Old Testament sat nav

ROAD MAP TO JESUS
By Alistair Chalmers
10 Publishing. 178 pages. £5.99
ISBN 978 1 913 896 829

Many people find the Old Testament uncomfortable. It’s treated a little bit like the New Testament’s strange, older cousin.

This book addresses this concern by providing a simple but clear road map for people to read the Old Testament. Chalmers begins with that big Old Testament teach-in that Jesus offers to the two disciples on the Emmaus Road, as recorded in Luke 24.

The author imagines himself as a fly on the wall at that event and seeks in this book to reconstruct what that conversation might have included. There follows a three-part journey. The first is a journey from Genesis to Jesus, tracing how the story leads up to the Incarnation. The second part of the book tracks back from the story of Jesus to the Old Testament underpinnings of that story that are fulfilled in Jesus. The third part makes use of the end of Luke chapter 24 to speak about how the message of Jesus is defined, how we are equipped to tell that message and where that message is heading. The book concludes with the poignant question: ‘Where do you fit into this story?’

There are a number of resources that do similar things to this book, but this a welcome addition to them, and will prove to be a useful orientation for a reader new to the Scriptures, especially to those of the Old Testament. Particularly welcome for those who struggle with reading is the brevity of the chapters, each three to four pages long.

It is odd given its title that this book contains no maps! On a more serious note, many of the issues that people have with the strangeness of the Old Testament revolve around the what appear to be God-sanctioned acts of violence, various ‘Texts of Terror’, like the story of Jephthah’s daughter, and troublesome bits like Psalm 137.

Perhaps the author might be persuaded to do a companion book on these various bumps and roadblocks on the Road to Jesus in the Old Testament!