From Genesis to Chronicles, One Unbroken Redemption Story with Dr. Carol Kaminski

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today I have the privilege of having Dr. Carol Kaminski with me. Dr. Kaminski, thank you so much for your time today.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: Great to be here.

Johnny Ova: When people open the Old Testament, a lot of them see thirty-nine separate books with no obvious connection between them. We know they're separate, but sometimes people think they're completely separate. Why does so much of the church struggle to read this as one story?

Dr. Carol Kaminski: That's a great point. I do a lot of Bible seminars in churches, helping people understand the Old Testament, and one thing I hear repeatedly is, I started reading it and I've tried and I can't do it, and I'm not sure how it fits together. One of the big issues, of course, is that there's a historical distance from the Old Testament. But I think the most important one is that not all the books are in chronological order. I remember doing a seminar in a church where a medical doctor who had been a Christian for five years heard me say, look, they're not all in chronological order, and I walked through how that affects how we read it. He came up to me and said, good tip. I've been a Christian five years and I didn't know that. So we need to help people see the unity of it, but it's tough to put the books together.

Johnny Ova: That's a great point, because there are two opposite sides of the spectrum. As a pastor, I see new Christians come into the church thinking the Bible is one book with chapters, so they read it as chapters. So you explain that they're separate books, but you also don't want to take out the threads that weave through it.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: That's right. That's where I think the way to read the Old Testament is to see the Bible as one redemptive story. One redemptive story means you've got to start from the beginning, and if the books are not all in chronological order, you need some help working out how to do that, because the books have been placed according to genre, or type of literature. All sixteen prophetic books are together. Imagine reading a history book on World War II where the author said, I'm going to group all the ground wars together and all the sea wars together, and put all the air raids chapter by chapter, out of order. It would require that you know a basic history of World War II to separate them and put them back together. That's kind of what the Bible does. It's arranged by genre, and for the prophetic books the longer books come first. How do you put that together? That's hard for people.

Johnny Ova: Especially. It's hard for advanced Christians, let alone brand new Christians you just hand a Bible to.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: That's right. So what we tend to do is pull out individual books, like Isaiah, or Bible verses that mean something to us, but then we lose the context and we lose the narrative.

Johnny Ova: You spent years at Cambridge working in Genesis, and eventually you built an entire framework to teach this. What convinced you the Old Testament was actually one unified narrative and not a collection of disconnected books? What popped out where you said, wait a second?

Dr. Carol Kaminski: I think it first happened when I was studying theology back in Australia. I had decided to go to Bible college for one year, to take a year off work and learn my Bible. I took a class with a faculty member who was a Gordon-Conwell graduate, and I ended up studying at Gordon-Conwell too. He was pointing to the book of Isaiah and its connection with the Gospel of Mark. Suddenly it was like, wait a minute, the lights went on. That was the beginning of a journey of seeing that this is one story and you have to read it as one story. Then my work in Genesis helped too, because Genesis is the beginning of the story. When you watch a movie or read a book, you have to get the opening chapters to know what it's all about. So it's been a journey that really began about thirty years ago.

Johnny Ova: I definitely want to go into Genesis, but let's get CASKET on the table first. Walk us through the big idea behind CASKET.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: CASKET is the acronym for the Old Testament, and there's an acronym for the New Testament as well: CASKET EMPTY. It's built around two timelines, I know this looks detailed, an Old Testament timeline and a New Testament timeline, and when you put them together, they give you the whole biblical story. As I was teaching the Old Testament in a church context, I wanted to help people learn the narrative, but you've got over two thousand years of history in the Old Testament. How do you put it all together? So CASKET is for the Old Testament and EMPTY is for the New Testament. When I started this, people said, what about BASKET EMPTY? CASKET is a bit morbid, isn't it? And I said no, it's got to be casket, because death starts in Genesis 3.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: It's a quick way to put all the books and the key events in chronological order. It stands for Creation, Abraham, Sinai, Kings, Exile and Temple. That's the Old Testament. For the New Testament it's Expectations, which is the intertestamental period, then Messiah, Pentecost, Teachings and Yet to come. So the whole acronym says that the Bible hangs together on the death and resurrection of Jesus. CASKET EMPTY points to Jesus as the center of the story. I do a lot of seminars, and we have resources and Bible studies, and what we've found is that it helps new Christians learn the Bible. People say, I can get that. It also helps people who have been in the church for twenty years. They come up to me and say, this is the first time I've really put the Bible together. So it helps at various levels.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: I started it many years ago, and I work with David Palmer, a New Testament professor, who does the New Testament side. We've had the material translated into Chinese, Arabic, Korean, Farsi for an incredible Farsi project, and Thai, so it's helping at a global level as well. We have a real missions heart for the whole project, and we're currently doing a Spanish translation.

