As a Messianic rabbi, Eric Tokajer says one of the worst things about the Bible is the blank page between the Old Testament and the New Testament. That page, he says, makes it appear as if the two are separate books.
But, he says, 80% of the New Testament is either a direct or indirect quotation of the Old Testament and, therefore, are not to be divided. When we read the New Testament and don’t relate it to the Old Testament, the text is taken out of context.
Tokajer says the split in beliefs by God’s people is interesting because “God spends the entire Bible trying to build one people, and His people spend almost the entire Bible trying to divide themselves.”
“For instance, if you don’t go back to Genesis and read about Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael, then you cannot understand a great deal of what Paul is saying in Galatians,” Tokajer told Dr. Steve Greene on a recent edition of “Greenelines” on the Charisma Podcast Network. “Rather than looking back, because it’s one book that starts in Genesis and goes through Revelation, people will read Galatians out of the context of the entirety of Scripture.
“When you do that you, by necessity, come up with a bad understanding, and thus it becomes Torah vs. grace or Old Testament vs. New Testament, when God never intended for the New Testament to be an opposition for the Old Testament. It is a continuing book of one life lesson that begins with God speaking, ‘Let there be light’ and the sound of water, and ends up with Yeshua being the light and the sound of many waters.”
For more of Eric Tokajer’s thoughts on the Old Testament vs. the New Testament, listen to the podcast below.
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