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The Root and Fruit, October 19
Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me.
John 5:46
.
The Word of God includes the Scriptures of the Old Testament as well as of
the New. One is not complete without the other. Christ declared that the truths of
the Old Testament are as valuable as those of the New. Christ was as much man’s
Redeemer in the beginning of the world as He is today. Before He clothed His
divinity with humanity and came to our world, the gospel message was given by
Adam, Seth, Enoch, Methuselah, and Noah. Abraham in Canaan and Lot in Sodom
bore the message, and from generation to generation faithful messengers proclaimed
the Coming One....
Of Christ’s life and death and intercession, which prophets had foretold, the
apostles were to go forth as witnesses. Christ in His humiliation, in His purity
and holiness, in His matchless love, was to be their theme. And in order to preach
the gospel in its fullness, they must present the Saviour not only as revealed in
His life and teachings, but as foretold by the prophets of the Old Testament and as
symbolized by the sacrificial service....
In every age there is a new development of truth, a message of God to the people
of that generation. The old truths are all essential; new truth is not independent of
the old, but an unfolding of it. It is only as the old truths are understood that we can
comprehend the new. When Christ desired to open to His disciples the truth of His
resurrection, He began “at Moses and all the prophets,” and “expounded unto them
in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (
Luke 24:27
). But it is the light
which shines in the fresh unfolding of truth that glorifies the old. He who rejects or
neglects the new does not really possess the old. For him it loses its vital power and
becomes but a lifeless form.
There are those who profess to believe and to teach the truths of the Old Testa-
ment, while they reject the New. But in refusing to receive the teachings of Christ,
they show that they do not believe that which patriarchs and prophets have spoken....
In rejecting the Old, they virtually reject the New; for both are parts of an
inseparable whole. No man can rightly present the law of God without the gospel,
or the gospel without the law. The law is the gospel embodied, and the gospel is the
law unfolded. The law is the root, the gospel is the fragrant blossom and fruit which
it bears.
The Old Testament sheds light upon the New, and the New upon the Old. Each
is a revelation of the glory of God in Christ. Both present truths that will continually
reveal new depths of meaning to the earnest seeker (
Christ’s Object Lessons, 126-
128
).
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