Johnny Ova: That's great. I'm going to have all of this linked, so if you're watching or listening, click the links below and get yourself a copy. Understanding the story and narrative of Scripture is so important for understanding the different parts of the Bible. You mentioned Genesis, so let's go there. The story opens with creation and then immediately moves into rebellion and judgment. How does that opening set up everything that comes after it?

Dr. Carol Kaminski: That's such a great question. The first thing to notice is that Genesis has only two chapters on God's good creation. For many of us, we'd love more about creation. Only two chapters, and then you've got what's traditionally called the fall in chapter 3, and from chapter 3 to the end of the book it's pretty messy relationships. That tells us something significant. God made a good world from the beginning, under his blessing, but things go wrong really quickly. In Genesis 1 you have humanity made in the image of God, there to be fruitful and multiply, under the blessing. Then chapter 3, traditionally called the fall narrative, sets the context for the whole story of the Bible. Because Adam disobeys God's command, they're banished. That anticipates the whole story of Israel when they disobey God's commands, and we start to see the human story being played out in the story of Israel.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: Genesis 3 even sets the context for the work of Christ. Romans 5 says Adam is a type of him who was to come. So to understand the Old Testament, we need to understand Genesis, and that carries into Romans 5, and we could think of 1 Corinthians as well, about death and resurrection. That's why we say from the very beginning that Jesus is the solution to Adam's sin, answering his disobedience with his obedience. He's also the one who overcomes the death that begins in Genesis 3. It's a remarkable story that helps us see the big sweep of Scripture.

Johnny Ova: There are a lot of parallels between Jesus and Adam too. They call him the second Adam, overcoming the separation Adam brought into the world.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: That's right, lots of links there. My philosophy when I teach the Old Testament is that I don't stay in the Old Testament the whole time. From chapter 3, from the very beginning, I'll say, look at this chapter, now I want you to see how it fits with the New Testament. That way people start to see it as one redemptive narrative. Jesus is the climax of it, but God is preparing his people through the Old Testament with the categories they need to understand who he is.

Johnny Ova: Dr. Kaminski, when I'm studying my guests before the podcast, I always find one or two things that are controversial or not often spoken about, so I'm putting you under the gun here. You've argued something that cuts against the common reading: that Noah was not chosen because he was righteous. What did you find in the flood narrative that pushed you to that conclusion?

Dr. Carol Kaminski: Okay, good. Correct. I was in Cambridge working on the sin narrative in Genesis 6, that the wickedness of humanity was great. At the same time my sister was about to have a child, so I was looking at kids' books in Cambridge, and I saw a book on Noah: "There once was a good man named Noah." It stopped me in my tracks. No, actually, he's among sinful humanity. Over the years I've looked at more than thirty children's books, and it's incredible how many say, there once was a good man named Noah, and God had a special plan for him. They do the same thing with Abraham. If you have kids and kids' books, go look at the story of Abraham: there once was a good man.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: In Genesis 6:5 you have the statement that God saw the wickedness of humanity. The contrast is not, but Noah was good. The contrast is, but Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. What I argue is that Noah was sinful like everybody else when God chose him, and it was due to God's favor, his grace. Then he is declared righteous, but that's after he has built the ark. Genesis 7:1 says, I have seen that you are righteous, and just a few verses earlier it says he did everything God commanded him. So unlike Adam, who disobeyed God's command, we now have Noah obeying God's commands by faith, and he is declared righteous. But my point is that when God first chooses him, he's among sinful humanity.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: That's why, right after the flood, you have the statement in Genesis 8:21 that God will withhold his judgment even though the sin of humanity continues after the flood, and that's an echo of chapter 3. In other words, the flood doesn't clean up humanity, because it's going to take more than water to do that. So Noah is declared righteous, but he is chosen out of divine favor, not because of his goodness. I argue the same thing about Abraham.

