Obedience and Discipleship

00:00 - James Spencer (Host)
But Christ is the only one who has been resurrected and glorified and ascended and sitting on the right hand of the Father, and he shows us what it means to be truly human. We see that Jesus is not excited about going to suffer. He would prefer that there was a different direction. He's asking God and God saying no, you really do need to follow the detour we have to go through this.

00:19 - Speaker 2 (None)
Welcome to PREPPED, the podcast that equips you to live out God's story, not the world's story. Hosted by James Spencer, phd, each episode bridges the gap between academic insights and everyday life, preparing you to understand the Word of God and put it into practice. Whether you're diving into biblical studies, looking for ministry guidance or aiming to deepen your faith, PREPPED empowers you to think biblically and theologically in a world that encourages you not to Ready to get PREPPED. Subscribe now and transform the way you bring God's story into the world.

00:52 - James Spencer (Host)
Hey everyone, I'm Dr James Spencer. Welcome to this episode of PREPPED. Today we're going to be exploring a topic that's really very much related to discipleship and in many ways related to the Old Testament. It's going to be the topic of obedience, and I know that obedience can spark a number of sort of mixed reactions, and for many obedience can conjure up images of like rigid rule following or even legalism. Unfortunately, I think this is a misunderstanding of obedience. Obviously, there is something to understanding that there are rigid rule followers and there are legalists. There are people who are just trying to implement a set of rules for the Christian life, and I would say that many times those are particularly associated with the Old Testament.

01:34
The Old Testament has the law in it and so, because we don't fully understand how the law functions, what the law is doing, I think there have been some misunderstandings promoted about what the Old Testament is, how obedience functions, and then it's clouded the significance of obedience in the life of faith. But when we think about discipleship, it's really difficult not to think about obedience. If we go into the Old Testament, the Great Commission go and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and teaching them to observe or obey all that Christ has commanded. And so obedience is this sort of aspect of discipleship that we can't really ignore, and I think you know there have been some relatively popular books that have promoted this kind of understanding of obedience, or a skewed understanding of obedience. In my estimation, stanley's book Irresistible is one of those. He tends to portray the Old Testament as a quid pro quo system where Israel trades obedience for God's blessing, and it's a view that reduces obedience to self-interest and really, I think, fails to capture the rich missional and relational dimensions of obeying God. But what if obedience isn't about earning blessing? What if it's about aligning ourselves with God's design and participating in his mission?

02:53
So in this episode we're going to explore how obedience in the Old Testament really connects to discipleship, how it reflects God's wisdom and love and why it remains central to following Christ today. Along the way we'll draw some insights from how discipleship shows up in the Old Testament and the role of the law and the covenants in shaping our faith. I would just say that you know I'm sort of doing a couple of episodes not dealing with specific Old Testament texts, as I did for the first several episodes After the Cain and Abel narrative and we look at worshiping God on our own terms. I think some of these topics just naturally open up, and so we will get to the flood narrative, we will get to the Tower of Babel incident. But at this point I wanted to take a little bit of time and do this little miniature arc outside of, you know, any strict analysis of a single biblical text, to kind of give a broader understanding of how the Old Testament patterns can be implemented within our life. So let's just take a look at what obedience is in the Old Testament and I want to try to give you an understanding both of what I think some of the misconceptions about obedience are and I'm going to use some of Andy Stanley's work to sort of illustrate that. But then also let's take a look at what the Old Testament is really doing with obedience to sort of illustrate that. But then also let's take a look at what the Old Testament is really doing with obedience.

04:06
So we'll start by addressing a common misconception that obedience in the Old Testament was transactional. I think Stanley really does suggest this that Israel's obedience was self-serving. What they're trying to do is they're trying to obey in order to get blessing. It was a way to secure the blessings from God. But that perspective ignores the deeper reasons.

04:25
God called Israel to obey his law. Take Deuteronomy 4.6 for a good example. Moses says to the Israelites keep them the laws, god's statutes, god's instructions, and do them, for that will be your wisdom and your understanding. In the sight of the peoples, obedience wasn't just about bartering with God. It was about revealing his wisdom to the nations. Israel's faithfulness showcased what life could be like under the reign of the one true God. Now, if we just take a step back and think about that, what is God asking Israel to do? In obeying, he's revealed himself to Israel. He hasn't revealed himself like this to any of the other nations. He's given Israel the law and he's walked them through the desert for a very long time trying to get them to understand and learn who he is. And so, in obedience, what God is trying to get Israel to understand is that they need to true themselves to this reference point. That obedience helps them to operate along the grain of the universe, we might say, as opposed to against the grain.

