Teaching Old Testament

By Sara:

You may remember that I was teaching a class on the books of the Old Testament during the past school term.  The term is over, students have gone home for the holiday, and grades are marked, but there's still opportunity to share with you about the class.

I really enjoy teaching about the Old Testament.  I have always loved reading the Old Testament, so I like being able to help the students appreciate it as God's word too, since many of them don't have lots of knowledge of the Old Testament or an understanding of why it is still important for Christians.

With this Books of the Old Testament class, we had to cover all 39 books in one semester, so I sometimes felt like I had to rush through it.  However, we did still have good discussions about serious questions the students had, which came up as we studied the Old Testament.  Maybe they were just trying to get off topic, like all students :) but they kept asking such good challenging questions that I finally started leaving an extra ten minutes at the end of class for us to discuss the tangential questions they asked during class or any other things they wanted to discuss.

I think that the biggest issue and question that the students kept asking about was how God allows righteous people, or Christians specifically, to suffer.  We spent a lot of time on this when we looked at the book of Job, but some other times it came up were: when we covered Genesis (Joseph getting sold into slavery and then thrown into prison for doing the right thing), Daniel (Daniel getting thrown into the lions' den because he refused to stop worshiping God publicly, his friends refusing to bow down to an idol whether God saved them from the fiery furnace or not), and Jeremiah (who was put into a cistern, mistreated, and continually mocked for speaking God's word to people).

The students know from experience that Christians do suffer, but it was hard for them to know how they could respond to suffering people in their churches, especially when so many people have the view that God will fix all of your problems as long as you have enough faith.  It was helpful for them to look at examples from the Old Testament of people like Jeremiah who didn't really have a happy ending to his story.  Or Joseph who went through years and years of suffering for God's ultimate good purpose, even though he didn't know what that purpose was until much later.

The issue of being saved by God's grace, rather than through works came up a lot also (mostly in the end-of-class discussions).  One of the students explained that he believes that God saves us by our faith, not through our works, but he wondered how he could teach that to his church.  He was afraid that if he told people in the church that they were saved by grace, they would just go out and do whatever they wanted instead of trying to do what was right.  To face this topic, we talked about how even in the Old Testament, people were saved by grace and then because of their salvation, they tried to obey God out of gratitude for what God had done for them.  For example, Abraham had faith and it was counted as righteousness.  God saved him even before Abraham demonstrated his faith by being willing to offer Isaac as a sacrifice or do the other things that God commanded him to do.  If we really are saved, we won't be asking what we can get away with doing under God's grace.  Like Romans 6:15 says, "shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!"

I hope that these discussions gave the students more ideas for how they can address difficult issues in their churches.  I'm thankful that they have made the effort of coming to Berea in order to get better theological and biblical understanding and I pray that they will continue to grow in their relationship with God as they learn and serve him.