In one of the prior segments, we talked about the three levels of the Scripture that when we're reading the Old Testament doing expository teaching, we want to consider all three levels. The first level, the storyline, the second level, the moral lessons, and the third level being the foreshadowing of things to come. And I want to talk about something I really didn't develop before about the third level.
And this can be both the most controversial and the most rewarding thing as we bring the insights of the early Christians to bear in teaching. So I want to talk about talk about this because sometimes people will criticize saying, " Well, how do you know that? How can you be sure that that insight is correct or not?" So I came up with something I invented myself. It's called the Mount Rushmore Test. And so you'll find out in the course of this segment what this is.
This is what I want to talk about here is this is kind of quality control or taking a good hard look at what you're teaching, something that may sound like a good idea originally, but you may end up leaving it on the cutting floor. So now just to the three levels that we talked about, the early Christian writers differ from person to person. They don't see that every story has a second level or every story has a third level, but they will look and see if there is a second and third level.
Are there moral lessons in the story for us now for the Christians? And is there a foreshadowing here as well? Now, they didn't necessarily see all three levels present in every story. On the other hand, they also didn't believe that all the foreshadowings of the things that are in the Old Testament are contained there were explained by the New Testament writers. So the early Christians believed that there was more in there than was revealed by the Jesus and the Apostles. There's more for us to dig out.
There's more treasure buried in there. So let me give you an example to illustrate why this really is not a far-fetched idea at all. In Acts chapter 3 and in Acts chapter 7, Peter in Acts chapter 3 and then Stephen in Acts chapter 7 make reference to a famous prophecy in Deuteronomy chapter 18 verses 15-19 where it says that God would raise up a prophet like Moses and then after God did this in the future that everyone must listen to what he says.
And Peter says that this refers to Jesus and Stephen says that it refers to Jesus but they don't explain in what way was Jesus like Moses. Now, in an early Christian writer Eusebius writing around the year 320 or so in Proof of the Gospel Book 3, it's a phenomenal apologetic work.
And he mentions he picks this up this whole idea of when it says in Deuteronomy 18 that God will send a prophet like Moses, he says, " Jesus is the fulfillment of this important prophecy," and then he rattles off about a dozen extraordinary similarities between Jesus and Moses.
And then after he gives a dozen examples, he says, " You know, I just don't have time to give all the rest of them, you can go and find them at your leisure." Spending some time reading through and digging through the writings of Moses, Exodus through Deuteronomy. I think Eusebius is absolutely right. There were a lot of extraordinary parallels between Moses and Jesus that he didn't even mention, although he mentioned over a dozen.
So Peter and Stephen mentioned that this is about Jesus, but they don't give the explanation. That's there for us to dig out ourselves. And another example where the apostles would allude to something but not really give much of an explanation, Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter 5, when he's addressing the problem of immorality in the Corinthian church. And he says, " 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 truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. Therefore, let us 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. That's 1 Corinthians 5:6 to 8. So Paul here just mentions in passing that Christ is the Passover Lamb that's talked about in Exodus 12 and 13. He doesn't develop the idea.
He doesn't explain the similarities between Christ and the Passover lamb, that he was a lamb without defect. He was slain at twilight, that none of his bones were broken, that the blood of the lamb protected people, and that they would eat a memorial meal regularly thereafter. All the similarities between Christ is Christ is our Passover Lamb who was sacrificed to redeem us. He doesn't explain that.
He just mentions in passing, " Christ is our Passover Lamb," and then he focuses on now we eat the unleavened yeast, the bread with the unleavened yeast, which is basically getting the sin out of our lives and out of the church. So, as in this example here of Paul and the other example of Peter and Stephen, there's no place in the New Testament that explains all the elements of the prophecies. There's no catalog of all the Old Testament prophecies and the significance of them.
There's no place where someone said, " Okay, in the book of Genesis, here are all the prophecies. In the Book of Exodus, here are all the prophecies." Jesus explained that in Luke 24 to the apostles and perhaps the two on the road to Emmaus, but we don't have that. We just have when the apostles are bringing up the examples.
Particularly in the Book of Acts, we have a lot of the apologetic prophecies that are brought up throughout the Book of Acts as Peter and Paul and others are explaining the faith to the Jews and the others who they're trying to bring to faith. So they're using specific prophecies as they need them related to proving the faith.
