Christians should read the Old Testament as one long story that God is telling, in which every passage has a place, a genre and a main point, and in which Christ is where the story is heading. Read that way, it is neither a rulebook of timeless commands nor a museum piece the New Testament made obsolete. Dr. Esau McCaulley, who teaches New Testament at Wheaton College, offers four habits that make this kind of reading possible: know where you are in the story, do not mistake a description for an endorsement, keep the main point the main point, and read the law as instruction rather than a bare legal code.
Why do both of the usual readings go wrong?
Lisa Fields, the founder of Jude 3 Project, names the problem as it shows up in preaching. A great deal of preaching works from Old Testament narratives, pulls principles out of them, and applies those principles to life today. That is fine in itself. The trouble starts when listeners, as she puts it, “they confuse principles with commands.” A lesson drawn from Abraham’s story becomes an obligation, and the Old Testament starts to look like a strange and sometimes cruel set of instructions.
If the Old Testament seems to command polygamy, deception or violence, the easiest move is to set it aside. But that cuts away the story Jesus himself claimed to fulfill. McCaulley’s four habits slow the reader down enough to ask what kind of text this is and what it is doing.
Where does this passage sit in the story?
McCaulley’s first habit is simple to state. “One of the things that I try to do as a reader of the Bible is keep an idea where I am in the narrative when something is occurring.” Before asking what a passage means for you, ask where it falls in the movement from creation, to Israel’s covenant, to kingship, to exile and return, to Christ.
His example is David. When David sins with Bathsheba, the consequences outlive David. McCaulley traces how that sin echoes through the generations and contributes to the later division of the kingdom. Then the prophets begin to speak of a greater David, a king who will succeed where David and Solomon failed. A reader who isolates 2 Samuel 11 can draw a moral about temptation. A reader who knows where the passage sits sees something larger: the failure of even the best human king, and the hope that failure creates.
This habit also works backward. McCaulley asks, “how do later events throw a fresh light on the things that I’ve read earlier?” Earlier passages are filled out and sometimes reframed by what comes later.
Deuteronomy 27-30 is a clear test case. There Moses sets out the blessings and curses of Israel’s covenant and warns that Israel will break it, go into exile and later be called back. McCaulley follows that thread forward. The historical books describe the exile to Babylon as the fulfillment of those warnings. After the return, Nehemiah 9 has the people confess that they are still servants in their own land. Then Paul writes in Galatians 3:13, “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.” Knowing where Deuteronomy 28 sits keeps a reader from lifting its curses out of Israel’s covenant and assigning them to some other people in some other century. McCaulley treats that kind of reassignment as a breakdown of the whole biblical narrative, far more than a quarrel over one verse.
Does the Bible approve of everything it records?
The second habit addresses the most common trap in Old Testament narrative. McCaulley states it plainly: “everything that is described is not therefore commended.”
Narrative usually lets events pass without pausing to evaluate each one. That restraint belongs to the genre. McCaulley’s example comes early in Genesis. The first man shown with two wives is Lamech (Genesis 4:19). In the same passage, Lamech boasts to those wives that he has killed a man for wounding him (Genesis 4:23-24). The text introduces polygamy through a violent and boastful man. As McCaulley follows the later accounts of men with several wives, he observes that they often lead to drama and dysfunction. The narrative makes its judgment through consequences.
He also points to the wider canon. When God describes his love for Israel, the image is of a husband faithful to one chosen wife. So the Bible itself holds a tension between what it describes in some households and what it affirms about love. McCaulley warns that “a lot of times Christians get themselves twisted into knots trying to figure out how we can affirm something that the rest of the Bible reveals to us as being like wicked.”
Abraham’s lie that Sarah was his sister works the same way. McCaulley reads the story as showing that “Abraham isn’t necessarily engaging in behavior that is commended by God, but it’s showing that God is being gracious to him despite these things.” The story’s real subject is God’s faithfulness to a flawed man.
Genre matters beyond narrative. McCaulley notes that “Proverbs speak about things that are generally true, not things that are always true.” Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Read as a guarantee, that verse becomes a source of guilt for faithful parents whose children walk away. Read as a proverb, it states a real and wise pattern without promising an outcome. The Psalms have their own rules too. McCaulley says that “the prayers are allowed to be messy,” so when a psalmist asks God to strike an enemy, the reader is hearing an honest prayer rather than a forecast of what God will do.
Which details carry the meaning?
The third habit is a caution aimed especially at preachers: “don’t make a mountain out of a narrative detail that isn’t necessarily that important to the narrative itself.”
McCaulley’s example is the fiery furnace in Daniel 3. The king, in his rage, orders the furnace heated seven times hotter than usual (Daniel 3:19). A preacher might build a sermon on that number, perhaps that your enemies will sometimes be seven times as cruel. McCaulley sees the book doing something else. The narratives of Daniel concern Jewish exiles under pressure to compromise who refuse, and a God who acts for them. The question the book answers, as he frames it, is “how do I be a Christian in exile and in the lack of political power.” The hotter furnace heightens the danger and so magnifies the deliverance.
