The Old Testament and the New fit together the way the opening and closing of a single story fit together: the New Testament keeps finishing threads that the Old Testament started. In a Jude 3 Project conversation with Lisa Fields, Dr. Cleotha Robertson, who teaches Old Testament at Alliance Theological Seminary, names several of those threads. This guide lays five of them out in the order they appear in the Bible and shows where each one comes out in the New Testament.
For each thread you will read where it starts, follow where it lands, and test the connection yourself. You can work through it alone over a week or with a group across two meetings. If you meet as a group, bring at least two translations, including a King James Version and a modern one.
The piece most readers are missing
Robertson thinks the struggle with the Old Testament is newer than it looks. People of her generation, she says, grew up knowing the stories. Now she sees a generation whose reading is narrower: “their Bible is the Psalms and the New Testament.” She adds that such readers interpret by drawing out principles rather than by knowing the larger historical narrative.
That contrast is the prerequisite for everything else in this guide. A principle can be lifted out of any verse and carried anywhere. A thread can only be followed. If you collect principles, the Old Testament seems redundant, because the New Testament states its lessons more directly. If you follow threads, the Old Testament turns out to be the place where the New Testament’s key words were first given their meaning.
Robertson’s central claim is that “you can’t see or totally understand all of the themes and ideas in the new, unless you see just the continuity with the old.” She lists the people of God, the covenant of God, God revealing himself, God who speaks and God who acts. “All of those are themes that are present in the old, and they find their way into the new.” The payoff, in her words, is that “it just makes Jesus make more sense.”
It can help to think of a reader who meets only the New Testament as someone who joins a conversation halfway through. They hear every word, but they cannot tell what those words are answering. The comparison only goes so far. In a real conversation the earlier part is gone. In this case, it is sitting on the page in front of you.
First observation. Before you read further, write down everything you know about the Old Testament in the order you think it happened, without looking anything up. In a group, compare lists for a few minutes. The point is to see where the gaps are, not to grade anyone. Keep your list. You will come back to it at the end.
The map: five threads, in order
1. God speaks
The Bible opens with speech: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). From the start, the God of Scripture makes himself known by speaking.
The prophets carry this thread forward. Robertson defines a prophet as a person, man or woman, who speaks for God, and she stresses that “the message is not their own.” The prophets mattered because they carried a word that came from someone else.
The New Testament takes up the thread explicitly: “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1-2). In modern English, “sundry times and in divers manners” means at many times and in various ways. John makes the same move in a single line: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).
Observe: In Hebrews 1:1-2, what stays the same between the fathers and “us,” and what changes? Notice that the speaker is the same God. What is new is how he speaks.
2. God binds himself by covenant
A covenant is a binding commitment between God and a people. Early on, God calls Abraham and promises him a family through whom blessing will reach everyone: “and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). Later, the prophets look past Israel’s broken covenant to a better one: “Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah” (Jeremiah 31:31).
In the New Testament, Paul says the promise to Abraham already announced the gospel, because it foresaw the nations being blessed through faith (Galatians 3:8). At the Last Supper, Jesus speaks of the cup as the new covenant in his blood (Luke 22:20). Hebrews 8 then quotes Jeremiah’s promise at length.
The New Testament plainly presents Jesus as bringing in Jeremiah’s new covenant. Faithful Christians disagree about how the promises made to Israel relate to the church today, and the threads on this map do not settle that question.
3. God acts to rescue: the Egypt thread
Robertson points out a recurring Egypt motif. The patriarchs went down to Egypt in times of drought. Israel later came up out of Egypt in the Exodus. The prophet Hosea looks back on that rescue: “When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt” (Hosea 11:1).
Matthew applies that line to the child Jesus returning from Egypt: “Out of Egypt have I called my son” (Matthew 2:15). Robertson describes this as a reuse of the text in the life of Jesus.
Read Hosea 11:1-4 before you draw a conclusion. Hosea is remembering a past event, not forecasting a future one. Many interpreters read Matthew as presenting Jesus as the one who walks Israel’s path faithfully, so that Israel’s history comes to rest in him. That reading is well grounded, but it is an interpretation of Matthew’s method, and it should be held as one.
4. A holy God dwells among his people
At Sinai, God tells Israel, “And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). In Leviticus he repeats the reason: “Ye shall be holy: for I the LORD your God am holy” (Leviticus 19:2).
For Robertson, Leviticus as a whole answers one question: “how does a holy people interact with a holy God?” Its laws on food, clothing, priests, worship and land all serve that question. Its sacrifices, especially the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16, supply the imagery that the New Testament later uses for Jesus as priest and sacrifice.
