the Reformation and the Anabaptist/Mennonite branch of Christianity of which I am a member and how it fits into the big picture.

From January to June 2016, we completed a survey of the Old Testament. We learned some key concepts of what God was doing with his people, how he created this group and what he gave them. These were reviewed in our first class of Season II held at Peace Mennonite Church on November 13, 2016 and are summarized in 20 points below.

Now, we want to learn what was changed or added to this in the New Testament and subsequently. Since June, I have been led by the Spirit, I believe, to a number of readings on what happened in The Early Church after the New Testament era. This has been most enlightening and I think has a lot to offer us as to the answers of those questions we spoke of above. Some of what we will learn might surprise us.

I would invite you again to come and join in this exploration of what was happening with the people of God in the New Testament, and what is happening with them up until today.

From last January to June [2016], some of you attended Season I of this series, in which we went through the Old Testament from Genesis to the Malachi. As you will recall, the purpose of these classes was:

1.    To trace the fundamental principles that the Bible introduces in terms of what it means to be the people of God, or as we now often also refer to ourselves, the church.

2.    A second purpose was to try and see what in the Old Testament spoke to the New Testament teachings of Jesus and the apostles that we as Anabaptists in particular

have taken as instruction for what it means to be the church, the people of God. In the Old Testament, of course, the people of God largely referred to The Children of Israel, or the Jews or Hebrews.

I wanted to be clear to the student and reader that I am not saying that what I am putting forth is the only understanding or interpretation of all of this material. I'm always open to your contributions and insights. The Bible is interpreted by all of us together as a community. That is another Anabaptist or Mennonite viewpoint. That is because we believe that we all have the Holy Spirit living within us, if we are Christians, and we understand that the Holy Spirit played a role in providing us this Bible, and therefore in helping us understand it now.

Now, we will turn our attention to the New Testament, and ultimately, to the history of the church after the New Testament. We will look at the same concepts we learned in Season I as well as see if there are any really entirely new concepts introduced in the New Testament and possibly even subsequently. Before we did that though, especially since it has been a number of months since we ended Season I, and because not all of you were not able to attend all of the classes, we did do a review.

I should say that in this review, we will not be referring that much if at all to any specific biblical passages. We did a lot of that in every lesson last year and will continue to do that once we get into the New Testament. So, let us look at where I believe we have come so far, before we move on.

1.    There is one God.

2.    Everything begins with God.

3.    God created everything.

4.    God created everything in order.

5.    God created everything good, as in beautiful.

6.    God also created everything different. Not only is there incredible diversity, no one unit is like another.

7.    God created mankind in his image.

8.    God created us to be in relationship with him and one another.

9.    God created us because of his love and desire for fellowship with us.

10. God is Love.

11. Man made a poor choice and God's perfect creation was spoiled by sin.

12. God was ready with Plan B, offering man away out of what he had fallen into.

13. God is our Redeemer. He redeems individuals and their cultures and will someday redeem the world.

14. God calls individuals to be a new people set apart from this fallen world.

15. God makes covenants and keeps his promises.

16. God is Faithful.

17. God gave The Law to show people what was expected of them in terms of their behavior.

18. God gave instructions as to what was expected in terms of worship.

19. God gave instructions in regards to building a place of worship.

20. God makes accommodations for humans in their weakness, e.g. allowing divorce, allowing his people to have a king, and a temple in their capital city.