Session 1 – Introduction

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Page 3 and Luke chapter 24. And may I say a formal thank you for allowing me to join you for this part of your RML programme. I said last night that I’m a big fan of Read, Mark, Learn, and I’ve been praying that, uh, once again we would be thrilled by the gospel as we study his word. This weekend and that you’d be motivated to keep working away at studying God’s Word through to the end of your overview year. For this weekend is in fact a mini Bible overview, and I’m just going to take a few moments to explain what I mean by that, and then we’ll pray and get underway with our first session.

Do you remember from Luke chapter 24 that Cleopas and his companion on the Emmaus Road found that their hearts burned within them as the Lord Jesus opened up the Scriptures to them and showed them from those Scriptures that the Bible was pointing to him, that the Old Testament was pointing to him, the Christ, to his death and his resurrection. Have a look at it there in verse 26. Luke 24:26. Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory? Necessary according to the Old Testament.

That’s what the unfolding storey of the Old Testament is all driving towards. Jesus’ death and resurrection are the climax of Old Testament revelation. Verse 27: And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. And Cleopas and his companion found that mini Bible overview given by Jesus absolutely breathtaking. Have a look at it there in verse 32: they said to each other, did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?

And it’s the testimony of so many believers, including, I suspect, many of you, that we’ve been gobsmacked by the gospel, particularly when it’s been presented to us in the way that the Bible itself presents it to us, namely in the unfolding of God’s history, going back to Genesis and moving gradually through the Scriptures, step by step, to take on board a message that’s progressively revealed, a message that develops and builds up to its climax in the Lord Jesus Christ and its consummation in the new heavens and the new earth. And as we work on the flow of the Old Testament, we’re driven forwards to Christ. By the plotline and by the models and shadows and types— the Exodus, temple, priesthood, sacrifice, kingship, and so on. It’s what you’re finding this year in your Bible overview. And Bible overviews are meant to grip us with excitement and to leave us with a deeper understanding of the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ, which will in turn lead us to love him and to serve him all the more.

What happens at the end of Luke 24 is that Jesus teaches another Bible overview to a larger group, to the 11 apostles and some others, and then he blesses them and leaves them. He’s taken up into heaven. So by the end of the chapter, Jesus is no longer there, but now the disciples are clear that Jesus is the fulfilment of the Old Testament. What reaction does that produce in the disciples? Why?

Worship of Jesus, joyful obedience to Jesus, and praise of God. Worship of Jesus, joyful obedience to Jesus, and praise of God. Why don’t we cheque that out? I’ll read from verse 44. Then he said to them, these are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.

Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures and said to them, thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the 3rd day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high. Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands, he blessed them.

While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshipped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy and were continually in the temple blessing God, or praising God. It’s one of those remarkable things in a Bible overview, and I’m sure you’ve been finding that this year, that even though we’re not usually given a list of dos and don’ts. Yet our lives are transformed by the gospel such that we are motivated to keep trusting God and keep repenting, keep reforming our lives in line with the dos and don’ts that we know from elsewhere in the Bible already. I’m not going to be giving you a list of dos and don’ts this weekend.

If you’ve come here expecting to be told, be patient, bless those who curse, Don’t lose your temper and so on. I’m not going to be giving you that. I’m assuming you know much of that already anyway. But I am, God willing, going to be presenting you with the gospel, which should motivate us to repent where we know we need to, and so it should contribute to shaping us more into the likeness of Christ. Now, we’re not given the details of what Jesus said in those Bible overviews, any more than we’re given the details of another Bible overview that that Paul gives right at the end of the book of Acts.

You know, Luke and Acts are essentially 2 parts of the one work. But what we do know is that Jesus worked his way through the 3 parts of the Old Testament. Have a look at verse 44. Then he said to them, these are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Now we know from that verse and from elsewhere in the New Testament that the Old Testament in Jesus’ Bible had 3 big parts to it: the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings.

