A Review of the Old Testament Narrative
August 13, 2025
In the beginning, when matter was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep,
the Spirit of God brooded over watery chaos, bringing forth order and life.
God spoke, and there was light. Suns and moons, stars in their courses,
planets with clouds of gases, deep oceans, high mountains.
And over long, long periods of time, God created trees and flowers of every kind,
fruit-bearing trees and many grasses. Creatures of the sea and birds of the air filled the Earth.
Four-footed creatures and beasts of all kinds traipsed across the ground.
In the fullness of time, out of the dust of the earth, humankind emerged.
Male and female we emerged. We evolved in the midst of God’s good creation,
the pinnacle of all that God had accomplished, created in God’s own image.
And God saw all that had been created, and God called it good.
In the beginning, we were free and unashamed; we walked in the garden aware of God’s presence.
But from the very beginning, we rebelled against God’s ways.
The early man, “Adam”, and his wife disobeyed God and followed their own will.
Their sons, following in their footsteps, went astray, and one of them killed the other.
God, the benevolent creator, became judge and redeemer.
When we were prideful, when we tried to be like god, there were consequences.
When we were slothful, acting as less than human, there were consequences.
And human life on Earth became violent and divisive, and relationships were hard,
and life was difficult. Yet God abided still among the creation that at heart, remained very good.
Later, when our ancestors were following in paths that were not good,
and participating in behaviors not intended by God,
God allowed a huge flood to cover much of the earth.
Only a few of us and our animals survived, enough to start over again, to begin anew.
We noticed a bright rainbow in the sky and heard a promise
that the terrible flood would never again destroy so many.
Once, in those early years, we built a tower, trying to reach up to heaven,
trying to see like God sees, to be gods ourselves,
but God did not want us crawling all over ourselves, everyone trying to be first,
everyone trying to get to the top of the heap, so God shook God’s head,
the tower fell, and we were scattered across the face of the earth.
Everything that happened in those days was seen as a direct result of God’s favor or God’s punishment.
Then, in the fullness of time, God decided to tell God’s story,
to share God’s good intentions, through one particular people.
All the peoples of the Earth belonged to God, but this one particular people
would be the bearers of the Story.
A particular man named Abram moved across the fertile crescent,
from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers into a fertile land where three continents come together.
Abram and his wife Sarah were promised descendents as many as the stars in the sky,
but it took 25 years for them to bear a child. 25 years after the promise,
the pregnancy was so preposterous that Sarah and Abraham laughed at the news.
They even called their son Yitzak, Isaac, which means “laughter”.
Oh, there had been another child, the first child of Abram, Ishmael, who was born by Hagar,
Sarah’s maidservant. Though it had been Sarah’s idea, Sarah became jealous.
Sarah told Abraham to send Hagar and Ishmael away, to banish them from their sight.
Ishmael too became the father of many tribes, tribes that would later experience conflict
with the descendents of Isaac.
The son, Isaac, married his cousin, Rebekah, a mover and shaker.
Rebekah bore Isaac twins, Jacob and Esau.
Esau was the older, but Jacob was the trickster, the over-reacher.
Rebekah favored her younger, brighter son, and so she finagled with her son Jacob
to trick Esau out of the birthright, out of the blessing meant for the oldest son.
Jacob, the younger twin, the second born, would become the one who would bear God’s story.
Jacob was not a God-fearing man, at least not at first, but then one night,
all alone at the River Jabbok, he saw a ramp, a ladder, connecting heaven and earth,
and Jacob realized that God was with him.
In a move of self-preservation, Jacob left Esau and his home.
He lived and worked for many years for his uncle Laban.
Jacob worked for seven years to marry Uncle Laban’s beautiful daughter Rachel,
but when he woke up on the morning after the wedding, he found the older sister Leah beside him.
So Jacob worked seven more years to marry Rachel.
Both sisters, along with their maid-servants had children by Jacob;
in total, they bore him 12 sons and one daughter.
These twelve sons were to become the twelve tribes of Israel.
On the way back home to face his twin Esau, once again Jacob stayed all alone by the River Jabbok.
This time, he wrestled all night with God, and received that name, a new name for him, Yis-rael, Israel,
“the one who wrestles with God” – the name which would forever identify a people, a nation, a story.
Jacob, like his mother, strongly favored one of his sons, one of the youngest, Joseph, child of Rachel.
Jacob gave Joseph a special multi-colored cloak that none of the other brothers had received.
Joseph’s older brothers became jealous of their uppity little brother,
who had prophesied that they would all bow down to him one day.