Johnny Ova: One of the things we've been talking about at Sound of Heaven, in a series we've continued by request, is this. We started with words, and now we're moving into "Look Again," which is on stories. The idea is that ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek are so complex that translators sometimes had a hard time picking an English word that fully grasps the depth of these ancient words. When you do word studies, it puts a wow factor into these Scriptures, and it's the same with the stories. If this word means this, what does that mean for the story? One thing we've been uncovering is that God really is the same yesterday, today and forever. The idea that the God of the Old Testament is the mean, nasty, violent dad and Jesus came as the good guy, all love, grace and favor, in the New Testament, is looking through the wrong lens. One of my arguments is that the Old Testament is the view of God through the eyes of man, and the New Testament is the view of God through the eyes of God, Jesus. So if the favor Noah finds is unmerited, what does that tell us about grace and how it works through the whole Old Testament story, not just the New Testament?

Dr. Carol Kaminski: It runs through the whole story. Absolutely, it does with Noah, and you can look at each person. Think about Abraham. Again, kids' books: there once was a good man named Abraham. Joshua 24:2 says Terah and his family worshiped idols, so we know they were an idol-worshiping family. When you come to Romans 4, it says of Abraham that God justifies the ungodly. Not only that, but I think the hallmark of God's character is revealed in the golden calf story, and it's a tragedy that we've missed this in the church. In the golden calf story, the term "favor" from Noah's story shows up again. God continues with his people in spite of the fact that they have just built a golden calf, bowed down and worshiped it. Moses understands this: if I have found favor in your sight. And God says in Exodus 34 that he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness. That description is the hallmark of his character.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: When I'm teaching in churches, I find I'm reintroducing people to the God of grace that they really haven't understood. You see it throughout the period of the kings, when they mess up over and over again. It's pitiful. Even students in my classes ask, why does he keep forgiving them? Why does he keep doing that? And they're quite moved when they realize this is the character of God that we've missed by not knowing the story. With a selective, cafeteria-style approach, picking out a couple of verses, we can pick out negative ones and not understand the story.

Johnny Ova: Why is the call of Abraham such a hinge point in the storyline?

Dr. Carol Kaminski: I think the call of Abraham is really the answer to the problem of Genesis 3 to 11, the fall narrative. It's going to be by grace. Abraham is a sinner who is saved by faith, so he's a model for us. There's also a whole cluster of promises God makes in Genesis 12:1 to 3 and Genesis 17: many descendants, land, and all the nations being blessed through him. These promises reverberate throughout the New Testament. It's really the high point of the redemptive story, and the solution to the problem of humanity is found in the call of Abraham and God's promises.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: You mentioned Hebrew words. When you trace it through the larger redemptive plan, God makes promises to Abraham and to his seed, or offspring. The word seed there is singular, and Paul quotes it in Galatians 3 and says the promises were made to the seed, and guess what, the singular is Jesus. He sees the culmination of all these promises in the larger redemptive plan being fulfilled in Jesus. That's amazing. And it's amazing that Paul, not just because he's a Hebrew scholar, recognizes the providential and sovereign hand of God, so that even the singular noun "to your seed," what's called a collective singular in Hebrew, was singular for a reason. Isn't that incredible? He even says the gospel was proclaimed beforehand to Abraham. I love that.

Johnny Ova: So good. Let's move forward to Sinai and the giving of the law. I'm sure you've experienced this too. A lot of readers hit a wall here, and the narrative feels like it stalls. We're free, and now we've got law and all these things we have to do. How does the law actually move the redemption story forward instead of interrupting it?

Dr. Carol Kaminski: Now God is forming a whole people instead of individuals. That's the first thing, because he's entering into a covenant with Israel. I like to think of the law as communicating God's character. We have two boys, and when they were younger, we tried to instill in them the things we valued. When they were teenagers: you turn up to work every day, and even if you don't like your job, you still turn up. Sometimes we'd say, Kaminski boys don't do that. As parents, I know that doesn't work that well in the long run, although they're great kids, and they're both married now. But I think that's what the law is doing. God is showing his character. You're not to commit adultery, because God is absolutely loyal in his relationships. That's his character. He's faithful, and he's instilling his character in his people.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: Look at a little law like this: when you glean your field, don't go to the edges. Leave enough so that the poor in the land can get food. In an American context, and I'm from Australia, people would say, it's your land, go right to the edge. But a theme runs through the Old Testament: care for the poor and needy in your community, because that's why I'm blessing you. So the little law about not gleaning to the edge actually reveals God's character and his care for the poor and needy in their midst. Scholars have done great work helping us understand the law in its ancient Near Eastern context, and also showing some of its distinctives.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: One other example is the laws on slavery, or indebted servants. That was quite common, because you couldn't go borrow money from a bank, so what did you do when you were in debt? You put yourself into service. But the laws governing how you treat a servant differ significantly from ancient Near Eastern laws. If you knock out someone's eye or tooth, you let them go free. Why? Because there's an emphasis on human dignity and the image of God in everyone. So when you dig a little deeper, the laws show God's character and the values of the community, while I recognize they're hard for a reader.