05:29
I like to think of it. It's sort of a fitness metaphor. So if you're not into fitness, maybe it won't connect with you as well, but if you've ever gone to the gym or even just picked up a heavy object, you know intuitively that there's a right way to do that and a wrong way to do that, maybe multiple right ways and multiple wrong ways, but either way, you're not going to look at this heavy object on the ground and then try to do some weird you know strange yoga pose, grab a you know a 300 pound barbell and pick it off the ground. You're much more likely to hurt yourself doing it against sort of what you know to be the order of things. Then if you just sort of lift with your legs, pick it up the correct way, you could still get injured, I suppose. But at the end of the day you're doing something that is more aligned with the activity that you're performing. So I tend to think of obedience in that way.

06:18
Obedience wasn't about sort of this transaction where, you know, like what we might think of happens at a cash register where we trade money for goods. It's not that it's a way of living into the actual order of things. It's a way of aligning oneself, truing oneself, to a reference point. And so, because Israel now knows God, they know God is the creator, they know that God is the good lawgiver, they know that God is going to provide for them. They've seen all these things happen. All God's saying is look, this is reality, I am reality, I'm here. Honoring me is the way that you are going to be successful. In other words, if we think back to some of what we talked about in creation, what we see is that humanity is created to be independence on, not independent from, god. You've heard me say that multiple times if you've listened to the other podcasts. We are created with limitations, and those limitations require us to depend on God, and so part of that dependence is this obedience. It's trusting God that he knows better than we do and allowing us to align ourselves on his terms, not on ours, and so you can kind of see how these themes are beginning to connect. So I think obedience is this idea that is even deeply tied into God's creation.

07:39
If you look at Proverbs 3.19, that text is going to remind us that God established the world in wisdom. There's actually some really fascinating Targum texts. These are Aramaic translations of the Old Testament, and one of the Targums reads in the beginning. This is in Genesis 1.1, in the beginning, god created the heavens and the earth. And then it adds the phrase with wisdom, and it emphasizes this idea that when the ancient people were reading Genesis 1, 1 through 2, 3, they aren't just seeing God sovereignly creating the universe, they're watching him do this in a wise fashion, and so this idea of obedience and wisdom connecting together is really crucial God's law. They're aligning themselves with that wisdom. They're living in harmony with the way that God designed the world to function.

08:27
Blessings weren't rewards for good behavior. They were more the natural result of living according to God's order. So I'm not denying that at some times, at some points, there are these times where God is going to give Israel a blessing because they've obeyed him and he's going to deny them a blessing because they've obeyed him and he's going to deny them a blessing because they've disobeyed him. But I think the difference between saying that and arguing for a transactional approach is just this If we think about what God is really wanting to have happen, where he's wanting everyone, he's wanting to get the glory that is due him.

