The Encourager
“Paul's Appeal to the Old Testament - by Jeff Curtis”
Paul’s Appeal to the Old Testament
Jeff Curtis
Paul’s reference to “strange tongues” in 1Corinthians 14:21, examined in the context of Isaiah 28:11-12, could seem strange to readers of the Bible today. Isaiah’s message to his contemporaries about a ‘foreign tongue’ concerned God’s speaking to Israel through a foreign people. It had nothing to do with those people at Corinth who had been gifted by the Holy Spirit in the church at Corinth. If the passage in Isaiah wasn’t predicting the New Testament events, what was Paul’s purpose in citing it?
Christians should realize that not every quotation of the Old Testament in the New Testament is a prediction of some event in the life of Christ or some aspect of the church He built. (1) Sometimes New Testament writers used the Old Testament to support godly ethical imperatives. When Paul wrote, “He who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law” (Romans 13:8), and then named several to the Ten Commandments, he wasn’t saying that these words were about Jesus or His people. Rather, he was drawing lines of continuity between the Old and New Testament. He was asserting that the message of Christ requires the same kind of moral living that the Old Testament required.
(2) At times an event in the history of Israel was described in language that was suitable for a similar event described in the New Testament. When Matthew cited Hisea 11:1, “Out of Egypt I called My son” (Matthew 2:15), he wasn’t noting the similarity of events when the people of Israel, God’s son in a spiritual sense, came out of Egypt and the time when Joseph brought Jesus out of Egypt to live in Canaan. The two events were in some were similar, but Matthew had no need to do an exegesis of the Old Testament text to modern standards in order to justify his citation of the prophet Hosea.
The taking if words from their original context because of their appropriateness to a new situation is a common practice, both inside and outside the Bible. An illustration of this might help. One of the world’s most famous buildings is St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Among others buried there in the crypt of the cathedral is its architect, Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723). His tomb is marked by a small plaque with Latin inscription that was written by his son. It is translated, “If you seek monuments, look around you.” When one lifts his eyes above the crypt, he sees the spires and grandeur of the cathedral, no mere statue was suitable for such a builder.
These words might be applied to the life of a person today. Suppose an elderly man lost his faithful Christian wife to death. At the memorial service, he might see people who she had counseled through crises, poor children she had fed, and women she had taught and encouraged to obey the Lord in baptism. Looking at these people whose lives his wife had blessed, he could say, “If you seek monuments, look around you.” By citing Wren’s epitaph, the husband would be claiming that the words had been written for his wife; yet they would be applicable, for the woman’s monument would be etched into the lives of living souls. New Testament writers used the Old Testament in a similar way, and that is the way Paul cited Isaiah 28:11-12 in 1Corinthians 14:21.