Johnny Ova: Totally get it. The period of the kings begins with an enormous promise and ends in collapse. What is that whole rise and fall doing in the larger story?

Dr. Carol Kaminski: With kingship, of course, you've got Saul first, when the people ask for a king. But the promise of kingship goes back to Genesis 17, to Abraham. Then in Genesis 49 there's a blessing that says the scepter will not depart from Judah. So we know God's plan from the beginning was kingship. The people ask for a king because they no longer want God as their king, and then David is chosen. The theme of a king from the tribe of Judah ruling over God's people runs from Genesis through David. The Davidic covenant in 2 Samuel 7 also runs throughout Scripture: God promises an everlasting throne and an everlasting kingdom, which is ultimately the kingdom of God.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: As you know from the story, we have not only the northern kingdom but the southern kingdom of Judah, and it ends in 586 BC. But there's hope that God will one day raise up a righteous Davidic king to rule his people. The New Testament is all over it. Matthew is all over it: they're waiting for their Messiah and the everlasting kingdom. That theme runs especially through the southern kingdom. On my Old Testament timeline we have a display for this, because I think it's one of the most complicated sections of Scripture. You can see it starts with the united kingdom, and then we have the whole kingship narrative with each king and little bullet points next to each one, so people can understand it as a whole. It sets the context for Jesus.

Johnny Ova: In a lot of those stories with the kings, and I know you wrote a commentary on 1 and 2 Chronicles, which we'll get to in a second, when you read about the exiles it feels like the lowest point. The story could have ended a million different times. They get exiled, done. How does the Old Testament keep that thread of hope alive through all of it?

Dr. Carol Kaminski: We've got both the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom. The northern kingdom has kings who are not from the tribe of Judah, and it has these mini-judgments until it finally comes to an end in 722. For the southern kingdom, on the timeline we have a blue line that runs right through, and when you put the Old and New Testament timelines together, they meet up at Expectations. We've talked about the importance of God's grace, and God's grace comes to David, because God promises him unconditionally in 2 Samuel 7: when your days are complete and you've died, I will raise up your seed after you, and I will give him an everlasting throne and an everlasting kingdom.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: When you trace that promise of kingship through the southern kingdom, you have some good kings and some bad kings, and as you said, it looks like it's going to be a disaster. Finally, in 586 BC, the Babylonians come against Jerusalem, it's destroyed, and there's no king on the throne. But the prophets announce that the days are coming when God will raise up a righteous Davidic king. And here's what I think is really fun. I mention this in the commentary. In 2 Samuel 7, the verb "to raise up," do you mind if I do a little Hebrew word here? This is so fun.

Johnny Ova: Go for it. It's great.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: The Hebrew word is qum, to arise, and it's in what we call the causative in Hebrew, so literally God says, I will cause your son to arise. The Greek translation of the Old Testament uses anistemi, where we get the word for resurrection. Can you believe that? I will resurrect your son. So with Jesus, the disciples believed he was the king of Israel, and they're despondent because he's died, but then three days later God raises him up, in fulfillment of God's promise to King David. The New Testament writers are all over that in the book of Acts. They get it, because they understand Jesus is the only righteous Davidic king, and his resurrection is his vindication that he's righteous. Isn't that a wonderful thing? Why wouldn't you want to study the promises God makes to David? I rest my case.

Johnny Ova: Anytime you need to break off into a Hebrew word, you don't need permission. I love it. So, on to your commentary on 1 and 2 Chronicles. Chronicles retells the entire story from the beginning all the way to the return. Why does the Old Testament close by looking back over its own story? We see something similar in Deuteronomy, the look back. Why do you think it does that?

