The Bible unfolds through progressive revelation, meaning our understanding of God grows from the Old Testament into the New. Jesus gives a New Commandment to love one another, which is founded upon His grace, not just on obedience of keeping the old laws. The central offer of this New Covenant is salvation through faith alone and the subsequent gift of the Holy Spirit, which is given freely to all who believe, making no distinction between Jew or Gentile. This free gift of grace is what unites all Christians, regardless of their differing backgrounds.

Automatically Generated Transcript

[00:00:00] My purpose tonight is to put before us the understandings that will help us to see how the Old Testament and the New Testament are two parts of the one Bible that’s necessary, both for the contributions that they make. Okay, and we’re talking about the Old Testament, which is often referred to as the law of Moses, because that’s the central part of it, but there were the writings of wisdom like Psalms and Proverbs. There were also prophecies from different prophets, but overall it is the religion of the Jewish nation that was formed under the leadership out of Egypt by Moses and the people who got set up eventually in a temple in Jerusalem. And to which all the nations of the world were invited to come and worship. There was in the temple a court for the Gentiles, Gentiles and non-Jews.

[00:01:02] And so if they were to come, they were welcome to worship the God of Israel in the court for the Gentiles. And if per interest that they wanted to become Jewish people, they could so become proselytes and there was a baptismal service that would enter them into being a part of the children of Israel. And that’s the Old Testament. And the new Testament is mostly about the life of Jesus and the explanations about that and the church that was formed around Jesus and his sacrifice and his teaching and Jesus and his presence as Lord of Lords and the Lord of the church. and that’s the New Testament. Now when we have these two parts of the Bible both are necessary to make the whole counsel of God. But if we were to just emphasise the old

[00:01:58] there’d be something lost in terms of that which is contained in the new. And there are some people whose emphasis of life has a major part coming from the Old Testament and not as much coming from the new. And it represents a little bit of a loss of really being what God wants us to be because as I’ve been explaining to the church what we have in the scriptures is a record of what is called progressive revelation. God builds up gradually all along the way. And in his building up there was actually a process whereby some new prophet came that he would be measured in the prophecies that he made according to whether or not they followed the line of revelation already given by God. And there was a little phrase that’s used about what was said by the latest prophet,

[00:02:51] and it says, is it according to the other prophets? In the New Testament quote of that, according to, it’s the little word, karta. Karta, the other prophets, or karta, what God has already said. And one way a new prophecy or a new revelation could be accepted would be that it lines up with that which God had already given because God never contradicts himself. There certainly are developments in the Word of God and in God’s revealing his plans and revealing his person. And those developments you can see very clearly from how in the Old Testament there’s not really that much understanding of the fact that there’s one God. In fact, the central statement that the Jewish people had to make was one about the Lord our God is one God. although if you really read it carefully in the Hebrew

[00:03:42] and see translated exactly across the English it actually reads the Lord our gods for the word for God there Elohim is in the plural but then the next word is is which is a contradiction of grammar rules but the scriptures are making a point the Lord our gods the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit that we learn mostly from the New Testament though once you know it from the New you can find it in the Old but the Lord our gods is one and the unity of the Godhead three persons in one God has been a mystery which a lot of people looking in from outside Christianity and not really getting a very big look have often puzzled over what appeared to them a contradiction is that there are three gods, no there’s one God but in three persons and that has been understood and very much clarified

[00:04:38] to certainly the historical revelation of what is Christianity that Christianity is about three persons in one God and we are theists who believe in one God but that is in the three persons of the Godhead now this has very often been thought about and argued about and discussed by intellectuals within the church You can’t get away from the sense that it is beyond what any rational thinking could put up. It is just what God reveals of himself. And that is reflected in how Jesus is understood when he came into the world because Jesus is talked about as God’s only son. Have you ever noticed what might be an apparent contradiction? Because we who become Christians, by so becoming Christians, are then called sons and daughters of God. We become children of God by our joining to the one son of God, Jesus.

[00:05:40] And when a person confronts or has Christianity confront him or her, the challenge is that will they come and accept this person, this only begotten son, John 3.16 in the Old King James Version reads, for God’s love of the world that he gave his only son. Now you’ve got plurality in the Godhead there, but you’ve got the strange fact that there’s only one son. And yet we are sons of God and whosoever believes in him, we have everlasting life, but we also get made to be the children of God. And there’s this plurality in the sons of God that comes by our commitment to the one Lord Jesus Christ. The one and only truly begotten son. Now, the word begotten, by the way, has to do with the fact, this is, I’m only adding to the effort to swallow all of this, I know, but it’s the truth.

