When the Old Testament Troubles You: Reading Scripture Rightly

Imagine sitting in a Bible study group in Lagos on a Wednesday evening. Someone reads from 1 Samuel 15:3, where God commands Israel to utterly destroy the Amalekites — men, women, children, and livestock. The room goes quiet. A young professional at the back shifts uncomfortably and whispers, ‘Is this the same God we worship?’ It is a fair question. And it deserves a serious, scriptural answer — not a dismissal, not a defensive wave of the hand, but honest theological engagement.

Difficult Old Testament passages are not accidents in the canon. They are not mistakes God made before He ‘calmed down’ in the New Testament. That view — called Marcionism, after the second-century heretic Marcion — was condemned by the early church precisely because it tears Scripture apart and leaves the believer with a half-Bible and a half-God. Jesus Himself said in Matthew 5:17, ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.’ The Old Testament is not obsolete. It is completed, clarified, and illuminated by the New Testament.

The first key to understanding difficult Old Testament passages is the principle of progressive revelation. God did not reveal everything about Himself at once. He unfolded His character, His plan, and His standards gradually, through covenants and history, until the full expression of Himself arrived in the person of Jesus Christ. Hebrews 1:1-2 states this plainly: ‘God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son.’ This means the Old Testament is real, authoritative, and inspired — but it is not the final word. Christ is. When you read a troubling command or event in the Old Testament, ask: what does this reveal about the trajectory of God’s redemptive story, and how does Christ bring it to its intended destination?

The second key is understanding typology and shadow language. Much of what appears violent, strange, or demanding in the Old Testament is shadow pointing to substance. The animal sacrifices of Leviticus seem brutal until you understand that every slaughtered lamb was preaching the same sermon: blood must be shed for sin. Hebrews 10:1 confirms this: ‘For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect.’ The temple, the priesthood, the dietary laws, the feasts — these were not arbitrary rituals. They were a visual curriculum designed to prepare a people for the Messiah. When the shadow confuses you, look for the substance. Look for Christ.

Third, historical and covenantal context matters enormously. The command to destroy Canaan must be read within God’s judicial dealing with nations whose wickedness had reached what Genesis 15:16 calls the fullness of iniquity — ‘for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.’ God was not randomly violent. He was executing delayed judgment on societies steeped in child sacrifice, sexual perversion, and systematic evil. He used Israel as His instrument of judgment in the same way He later used Babylon against Israel herself. This does not mean Christians today have warrant to wage holy war — that theocratic framework was specific to Old Covenant Israel as a nation-state. The New Testament church is not a political nation; it is a spiritual body with spiritual weapons (2 Corinthians 10:4). Context is not an escape hatch from difficult texts; it is the honest hermeneutical work every serious believer must do.

For the Nigerian Christian, this matters deeply and practically. Many believers in Nigeria carry a fractured relationship with the Old Testament — either over-applying it by treating every Levitical law as binding today, or dismissing it entirely as irrelevant. Both errors cost you. If you over-apply it, you may find yourself promoting practices — be it certain ritual cleansing traditions, polygamy defended from the patriarchs, or prosperity formulas lifted from Deuteronomy — without passing them through the filter of Christ’s completed work. If you dismiss it, you lose the prophetic richness that gives the New Testament its roots. You lose the Psalms. You lose Isaiah 53. You lose Daniel’s visions that make Revelation sensible.

The right posture is what Paul models in 2 Timothy 3:16-17: ‘All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.’ Notice he says all Scripture — including the parts that make you uncomfortable on a Wednesday evening in Lagos. The discomfort is not a signal to skip the passage; it is an invitation to dig deeper, pray harder, and allow the Holy Spirit to illumine what your natural mind cannot process alone.

When you encounter a difficult Old Testament text, apply this threefold method: First, read it in its full immediate context — do not isolate a verse. Second, trace the theme through the whole Bible — see where it points in the New Testament. Third, ask what it reveals about the holiness of God, the sinfulness of man, and the necessity of Christ. That triangulation will rarely leave you without understanding.

The God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are not two different beings wearing different moods. He is the same God — holy, just, merciful, and purposeful. Romans 15:4 reminds us: ‘For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.’ The Old Testament was written for your learning. Approach it with reverence, rigour, and the light that only comes from knowing Jesus. He is the lens through which every difficult page becomes, not scandalous, but glorious.