In this segment, I want to talk about two very powerful concepts that I think are the key to unlocking the most you can get out of the Old Testament particularly, but it'll help you in the New Testament study as well. The two key concepts are looking at the first one is looking at the three levels of Scripture, the first, second, and third level of Scripture, looking at all three levels. And the second one is Eastern versus Western type thinking and prophecies in the Scripture.
So I hope this will expand your mind and challenge you to dig deeper in the Bible, in your own personal study and in your teaching. I live in a town that's very close to Boston, and so it's an urban area, it's on the commuter rail system, and the part of the town that I live in, most of the houses are two-family houses. Our house is a two-family house as well.
So if you're looking the outside of the house, you'll see that there are two front doors on the house, and you see that there's the first floor, the second floor, and then there's some under the roof, there's some rooms on the third floor as well. So, to an outsider looking from the street, you might assume that the downstairs unit has the territory on the first floor, and the upstairs unit has the second and third floor. That's what you might guess.
If you went inside the downstairs unit, where my actually, my daughter and son-in-law live there right now, if you went into the inside of the downstairs unit and you walked around, you'd realize that actually the downstairs unit has one bedroom on the first floor, and then there's a stairway and it has one bedroom on the second floor. So even though the second floor is mostly our unit, that there's a back stairway and there's one bedroom on the second floor.
So most people who've come into the house and looked around think, " Ah, the downstairs unit has two bedrooms. There's one on the first floor and one on the second floor." You can't see until you get inside that there's one on the second floor. But what almost no one realizes is that there actually there is a hidden third level in the house.
That when the house was built, in addition to the downstairs unit having a bedroom on the first floor and one on the second floor, there is a stairway that goes up and there's one other bedroom on the third floor that belongs to the downstairs unit. And this was converted over by a former owner who just put up a little thin piece of sheetrock to close off this back stairway. But the stairway is there.
So there's a hidden stairway and we may open it up sometime and restore the house back to where it originally was, but that's the way it is right now. To me, the Bible is like this, that there are three levels, just like the three levels to my downstairs unit, where there's one bedroom on the first floor, one on the second, and then a hidden one on the third floor, I think the Old Testament is like this as well.
The early Christians understood the Old Testament as a story that it was to be understood on three levels. The first level, the most basic level, if you think of it like a three-story building, the foundation, the lower level, is just the basic storyline itself. Here's what happened. The second level is the moral lessons for us from the story. And then the third level, which many people never get to appreciate, it's kind of like the blocked off hidden third stairway.
The third level is the prophecies or foreshadowings of Christ and the New Testament events that are hidden in the story. So when the early Christians are reading the Old Testament stories, they'd be looking at all three levels, saying, " All right, first let's understand the basic storyline. Now, what are the moral lessons from us? And is there anything that is foreshadowing? Is there any prophecies that are contained in the substance of this story?" So this is I'll give you an example.
Let's take the example of the Exodus story in Exodus, the Passover Lamb story, in Exodus chapter 12 and chapter 13.
So the basic storyline is that Moses is told this is the in anticipation of the 10th plague, Moses is told that every family is to take a lamb and slaughter it, twilight to ease the Passover, put the blood of the lamb over the door frame, eat a meal inside the house, don't go outside of the house, that the lamb is to be a male lamb without defect, and you're to break none of its bones when you have the meal. So that's the basic storyline of the story.
And then afterwards, you get rid of all the yeast and for the next seven days you have no yeast in the house and anybody who has yeast in the house gets booted out of the community. So that's level one of the story. Level two would be so that's the basic storyline. Level two would be are there any moral lessons in the story for us? Well, moral lessons in the story and the Exodus story we know from what it says in 1 Corinthians chapter 5, let's read from there. Starting in verse 6, your glorying is not good.
Do you not know a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump since you are truly unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover was sacrificed for us. Therefore, let's keep the feast not with the old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. So it's saying, the moral lesson for us Christians in this story is, after the lamb is slain, you eat the bread without yeast.
Now that Christ, our Passover lamb, has been slain, we need to get all the yeast, all the sin out of our lives. So there's a moral lesson for us in the story, and Paul brings it to bear here in the Corinthian Church when he's dealing with the problem of gross sexual immorality in the church there. He's saying, " Don't you understand? This lesson is for us. There's a moral lesson contained in that story. The lamb has been slain. All the yeast gets taken out.
