The Old Testament Reset: Why Ancient Scripture Still Speaks to Modern Faith w/ Dr. Geoff Harper

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and joining me all the way from Australia, I have Dr. Geoff Harper. Dr. Harper, thank you so much for joining us. Tonight my time, today your time, I believe. I appreciate the time.

Dr. Geoff Harper: It's a pleasure to be here, just after breakfast time here in Sydney.

Johnny Ova: Just after breakfast for you, just after dinner for me. At least we ate. That's the most important thing.

Dr. Geoff Harper: And I guess that's the marvel of the technological world, isn't it? We can talk to each other across time zones.

Johnny Ova: It really is amazing. Let's jump right in. For those who may not be as familiar with your work, can you share a bit about your background and what drew you to Old Testament studies?

Dr. Geoff Harper: Sure. I work in Old Testament studies, in the Pentateuch in particular, and even within that, the book of Leviticus is where I was drawn many years ago, first as an undergraduate student and then as a doctoral student, and I stayed working in Leviticus. I've been continually drawn back to that part of the Old Testament over the years. It's occupied lots of my thinking, lots of my research, lots of my publications. Not everything. I do sometimes venture beyond that. But there are just endlessly fascinating questions and things to explore and bring before students as well. It's a wonderful job to be able to do that.

Johnny Ova: That's great. What is it about Leviticus specifically that drew you to it?

Dr. Geoff Harper: I think it's a unique portrait of God and his interactions with the people of Israel. That opens up a whole wealth of understanding about who God is, what the human problems are, and how God has acted and continues to act to address some of those problems. You get this poignant picture of a God who's so committed to his people that he'll do anything so that the invitation to come and live with him can happen. It's just wonderful. It's continually encouraging from a completely personal point of view, and also fascinating from an academic, professional point of view. There are endless things to think about.

Johnny Ova: So many people struggle to see the Old Testament as even relevant today. I know this has been a debate going back to some of the church fathers of the early church, and right up until today: how relevant is the Old Testament for us? I'm going to ask you some more specific questions about intertextuality as we go, but at a high level, why do you believe it still holds so much importance for our modern faith?

Dr. Geoff Harper: That's a great question, and as you say, it's much debated. People have lots of opinions on it. Let me tell you a story that might help illustrate it. One of my students here at the seminary where I teach, he and his wife were invited to read the Bible with a non-Christian couple they'd met. So they turned to one of the Gospels and started reading the stories of Jesus and discussing them with the other couple. It was fascinating to me that after several weeks of doing that, they realized the questions this couple had were so profound that they just weren't making any sense of the Gospels. Here in Australia it's very much a post-Christian environment. People are very secular. So they were asking questions like, what is God? What are we talking about here? There was no background at all. My student realized they weren't making any sense of it, and thought, maybe we ought to go back to Genesis 1, start there and read from there onwards.

Dr. Geoff Harper: They did that. There were obviously still lots of questions, but they noticed the penny was beginning to drop. This non-Christian couple they were discussing the truths of the Bible with were starting to get it. I think that's such a good illustration that the value of the Old Testament is not just there with information or history, but it's actually shaping our whole view of the world. It's communicating a worldview, giving us a framework of understanding within which the truths of the gospel now make sense. That was such a poignant illustration of that truth playing out in a very real situation in a church here in Sydney.

Johnny Ova: That's a great story, because it does make sense. You read the New Testament and Jesus comes to fulfill the law. But what is he fulfilling? A lot of his comments make references for an audience that understood the law and the writings of the Old Testament. I want to ask, a little off the cuff, about the spiritual state in Australia. You're around the Sydney area, correct?

Dr. Geoff Harper: That's right. I'm originally from Ireland. I grew up in Dublin, but I've been living down under in Australia for the last 16 years or so. Two very different cultures, though in some ways similar, both English speaking, both Western and post-Christian in different ways. Here in Australia it's a deeply secular culture, in which Christianity is still a very present force and yet increasingly marginalized. I'm beginning to notice people growing up without even the basics of a Christian understanding, simple things like Jesus or the resurrection or Moses, things you might take for granted that surely everybody knows. At some level it's just not there at all.