The brothers faked Joseph’s death with lamb’s blood on the special cloak,
and then sold him off to a caravan of slave-traders headed off to Egypt.
From the earliest days, family life was a challenge for us.
We exhibited marital challenges, parental favoritism, sibling rivalries, pride and prejudice,
plotting and scheming against one another, and we even did harm to our own blood kin.
Even so, God’s good intentions remained.
The child slave Joseph fared surprisingly well in Egypt.
Though he faced false accusations and a frightening time in prison,
he proved himself as a dream interpreter. He became a chief steward for the powerful Pharoah.
When a famine came, Joseph was even placed in charge of food distribution.
It came to pass that Joseph’s older brothers, the ones who had sold him off into slavery,
came to Egypt in desperation, looking for food.
By God’s grace, Joseph received them and reconciled with them.
Joseph invited his brothers to settle in Egypt, not far from the River Nile.
There they would live with food enough to spare.
Over time, the Hebrew tribes thrived in Egypt, and after several hundred years,
they became a nation within a nation. Ultimately, they became an enslaved people,
forced into slave labor for Pharoah’s building projects.
One of Jacob’s descendents, Moses, a Hebrew, escaped Pharoah’s killing of the infants,
and incredibly, was raised by Pharoah’s daughter in Pharoah’s own home.
One day, many years later, in an effort to defend a beaten Hebrew slave,
Moses rose up and killed an Egyptian soldier.
Facing murder charges, he ran off into the wilderness where he met Jethro, the priest of Midian.
Jethro took Moses under his wing and allowed Moses to marry his beautiful daughter,
the desert princess, Zipporah. Soon, Moses had a stable life as a shepherd and several children,
and he settled down to live a comfortable life.
But God, Yahweh, as God became known, had other plans,
plans which God spoke to Moses through a burning bush experience.
Yahweh told Moses to Egypt and demand that his people, the Hebrew slaves,
the children of Abraham, be set free from slavery.
Of course, when Moses demanded freedom, Pharaoh laughed in his face.
But God’s plans would persist. God provided an Exodus, a “way out” for the slaves,
and the twelve tribes escaped through the Sea of Reeds from their oppression.
For a whole generation, the Hebrews wandered in the wilderness on the Sinai peninsula,
living in the tension between faithfulness and unfaithfulness.
God intended to form of them a holy community, a community of worship and order.
But the Hebrews struggled to get along. They complained about about Moses.
They complained about God. They created and worshiped idols.
Even so, God was faithful still. God abided among the people, and did not forsake them.
God gave the people a Law, a way to live with one another,
instructions on how to be faithful to God and how to live together in peace.
God promised them a land, a land flowing with milk and honey.
The people held onto hope for the future, and the wilderness community survived.
In the fullness of time, when Moses and all the former slaves had died,
the people entered the Promised Land. But the land was not empty.
There were others already living there, and so they fought.
They fought almost continuously for the land and, over the generations many, far too many, died.
They engaged in tribal warfare for generations, led by judges like Samson, Gideon, and Deborah.
There was a particular tribe, the Philistines, who lived near the coast on the Gaza strip.
The Philistines complained that the Hebrews had moved in on their territory.
They were offended when the Hebrews were so sure God was on the Hebrew side.
Still today, the descendents of those ancient tribes are still fighting for land,
still amazed that the other people do not see how God just might be on their side as well.
Once the Hebrews settled in the land, they wanted a king.
Everyone else had a king, so they wanted a king. It wasn’t good enough that God was their sovereign.
They wanted someone they could see and touch, someone they could parade through their streets,
someone who would stand tall and look good and make their enemies tremble.
So God relented and God appointed the prophet Samuel to be the anointer.
A reluctant Samuel anointed a young man named Saul as the first king.
Saul stood head and shoulders above the rest.
Saul very much looked the part, but he never could quite walk the walk.
Before long, while Saul was still king, Samuel anointed another, the 8 th son of Jesse,
a young shepherd who had been keeping flocks in the field.
Young David, a most unexpected choice, in time would become the most beloved of all earthly kings.
David, the shepherd poet, the musician, the fierce warrior, would become known for his love of God
and for his people, and would be loved dearly by them. But David also loved beautiful women.
One spring day, when kings were going out to battle, David stayed home in his beautiful palace.
He took a stroll on his balcony. He gazed upon the beautiful Bathsheba bathing nearby.
Then, acting as if he was above the law, he summoned her to his side.
He had an affair with the wife of one of his most faithful officers.
That affair, and the subsequent murder of Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband, and the cover up that followed,
all became part of the beginning of the end of the united kingdom.
There was a prophet named Nathan, which means “gift”, who told David so.