[00:06:32] But when the Bible speaks about God, you realise that all through the Scriptures, it’s really clear that he’s the one eternal Father. Now, just stop for a moment. How do you get to become an eternal Father? The answer is you don’t. And you either are eternally a Father, you don’t become that partway through. The Father didn’t become a Father. He always was Father because he always had a Son. It’s the eternality of the Son that makes the eternal quality of the Father. Yet you might come back to me and say, what’s this business of begotten when, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son? The word begotten is one that means is the outcome of the fatherhood. He did beget a son but he didn’t beget him as the sense that he didn’t exist before he came into existence.

[00:07:33] He always was with the father and that’s what John chapter 1 in the New Testament says in the beginning was the word that’s Jesus by the way and the word was with God and the word was God. The deity of Jesus is an eternal fact that was there at the beginning of all the action of creation and the rest. In the beginning was, that little word was as a continual existence. It’s in the past, yes, but it always was the case. Jesus or the eternal son, he wasn’t called Jesus until he came and took on humanity. And the fact of his being born to the Virgin Mary is how he got to be at a moment begotten in the sense that the Father didn’t have him in that way as a son until he was at birth. And when the birth of Jesus happened, he was the begotten son of the Father, even though he always was the son.

[00:08:28] Sorry if I’m blowing your mind, but this is just how it is. Now, don’t get upset or don’t get some sort of feeling that you can’t cope with such understandings because these things of the Scriptures are beyond our capacity to compute. you just hear them and you believe them. And there’s something about the New Testament that adds to our understanding because, as I said, the whole Bible is a progressive revelation that goes through. And if you just had an Old Testament faith, you’ve not had the wrong faith, you just haven’t had the latest progress report. Because the New Testament is that. It is something God does as a new step of revelation. Or you say, where’d you get that? I’ve been going over this, I know, a fair bit, but the book of Hebrews in chapter 1 is the place to go.

[00:09:19] Many different ways God spoke to the fathers through the prophets, but now in these last days he has spoken through his Son. Jesus coming into the world and taking on humanity to become visible, to become watchable, lookable, to understand that this person, the Son of God is someone that you can read about and come to know, to be amazed at his personality and listen to his words. That’s Jesus coming into the world in order for God to speak to you, to get through to us, to bring himself to us. We were lost because the scriptures teach about the fall of humankind at the beginning of the world and how the whole human race, though there might be good peoples and bad peoples, there might be people whose lives have had evil get worse and worse and other people have been trying hard not so to do.

[00:10:13] People have been seeking to worship God as best he was realised, as was the case with many of the Jewish people in the Old Testament doing their best, sinners though they be. Like King David who was trying hard to, in fact he’s called by the scriptures, a man after God’s own heart, but yet he had sinned rather badly at one stage and God forgave him. But in his prayer he says, take not your Holy Spirit from me because in that Old Testament area, if a person really turned against God, God didn’t stay with them with his Holy Spirit. He left. That had happened to King Saul and David knew it and so when he had sinned, he prays the prayer of repentance, Psalm 51. You can check it up at home. But Psalm 51 and a part of that prayer is where he says, take not your Holy Spirit from me.

[00:11:00] But you know when we get to the New Testament, a further progress of reality, a progress of God’s dealings, a progress of what he’s prepared to do to make a people of God, we find that there’s a verse and the one I want us to look at here is something to open your eyes a bit to the New Testament, but will the first of my verses please, about a new commandment. Did we not just read it? I think we did. A new commandment. Oh, just stop a moment. Don’t go any further. The Old Testament was full of the old commandments. If you haven’t ever caught up with the fact that the New Testament is a progress forward in the revelation of God, here’s Jesus giving it. A new commandment I give to you. And interestingly, it’s about the basis of Christian fellowship not being so much as the Old Testament keeping of the laws

[00:11:52] and they had rather strict punishments when people fell out not doing the right thing. There was all sorts of awkwardness and the Old Covenant compared, that is, to the new. But the new commandment is one based on love. That you love one another just as I have loved you. Jesus came to show the love of God. How he did that was by how he accepted people though they were unlovely. How he accepted people though they might have been sinners and had dropped out of the true religion and available at the time, which was the Jewish religion, dropped out and they became people who were considered awful sinners and were kept out of the synagogues and weren’t allowed to come and do anything about their being Jews even though they should have been able to so do. But they had sinned their way out of it.