Johnny Ova: Are people open, generally?

Dr. Geoff Harper: That's the intriguing thing. I think a generation ago people were less open, because they were deliberately moving away from Christianity, so they often had an axe to grind or negative things to say. Increasingly, and I think this is reflected elsewhere, in the UK in particular, you have a generation that's grown up with nothing, and suddenly the claims and truths of the gospel are fascinating again, because they're new. I was talking with another student here at the seminary who was teaching a group of children, leading them through the story of Jesus toward Easter. When Jesus died and then came back to life again, there was this audible gasp around the room, as the children heard it for the very first time. The newness and the power of that is intriguing in a completely different way. So there are lots of great things happening, people coming to faith, people being open in a way that I think a previous generation maybe wasn't.

Johnny Ova: That's exciting. Do you think the earlier pushback was more of a moral issue, or more of a theological or intellectual issue?

Dr. Geoff Harper: I think probably various combinations of all of those things. I don't think there's one narrative that captures everybody. Just the slow diminishing of interest in Christian things, and a very easy replacement with materialism and other things.

Johnny Ova: Sure. All right, let's get back on track. I brought that up because we take things for granted, especially a lot of my listeners, people in the church. We get in those bubbles where it's like everybody believes like us, everybody's dealing with the same things. So it's great to hear a different perspective. Back to the Old Testament. How do you personally approach teaching it so people see it not as distant history but as God's living word?

Dr. Geoff Harper: There are lots of ways. I'm teaching first-year undergraduate students this year, and my aims as a teacher include content. They've got to wrestle with the book of Isaiah or the book of Genesis. We've got to talk about content. But really, my high-end goal is to awaken a fascination with the Old Testament. It is intriguing. It's fascinating. There's so much to explore. Part of that is because it's an unknown for many people. They have quite a surface-level understanding of, say, the book of Genesis, or they know the Exodus story, and yet there's so much in the detail that's really intriguing. So I try to awaken that sense of curiosity and fascination, the idea of exploring something that's intriguing and wonderful and yet directly applicable to life. Sometimes in class you see tears as people get something about who God is and his interaction with his people, and sometimes there's laughter and joy as they sense something they hadn't sensed before. So I try to awaken that, and hopefully people will go on into a lifetime of continuing to explore.

Johnny Ova: There's so much in the Old Testament, and so many relatable characters, for lack of a better term. Sometimes you're David, ready to take on Goliath, and other times you're David on the roof going, I don't know if I should be looking at this right now.

Dr. Geoff Harper: That's true. And that raises lots of awkward questions and hard questions and difficult topics. But they're actually good for us to wrestle with. They're there in the Scriptures for a reason. They're preserved for a reason. It's much easier and more comfortable just to ignore them and pretend those parts of the Bible aren't there. But they are. So we've got to wrestle with why God has preserved these for us. What is he saying to us about himself and his interactions with the world? What is he saying to us about ourselves and our interactions with one another? There are uncomfortable truths in that, and I think maybe the Old Testament confronts us with more of them. It's certainly a longer body of work than the New Testament, so there's more content. But some of those pictures are really graphic, sometimes difficult, uncomfortable truths that, if we're honest, sometimes we don't want to see.

Johnny Ova: I like that rawness of the Bible, because sometimes we paint Christianity as sunshine and rainbows and flowers all the time, and then we don't know what to do with ourselves when we deal with terrible things: the loss of a child, divorce, pain, heartbreak, betrayal. But God promised me all these things. When you see these biblical figures, men and women just like me and you, being used by God in their flaws, I think that's encouraging.