And then in the New Testament letters, the apostles and the New Testament writers are using Old Testament stories to reinforce the specific points that they're trying to make, just like Paul did by pulling in the story of the Passover Lamb with sexual morality.
So they're trying to address things in the Church like holiness, separation from the world, persevering in the face of suffering, how the Gentiles can be saved without following the law of Moses, the importance of submitting to those in authority, the dangers of sexual immorality and other sins of the flesh, the importance of the prayer of the righteous, all these specific things that they're talking about, and they pull in examples from the Old Testament to support those specific points.
I think of it as I'm in the presence of a master carpenter who has an extensive toolbox, and he needs a specific tool, so he reaches in and he pulls out whatever tool he needs for the job at hand. So he's pulling out a hammer, a stud finder, a chisel, a razor knife, some kind of a special hex screwdriver, whatever the specific tool it is that the apostle needs from the Old Testament toolbox. He just pulls that tool out, uses it, and puts it back in the box. I wish I could have him.
Could you please take a minute, open up the box, and explain all the tools that you have in there? You're just pulling out the ones that you need. So that's the way I see the apostles in quoting from the Old Testament, is that we don't see everything they have in their box. They're just bringing the tools to bear specifically when they need them.
So whenever Jesus or one of the apostolic writers is speaking about an analogy, an allegory, a third-level meaning, a foreshadowing in the Old Testament, like Jesus in John chapter 3 speaking about the bronze serpent. We know that the bronze serpent that Moses raised up on the pole in the Book of Numbers is foreshadowing Christ on the cross, that he would be raised up just like the bronze serpent was raised up. And the reason we know that is because Jesus said so. And the same thing with the Passover Lamb.
We know that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Passover lamb because Paul said so and they're writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. So that's all pretty straightforward. The question is, what about the other tools in the toolbox that the apostles may not have brought out? Do we just assume that there's nothing else there? I don't think so. And the early Christians certainly didn't either.
So I started reading the early Christian writers and they would mention connections and foreshadowing and things that they saw that the New Testament writers many times the New Testament writers also spoke about them, but sometimes they didn't.
And so the question I was left with in reading through the Ante-Nicene Fathers is, that's an interesting point that was being made by this early Christian writer, but is this a legitimate foreshadowing of something that was put in there by the Holy Spirit or is this just a hyperactive imagination on the part of the early Christian writer? And how can I tell? How do I know? I can't either accept it all or reject it all. How do I know which ones are reliable or not?
So when I started reading the Ante-Nicene Fathers, I started with volume one and the first several examples that I saw in there of analogies and allegories that the early Christian writers were pointing out, I thought, " I'm a natural skeptic, I'm an engineer by training, so I doubt everything and you have to prove it to me." And so the first several that I saw, I thought they seem kind of speculative, I'm kind of doubtful.
And then I read a little further on as reading Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho and his first, second apology. And I thought, " Wow, these really make a lot of sense to me. This puts the pieces together and really helps me to see things I'd never seen before." So when I come up to a foreshadowing that is claimed by a early Christian writer, the question I have to ask myself is, is this a legitimate foreshadowing?
Was this designed and put in there by the Holy Spirit, or is it just a coincidence and someone's imagination? So anything I see in the early Christian writers or sometimes I'll see something that looks like a pattern that I see myself and I'm wondering how do I know if this is just my imagination or if this is something put in there by the Holy Spirit? So that's the question I'm left with. What's my imagination and what is seeing something that was put there by the Holy Spirit?
I'm reminded of a book I read years ago. This is actually first published in 1888 elementary lessons on logic, deductive and inductive. I'm always trying to sharpen my thinking and my logical and reasoning skills. And near the end of the book, the author is talking about He's talking about some of the great theoreticians of all time. And he says there's a side of the work that they do which most people don't appreciate.
So hear what he has to say and I want to talk about how it relates to what we're doing in teaching the Bible. So he's saying the great experimentalist is he who ever has a theory or even a crowd of theories or ideas upon his mind but is always putting them to the test of experience and dismissing those which are false. The number of things which can be observed and experimented on are infinite. If we merely set to work to record facts without any distinct purpose, our records will have no value.