And then if you read the story, anyone who doesn't get rid of the yeast gets banished from the community, which ties in with the discipline that he recommends there. So first level, the basic facts of the story. Second level is the moral lessons for us. And then the third level is foreshadowings or prophecies of things to come. I think most of us are familiar with the third level from this story. Christ is the Lamb without defect. He was without sin. It was the blood of the lamb that saved people from death.
He was slaughtered at twilight. There was a meal of the flesh of the lamb that would be commemorating this periodically after that time. And then after the lamb was slain, the people were released from bondage and they would eat the bread without yeast for the next seven days. So this is all of these things which is representing they get the sin out after that point in time. So there are all three levels of the story. There's the basic storyline, moral lessons for us, and then foreshadowings.
There's the prophetic element here. Early Christians, whenever they're reading the stories in the Old Testament, would ask themselves this question, is there a level 2 and is there a level 3 in this story here? Whether it's referenced specifically by the apostles or not. So that's the first thing I want to lay out that as we're talking more and more about expository teaching and giving examples of that, whenever I'm teaching through the Bible, I did a long series through Genesis, I did a long series through Exodus.
We take the stories one at a time. First we explain what's the first level. Second thing we take a look at is are there moral lessons for us? And then the third thing is there is some prophetic element here. So you can always do this whenever you're reading stories from the Scriptures, particularly from the Old Testament. Something that really opened my eyes up to this was when I was reading I started reading through Ante-Nicene Fathers Volume 1 just to become more familiar with the early Christian rights.
I was interested in what was the Church like in the beginning. So I wanted to didn't want to trust anybody else's assessment of it. I wanted to see for myself what did they believe, what did they teach, how did they live. So I started reading through the Ante-Nicene Fathers, read through volume one, and some of the things I thought were a little speculative, some of the things I thought were a little strange, some of the things were very interesting.
But I came to Justin Martyr's writings and particularly his first and second apology in his dialogue with Trypho. Dialogue with Trypho is an argument between Justin Martyr and Trypho, who is a Jew, and they're having a debate over the Old Testament. And the Jew is complaining to Justin about the Christian faith. Justin is a Samaritan who converted to the Christian faith. And Justin knew the Old Testament very well, and he used it tremendously effectively to explain and defend the faith.
And he opened my eyes up, practically speaking, to so many examples of this foreshadowing or prophetic type of prophecy contained in the Old Testament stories. The one with the Passover Lamb is mentioned by the New Testament writers, but there were several that are not necessarily mentioned by New Testament writers, but the early Christians saw them nonetheless.
And it opened my eyes up to that, also opened my eyes up to the power of the Old Testament in persuading unbelievers, that this is in the Book of Acts, this is how people came to faith. This is the Old Testament prophecies. And the Provide series that we did, which is part of the Historic Faith series also was put together really to show people how to do this, how to convince unbelievers as they did in the beginning of the church.
So three levels of the Scripture to look at it, all three levels, including the hidden third level. And then the second thing I want to take a look at is Eastern versus Western-style prophecies. Many years ago, a friend of mine had recommended that I read David David Bercot's book, The Real Heretics, and a friend said, " Well, if you like that book, you're going to love common sense." He said, " It's even more radical than Real Heretics was." So I got the book. This is Common Sense.
I don't know if it's still in print. I remember telling David Bercot that I had read Common Sense. He was very apologetic. He said, " Oh, I'm sorry that you read the book." I got a lot of criticism about that. I probably stated things too strongly in the book. I got a lot of pushback. And I said, " David, I thought the book was perfect. I thought it was great. I loved it. And you opened up my mind to so many different things.
You introduced so many topics that really caused me to stop and think and dig a lot deeper in the Scriptures. And one of the chapters I think the chapter is only about nine pages long, but one that completely upended how I read and teach the Scriptures is chapter 14. It's entitled " What We Would Rather Not See." And so he's talking about David's in becoming familiar with the early Christians, he got to see that they think differently than most Western Christians think.
And to process that, how do they think, how did they read, and they don't think like most of us do? And I'm going to read from there. He says, this is page 96 in the book. He says, " But if we are to accurately understand Scripture, we must learn to think as Easterners." And that's not easy for us to do. It's the Eastern thinking of the early Christians that so often repulses the uninitiated Western reader.