The thread lands in two places. Hebrews 9 presents Christ entering the holy place with his own blood. First Peter 2:9 addresses believers with Sinai’s language: “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people.” In 1611 English, “peculiar” means belonging specially to God, not strange. Faithful Christians also differ on how the Old Testament law applies to believers now. Tracing the purpose of holiness forward does not require you to choose one of those views first.
5. A particular people, open to the nations
Robertson notices two movements held together in the Old Testament. God works with one particular people, yet “their role as a special people was to be a light to the nations.” She adds, “that group is not closed,” and she names Ruth, a Moabite, and Rahab, a Canaanite, as outsiders who were drawn in. Isaiah gives the thread its plainest statement: “I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth” (Isaiah 49:6).
Matthew puts both women in the family line of Jesus: “And Salmon begat Booz of Rachab; and Booz begat Obed of Ruth; and Obed begat Jesse” (Matthew 1:5). In Acts 13:47, Paul and Barnabas cite Isaiah’s “light” to explain their preaching to the Gentiles.
This thread has a second strand. Robertson argues that Scripture thinks in groups more readily than Western readers do: “I worship the Lord as a part of a larger collective.” Lisa Fields connects this to the prayer Jesus taught, which begins “Our Father,” and she draws out its point: “what I do just doesn’t affect me, but it affects us.”
The mistake to avoid
Once readers see these threads, they often swing too far. They begin treating the Old Testament as a puzzle with Jesus hidden in every verse, or they jump straight to the verses the New Testament quotes. Both mistakes skip the step Robertson insists on. Her rule is that “a passage has a meaning in its context,” and she notes that “usually there are major events that happen in a book that a writer is dealing with, and they’ll permeate the whole book.”
Each thread therefore has two points that matter: what it meant where it started, and what it means where it lands. Hosea 11:1 meant something to Israel before Matthew used it. Leviticus told Israel how to live near God before Hebrews drew on its imagery. If you skip the first point, you can no longer see what the New Testament writer is doing.
Robertson’s treatment of Deuteronomy 28:68 shows the cost of skipping it. Some teachers use that verse to claim African Americans are the true Israel. Read in its setting, it belongs to the blessings and curses Moses speaks to Israel’s tribes before his departure, and she says it is not about people of color at all. A verse cut loose from its book can be made to say almost anything. A verse kept inside its thread is much harder to bend.
Practice: trace one thread from end to end
This exercise takes about forty-five minutes alone. In a group, assign one thread to each pair and give each pair three minutes to report back.
- Choose one of the five threads above.
- Read the whole Old Testament chapter where the thread starts, not just the verse. For thread five, read all four chapters of Ruth.
- Write one sentence on what the passage meant to its first hearers, without mentioning Jesus.
- Read the key verses in the King James Version and in a modern translation. Robertson recommends this pairing because the 1611 wording can hide the meaning. Mark any place where the modern rendering changes how you understood the verse.
- Now read the New Testament passage where the thread lands. Write down what the writer keeps from the original, and what the writer adds or applies in a new way.
- Use the cross-references in a study Bible to find one more place the thread appears that this guide did not mention.
For facilitators: step three is the hardest, and groups will want to skip it. Hold them to it. Most of the discovery in this exercise comes from the difference between the sentence in step three and the notes from step five.
Questions for discussion
- Look back at your first-observation list. Which of the five threads were already on it, and which were missing? Where did you first learn the parts you knew?
- Robertson contrasts reading for principles with knowing the larger narrative. Take a familiar Old Testament story, such as Joseph or David. Reduce it to a principle. What disappears when you do that?
- Hosea 11:1 remembers the Exodus, and Matthew applies it to Jesus. How would you explain what Matthew is doing to a skeptical friend, without claiming Hosea predicted it?
- Exodus 19:6 and 1 Peter 2:9 use similar language. Christians read the relationship between Israel and the church in more than one faithful way. Can you state two of those readings fairly? What in each passage does each reading account for?
- Why might Matthew name Rahab and Ruth in the family line of Jesus? What does that choice suggest about who the promise was always meant to reach?
- Which thread on the map looks different when you read it as addressed to a community rather than to one person?
- Which Old Testament book do you now want to read straight through? What has kept you from reading it so far?
For facilitators: question four does not need a resolution. Success means each person can restate a view they do not hold well enough that someone who holds it would agree with the summary.
After this guide, try one habit. The next time a New Testament writer quotes the Old Testament, find the source and read the whole chapter around it before you read on. Ask what it meant there first. Then ask why the New Testament writer reached back for it.