David grieved when his first son with Bathsheba died.
David’s second son with Bathsheba, Solomon, would have a glorious, yet troubled reign,
for David always chose Solomon over his other, older sons.
Solomon was known for his wisdom. He was known for building the grand temple in Jerusalem,
but Solomon was distracted by untold luxuries. He was distracted by many foreign wives and concubines.
He was pulled away from the worship of Yahweh by many competing religious ideas.
The people of Judah had become organized and powerful, a legitimate nation, a real world leader.
But sadly, the nation began to crumble from within.
The sins and failures of the leadership echoed through the peoples, and the kingdom began to fall apart.
Instead of serving God and attending to the needs of the common people, the kingdom served itself.
And after only three kings, after less than one hundred years, the nation suffered a violent division –
ten tribes to the northern kingdom, two to the south.
But God remained faithful still. God still abided with the people.
Even in those years of a divided kingdom,
led by many a king who did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, God abided still.
God sent many a prophet to call them back to God’s ways,
to call for justice for the poor and right-living among all.
When the king was righteous and followed the Lord, the people tended to fare well.
When the king was unrighteous and neglected the poor, the people and even the land suffered trauma.
In the North, prophets like Elijah, Amos, Hosea, and Zechariah cried out for justice and righteousness.
In the South, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, and Habakkuk cried out:
“let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
But the kings and the religious leaders and the people would not listen.
They participated in a system which favored the well-to-do.
The rich got richer and the poor got poorer, and the political/religious leaders did nothing to stop it.
The prophets cried out again: “Remember the widows and the orphans in their distress.”
But the leaders remembered mostly their own wants and desires; they were proud of their stations in life.
The prophets urged the nation to worship God alone in truth and righteousness,
but the people were distracted. They worshipped gods of fertility, financial success, and worldly power.
They ignored God’s will and God’s good intentions.
They failed to prioritize right worship and faithful living.
God held out God’s hands all day long to a rebellious and contrite people, but they would not turn to God.
Finally, God’s long suffering patience wore thin.
The Northern kingdom was overrun in 722 b.c.
The Southern kingdom was destroyed in 587 b.c., only about 450 years after its establishment.
There were a few good kings along the way, kings like Josiah, who made spiritual reforms.
But the reforms were too little, too late. Jerusalem was utterly destroyed by an invading army.
Not a stone was left standing upon another.
Great suffering came to all, and all the leaders were carried off into exile, to Babylon,
to serve in a foreign land under an oppressive king named Nebuchadnezzar.
There, in exile, the people wondered if their faith was dead, wondered if God was dead.
They wondered if they could sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land.
But Daniel faced the lions in their den, and was saved by prayer.
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego lived through the fiery furnace because of their faith.
Ezekiel had visions of the dead bones of the people of Israel coming to life again.
And God heard their prayers from exile.
God saw their attempts to gather the sacred writings together, to relearn God’s good intentions,
to remember God’s ways. And God provided another “way out”, a way home from exile.
God’s unexpected hand in the return from exile was none other than a Persian conqueror named Cyrus.
After only a generation, the leaders began to come home.
Ezra and Nehemiah were among the rebuilders of the walls of Jerusalem and of the nation.
Though the temple would never be like it was before, it was rebuilt to the glory of God.
Prophets like Malachi and Second Isaiah encouraged the people.
They promised the that their faith could be restored, that hope would come,
that there would be a special One, a Suffering Servant, who would come with healing in his wings.
For 400 years, the people waited. No Scripture to speak of was written.
No significant activity from God’s messengers, the prophets, was recorded.
A long, pregnant pause – a silence in God’s story – occurred as the world prepared for his coming.
In the meantime, Alexander the Great of Rome cemented an empire spread across the known world.
A common language had become known among the peoples.
Roads to provide ease of travel and sharing of commerce had been laid.
All the circumstances for the spreading of good news throughout the known world were in place.
Then, in the fullness of time, at the turning point of the ages,
God spoke again, and the Light of the world was born among us.
The One who would become Light to all nations was born poor, in a stable, in Bethlehem.
His story is the continuation of the grand story of the Old covenant.
His story is the fulfillment of God’s good intentions.
He is the incarnation of love, justice, and righteousness.
His story is God’s Story, our Story – a story to be explored next Sunday,
a story to be explored every Sunday, to be explored every day even.
His Way has become The Way for us, as we seek to live as those who desire to love God
and live in love for one another.
And as we do so, God abides with us still. Amen, and Amen.
Rev. Dr. Todd Speed, Decatur Presbyterian Church, Decatur, Georgia