He finds himself muttering, " These people don't think like I do." Their logic doesn't make any sense to me, so he quickly dismisses both them and their writings as strange. However, the New Testament writers followed the same peculiar logic as did the second century Christians. If we hadn't already westernized and sanitized the New Testament, we'd be able to see that. But as it is, our eyes are safely closed to the Eastern way of thinking that is woven all throughout the pages of the New Testament.
But since the early Christian writers have not been westernized and sanitized, we immediately notice their Eastern thought process when we read their works. So you know I'm not only am I a Westerner growing up in the United States, I'm also an engineer on top of that. So I'm like a hyper-westerner in terms of my thinking style is very, very logic, very analytical by nature. So I'm trying to understand this concept of Western versus Eastern type thinking. And let me give you an illustration.
There are Western-style prophecies and Eastern style prophecies. Western-style prophecies would say, " Here's what's going to happen. One, two, three, four, five. Isaiah chapter 53 is an example of a Western-style prophecy that talks about the suffering servant who would be led like a sheep to the slaughter as the lamb before the shearers is silent. He didn't open his mouth. It says what's going to happen pretty much in an unhidden fashion. So that'll be a Western-style prophecy. Pretty straightforward.
Eastern-style prophecy, we gave the example of the Passover lamb. This is an Eastern-style prophecy, meaning it's an analogy. So everything in the one story represents the reality in the other story. So, for example, the Passover Lamb represents Christ. In the different aspects of the Passover Lamb, none of its bones are broken, that it's the lamb without defect, that it's slaughtered at the twilight, all these things were foreshadowing in detail things that would happen to Jesus.
So the Eastern style of prophecy is analogies. I think of it as like an onion. An onion is made up of different layers, all of which mirror what's on the outside. So this is this type of prophecy or this type of thinking with allegory and analogy is more typical of Eastern cultures and thinking. Think of Persia and India, whereas the more straightforward style of communication would be more typical of Western cultures such as Rome.
Now, Bercot mentioned that there's a lot of Eastern-style thinking in the New Testament that we are just it just kind of goes right overhead. We don't even notice that they're using this in the Scriptures. Let me give a few examples of these. They're all over the place, actually. Paul's argument for financially supporting those in the full-time ministry is 1 Corinthians chapter 9 and verse 9. He says, " Here's why you need to support the full-time ministers.
For it is written in the law of Moses, you shall not muzzle the ox while it treads out the grain." Is it oxen God is concerned about? So that's an unusual way to explain the significance of financially supporting the elders and the ministers in the church. But that's how Paul read the Scriptures. He saw that there was a deeper meaning in this story that's talking about animals that was intended for us to learn from. I'll give you another example.
Paul's argument about why Christians should not be intimately connected with unbelievers. Certainly that would include not for somebody who's a Christian not to marry somebody who's not a Christian, but it would certainly include that, but it goes beyond that. In 2 Corinthians chapter 6 and verse 14, think about the logic that Paul uses. This is an Eastern type thinking. Paul says, " Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. So for what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness?
And what communion has light with darkness?" And when he says, " Don't be yoked together with unbelievers," what's he referring to? Well, this is a passage in Deuteronomy 22:10 seems to be pretty clear this is what he's talking about. He says, " You shall not plow with an ox and a donkey together." So you get an ox and a donkey and you don't put the same yoke on the both of them. What's going to happen if you do that? It's going to be irritating the both of them.
I don't know if they're going to plow in a giant circle. They can't keep a straight line. For whatever reason, he says, " Don't do that." And Paul's explaining, " No, God's revealing, even in the law of Moses, something for us. We aren't to be yoked together with animals of a completely different type, meaning, you know, Christians and non-Christians, it's like an ox and a donkey. You don't yoke the two of them together." Another example of Eastern style thinking.
In 1 Peter 3 and verses 20 and 21, Peter is speaking about the flood in the days of Noah and he says he's talking about, he says, " Once the divine long-suffering waited in the days of Noah while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is eight souls were saved through water. There is also an antitype which now saves us baptism, not the removal of filth from the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God through the resurrection of Jesus Christ." That's 1 Peter 3:20 and 21.
So antitype is not a word that rolls off our tongues all the time here. This is this from the New King James Version, but that is exactly the correct word that he uses there. There's a type and an anti-type. Anti means a Greek prefix means instead of. So basically you think about if you take a seal and wax, okay, the seal is the type and then the wax imprint that's left is the anti type that's left behind.
