Author: Daniel Stevens

Why Must We Read the Old and New Testament as a Unified Body of Scripture?

We need to recognize that the one God who spoke in the Old Testament also speaks in the New Testament.

April 01, 2025 by: Daniel Stevens

Old Points to New

I would say that the two fundamental things that we need to do is first recognize and then notice. We need to recognize that the one God who spoke in the Old Testament also speaks in the New Testament. We should expect, then, that he knew what he was doing all along, and he knew what he was going to say when he was giving his earlier revelation.

Because all Scripture is God-breathed and because the God who spoke in the prophets to the fathers also speaks to us in the Son, we can be confident that things in the Old Testament do correspond to and do point to the things in the New. We can be sure that it’s a possible project, that reading the Old and the New together isn’t going back in time in a way that’s inappropriate, but is indeed what we were designed to do.

Second, we need to notice. For this I’m going to say we need to notice both parallels and resonances. We need to be able to see where the words of the Old Testament are used in the New Testament. This isn’t an accident or something that happens by chance, rather the New Testament authors, guided by God, were carefully reading and interpreting the Old Testament Scriptures.

Whenever we’re using their words, we should stop and ask Why? and How? What point is this citation being used to make? In what ways are these themes being developed in this new setting in the New Testament books? What context is brought in that we wouldn’t expect or that we might? And then beyond the actual exact words of the Old and the New, we should see resonances. Look for ways in which things in the Old Testament look like things in the New Testament.

God structured history and inspired the Old Testament to point forward to greater realities in the New.

In the book of Hebrews, it is commonly referred to as shadows or types—things in the way that God structured history and inspired the Old Testament that point forward to greater realities in the New. So we can see the tabernacle and see the ways in which that points to the place where Jesus ministers in heaven before the presence of God for us.

We can see the Levitical priesthood and the sacrifices on the day of atonement, and we can use that resonance to see the way that Jesus offers himself once and for all to atone for the people.

So if we have these things in mind—the one God who spoke in the past still speaks in all of his word, and if we see how the words are used again and the themes correspond—we will be able to read the Old and the New alongside one another for our good.

Daniel Stevens is the author of Songs of the Son: Reading the Psalms with the Author of Hebrews.

Daniel Stevens (PhD, University of Cambridge) is assistant professor of New Testament Interpretation at Boyce College, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Daniel lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife, Hannah, and two children.

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How the Author of Hebrews Reads the Book of Psalms

If we look to the way the New Testament uses the Psalms, we will discover that in addition to an emotional outpouring to God, the New Testament authors find a rich theology of God in the Psalter.

March 12, 2025 by: Daniel Stevens

The Psalms

The Psalms have always been at the heart of Christian worship. Believers sing, pray, and meditate on the words of the Psalms week in and week out, and they have done so since the foundation of the church. This frequent devotion, however, is often only partially formed. We go to the Psalms looking to find ourselves, to put words to the emotions we already feel or hope to feel. We go to the Psalms as a voice for our heart, as a counselor, as a comfort. None of this is wrong—it is part of why God gave us the Psalms—but it is incomplete.

If we look to the way the New Testament uses the Psalms, we will discover that in addition to an emotional outpouring to God, the New Testament authors find a rich theology of God in the Psalter. The Psalms, in the New Testament’s reading, are the songs of the Son. The Father speaks to the Son, and the Son speaks in return.1 It is not just that some psalms predict things about Jesus; it is that in many of the psalms, we hear the voice of Jesus speaking and the Father speaking to him. The Son speaks in his preincarnate glory. He speaks in his earthly life and suffering. He even speaks in the role of his people, taking their sin and their suffering onto himself.

Paul, the unknown author of Hebrews, and Jesus himself all go to the Psalms to find Jesus, the Son of God, speaking and being spoken to. In earlier eras, the church has been more conscious of this, singing the Psalms regularly and finding the words of Jesus in their mouths even as they saw Jesus singing their own thoughts, emotions, and confessions through the Psalter. More than any other book of the Old Testament, the Psalms presents us with the unity between Christ and his people as the psalmists quickly shift between speaking of the Son in his glory, in his humility, and in his representation of his people. Theophylact, a medieval Greek bishop whose New Testament commentaries proved influential in both the Western and Eastern churches, would generalize from specific quotations and claim that Paul read entire psalms as being about Jesus. This was likely uncontroversial. This is not to say that an interpretation is right because it is old or was widely accepted; but in this case, those Scripture-saturated Christians were more sensitive to the Bible’s own way of reading itself. The Psalms are, in their fullness, the songs of the Son, the hymnbook of the greater David.

This is plain throughout the New Testament, but it is particularly poignant in the epistle to the Hebrews.

Read by the Author of Hebrews

In the book of Hebrews, we are presented with the God who speaks. He speaks to us in his word and in his Son. But this is not all we see. The Father speaks to the Son, and the Son speaks back. The author finds throughout Scripture, but particularly in the Psalms, this call and response within the Trinity. A divine conversation plays out before our eyes as the world is made, as salvation is accomplished, and as all things are made new in the Son of God. Our God is a speaking God, and before he ever spoke to us, God has always been the one who speaks within the Trinity. As this speaking God turns to that which is not himself, all creation bursts into being and is sustained by that same word. Within history, God speaks again and again, until at last that Son comes in whom God communicates perfectly and finally. By grace, Hebrews gives us glimpses of this divine conversation. To do so, the author turns to the language of the Psalms.

Within history, God speaks again and again, until at last that Son comes in whom God communicates perfectly and finally.

While any book of the New Testament could be used to help us understand God’s revelation in the Old, few books offer as extended, deep, and explicit an interaction with the Old Testament as does the epistle to the Hebrews. In particular, in this one letter, we are shown time and again how the Psalms form our understanding of Jesus: his nature, his work, and his relationships. Through paying close attention to how Hebrews reasons with the Psalms, we will see Jesus more clearly and learn to read the Psalms the apostles’ way, as the songs of the Son.

More than any other inspired writer, the author of Hebrews develops his argument by reasoning with the Scriptures of Israel and particularly with the Psalms. Far more than simply quoting the Psalms as illustrations or proof texts, the author of Hebrews composes his entire letter as a series of arguments from the Psalms and other Old Testament texts in light of Jesus’s life, death, resurrection, ascension, ongoing work, and coming return.

Nowhere else do we have such a dense and sustained interaction with one book of Scripture by another. While the author weaves together texts from all of the Old Testament canon, deftly synthesizing the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings as he demonstrates the superiority of Christ, it is to the Psalms that he returns again and again. At crucial points in his argument as he explains or applies or clarifies, the author of Hebrews reaches consistently for the Psalms. Since this is the case, it is particularly helpful for us to explore how the author reads the Psalms.

It is my conviction that if we read the Psalms with the author of Hebrews, we will learn to read the Psalms for what they truly are. Their meanings will unfold as we see precisely how they witness to Christ: not only as predictions to be fulfilled but also as testimony to the very voice of God—the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. In the voice of the psalmists, the Son reveals his nature, his mission, and his relationships with his Father and his people.

Notes:

  1. While this type of observation is common in the older theological tradition, in modern scholarship on Hebrews it has been most clearly argued in Madison Pierce, Divine Discourse in the Epistle to the Hebrews: The Recontextualization of Spoken Quotations of Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

This article is adapted from ​​​​Songs of the Son: Reading the Psalms with the Author of Hebrews by Daniel Stevens.

Daniel Stevens (PhD, University of Cambridge) is assistant professor of New Testament Interpretation at Boyce College, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Daniel lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife, Hannah, and two children.

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