Almost from the beginning of the Christian Church, there have been those who saw the Old Testament as an embarrassment. Within a century after Christ, Gentiles already outnumbered Jews in the church, and some were asking, “Why are we using this strange Jewish book as our Bible?” There was this one Gentile believer named Marcion in the second century, for example, who decided to toss the whole thing out. Marcion loved what he heard about Jesus, and his 1 teachings of love and forgiveness and mercy to the poor and downtrodden, but that Old Testament God was something else! Judgmental, bad-tempered, nothing at all like Jesus. Marcion decided that the Old Testament God wasn’t Jesus’ Father at all but some sort of semidivine poser who got big ideas about himself and went and created an ill-conceived, poorlyconstructed world. Marcion was rejected by the church as a heretic, but there are a lot of Christians today who unconsciously hold similar beliefs. Like Marcion, many would just as soon drop the whole Old Testament as a bad lot.
Sermon Notes