09:01
He's wanting everyone. He's wanting to get the glory that is due him. He's wanting to live in the presence of his people and he wants them to experience him as their God and as his people. That's what he's after. He's after that sort of recapturing what we saw in the garden in Genesis 1 and 2. And so he's trying to get back to that. Well, that can't happen when his people are disobedient to that. Well, that can't happen when his people are disobedient. And so, if they're being disobedient, god really has to discipline them at some point. That activity can't come with a reward, it just can't. It doesn't demonstrate. If they're being self-directed, if they're deciding to do whatever it is that they want to do and interact with God on their terms, god has to bring them back into line. He's got to true them up with him, who is the reference point. And so the same thing goes with obedience. Right, he can't have them obeying and then have their life be horrible, even though that happens sometimes. In the Old Testament, this is largely what many of the laments are about. You know why is the wicked prospered, but the righteous are suffering, right? And so there has to be this idea that, no, when we obey, god is going to not reward obedience, but God is going to act through us. God is going to bless us because of that obedience, because now what he wants to show is that I am God way to show that he is God than by making sure that this people who are obeying him, who are following his laws, who are following his instructions, who trust him as members of a covenant with him, that they prosper really, despite their size, their strength, even their, you know, inherent morality. And so this obedience is really crucial to that whole covenant perspective. So you know, I think that obedience is not quite, uh, a transactional, it's not really a transactional sort of idea. I would call it a covenantal idea. It's our right response to the god who created the universe, who is sovereign, wise and and benevolent, who knows much better than we do. And disobedience is that sort of moment where we decide that life is going to be lived on our own terms, even though God, who is all wise, all benevolent, all sovereign, is telling us to do something differently. So I would say obedience in the Old Testament wasn't just about personal holiness either. It had a missional purpose. And we see this, really we saw that in the Deuteronomy four passage, because when Israel is going to follow God's commands, they're set apart as a light to the nations. You know, if we think about laws about caring for the poor and the sojourner, such as Leviticus 19, 33 and 34, which commands Israel to love him as yourself. That's where that statement that Jesus uses in the New Testament comes from. It comes from Leviticus 19, and we see it twice. We see it first in regard to just the Israelite, their brothers, these are fellow Israelites, where, you know, the Israelites are told to love their neighbor as themselves. And then, later on, these sojourners who are living amongst them, the aliens and strangers, they're to love them as themselves as well. So these laws show that God's people are to reflect his love and justice, not only toward fellow Israelites, but toward outsiders as well. And Jesus is going to go ahead and affirm that in the New Testament, particularly in the parable of the Good Samaritan. By extending love to a Samaritan, a cultural outsider, jesus reveals this expansive nature of neighborly love that is rooted in Old Testament law. And so you might ask yourself you know, how does love and obedience connect? Well, in the book of Deuteronomy, particularly when we read something like you know love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength. That love is not just speaking about a devotional affection or, you know, some sort of emotional desire that we have. This love was speaking to a total allegiance to God. And while I won't go through that whole text here, what I generally paraphrase that text to say is love the Lord, your God, with all you are and with all you have. And so these various components the heart, the soul and the strength they really do speak to this expansive allegiance that we are supposed to have to the Lord. And so when we think about love as loyalty, as denoting the deep devotion, not just a warm, fuzzy feeling or an affinity toward, but a deep allegiance to God that we are never going to be disloyal to this God, then I think obedience makes much more sense as a component of love. Now I think also discipleship also brings to mind that image of Jesus and his 12 disciples. But the roots of discipleship run deep in the Old Testament and one key way it shows up is through imitation. So imitation is just the idea that we are going to take a look at an example and we are going to try to mimic that example, become as close to that example as we possibly can. So if we consider the relationship between something like Moses and Joshua. Joshua's eventual leadership of Israel doesn't happen in isolation. It's cultivated over years of walking closely with Moses. Joshua is observing Moses's faith. He's learning from his mistakes and he's adopting that devotion to God. He's developing sort of a posture that makes him look and sound and act and think more like Moses. Now obviously there's other components to that, but Joshua is sort of learning from Moses. He's learning to imitate Moses in many ways and this process of limitation prepared Joshua to lead with wisdom and courage. We also see this dynamic in family settings, such as the way Abraham's faith influenced Isaac and Jacob. And discipleship in the Old Testament wasn't formalized in classrooms or programs. It happened in life-on-life relationships. Leaders and parents modeled faithfulness, creating a ripple effect across generations. In fact they're called to teach their children across those generations, to give them the law. Even if you look at Deuteronomy 6, and it'll talk about why are we doing these various rituals, why are we doing these activities? We see this in Joshua when he sets up the pillar as they're crossing the Jordan. There's all these different examples where an action, a ritual, a community festival of some sort prompts these questions from children. But that implies practice, and so as the people practice these things, as they're doing the laws, as they're following God's instructions. The children are curious, they ask questions, and then that gives the parents or whoever else happens to be in the community who's answering the question, gives them the opportunity to help the child understand what's really going on here. And so this idea of modeling or imitation is very much a part of what we see in the Old Testament, and the Old Testament is a very sort of we could call it a lived faith. That does not mean that there isn't a learned faith in the Old Testament, but I think there's a difference between what we see go on in like seminary classrooms today, where we're learning about theology, and we're learning about biblical studies. I did that, I love that, but there is a slight difference between that and really being sort of discipled. I think learning about the Bible and theology is absolutely crucial, but we have to avoid learning about God instead of or only learning about God. Simply learning about God and not learning to obey God that's what the Great Commission calls us to. That's what it means to be a disciple. It's not simply learning about, it's not having the facts, it's about learning to obey, learning to observe, and that requires this sort of adaptability and the complexity of life, we have to figure out. What does it look like for me to be faithful in all of these different