We must have some opinion or some theory to direct our choice of experiments and it's more probable that we hit upon the truth in this way than merely by haphazard. So he's saying you have to have a theory and idea at least and then test out whether the idea is legitimate or not. He says but the great requisite of the true philosopher is that he be perfectly unbiased and abandon every opinion as soon as facts inconsistent with it are observed.
So this is true in reading the Bible and anything else you want to have you want to come in with an open mind and unbiased and be proven by the facts that are there. Continues it has been well said by the celebrated Turgot that the first thing is to invent a system. The second thing is to be disgusted with it. That is to say we ought to have some idea of the truth we seek but should immediately put it to a severe trial as if we were inclined to distrust and dislike it rather than be biased in its favor.
Few men probably have entertained more false theories than Kepler and Faraday. Few men have discovered or established truths of greater certainty and importance.
Faraday has himself said, " The world little knows how many of the thoughts and theories which have passed through the mind of a scientific investigator have been crushed in silence and secrecy by his own severe criticism and adverse examination that in the most successful instances not a tenth of the suggestions, the hopes, the wishes, the preliminary conclusions have been realized. So this is from Elementary Lessons in Logic, pages 237 and 238. He's talking here.
Turgot was a famous French economist and statesman from the 18th century. Kepler, of course, was Johannes Kepler, the famous mathematician, astronomer from the 17th century who came up with laws for the motion of the planets. And then Michael Faraday, one of my favorite scientists. He was a 19th-century British scientist, also very serious Christian, who made massive contributions in electricity, electromagnetism, electrochemistry, and I'm an environmental engineer by training.
He's considered to be one of the most influential scientists in history. So that's what the quote was from. And so what he's saying, the point that's being made here by the author is any real truth seeker who comes up with something substantive is always analyzing and coming up with ideas. But then after he comes up with the ideas, he seeks to destroy the ideas. He puts them under the test of logic to find out that these ideas hold water or not. He won't be biased in favor of it.
He's trying to destroy it and hit it as hard as he can and see if it lasts. I mean, I think about it in my own profession of civil environmental engineering, people will make mixes of concrete. They're trying to make really strong concrete that's going to last for whatever conditions that you need. Concrete is made up of it's made up of cement and lime and it's made up of sand and gravel and water in different combinations, sometimes different admixtures are added to it.
So people come up with different designs for concrete and then after they do we will make a cylinder of the concrete and let it cure for a period of time and then we'll put it in a machine that puts it under tremendous pressure to test it and to see how strong it is. When does it crack basically when does it fail?
So that's the idea that when you come up with an idea, when you have a concept or an idea or a thought, maybe this is foreshadowing this, maybe this means this is to put it to the test and put it under pressure and see if you can disprove it or to see where the facts lie. Don't be too wedded to it emotionally. So this is a good test in science. Turgot was an economist. Kepler was a physicist and Faraday was involved in electricity, all these different areas.
I think it's the same thing with the Bible too, as we come up with an idea. Let's put it under the test and see if it really holds water. So if there is an early Christian writer says, " I see this element in an Old Testament story is foreshadowing something about Christ, about Satan, about the God's plan of salvation, about heaven." Something else. This is a deeper foreshadowing. It's not referenced by a New Testament writer. What do you do with this? How do you explore this? How do you put this to the test?
I've come up with what I call the Mount Rushmore test. I want to start off by giving an example. Here we are in Boston. We're not too far from New Hampshire. The New Hampshire border is about 30 miles away, and one of the favorite places for people to go in the Boston area is up in the White Mountains for skiing in the winter time, and it's cool there in the summertime.
So up in the White Mountains, there is a mountain called Cannon Mountain and on the north side of Cannon Mountain up until 2003, it's no longer there. There was a famous landmark, okay? And this is the landmark here and it's called the Old Man in the Mountain. And this is like the emblem of the state of New Hampshire.
This is a famous iconic view that from the north side of the mountain, if you look, you can sort of see the outline or the silhouette of it looks like it looks like a man there and you can see there's a nose there, you can see the mouth, there's a chin, there's a forehead.
So you see, you can imagine how someone would look at that and say, " Hey, that kind of looks like a man a little bit there." And it's unfortunately 2003, the chin is jutting out with nothing underneath it, and so gravity took its course and entropy, and the whole of the bottom of the face fell off, so it's now the old forehead in the mountain, not the old man in the mountain. It doesn't look like anything recognizable at all. So people in New Hampshire lost an iconic landmark there.