Dr. Geoff Harper: It really is. It's continually encouraging to see the portraits of the patriarchs like Abraham. It's very easy to look at Abraham simplistically and say he was a man of faith, a man who trusted God, he was obedient. That's part of Abraham's story. It's not the whole story. When you read the details, there are far more flaws, far more idiosyncrasies, far more doubts, far more wrongheaded actions. Abraham didn't start as a man of faith, but he became a man of faith. There's a transformation in Abraham that the stories of Genesis invite us to see. I think that's not just saying something about Abraham as historical information. It suggests this is God's way of interacting with the people he calls to himself: to take them in all their inherent messiness and lopsidedness and wrongheadedness, and to transform them into different people, people who better resemble him. God can do that with Abraham, and God presumably is still in the same business of changing men and women, making them into people they weren't, who are now more pleasing to God. These pictures of what God can do and is doing are wonderful.

Johnny Ova: So good. You've done a significant amount of research on intertextuality. Can you explain what that means for our audience and why it's so vital for understanding the Bible as a whole?

Dr. Geoff Harper: Essentially, intertextuality is the use of one text by another author as they write. It could be spoken speech as well, but since we're talking about the Bible, it's using previous texts. It might be language, like a quotation, or something more subtle, like an allusion a later writer makes to a previous work. We see it all the time in movies, in Netflix series, in novels we read: allusions to famous figures or what they said, or speeches from the past, that raise an awareness. They're not just talking about this moment. They're bringing other moments to bear that enrich what's going on, give it a deeper level of significance or heighten the tension of what's happening. The biblical texts do that all the time. We see it clearly with the New Testament's use of the Old Testament. That becomes really obvious. Less obvious, but just as present, is the Old Testament's use of the Old Testament, later books referring back, connecting to earlier ones, using them for a whole lot of different purposes. I've spent lots of time digging around in that. There are lots of really fascinating things there that bring another dimension to what the Scriptures are doing and to the interconnectedness of the Bible as a whole.

Johnny Ova: I was going to ask about weaving the Old and New together. The way we teach and understand it here, you have Adam and Eve in the garden, sin comes in, we see the fall of man and separation between God and man. The Old Testament seems to be this major overarching story culminating in the redemption story that comes in the figure of Jesus Christ. How, in your opinion, does the Old Testament weave into the New Testament story of Jesus in ways that are often overlooked? Maybe give a couple of examples you've noticed that fascinated you.

Dr. Geoff Harper: Let me start with an example. There are lots of ways the New Testament does that. Some, like I said, are really obvious. Reading Matthew's Gospel, Matthew will frequently say something like, this happened to fulfill the word of the Lord spoken through the prophet. That's made it really clear. It's like a good essay where somebody's put it in the footnote. But the New Testament writers often just write in a way that assumes familiarity with the Old Testament. The working assumption seems to be that the people they're writing to have saturated themselves in reading and thinking and meditating on the Old Testament Scriptures, and can make the connections without being told as explicitly as Matthew does. That works out in lots of fascinating ways. There are so many examples, but take Mark 1, where somebody comes to Jesus and says, if you're willing, you can make me clean.

Dr. Geoff Harper: Jesus heals the man and sends him to the priest at the temple, and that's the end of the episode. You think, okay, Mark is saying Jesus can heal people. He is saying that. And yet as you think about it, there's a whole lot more going on. This man comes to Jesus with a disease that, maybe somewhat unhelpfully, has been translated as leprosy, modern-day Hansen's disease. It's probably not that. It's the disease Leviticus 13 and 14 talks about, a disease that is significant not because it's life-threatening but because it defiles a person and makes them impure. Being impure means they are separated, in this case, from other people in society but also from temple worship. So this man comes to Jesus asking to be made pure, to be cleansed, rather than to be healed. Jesus heals him, but then still sends him to the priest to perform the ritual purification required to restore him to the worshipping community of Israel.

Dr. Geoff Harper: Read it against Leviticus 13 and 14. There's a whole long chapter diagnosing the disease, all the various symptoms, and then a long chapter saying, here's what needs to happen when the disease is gone, here are the rituals that need to happen. But it says nothing about how you actually heal a person. Presumably that's left as a gap. God must be the one who heals. And yet in Mark's portrayal, Jesus comes and does the thing nobody in Israel could do: he heals this disease and overcomes the source of impurity itself. Mark is saying something really significant about who Jesus is. Yes, healing is part of that, but that's at the surface level. Against the backdrop of the Old Testament, a much richer picture begins to emerge of who Jesus is and what he's doing in the world, to make people fit to stand in the presence of a holy God. And it's all over in five or six verses. It's a really short episode, but it's saturated with the Old Testament, and that makes the picture in the Gospel so rich and so deep. He keeps doing it chapter after chapter all the way through Mark's Gospel, and the other writers are doing the same.

