Greetings dear listeners, welcome to our third talk in our series on the Old Testament Survey. In our last talk, we introduced all the four categories of books that make up the Old Testament; law, history, wisdom and prophecy. We mentioned that we will look into each category on its own. So today we begin with the first category “the law”and will speak two sessions on this category. For this first session, we will explain the purpose and significance of the law in the Old Testament. In the next session, the fourth talk, we will outline the content of each of the books of the law and show how they are linked to each other.

The books of the law are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. They collectively layout God's national covenant with Israel. This national covenant is the core of the Old Testament. They include how God came to make this national covenant with Israel, God's plan to save humankind through this covenant, the laws and articles that govern God as the master of this covenant and Israel as His people and His servant. Specifically, we will highlight eight major themes in the law: God, creation, mankind, man’s sin, salvation, Abraham, Israel and God's national covenant with Israel.

First and foremost is God Himself. The law reveals that its basis is the one true God of all creations. He created all of reality; the entire realm of existence, the whole universe, and all the forces and principles that make the world what it is. Out of all He created mankind and this earth as the home of mankind, the highest priority in all of His design and purpose.

The next theme is God’s Creation, all that exists is created by God. Creation is not self-existant, nor self-sustaining. In this way, the Bible’s revelation may differ from many other religious and philosophical understandings of creation. That creation in the Bible is not self-existent, nor self-sustaining. It only exists by God's choice and actions. It depends on Him for its ongoing existence. God alone is self-existent and self-sustaining. In other words, He alone has life in Himself and can exist on His own without the need for anyone or anything else.

He is transcendent over all. This means that He is superior and dependent on nothing - all that exist are under His sovereignty. So creation is entirely dependent on God and subordinated to Him. Therefore, as mankind that God created in His own image, we are designed in such a way that we share something of His likeness. That is the true meaning of being made in His image. He gives us life by breathing His own breath into us. Hence, there is no other living being that is like mankind, because everything else is created by the word of His command. But only mankind is created by the breath of God into His earthwork. And that is what makes us unique. He has given us our worth and a place of priority in His creation to oversee the earth.

The next concept is of great importance but it is also a great tragedy, and that concept is sin. God created all things good. When He created humankind, He said that it was very good. This meant that there was no evil, no decay, no death and nothing bad in all that God had created before mankind turned away from God.

By disobeying Him, mankind disrupted the goodness of all that God created. This act of disobeying God and living the life that continues this disobedience is called sin. It brought about decay, evil, pain, suffering and death into this world and that God had created. The symptoms of sin include human disbelief, ignorance, apathy and rebellion against God. Mankind disobeyed God, and brought about the consequences of sin. Therefore, according to the Bible, to blame God for any evil or consequences of sin in this world is to put responsibility with the wrong source.

And this disobedience includes mankind and even the devil in turning away from God. That rebellion that led to sin and all the suffering and consequences that follows. Now in the face of sin, we come to the next primary concept and teaching of the Old Testament and of the Bible, the theme of salvation. God acted to save us after we fell into sin. The world and mankind have gone from bad to worse in the downward spiral of decay, suffering, pain and death. That would result in our ultimate destruction. But God, in His mercy towards us, acted to save us by revealing Himself to people He chose, who responded to Him and obeyed Him. It is through these people that God worked His plan of salvation so that those who would turn away from sin and back to Him may be saved. And this led to Abraham. God found Abraham to be a man who would choose to answer His call to be His instrument to save all humankind, through his descendants, by Abraham’s response of obedience to the call of God.

So God made a covenant with Abraham so as to put into motion His plan to save all mankind. Now, this plan, of course, could not be worked out within one human lifetime and saw the covenant of God including Abrahams’ descendants as His way of using those who obeyed Him to save all humankind. And these led to Israel, whom as a nation, are the descendants of Abraham. Abraham had a son Isaac, to whom God gave His covenant, or Abrahams’covenant. And Isaac had a son, Jacob, to whom God also gave the Abrahamic covenant.

But all the twelve sons of Jacob were inheritors of the Abrahamic covenant. So the twelve sons became twelve tribes, and they collectively formed the nation of Israel. God acted according to His promise to Abraham that He would use His descendants to bless all the nations of the earth by making a national covenant with Israel. This national covenant with Israel forms the body of the Old Testament. And in the subsequent talk, we will clarify how this works out. Also in the next talk, we will cover the content of each of the books of the law, and expand on the themes we highlighted today.

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