[00:12:42] But Jesus went and accepted them and one of the features of the life of Jesus is how he didn’t stop himself from reaching out to every single type of person. and if they were someone that would fulfill their lives with sin he sought to deal with them and to forgive them. Jesus then says to his disciples a new commandment because it’s not the same as the old. A new commandment I give to you that you love one another as I have loved you. You also ought to love one another. In the morning’s message the thing that I had to go on about was the fact of these one another’s and the fact that it’s not just love, it’s a virtue and do as much loving as you can, but there’s a sense of love one another, especially found amongst Christian brethren, not with a big B, I mean, well maybe a big B,

[00:13:36] but not with the people who are sort of like one group of Protestants, but amongst those who are brothers and sisters in Christ, which is every person that’s come to Jesus, even if they were someone who very fleetingly found him before they died, think of the thief on the cross who repented, Jesus saying to him that grand assurance, truly you’ll be with me in paradise. The man hadn’t lived long enough other than just to repent, he was an awful rotten murderer type sinner, but he got accepted by Jesus and that’s actually the status of us all. And the reason why there’s a new commandment is because it’s not just the old, this is Jesus’ step forward in progressive revelation as to what it is to be God’s people and it’s to obey the commandment to love one another.

[00:14:34] The message this morning was all about the one another’s that you can track down in the New Testament of the various ways we treat one another because there’s something, no barrier, no bond, no distinction, even though some may not always live up to what that is. Yet Jesus calls us to love one another just as he says, I loved you. How did he love us? He loved us despite our sins. Even more so, he loved us knowing that on the cross, he would bear the punishment for all of those sins. There wasn’t any punishment left. When Jesus finished his bearing the sin of the world, including your sins, that is, he cried out and said, it is finished. Just before he gave up the ghost and died, he knew his job, to die for you, had been finished. never needing anything else to be done about your sins. Do you know that?

[00:15:38] And when you begin to sense that God’s been working on you to come and know him properly, you don’t have to somehow find a way to add a bit of extra payment. You don’t have to make any big promise that you’re going to really slave to serve him. He loves you and gave himself for you and calls you to come to him, to belong to him. And so when he says to the disciples about loving one another, to do just the same as he loves them, he loves us. By this all people will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another. That is a fantastic statement and what I’m underlining for it, if you can imagine an underlining in that top sentence, a new commandment. now if you live just by the Old Testament or by a majority of the teaching of the Old Testament but not sufficiently enough of the New

[00:16:37] your attempt to be Christian is deficient and you need to get into the New and learn more of it and have a Christianity that’s based on Jesus’ New Commandment and based on all the teachings of the New Commandment now that’s not to lessen the Old I think there’s something deficient of a Christian that just has a quick grasp, not gasp, but grasp of the centre of the New Testament. God loves you and he gave his son for you to die. You can come and receive him. Become a Christian. You do that and you’re a Christian. That’s enough for me and now you’re a Christian. You actually have a deficient, listen, deficient faith because if you miss out all the Old Testament there’s an enormous amount of good teaching in it. and so one of the problems we have in our generation is a Christianity, Protestant Christianity

[00:17:31] is particularly like this where we get people to come to Christ and we then just do things of nice programs with them but they are ignorant about all the blessings in the Old Testament and there’s something deficient about that Christianity just as in the opposite way if you were to have an Old Testament faith but haven’t caught up with the thrust of the New Testament. By the way, do you know what the thrust of the New Testament is about mostly? Well, when I say mostly, what is different in the new from the old? Let me hear and answer people just off the top of your heads. What is there in the New Testament that’s just different from the old, the biggest difference you might think of? What would you say? Not you, Vanessa, I know you probably know. what is the New Testament that is so amazing

[00:18:25] in its difference from the old come on the grace of Jesus ok the grace of Jesus for sure how God the Old Testament is full of God’s grace but how he then did it in Jesus is revealed to us in the New thank you what else the New Testament what’s wonderful about what the New Testament offers you. Thank you very much. The person of the Holy Spirit. He’s mentioned in the Old Testament. The Spirit of God hovered over the face of the world. It’s a creation. He’s busy there. It’s a part of the creation. But the teaching about the Holy Spirit, which is the love gift of God when you become a Christian. The very first Christian sermon. Let me put it this way. You can find sermons in the Old Testament that have Christian equivalents. But the first sermon given as a Christian sermon was by Peter at the day of Pentecost.