Johnny Ova: Beautiful. I love opening these lenses for people, because I never put those two together, the root of the uncleanness. Now, when you read through the Old Testament, you get a lot of questions. What is for us today and what isn't? Should I cut the hair on the sides of my head? Do I eat fruit that grows from somebody else's yard? And obviously, do not murder, do not take the Lord's name in vain. Some of these passages feel very time-bound, very connected to their time, while others feel timeless. How can we discern the difference between what was fulfilled in Christ and what continues to speak directly into our lives today?

Dr. Geoff Harper: In some ways that's the $64,000 question, isn't it? I sometimes tell students that the question you're asking is probably the most difficult question in theology, but also one of the most important. It's occupied Christian thought for the last 2,000 years, and it occupied Jewish thinking even before that. How do we understand all these things and their ongoing relevance? Maybe all that is to say there's no simple answer. Sometimes people suggest there is, that you can divide the laws into different categories and that makes it easy and makes the problem go away. It just doesn't.

Johnny Ova: Some of the categories, like the moral, the ceremonial.

Dr. Geoff Harper: And the civil. It'd be great if that worked. It just doesn't. How do you assign different laws to different categories? Who gets to choose which law falls into which category becomes the big question. Often people put laws into civil or ceremonial because in some ways it suits them, because then they don't need to think about them. I'm not sure that's the best way to go about it. Certainly when you look at both the Old Testament and the New Testament, they both consider the law as a whole. And if you think about it, the Pentateuch as a whole includes the rules and laws, but also the stories interwoven with them, along with the songs and genealogies. The whole thing comes as a package, as God's instruction for his people. So I think it's much better to approach it from Paul's point of view, when he talks about Scripture being God-breathed and useful. When Paul writes that to Timothy, he's not talking about the New Testament, because there wasn't a New Testament. He's talking about the Old Testament Scriptures.

Dr. Geoff Harper: So if we bring that to the issue of Old Testament law, Torah, Pentateuch, and start with it as our working assumption, that this is God-breathed and useful, then let's look for the use and the value and God's eternal, living word, rather than looking for bits we can ditch. It's just a better approach. It doesn't answer all the questions or remove all the difficulties, but it puts us in a different starting place as interpreters. We're trying to discern what God is saying and not saying here. And if we think about it, the issue is exactly the same in the New Testament. Multiple times Paul will conclude a letter saying, greet one another with a holy kiss. Here's an imperative from an apostle in the New Testament. I'm still waiting for my first holy kiss. I've visited lots of churches and lots of different countries all around the world. Why did we not obey what Paul clearly said? Because it's not as simple as that. There are contextual factors and historical factors and cultural things going on, and he's saying it for a particular reason. If we apply the same sort of logic and dig into what Old Testament laws are actually trying to do, we might come up with more sensible results.

Johnny Ova: That's an interesting way to look at it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like we can set some aside where it's clearly cultural for a season. With others, you're right, it's harder to say whether it's useful or not. That's the $64,000 question, like cutting the sides of the head. I'm in New York, and half an hour up the road there's a whole county of Jewish people who keep that, and they believe it's useful because they're honoring God that way. I don't know if you want to try cracking this nut in our last 10 or 15 minutes.