You can see what Jesus’ Bible looks like on page Don’t worry, it is the same as the Old Testament we have in our Bibles, but the order of the books is slightly different. The order of the books that Jesus worked with was less chronological than ours, less driven by the order of events in history, but more logical than ours in terms of gradually building up the picture of who Jesus is and why he had to come. The book we’re studying this weekend is the first book— you can see there— in the last part of Jesus’ Bible, the first book of the writings. It’s so big and so important a book that Jesus can say in verse 44 of Luke 24— we read it a moment ago— he can say the Psalms when he means the Psalms and all the other books in that last part of his Bible. Which are known as the writings.

It’s the first book and it’s the dominant book in the last part of the Hebrew Bible. It occupies a prominent position in the unfolding structure of the Old Testament, and it plays an important part in the progressive revelation of Scripture. Indeed, it is in fact itself a mini Bible overview, or at least a mini Old Testament overview. It’s not the only Old Testament overview in the Old Testament. The last book of Jesus’ Bible is also another overview.

The book of Chronicles moves its way all the way from Adam through to the return from exile. So the beginning and the end of the last part of Jesus’ Bible both serve this function of building up towards the coming of Christ. But it’s the book of Psalms that’s gone down in history as a mini Bible. Martin Luther described it that way. John Calvin said something very similar.

It’s the book of Psalms that sweeps through large chunks of Israel’s history several times. It’s the book of Psalms that the New Testament quotes more often than any other book, with those quotations applying more often than not to the Lord Jesus. So what we’re doing this weekend is a mini Bible overview, and like every other Bible overview, it will, God willing, help us to understand the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ— who he is, why he had to come and die and rise again. And like every other Bible overview, it will, God willing, help us to understand that gospel by gradually paving the way for Jesus to come through an unfolding storey that climaxes in Jesus by means of progressive revelation that gets sharper and clearer as we go through. And like every other Bible overview, it will, God willing, take our breath away.

And lead us to worship Jesus, to obey Jesus with joy, and to give thanks and praise to God. I say God willing because it’s not automatic. We must turn to God in prayer now, and we’re going to do that. I’m just going to ask somebody to close the door. Could I ask Andrew?

Thank you very much. And we’re going to ask God to help us to understand this book and to be thrilled by it. Let’s pray. Our heavenly Father, we do thank you for the way in which the Old Testament prepares the ground for the Lord Jesus Christ. We confess that we are often slow to grasp how the Old Testament points to your Son, and so we come to you now knowing that we depend on the ministry of your Holy Spirit to give us a fresh understanding of the gospel message from this part of the Old Testament.

Please open our minds to understand the Scriptures, just as the Lord Jesus opened the minds of Cleopas and his companion on the Emmaus Road, and the disciples, the apostles, and the others later on. And we ask that as we work on the book of Psalms, you’d grant us a clearer, sharper vision of who Jesus is and why he came and why he must come again. We dare to ask that our hearts might burn within us as we come to see afresh, and perhaps in a deeper way, that it was necessary that the Christ should suffer and then enter into his glory. We dare to ask too, our Father, that this weekend would be of real value for your kingdom and your glory, that it would spur us on to make the most of our Bible studies in RML and elsewhere, and that we come to worship the Lord Jesus more. More fully, that we’d obey Him more joyfully, and that we would praise You from the bottom of our hearts.

And we ask this all, all of this, in Jesus’ name. Amen. Well, we’re now at point 2 on the outline, and we’re going to spend quite a bit of time in Psalm 2 because it’s a colossally important psalm. And the work we put into this psalm will really pay dividends for our grasp of the big picture of the unfolding storey of the book of Psalms. In fact, in one sense, we’re not even going to start our Psalms overview until we’ve got Psalm 2 clear in our minds.

And I have 3 exercises for you to do relating to Psalm 2. What I’d like you to do first of all, the first exercise, is to produce a title or a headline for each of the 4 sections of the psalm. If possible, try to make each title short, but not so short that you don’t get to the heart of what’s there in the text. So brief titles that summarise each section are what we’re after. You’re used to this in RML.

Go for it.