Or if an old-fashioned typewriter, if anyone has ever seen one in a museum somewhere or those of us who are old enough to remember, you'd have a ribbon and you'd hit the ribbon with a piece of type and it would imprint on the other side an image of the letter.
So here he says that the water of the flood was a type of baptism which is the anti-type which followed it, which follows the same pattern, is that a few people in the days of Noah, a few righteous people were saved through water, and now there's an anti-type baptism which now saves us. So as I mentioned before, anti is a Greek prefix that means instead of.
Jesus uses an Eastern-style prophecy, beautiful example in John chapter 3, when Jesus says, " Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up." He's going back to the story in numbers where the people were bitten by serpents for their sin and they were all dying and God tells Moses to take a serpent, bronze serpent, and put it on a pole and lift it up, and anyone who is bitten by the serpent will look to the bronze serpent, lift it up on a pole, and be saved.
So he says, just like Moses lifted up in the serpent, I will be lifted up as well. He's talking about this is a foreshadowing of the cross, that all those who are bitten by the serpent, by sin, and by Satan, and who are headed for death can look to the cross for salvation. So that's the Eastern-style prophecy that the bronze serpent representing Jesus and being lifted up is a type of the crucifixion. I was teaching a class recently in our house church.
We're doing a sponsorship series going through the book of Exodus, and so we hit the part that most people find really boring in the Old Testament, which is the construction of the Tabernacle, starting around chapter 25 in Book of Exodus. So most people, their eyes glaze over, they tune out, " This is boring." But in Hebrews 8, 9, and 10, it explains that the Tabernacle is a scale model, basically, of the spiritual reality of things that we now see.
It was a prophecy, it was an Eastern-style prophecy, that the Most Holy Place, it says in Hebrews 9:24, represents heaven itself. And this is where this represents the presence of God, where the high priest, which foreshadows Jesus, came only once a year. He's the only one who can enter the most holy place, and he had to come with blood. And then the veil, which separates the Most Holy Place from the Holy Place, is torn in two from top to bottom at the time that Jesus dies.
On the cross, it expires, and of course that's the separation between the presence of God, where Christ entered and the rest of us, where the priests can go. And the priests foreshadowing, we are members of a royal priesthood, that we are offering spiritual sacrifices, the priests represent us.
So basically you have in the construction of the Tabernacle, which is specified in great detail, you have heaven, you have the sacrifice of Christ, you have the body of Christ, you have the ministry that we are called to as priests of God. So we have the Church, we have heaven, we have Jesus Christ, we have the atoning sacrifice, the blood of Christ. It's all there. In an Eastern-style prophecy, it's an allegory, it's a foreshadowing, it's a model.
So I just want to open your eyes to how much of this is specifically mentioned in the New Testament. We don't think about it typically, but it's all over the place. That the logic that they use is based on this Eastern type of thinking, which they consider to be just as useful and practical. And actually, there are probably more detailed prophecies that take advantage of this Eastern style of prophetic thinking than even the Western-style prophecies. So I think that, to me, was really mind-expanding.
And seeing when I started reading through the early Christians, to see that not only do the apostles did Jesus and the apostles use this type of thinking and point out some of these connections in the Old Testament. But the early Christian writers like Justin Martyr also point out some of these things as well that the New Testament writers don't specifically mention. I'll give you two examples for right now. We'll talk more about that as we give some more examples from teaching.
One is Exodus chapter 17, which was always a very puzzling story to me until I read Justin Martyr's explanation of it. Exodus chapter 17, one of the first challenges that the Jews face in the wilderness is battling the Amalekites. And in Exodus chapter 17, God gives some very unusual, strange instructions to Moses about how they're going to win the battle.
In Exodus chapter 17:8, " Now, Amalek came and fought with Israel in Rephidim, so Moses said to Joshua, ' Choose for yourself some mighty men and go out and set the army in array against Amalek. Tomorrow I'll stand on the top of the hill with a rod of God in my hand. So Joshua did as Moses said to him and set the army in array against Amalek. Then Moses, Aaron, and Hur went to the top of the hill. And so it was when Moses held up his hands that Israel prevailed. But when he let his hands down, Amalek prevailed.
Now Moses' hands became heavy, so they took a stone and put it under him and he sat on it. Then Aaron and Hur supported his hands, one on one side and one on the other, and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun. So Joshua defeated Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword. Then the Lord said to Moses, " Write this for a memorial in a book and recount it in the hearing of Joshua that I will utterly blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.