[00:19:30] Now, of course, Jesus gave snippets of things that are the gospel before the day of Pentecost. But the day of Pentecost, Peter declared it as a central offer of the church. he rehearsed what Jesus had done and achieved and how Jesus had gone to heaven and become lord of lords and king of kings and then he finishes up and says about how God now gives the gift of his Holy Spirit and he said if you repent and put your trust in Jesus God will give you not only the forgiveness of sins a once and for all forgiveness but he’ll give you the gift of the Holy Spirit that is the classic Christian offer the gift of the Holy Spirit you can’t be a Christian and not receive the Holy Spirit or if you didn’t let the Holy Spirit get received by you you’re not a Christian the presence of the Holy Spirit in you

[00:20:26] is a consequence of coming to Christ and if you come to Christ repent of your sins put your faith in Jesus accept what he did to atone for you by how he died on the cross God gives you not only a total forgiveness, once and for all forgiveness, never to be taken back, once and for all forgiveness, and he gives you the gift of the Holy Spirit. That happened on the day of Pentecost. Now, learning that was pretty difficult for the Jews because that was such new revelation. So we’re going to turn now to another Bible passage, which is in Acts, where Peter and the other Christians are having to work it through. And why this is really interesting to us is because you’ll find that there is some divergence of opinion amongst those who are the believers. And that’s no surprise

[00:21:19] because believers don’t all have the same ideas and some have caught up with what God has done in his progressive revelation and some are still back in the Old Testament era in how they understand things. But some of the believers who belong to the party of the Pharisees. Now, this is also amazing to me because the Pharisees and their leaders were the ones most anti-Jesus and the ones who schemed to get him crucified. But some of them who were in the party of the Pharisees, meaning they believed the doctrines the Pharisees had promulgated, but they were people who also heard the good news and became Christians, but they still were in the party of the Pharisees. So that actually is what happens amongst Christians. You run into people who’ve had a faith repentance experience and come to Jesus,

[00:22:05] But then you discover they’ve got a whole lot of things that really are quite contrary to normal Jesus-style believing in the Bible. If you want to know how to have the right style of being a Christian, follow what Jesus says and does and believes. And I was telling the church last week how on the last day of that conference they had here in Brisbane, on my way trying to find where I parked my car down near the waters of the – where’s that place with the big windmill? Anyway, yeah, sorry? Yeah, not the South Coast, but the – what did you? South Bank, thank you, yeah, South Bank. And I had thought that the whole conference was at the – what’s where the theatre is and there’s a big theatre place. It wasn’t actually, it was at another part where they’ve got different car parks.

[00:23:03] And though I parked in the first one, I went to the meeting of the second one. And when I came out to find my car for the life of me, I couldn’t find it. That’s a very aggravating thing. And I was walking around near the station there in South Brisbane and the lady who comes from Sydney recognised me and stopped and asked me a theological question. And she had a problem because she didn’t believe like some of the people in the church in the creation the way that the creation people were presenting it. She didn’t know that that was my belief she was criticising, but I let her talk on a bit. And then I said, well, a good way to decide who’s right about the whole business of God creating the world is look and see what Jesus believed. I said that’s what I do

[00:23:50] and I found places where he gives of his ideas and he talked about there being Adam and Eve and he talked about them being male and female which was quite the point of her question from the beginning and I said I just follow what Jesus believed about the creation that resolves that question and it was very helpful then I moved on to try and find my car but we are not left without a way to know and if you follow Jesus as the chief way which you do because you’re really a New Testament Christian, he will teach you to love the Old Testament and he’ll teach you how to know the parts that are meant to be literal. It’s clear from Jesus’ words. There’s no problem about it if you’re willing to let Jesus be the one leading. Well, here we have some of the believers in this big critical moment.

[00:24:48] There’s a big council that the early church has to decide on this issue about what to do with the people who come become Christian when they’re Gentiles and they don’t really like the law of Moses. They’ve never obeyed all the Old Testament ideas. And they said it’s necessary. We’ve got to circumcise these new believers, these new Christians. we’ve got to circumcise them and tell them to keep the law of Moses, turn them into what’s the proper Jew. And the apostles and the elders were gathered together to consider the matter. And after there’d be much debate, Peter stood up and said to them, Brothers, this is typical Peter. Brothers, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you that by my mouth, meaning he was the Gospelizer, the first one,

[00:25:33] that up. In my mouth, the Gentiles should bear, keep moving please, should accept or receive the word of God with the gospel and believe. And God who knows the heart bore witness to them, to the people and to all of us, by giving them the Holy Spirit as he did to us. That which unifies the church is that if you’ve really come to Christ, you have the Holy Spirit and even some of the people who might still be in the party of the Pharisees or they still might be Calathumpians when you’re a good strong Baptist or they might still be people who love scripture union and you don’t or still might be people who, you know, homeschool and you’re not or whatever the distinction might be. Right across all that, the thing that makes us one body is that we all have received the Holy Spirit. And he made