But if somebody was hiking along before in 2002 or before when it was still up there, and they came around the corner and they looked up from the right angle from the north view, they could look and say, " You know, that looks like kind of like a man's face up there if you never heard about it before." And your friends would say, " Yeah, I can kind of see that.
It looks like I see yeah there's the nose and there's the area where the eye would be and there's the chin." And you look at that and you say, " Okay, this is a natural phenomenon. This is a coincidence of nature. It just happens that of all the mountains in Massachusetts that one ended up from this one angle to look a little bit roughly like a human face. Doesn't look like that anymore.
Now, I want you to imagine that the same two hikers that were up in the White Mountains take a trip farther out west and they go to the Black Hills of South Dakota. And as they're hiking around in the Black Hills of South Dakota, they turn and they look up and they see another example of faces on the mountain. And this, of course, is Mount Rushmore. And this is not the rough outline of sort of one face on the mountain, but this is four famous U.S. presidents.
This is George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. Each of these faces is about 60 feet or 18 meters high. And if you look really carefully, you'll see tremendous detail on each of these figures, which is true to life. You will see the nostrils. You'll see the pupils of the eyes. You'll see the mustache on Teddy Roosevelt and his distinctive glasses that pinch his nose.
Lincoln's famous chin beard and the eyelids, the lips, the hairlines, all of it exactly matching what these presidents actually look like. Now, imagine our two hikers who were on the trip from New Hampshire look up and say, " Hey, this is kind of like what we saw in New Hampshire." Another complete coincidence, an accident of nature that just so happened that the way that the sand went and the way that the rain and the ice, that it created this image of the four presidents. Now, no one would ever say that.
No one would ever say that because the details. It's obvious that Mount Rushmore was designed by someone. Now you may not see the scaffolding. You may not see the signature of the person who did the work for over a decade up there. But even though you don't see the person who chiseled or blasted away to create this design, it's very clear to anyone who looks at it that this was designed on purpose, specifically by someone. There's just way too many details.
If you take a good look at this, this ever been an accident of nature. It can't be a coincidence. It must be designed. So that's what I call the Mount Rushmore test. If there are so many details in the story that line up that it would be it would take more faith to believe that this was by accident than by design, then I would say that the evidence pushes me to say that there was a designer behind this. In this case, the designer being the Holy Spirit. That's my Mount Rushmore test.
Now, I can't tell you where you crossed the line between Old Man of the Mountain and Mount Rushmore, but there is a line and I think most of us in our hearts will recognize when that is crossed. So that's what I look for. If an early Christian writer is pointing out a connection, I'll say, " Well, how many details are there that line up?
How likely is it that this could have just been a coincidence?" And so some of the questions that I'll ask are: Are there too many details in the story that line up for this to have likely been just a coincidence? That's one of the questions. The other question I'll ask is, are a lot of the details that are in this story seemingly irrelevant to the main point of the story? Sometimes there are a lot of details that are thrown.
Like for example, why would God give the direction when you're eating the lamb dinner for the Passover lamb dinner? Don't break any bones of the lamb. Why is that rule there? Well, you're eating a dinner. The lamb is dead. Who cares about the bones? Well, the reason it's in there is because it's foreshadowing that Christ was on the cross and none of his bones would be broken. So it's in there.
There's a details in the story that only makes sense that they were recorded for that purpose when we look at the third level, the level of the allegory. So that's the question. This is a common sense type of a test that I put. Was this something designed by the Holy Spirit that was put in there or not? Was it just a matter of a coincidence and a wild imagination?
So this is a test that I use myself and I encourage you if you come up with something that you think is a great idea or an insight that you're seeing something in the Old Testament that may be foreshadowing something in the New Testament, whether it's the early Christians or not. Try to tear apart the idea. Try to take a look and see what is the evidence here, how many of the details line up, what is the likelihood that this is just a coincidence versus something designed by the Holy Spirit?
Of course, anything that contradicts what's said elsewhere in Scripture is to be rejected outright. In the next section, I want to move forward and take all the different pieces of the things that we talked about thus far and look at some from real examples.
Let's roll up our sleeves and look at some real examples of stories in the Old Testament where we will look at the text and then develop an outline and the points that we would make looking at all three levels and taking advantage of the active reading idea and the questioning of the text and insights from the early Christians to really get the most out of the Scripture.