Now Moses built an altar and called this name the Lord my refuge for with the secret hand the Lord wars with Amalek from generation to generation." Some of the early Christian writers asked, " Why did Moses take this strange posture?" You want to pray to God for victory. You get down on your face or you get on your knees or something like that. He's praying in a strange position. He's sitting down on a rock. He's holding his hands up with the staff of God in his hands and one man at either side.
And Justin Martyr was communicating with Trypho, a Jew, and he says, " This is a foreshadowing of the cross." The whole idea that the Messiah could have died on the cross was a stumbling block to the Jews. And Trypho said with the whole idea that Jesus was the Son of God, how can we possibly believe that the Christ could have died such a horrible cursed death as dying on a cross. And he's saying, well, this is foreshadowed that exactly that it would happen in this way.
The only way the battle could be won was here's Moses is holding the staff of God in his hands with one man on each side holding his hands up all day long. That's the only way that the people could win. It's a foreshadowing with Jesus on the cross, obviously with a man on either side, a thief on either side of him.
So Justin Martyr pointed this out that God was pointing out that this was going to be the only way that God's people would win was that the crucifixion of Christ holding his hands up all day long with his hands on the wood. So I thought about that. I said, you know, this is too detailed. This is too specific. It totally makes sense. Other early Christian writers made the same connection as well.
Another example I'll give to you this is pointed out by the early Christians where they saw an allegorical style prophecy. They saw a foreshadowing of Christ's sacrifice that are not specifically mentioned by the New Testament writers. Another one is an example of Rahab and Joshua chapter 2. Let's turn there. So I read this from the early Christians. I never would have seen this myself. It's not mentioned in the Old Testament, but in New Testament, but I thought this makes perfect sense. It all fits.
God designed these events here for a purpose to explain in so many ways exactly what he was going to be doing in the future. In Joshua Chapter 2, the two men who enter into the House of Rahab and under her protection, they're sent away and starting in verse 17. So the men said to her, to Rahab, " We will be without fault regarding this oath of yours. For behold, we will come into a part of the city and you will set a sign and you shall hang this scarlet cord in the window through which you let us down.
Then you shall gather yourself and your father and mother and your brothers into your father's house. Whoever shall go outside the door of your house, his guilt shall be upon him and will be free of this oath of yours. But we will be responsible for whoever is with you in your house. But if anyone injures us or reveals these words of ours, we shall be free from this oath of yours. Then she said to them, " Let it be so according to your words, so she sent them away." So think about this.
This is Rahab, the prostitute, and her family who risked she risked her life to save the two spies because she said she feared God more than she feared the king. And they're told, " Take a scarlet cord and put it outside the window. And when the city is destroyed, your house protected by the sign of the scarlet cord will be spared from the destruction that hits everyone else." So I thought, well, that's kind of an interesting detail. But the question is, why a scarlet cord of all colors?
Does this story remind you of anything else? The household is protected by something red. It reminds me of the story of the Passover lamb, where they put the blood of the lamb, the red blood of the lamb, on the doorposts and the frame of the house, and the people who stay inside are protected when the destroyer comes. It's basically the same story, different city, different circumstances, but basically it's the same story.
So the point that Justin made is that the scarlet cord here and there I think at least two or three other early Christian writers represents the blood of Christ. There's a reason why it was scarlet. There's a reason why it was red. And this was the sign that when the day of judgment comes, when the destruction comes upon all the unbelievers and on this world, that those who are protected by the Scarlet cord and who remain under its protection, who stay in the House, that they will be saved on the Day of Judgment.
So I hope this opens up your desire to look at the Bible and look at the stories in the Bible more like the Christians did in the beginning. To look, first of all, whenever we're reading a story, to ask ourselves after mastering the details of the story, are there moral lessons for us that are in this story that can help us in our own walk and our own lives?
And then questioning the third level, is there something in this story that is foreshadowing Christ that can build our faith and that we can use to persuade other people? And then looking at the Eastern and Western-style prophecies and may God open up my mind and your minds that we can think more like Jesus and the Apostles did and appreciate the wonderful gems that are in here, not only the Western-style prophecies and logic, but also the Eastern style too.
As we see, we learn to read the Bible more like Paul did, as he expressed in 1 Corinthians, and more like the early Christians did. In the next lesson, I want to start talking about some specific tools that you can use that have been very helpful to me in terms of studying the Bible and helping me to come to a better understanding and teaching others.