[00:26:28] no distinction between them and us, having cleansed their hearts by faith. No one gets to be right with God just because you keep the rules. And the Old Testament’s pretty thick with the rules and they’re good rules. There’s nothing wrong with them except they applied to how Moses was given away to them that they could be Jewish and be the people of God for that period of time. Some of those rules are eternally to be kept. But not all of them. You can find all of those rules, thank the Lord, we don’t have to keep them now because of the rigor of what they are and because of the fact that we’ve got something far better. What makes us a body is not that we’re keeping all the rules but that we have the Holy Spirit that is given to us. If you’re not certain you don’t have the Holy

[00:27:16] Spirit, you need to do something about that this week. You don’t have to go on. It’s amazing when some people who’ve been in church circles for years and years, I’ve had ministers where I’ve been invited to be the speaker in their church and I get finished dealing with the church people and I go home and the minister’s got somewhere for me to sleep. This is down in Tasmania the one I’m thinking of and then he wants to stay up talking late but what he wants to do is get around to him admitting that he doesn’t know that he’s in the door he doesn’t know about the Holy Spirit being his what an opportunity I love opportunities like that to explain from the Bible I don’t remember what I did, this isn’t too long ago but what I would do is take him to the New Testament and the promises like this one

[00:28:10] having cleansed their hearts by faith your heart isn’t cleansed by joining the church or by keeping the rules or by seeking to improve or doing some extra special good works to make up for your bad ones, all of that’s a slap in the face of God because of the price he paid for your free forgiveness Jesus, his death on the cross was too big a price for anybody ever for God to want them to offer any extra payment that atonement that Jesus works was absolute and completed and all that you have to do is say to him thank you please forgive me freely I don’t deserve it I know that now just be my saviour because you died for me and you be staggered how quick God comes to bless you and give you of his Holy Spirit and fill your life now verse 10 therefore why are you putting God to the test by placing a yoke on the neck of the disciples

[00:29:20] that neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear but we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ just as they will and it doesn’t matter whether a person has been a Jew for many years and worn lots of persecution because of it they still need to simply come to Jesus and accept him as saviour and be saved by grace the grace of the Lord Jesus just as every person who’s become a Christian ever has had to grace means free gift the wages of sin is death but the grace the gift the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord I’m not sure what word is used for grace there but it’s either the word for free gift or it’s this word grace Certainly the Bible teaches that the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ is eternal life. The gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord

[00:30:18] and you get it freely. One of the signs of someone who’s actually understood that is that they get very thankful and one of the best evidence of someone getting in the door properly is that they are filled with thanks. Oh Lord, I could never have deserved this but you gave me. Well you gave your son in the first place to make it happen by dying on the cross and you give him now in the second place by his spirit coming to live within me. Thank you, I can’t Lord stop thanking you. We believe that we will be saved, that’s what being saved means, gotten in the door of Jesus through the grace of the Lord Jesus just as they will. The biggest thing that hits me from this passage is that amongst Christians you can get people who’ve got some major things wrong

[00:31:10] but they still are people who can be assured that because they’ve received the Holy Spirit they’re still in the door and so you can put up with the fact that not everybody in your group thinks exactly the same. It’s because some have learned well some parts of the scriptures and some have not learned that but they’ve done other things or some people never sat under teaching that helped them go through. It is amazing actually how many people are in our city of Brisbane who would say that they’re Christian because they have Christian beliefs but they’ve never actually had the opportunity to have someone disciple them which means help them to learn the major essences of the Christian faith like I’m doing with you tonight. This is a fantastic passage, Acts 15 of how it’s being rehearsed

[00:32:02] that everybody who gets saved is saved the same way by faith in the Lord Jesus and the gift of grace that he gives as you come to him. I’ve said enough one night and let’s have a word of prayer. Lord Jesus, I want to thank you for the New Testament Christianity. I thank you that it’s not one that means we can leave aside the Old Testament. I think we’d have a deficiency if we did that. I thank you, Lord, for the fact that both Old and you fit together and tell us how we can know you. Thank you for the progress in how you had your people by making them Jews in the first place but then you led them how to become Christians which actually this book of Acts is about and the Apostle Paul being the apostle to the Gentiles who became Christians and that becoming Christian wasn’t them becoming Jews.

[00:33:01] It was actually the fact that the Jews had needed to become Christians too in the step following the revelation of the New Testament, the new covenant. Father, thank you for these things and that we can understand them and I pray, Lord, that every person here tonight will be someone who will take with great value the presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.