(Terry Mortenson – Answers In Genesis) Most Christians at least give lip-service to following Christ. But what about His view of the Old Testament? How highly did He esteem its claims, both in His life and in His teaching, and do we embrace Scripture with the same zeal?
How extensively did Jesus trust and live by the Scriptures, which in His day were only the books of the Old Testament? How did He treat them in comparison to other claims of truth? After all, if Jesus is our Savior and Lord, shouldn’t we share the same view?
Factual History
Jesus trusted the Scriptures completely, and He revealed His trust in a number of ways. One is the way He treated the Old Testament’s historical accounts. He always treated them as trustworthy facts, even the events that many people today consider to be myths.
Jesus acknowledged that Adam and Eve were the first married couple (Matthew 19:3–6; Mark 10:3–9) and Abel was the first prophet and was martyred (Luke 11:50–51). He believed the accounts of Noah and the Flood (Matthew 24:37–39), Lot and his wife (Luke 17:28–32), Sodom and Gomorrah (Matthew 10:15), Moses and the serpent in the wilderness (John 3:14), the manna from heaven (John 6:32– 33, 6:49), the miracles of Elijah (Luke 4:25–27), Jonah and the big fish (Matthew 12:40–41)—the list goes on.
Jesus did not allegorize these accounts but took them as real events that actually happened just as the Old Testament describes. He used these past events to reassure His disciples that the future events of His own death, Resurrection, and Second Coming would likewise certainly happen in time-space reality.