He offers Gideon as a second example, and he says he is speaking from memory and that readers should check the commentaries. In Judges 7, God reduces Gideon’s army, and the remaining soldiers are chosen by how they drink water. Some readers treat the drinking posture as a lesson in military alertness. McCaulley suggests that “it could be that the whole point of that narrative is God wanted a really small amount of people so that he got credit for the victory.” The text supports that emphasis. In Judges 7:2 God explains the reduction: “lest Israel vaunt themselves against me, saying, Mine own hand hath saved me.” The narrator states the purpose, and the drinking test is simply the means of selection.
His summary is a rule any reader can carry into any passage: “we need to keep the main point of the text, the main point.” Ask what the author is trying to communicate, then ask whether the detail you are excited about serves that purpose.
What is the law, if not a rulebook?
The fourth habit concerns the part of the Old Testament that confuses people most. Many hear “law” and think of police and penalties. McCaulley reminds readers that the law is the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, “the Torah, which actually doesn’t just mean law, it means instruction.” That instruction includes narrative. Genesis and its creation account belong to the Torah. So does the Exodus. So do the songs of Moses and Miriam.
This changes what the regulations are. According to McCaulley, when God gave his people a way to build a life, “he didn’t just give them rules, he told them a story.” The two themes he sees repeated most often in the Torah are God as Creator and God as Liberator. God reminds Israel again and again that he brought them out of Egypt and out of slavery, and that he made all things. The commands follow from that identity. Read apart from the story, the regulations look arbitrary. Read inside it, they become instruction for a freed people about how to live before a holy God.
How those regulations bind Christians today is a question on which faithful Christians hold different views. McCaulley’s own reading draws on Paul, who treats the law as good and given by God but never the means of justification. He observes that Acts 15 and Galatians release Gentile believers from circumcision and food laws while still calling them away from sexual immorality, and he describes the result as “an actual mixed economy in the New Testament,” in which Jewish believers could keep the ceremonial law so long as they did not require it of Gentiles. His summary is that “it seems to me that you have the christological reinterpretation of the law,” with Jesus clarifying what the law was meant to do. The words “it seems to me” matter. He offers this as his reading, and other faithful Christians frame the law’s continuing role differently.
Isn’t this just a way to avoid the hard parts?
The strongest objection is that these habits could become escape hatches. If a passage is troubling, call it description. If a detail is awkward, call it unimportant. On this view, the method lets readers keep only the parts they like.
That would be a real misuse, and McCaulley’s handling of the conquest shows he refuses it. He leaves those texts hard: “I don’t think that the purpose of the conquest narrative is for us to feel warm and fuzzy at the end of it. It makes me uncomfortable.” What he does is put the conquest in context. He points to the pattern across the Old Testament that “more often than not, God’s mercy triumphs over his judgment,” with generations of prophets calling for repentance before judgment falls. He notes Rahab, a foreigner shown mercy, placed beside Achan, an Israelite judged, at the very start of the conquest. And he points to Genesis 15, where the land is withheld until the sin of the Amorites is full. His trust in God here, he insists, “is not a blind trust.” It rests on the character of God that emerges across the whole canon.
There is a second check built into the method. Each habit must be earned from the text. Calling something description requires showing how the narrative treats it, as with Lamech. Calling a detail secondary requires the author’s own stated purpose, as with Gideon. The method asks for more attention to the passage, not less.
How do you tell a real connection to Christ from an invented one?
All four habits lead to one orientation. McCaulley urges readers to “always keep in mind the narrative sweep of the Bible, that the star of every story is Christ.” He immediately guards against a cheap version of this. Connecting a passage to Jesus is “different than just a Jesus addendum to the sermon.” The link should come from the passage’s own place in the story.
His David example shows what a strong connection looks like. The failure of David’s line is told across Samuel and Kings. The prophets then build hope on that failure. Ezekiel 34:23-24, for instance, speaks of one shepherd God will set over his people, whom he calls “my servant David,” long after David had died. The New Testament takes that hope up openly, calling Jesus the son of David and the good shepherd. Each step is visible in the text: the story creates the need, the prophets name the hope, and the apostles claim its fulfillment.
A weaker connection skips those steps. Some readers have treated the scarlet cord Rahab hung from her window as a picture of Christ’s blood. The idea is devotionally appealing, but Joshua presents the cord as a signal agreed with the spies, and when the New Testament mentions Rahab, in Hebrews 11:31 and James 2:25, it points to her faith and her actions. The cord may be a fair Christian meditation. It is an interpretation, and a reader should hold it more loosely than the David line, because the text itself does less of the work.
Christians differ on how far such typology should go. Some readers find Christ foreshadowed in many small details; others limit themselves to links the New Testament makes. McCaulley’s habits do not settle that debate, but they give a test: the more a connection grows out of where a passage sits in the story and what its author meant, the more weight it can bear.
That test is also what frees ordinary readers. Lisa Fields warns that “people are going to study how you teach.” McCaulley wants preaching that a listener could repeat at home with the same passage, “So they’re not dependent upon us, but the God whom we serve for our spiritual sustenance.” A reader who can locate a passage in the story, name its genre and find its main point can test any sermon, including a persuasive one that reassigns Israel’s curses or turns a furnace temperature into a doctrine, against the text itself.