In Douglas Adam’s novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he tells the story of an imaginary society that builds a super computer called “Deep Thought” that is supposed to tell them the meaning of life, the universe and everything.
Deep Thought tells them it will take a while and asks them to come back in 7 ½ million years.
They do, and after millions of years of calculations, Deep Thought finally gives them the answer—to life, the universe and everything.
The answer is: 42.
When the people ask, “What kind of answer is 42, anyways?” Deep Thought tells them, “It would have been simpler to know what the actual question was. Only when you know the question will you know what the answer means.”
This is a helpful way to think about that part of the Bible we call the Old Testament. Christians can sometimes get bogged down in the Old Testament because it’s full of things like ancient genealogies, and strange archaic laws, and so on that seem to have little to do with life in the modern world.
One way to make sense of all this stuff is to remember Deep Thought’s words of wisdom: “Only when you know the question will you know what the answer means.”
Sometimes, for instance, you see bumper-stickers or billboards that say things like “Jesus is the answer” in vague ways, without ever saying what the question was. If Jesus is the answer ... we’ll only understand him as the answer when we know what the question was.
The writers of the Old Testament, of course, did a lot more than simply ask questions. They told stories and recorded history and prayed prayers and made prophecies. But in another sense there were deep questions about God—who he was, and how you did life-together with him—lying at the bottom of all these stories and prayers and prophecies.
How did we get here? Of all the things people worship as “god,” which is the True and Living God? What is God going to do to fix the brokenness of this world? What is God’s plan for the creation?
Once you frame it in this way, it’s pretty easy to see how Jesus is the answer to all these questions. Which God is the True God? The God revealed in Jesus. What is this God like? He’s like Jesus. What is he going to do about the brokenness of the world? What he did in Jesus.
This is why Christians have always insisted that The Old Testament Scriptures belong in the Bible, because you can’t truly understand the answer, if you don’t know the question.
Another way to think about it, is like the difference between an engagement ring and a wedding ring.
Before I married my wife, I gave her an engagement ring as a sign of my proposal. And before we were married, she wore it to show that I’d ”asked her a question”—will you marry me?
Of course, this question was not really answered until the day of the wedding, when we actually sealed our wedding vows. And on that day, I gave my wife a wedding ring, a gold band to show that the promise was now fulfilled and we had become husband and wife.
But here’s the thing: my wife did not stop wearing the engagement ring, simply because she now had the wedding ring. She actually continued to wear them both. The one ring symbolized the “will you marry me?”, the other symbolized the “I will.”
The Old Testament is to the New Testament what the engagement ring is to the wedding ring. Even though the engagement ring no longer means what it used to mean, in light of the wedding ring, still, you don’t throw it away for that reason, rather, it reminds us of the question that the wedding band is the answer to.
In a similar way the Old Testament continually confronts us with the questions that God has answered for us, once and for all, in Jesus Christ.
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