Dr. Carol Kaminski: A couple of things about the time Chronicles was written. We call the author the Chronicler. How original is that? He's not named. He's writing in the final period of the Old Testament, when God's people have been in Babylon and then go back to Jerusalem. It's a really tough time. Everything's expensive, they've got to rebuild, there's no king on the throne, and they're under the Persians, a small province in a vast Persian Empire. So the question is, what happened to all the promises of God? Here we have the Chronicler, probably a Levite, who devoted himself to the study of the Scriptures, and it's quite incredible. He retells the story of Israel's history to remind them that God hasn't finished, that God is at work and is fulfilling his creation purposes through his people. It has a lot of messianic echoes throughout, and it gives God's people hope that God is fulfilling his promises even though it might not look like it right now. He's still at work.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: I think it's a great message for us. And you'd love this as a pastor: apart from Moses, the Chronicler is one of our first writers of sermonettes, like Ezra. There are many sermons all through Chronicles. He's applying the Scriptures to the new context.

Johnny Ova: We can glean from that today too. Just a few more questions, because I want to tie this whole story together. You've mentioned it briefly, but through all six periods, what is the single thread that ties creation, Abraham, Sinai, kings, exile and temple into one connected account?

Dr. Carol Kaminski: Great question. I think it's the work of the sovereign God to bring about his redemptive plan. He's the key actor behind the whole story, the whole thread, and he is relentless in pursuing a sinful people so that his creation plan will be accomplished.

Johnny Ova: Amen. You also teach that this whole story finds its center in the death and resurrection of Jesus. How does reading the Old Testament as one unbroken story change the way we understand what Christ fulfills? I'm sure you've heard people say, I just read the New Testament, I don't read the Old. My mind goes, how do you know what's going on in the New Testament if you don't read the Old? It's like starting a movie right in the middle. You get pieces, but you're not getting the big picture.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: It's interesting you say that. Years ago, when we used DVDs instead of streaming, I was watching one of those long Dickens movies with my husband over the winter at Christmas time, and I was not getting the movie. After half an hour I said to my husband, could you pause it? I'm not getting the story. He said, well, it's Dickens, let's give it another half hour. Okay. Another half hour later, I said, pause it please. Could you explain? I'm still not getting it.

Johnny Ova: Patient husband. Very patient husband.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: About fifteen minutes later the DVD popped out and said, insert disc four. We'd been watching disc three without having seen discs one and two. And that was Dickens, which is already complicated. So we put in discs one and two, and disc three made a whole lot of sense. I like to think of the Old Testament as twenty DVDs, or streaming episodes, and the New Testament as one DVD. What we do is keep playing the last DVD, and we haven't got the categories to understand who Jesus is. It's like a movie with a powerful ending that means something to you because you've known the whole story, and you think, my gosh, that was incredible. Sometimes at the end of a movie they show the original characters again. The Bible is meant to do that. It's meant to stir our hearts and capture our imagination.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: Think about Matthew 1, the opening of the whole New Testament: this is the book of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham. You've got to know who those people are. What he's saying in that first verse is that Jesus is the fulfillment of God's promises to Abraham and God's promises to David. That's the whole narrative of Scripture, and it starts to mean something to you in a profound way once you understand the story. That's why I do four-hour seminars in churches, walking people through the whole Old Testament, and David, my colleague, does New Testament seminars. Often I do the first round and he comes six months later. What we're trying to do is help people in the church fall in love with the Scriptures and discover who the Lord is, and it's quite transformative in your life.

Johnny Ova: That's wonderful. Let's land this plane. Last question. For the pastor or believer who has always felt lost in the Old Testament, where do you tell them to start so they can finally see the whole story?

Dr. Carol Kaminski: I don't mean to be self-promoting, but we have a Bible study and a study guide, and the timeline. People have been using them for years. I have people tell me they've still got the timeline on their wall. You have to look at it visually to understand the narrative. The timeline highlights all the key events, so it's a theological timeline, not just a history timeline. And nothing beats studying the Scripture yourself. We have an eighteen-week Bible study through the Old Testament that walks people through the narrative. It's not a five-minute Bible study. We don't overload people, they just do four chapters, but you've got to dig in, and it's well worth it. You're going to be a Christian the rest of your life. Use the resources and get excited about who the Lord is.

Johnny Ova: Amen. I love it. Dr. Kaminski, I can't thank you enough for your time today. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: Great to be here. I love talking with pastors, because our heart is for the church. I teach in the academy and so forth, but my heart is for the church, helping people understand who the Lord is through Scripture.

Johnny Ova: These are important conversations to have. They really are.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: Well, great to meet you today.

Johnny Ova: Pleasure meeting you too.

Dr. Carol Kaminski: Great. Bye bye.