Dr. Geoff Harper: I'll say a couple more things. It's not going to crack the nut, but a couple of things that might be useful for your listeners. There's lots of value in archaeology, and one of the fascinating things we've discovered across the last century or so is a number of ancient law codes, like the laws of Hammurabi, that we've dug up and translated. They give us a really helpful understanding of how these sorts of texts functioned in the ancient world. Primarily what they're doing is painting a picture of the lawgiver. With the laws of Hammurabi, the whole ideal behind the laws is to say what a great king Hammurabi was. He's an 18th-century Babylonian king. What a wonderful king he is. Look how just his rules are. Look how gracious he is to people. Look at the wisdom he obviously has. At a really high level, I think Old Testament law is doing something very similar. It's saying, look at the portrait of Israel's God. Look how wise and just and caring and loving he is, and how he expects his people to follow suit. So having that high-level understanding is helpful. I can look for what this is saying about God, who he is and what he expects from his people.

Dr. Geoff Harper: Then maybe couple that with what Jesus does when he's asked what the most important part of it is: loving God with all your heart and soul and mind is the most important command, and then loving your neighbor as yourself. Here are two really good questions to bring to whatever part of the Torah we're in. How is this helping us understand who God is, that high-level thing? And how is this a possible expression of loving God, or a way to love one's neighbor? If I can grapple with those and work them out, then I can sense something of what God was saying to his people. Yes, in a particular time and place, with all the cultural things that come with that. But from that I can discern that this is God's way of acting in the world, and I can begin to work out how it actually lands for me in my context in Sydney, or up the road in New York, or wherever we happen to be. That gives us some really fruitful stuff to think about and wrestle with.

Johnny Ova: And probably all of us could do a better job at nailing those two down, loving God and loving our neighbors.

Dr. Geoff Harper: Yeah. I don't think we ever graduate from either of those lessons. They're lifelong lessons.

Johnny Ova: You shared one already, but if you have another, can you share an example from the Pentateuch where a passage or theme comes alive when viewed through the lens of fulfillment in Christ?

Dr. Geoff Harper: There are so many examples. I've been preaching through Leviticus at our own church recently, and a little while ago we were in chapter 16, the Day of Atonement, a well-known passage. Having worked through that, I looked at the book of Hebrews and the way Hebrews 9 and 10, right at the climax of the book, draws extensively on the Day of Atonement. Here's this day in Israel's sacrificial system that was climactic, the most important day of the year, a means of cleansing the people, cleansing the tabernacle itself, cleansing the altar, like a national reset point. And yet from the point of view of the Old Testament it was still limited. Yes, it was effective and able to do real things. It's not just a charade or a symbol. It's actually doing something. But even in the Old Testament, what it could do is limited. One of those limitations is that it cannot ultimately transform people. The reason the sacrifices need to keep being offered, as Hebrews says, is that the people kept sinning. There was a means of dealing with it, but the people kept on doing it, so there's this endless cycle.

Dr. Geoff Harper: The author of Hebrews picks up all that language to portray Jesus as a high priest who enters not just the earthly tabernacle but the heavenly tabernacle itself, with a better sacrifice, to bring about a better transformation of people. That's what the Old Testament was longing for, the ultimate transformation of people so they will no longer sin. The author of Hebrews brackets that whole section by quoting Jeremiah, the promise of the new covenant and the transformation of the human heart. That just makes so much sense. It's not that Jesus has come to do something entirely different or off on a tangent. Jesus brings it through to its fullest and final completion. Then Hebrews moves to the openness we all now have to enter the heavenly most holy place. That's so poignant when you've just spent time reading Leviticus 16. It's a wonderful moment, but it's the high priest only, and only once a year. There's access, but it's limited. When will it be for everyone? And Hebrews is saying, through what Jesus has done on our behalf as high priest, a new way has opened for all to come. It's incredible.

Dr. Geoff Harper: Every time I preach that passage, and I've preached it lots of times in different places, you look around the room and you see tears, because it's so moving, what God has done to overcome the full extent of our problem. A problem we've inherited, a problem we've contributed to across lots of different dimensions. God has acted on our behalf to do everything in order to bring us to himself. It's just wonderful.

Johnny Ova: Do you believe Paul wrote Hebrews?

Dr. Geoff Harper: I've no idea. That sounds like a New Testament question.

Johnny Ova: All right, I'll get the New Testament guy on next week to handle that one.

