Most Bibles have sixty-six books. Thirty-nine of them were written before Jesus was born. For a lot of modern readers, those thirty-nine are the part of the Bible they politely avoid. The Gospels feel approachable; the letters apply to life; the Old Testament sits there looking like a long, complicated preamble that most of us assume we can mostly skip.
This is a mistake, and not for the reasons you usually hear. The deeper reason is that Jesus and the apostles considered the Old Testament their Bible. When Paul writes all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness (2 Tim. 3:16, NIV), the Scripture he means is the Hebrew Scriptures we now call the Old Testament. The New Testament was not yet collected when he wrote that sentence. If you want to read the New Testament the way its writers wanted it to be read, you have to read what they were reading.
A few reasons it earns the time.
Jesus saw himself in it
After the resurrection, Jesus walked with two disciples on the road to Emmaus. They did not recognise him. They were still reeling from the crucifixion two days earlier, in the slow shock that follows the death of a leader you had pinned your hopes on. Luke tells us what Jesus did next:
And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself. (Luke 24:27, NIV)
He did not begin with his own teaching. He began with Genesis. He read the Old Testament as a story pointing at him, and he expected his followers to read it the same way. If you want to know how Jesus understood his own life, his death, and the years he had just spent in Galilee, this is one of the places he tells you.
It gives the New Testament its weight
The New Testament is full of quotations and echoes from the Old — more than three hundred direct citations, plus a great many allusions besides. Phrases that have become Christian shorthand, like Lamb of God, Son of Man, kingdom of God, and covenant, mean what they mean because of where they come from in the older books. When John the Baptist points at Jesus and says, Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29, NIV), the word lamb is doing centuries of quiet work. Passover. Levitical sacrifice. The suffering servant in Isaiah 53. The line is moving on its own. With centuries of weight behind it, it is staggering.
You can read the New Testament without the Old. You will read it more shallowly than you had to.
It teaches us what God is actually like
The God of the Old Testament is the same God Jesus called Father. The God of Exodus, of the Psalms, of Hosea, is patient and just and wounded by his people’s faithlessness, slow to anger, abounding in love. That is the God Jesus comes from and points us toward. The Gospels do not introduce a softer or kinder God than the older books had described. They show the same God, now in flesh, walking around Galilee.
Reading the Old Testament regularly keeps you honest. It is harder to invent a God who is more comfortable to you than the one actually there once you have spent a year reading the Psalms and the prophets at length.
A way in
If the Old Testament feels like an undifferentiated wall, a small reading plan opens a doorway:
- Genesis 1–3 — creation, the fall, the first promise.
- Exodus 1–20 — slavery, the exodus, Sinai.
- The Psalms, slowly — one psalm a day, read aloud, no hurry.
That is not a complete reading of the Old Testament. It is a doorway. Hebrews 11 takes its great roll call of faith straight from these passages, naming Abraham, Sarah, Moses and the rest — people who trusted God’s promise without ever seeing it fully kept in their lifetimes.
We are still in their story. Reading the Old Testament slowly is one of the simplest ways of remembering where it started.