Chapter 5

This week I was reading chapter 5 of Christianity and Liberalism by J Gresham Machen. This chapter was very interesting to me as it was about Christ. They give an overview starting the chapter as to where we would learn about Christ in the Bible. Machen starts out by saying that us Christians find out the most about Jesus as we know him in the new testament. The new testament is life with Jesus and that is where we find the primary scores that mention Him. Those primary sources would be the Gospels and Epistles. Those are where we find out the most about Jesus and His life as those are told from people who were living and walking the streets with Him. That is why people in our culture today put so much emphasis on the new testament. The New Testament is where we can find and apply most things to our lives today. They say that in the Old Testament is with the old covenant and doesn’t matter as much, since in the New Testament Jesus is here in person and is telling us what everything truly means and how to live. This though can be a very slippery slope that us Christians can fall into. We need to remain strong in still living out all of the Bible and not just the parts that we want to or we deem “ the most important.” When we get to hearing that the New Testament is the only thing that we need to read and that the Old Testament doesn’t matter then we have a very big problem. When we do that we are putting Christ in a box and doing exactly opposite of what He is telling us in the New Testament. We would be doing what we think is right rather than following the plan God has for us. In order to do that thought we need to be educated in His word and grow with Him. If we were only supposed to read the new testament then why do we have the old testament? We need to know the history and know our past to better shape the future. If we don’t know how God created the world and what His purpose was with Jeuss. If we didn’t know that then how would we know that Jesus was who He said He was. We find that truth and what it will look like in the Old testament and see it fulfilled in the New. So, while the new testament is very important and that’s where we learn the majority about Christ, we can not forget about or disregard the old testament.