Dr. Geoff Harper: I look forward to listening to that episode.

Johnny Ova: How do the theological themes of the Old Testament, like covenant, law, sacrifice and kingdom, help shape the way Christians live and think today?

Dr. Geoff Harper: All of those things are so important for understanding not just the Old Testament but the way the New Testament conceptualizes the life of the believer. In a sense, the Old Testament gives us the theological grammar of all the things you're talking about: covenant, law, sacrifice, atonement, forgiveness. It's all there in the Old Testament. The New Testament picks up that vocabulary and uses it to explain who Jesus is and the implications of that for God's people.

Johnny Ova: So it lays that foundation for us.

Dr. Geoff Harper: Yes, and it shapes the Christian walk in unique ways. Think of how often the story of the wilderness generation in Numbers comes up. They're the ones who were delivered out of Egypt. They experienced the Exodus, they experienced Mount Sinai. And yet they grumbled and complained, they turned to idols, they engaged in immorality, and God said, okay, you can all die in the wilderness, I'll start again with the next generation. That story appears again and again through the New Testament as a way of helping Christian people understand who they are and the implications of coming into relationship with a God who is holy and just. Paul in 1 Corinthians 10 picks up that whole story, and fascinatingly, writing to a Gentile church, he can say, here are the things that happened to our forefathers, including them in that story. Then he takes all the things I just mentioned, the immorality, the idolatry, the grumbling against God, the testing of God, and says, here are examples God has given us to turn us away from evil. So it becomes a way to understand the calling Christ has for his people.

Dr. Geoff Harper: Again, it's not in a different direction from what was there before, but in the same direction with the same sort of parameters. The difference is that now God has poured out his Holy Spirit within us to move us to the obedience God has always desired from his people, which in that sense increases the expectation. Sometimes when you talk to Christians, it's like obedience is a tag-on, an optional extra for the really dedicated. But the whole movement across the Scriptures is actually increasing the expectation of obedience. As new covenant believers filled with God's Spirit, in the language of Ezekiel 36, we're being moved to be obedient. The expectation is higher, because God is the same and yet has drawn us to himself. Whatever it meant to have the presence of God living in the tent over there, it's an entirely different dynamic to say the presence of that holy God now lives in us by his Spirit. You've raised the stakes considerably.

Johnny Ova: The standard is raised higher.

Dr. Geoff Harper: Absolutely. So all that language that on a first look you might think is done away with, or not really relevant, or not worth thinking about, is actually the whole framework for understanding ourselves as God's Christian people. It's all still there and flows through the text of the New Testament. So I think we do ourselves a disservice if we're not engaging with the Old Testament and understanding these concepts and how the New Testament writers are using them to speak to God's Christian people.

Johnny Ova: Just a few more questions before we wrap. If a believer wanted to start engaging the Old Testament more deeply, where would you encourage them to begin?

Dr. Geoff Harper: I'd just encourage them to begin reading it.

Johnny Ova: So right from the beginning? Open up Genesis and go?

Dr. Geoff Harper: Maybe from the beginning, or maybe from somewhere else. At one level it doesn't matter. I think one of the reasons people struggle with the Old Testament is that it's unfamiliar. People struggle with the book of Romans too, but because they're convinced it's important for them, they'll read it again and read it a third time. They'll listen to a podcast series, do it in Bible study, have a sermon series on it. They'll stay up all night talking to their friends about predestination. They engage deeply with it. If we apply that same thinking to the Old Testament, whether it's one book or the whole thing, and read it and reread it, listen to some sermons, find a good book on it, do it for Bible study, the more we grapple and wrestle with it, the more we'll understand and the more deeply we'll be able to engage with what it has to say. So my advice would be to do that. Start at the beginning if you want, or start somewhere else. It doesn't matter. Take the book you're most unfamiliar with and spend some time with it.

