Actually if you are counting books, there are 39 that do not mention Jesus. And if you just look at content, it is almost 70% of the Bible that does not have anything to do with Jesus. Or that is what many believe.
How many times have you heard the stories of the Old Testament but never heard them connected to Jesus? Okay maybe once or twice as an adult MAYBE. So how about when kids are taught? Almost never and it just kills me.
Too many times Old Testament stories are taught as great moralistic events that we should internalize as examples to learn things from. They are taught disconnected from the New Testament and unrelated to Jesus and have little redemptive value. Most of the time they are presented as random stories that might or might not be historical but are fun to read because they are entertaining. Murder, sex and money. It’s all in there.
Truth is, there is a metanarrative. As one pastor says, some people fit the Bible “… somewhere in between Aesop’s fables and Joseph Campbell’s myths. But Christians don’t believe that. We believe the Bible is the metanarrative. It is the overarching story under which all of history is to be understood and interpreted. We reject reducing the Bible to yet another good story. It’s the story of who God is, what God has done, what we have done, and what God has done to save us.”
If you don’t teach and preach Jesus, you are just another religious zealot trying to hopelessly convince people they need to stop doing certain things and to do other things better. If that is you, cut it out. Don’t leave Jesus out of the Old Testament. Or the New Testament for that matter. (Yes I have heard that done too).
Without Jesus, we have nothing and conversely Jesus is everything. I want to do and say nothing that tries to proves that otherwise.
This is something that aggravates me, as well. I love the Old Testament, and I look forward to teaching Jakob about how it relates to Jesus.
Yes, we have to get it right when teaching our kids. If not, they grow up with a misconception about the Bible, God, and Jesus. I have talked to too many people that seem to believe that Jesus suddenly showed up in the New Testament out of thin air. As adults, this misconception of Jesus hinders our spiritual maturity and I think to a certain extent puts the OT into a bucket of just do’s and don’ts. How much of God do we miss when this happens? That haunts me.