Why do I preach so much from the Old Testament? Because that's what the apostles' both practiced and commanded.
When the apostles set out to preach Christ and him crucified – they had to explain to Gentile hearers why a Jewish “Messiah” mattered to Gentiles! What does it mean to be a Christian?
You cannot make sense of Christian identity without understanding the story of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the story of Moses and the Exodus, the story of the Judges and the failure of Israel, the story of David and Solomon and the building of the temple, the story of the divided Kingdom and the failure of the kings, the story of the Exile and the restoration – the new Exodus under Zerubbabel, and the story of the rebuilding of Jerusalem – and the rebuilding of the people of God, under Ezra and Nehemiah.
The Gentiles who put their faith in Jesus were not just believing in something God did in their generation – they were believing in something God had been doing for thousands of years!
When you became a Christian you were grafted in to Israel – through baptism into Christ, you were joined to the family of Abraham (Gal 3:28) and became “heirs together with Israel, members of one body, sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus” (as Paul says in Eph. 3:6)
The weapons of our warfare are spiritual weapons – but they are weapons nonetheless! And so just as Nehemiah's laborers worked with the weapons beside them, even so must we.
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