Dr. Geoff Harper: Get some friends around you and do it together. That's always much better than struggling with the text individually. If it doesn't make any sense to me, let's do it as a group and help one another, because somebody else will see something I don't and they'll have a way of explaining it that's helpful for me, and I can do that for them. It's a much richer experience in community than sitting on our own in our bedroom or kitchen staring at the page going, no idea what's going on here. Let's do it together, because the rewards are worth it, for all the reasons we've been talking about and more. There's such tangible benefit from really deeply engaging with the text of the Old Testament.

Johnny Ova: I like that imagery of wrestling with texts that are somewhat uncomfortable. Why does this say this? Why is God doing this or allowing this? Why is this person responding this way? I think those are healthy conversations we need to start having more.

Dr. Geoff Harper: I think so. The temptation is always, because sometimes we're afraid of hard questions and afraid of doubt, to hide them and pretend they're not there, and certainly not talk to anybody about them. I think it's much healthier to have those conversations. Whether you keep a journal or a list or a spreadsheet, whatever you do, as you notice things that strike you as awkward or difficult, where you think, I don't know what that means, write them down. These are good things to talk about. They're good things to research and read up on, and to talk to other believers about. How have they thought about that portrait of God or that episode? If we can have more of these conversations together and develop communities that are open to having them, I think that's good for us all. I've been teaching Old Testament for many, many years, and I've written lots on it, and I still have questions. I still have things where I think, I don't quite know what to do with that. But you've got to keep coming back to them and not pretend they're not there or sweep them under the carpet. That doesn't help us or anybody else.

Johnny Ova: All great points. As we close, last question before we chat about you a little: what's the one truth from your years of study that you hope every Christian would take away about the Old Testament and its connection to our faith today?

Dr. Geoff Harper: I think the one thing I would say is that God is there and present in every season of life. I've spent a lot of time writing about Leviticus, and I've also spent time thinking through and writing about the topic of lament. It's something the Psalms make so clear, but not just the Psalms, that God is truly present with us people in every situation of life. The stories of the Old Testament feed into that, and Israel's history feeds into that. Even in the midst of judgment, or in the midst of slavery, as much as in the midst of deliverance and rescue, God is present and active and working. That's so wonderfully encouraging as we in our various lives face all kinds of things, some expected, some completely unexpected, some that fill us with joy, some that fill us with tears. It's such a foundation for life to know that God is with us in all of those. As Jesus says in his parting words at the end of Matthew's Gospel, surely I am with you always, to the end of the age. That's enough. That's enough, to know that Jesus walks with us on this path, on the good days, on the bad days, and everything in between. And the Old Testament stands as this living testimony to that reality as it played out in the lives of Israel across the centuries.

Johnny Ova: Dr. Harper, this has been an incredible and really rich discussion. I appreciate your wisdom and knowledge and this conversation. I really believe it's going to bless people and have them think on the Scriptures, meditate on them and take them to a deeper level. It's blessed me just having this conversation with you, and I really appreciate your work, your study, and even just the way you speak. It's really amazing.

Dr. Geoff Harper: It's a pleasure to talk and a pleasure to be able to speak on these things.

Johnny Ova: Is there any way people can get hold of you? Do you have anything coming up, or resources people could pull from?

Dr. Geoff Harper: I've got a book that came out a couple of years ago for people who want to grapple with Leviticus. It's written to pastors and Bible study leaders, really for people who are saying, I'd like to have a look, but I've no idea what's going on. It's called Teaching Leviticus, published by Christian Focus. I've got another book coming out with IVP next month looking at the whole biblical theme of impurity across the canon, grappling with Leviticus and Numbers, but also how it plays out across the Old Testament and how it shapes life and faith in the New Testament. We touched on a bit of that in the podcast, but there's lots more in there. It's another of these biblical themes we often dismiss or think isn't really relevant. But it's there all the way from Genesis to Revelation, and it's got a whole lot to say to us if we think about it.

Johnny Ova: I'm going to link the book on Leviticus in the description, and when this new book comes out, I'll be in touch asking, hey, did this come out yet? Because that's going to be one to read for sure. Again, Dr. Harper, thank you so much for joining me this morning, your time, and for digging in with me tonight.

Dr. Geoff Harper: It's an absolute pleasure to be with you.