situations? So we see that aspect of discipleship in the Old Testament. I think another way that discipleship, though, appears in the Old Testament is through covenant faithfulness. Obedience was more than following rules. It was about living out a relationship with God. So, if we take the story of like Ruth and Naomi, ruth's decision to stay with Naomi wasn't just an act of loyalty. It was a demonstration of covenant faithfulness that mirrored God's loyalty to his people. Ruth's obedience leaving her homeland, embracing Naomi's God gleaning in Boaz's field shows her trust in God's provision and her commitment to his people. And covenant faithfulness is also evident in the story of David, king David. Though far from perfect, david's heart was oriented to God. His Psalms reveal a deep reliance on God's character and promises, even in the midst of failure. And discipleship isn't about perfection, it's about steadfastly turning back to God and trust and obedience. So, as we think through all of that, what I think we see in discipleship in the Old Testament, particularly in the narrative texts, is this sort of lived experience in God's presence walking with God, making mistakes, experiencing God's discipline, experiencing God's mercy, experiencing God's grace, and all of these things form and shape the vision, the way that the Old Testament characters really understand how to walk with God. Some respond positively. I would say when we get to the life of Abraham, we're going to see this really tangibly come into place. Abraham made a lot of mistakes across his time with God. He's trying to understand what it looks like to walk with God, and it ultimately comes to this crescendo in Genesis 22, where God tests Abraham and asks him to sacrifice his son Isaac, and after it's clear that he's willing to do so. What we find out is that Abraham is one who truly fears the Lord. And so there's this aspect of journey that comes into place in many of the Old Testament texts, where these characters are, you know, having these different experiences with God. They're learning God through that experience, participating with God in these various experiences and then having to apply that to other contexts. And so there's some really, I think, a fascinating way to look at the Old Testament and say, wow, these people are doing exactly what we're doing. They're not following a set of rules, they're using, obviously, the law as this reference point. It's not trivial to them, but their goal was not simply to follow the law. If we even look at Psalm 1, we see blessed is he who delights in the law of the Lord. And so I think that discipleship in the Old Testament has these nuances that oftentimes we don't really grapple with. If we're thinking about obedience as transactional, now, I would also say that as we think through obedience, as we think through discipleship in the Old Testament, we need to address the role of the law, and I would say that the role of the law in the Old Testament extends beyond personal or national guidance. It really is. It highlights God's intentions for justice and righteousness in his creation, and I think that understanding carries forward in how Christians participate in the world today. So when I think about the law, what I think is that you know and we see this in the New Testament, paul references it in Galatians that the law is a guide, a tutor almost. And the way I think about that is you have to think about the law in terms of it helps to manage what would otherwise become far too disordered to sustain. And so I think, even as God gives the law and there are various texts I would point to for this but even as God gives the law, he is not trying to recreate Eden through the law. What I think God is trying to do is he's trying to say, okay, the world is broken and there's nobody who's going to be able to keep the law perfectly guidelines. If there aren't guardrails, if there aren't ways of managing this order that we now see, the chaos that's going on, this is going to fall apart very quickly, and so I'm going to give the law to create and manage, restrain the evil that might otherwise be done, and then he acts in other ways around the law. Obviously, that's not all he did, but that's part of what he did. So if we think about the Old Testament's emphasis on justice and the protection of the vulnerable, for instance, laws such as those requiring fair treatment of workers or care for widows and orphans, they reflect God's character and, in today's context, these principles remind us of the need for policies and actions that do align with justice, fairness and love for neighbor. But I would also just say that none of those were intended to eliminate widows and orphans. In other words, they're not shooting for a utopian society. They're managing the brokenness and they're giving God's people this understanding that, because God provides because God can give abundantly more that the people around here don't have to shun widows and orphans, they don't have to push the vulnerable aside. They can actually love those widows and orphans as an extension of their love for the Lord. And I think Jesus too engaged with these ideas. His fulfillment of the law didn't negate any of the law, but it really clarified the deeper meaning of it For Christians, participating in society with these values means we seek to reflect God's kingdom in our decisions and our influence. Obedience isn't limited to personal morality. It extends to how we advocate for and live out justice in our communities. So, despite the goodness of the law, the law had fundamental weaknesses. It couldn't change hearts. Israel had to struggle to obey and wasn't able to keep the full law. But that wasn't a failure of the law. It was really a failure of the human heart. The law was never intended to fix the human heart, transform the human heart. It was actually powerless against that. It was weakened by it. And so, as we think about the law in the Old Testament and we think about obedience and what its role is now in discipleship, there isn't a lot of difference in my mind. What we're saying is this we're not saying that we can ignore the law because the law is too weak to do anything anyway. We're not saying we should set aside obedience because now we have Christ and all we really need to do is love him or walk with him or be in relationship with him. No, we still have to learn obedience. We still have to conform our behavior, true it to the reference right. We true it to the reference point, but what we understand about the law and I would say this is the biblical law as well as the external laws that we have in our various societies is that it is weakened by sin. It continues to be weakened by sin, and so now what we understand is that we have the Holy Spirit inside of us. This is Ezekiel 36. God is going to send and he's going to change our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh, and he's going to change our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh, and he's going to put his spirit within us to cause us to walk more obediently. Now what we have is this sanctification process that helps us be more obedient, learn to observe all that Christ commanded, and so we have the Holy Spirit within us who helps us to do this, and we're not following laws and rules and what have you? We're actually, you know, starting to try to live according to the spirit. The laws inform that. They help us understand what that reference point is right, and they help us true ourselves to it. But Christianity is not about following rules in the strictest sense. These laws are given to us as guidelines, as revelation, to describe who God is and give us a better sense of who he is and what he wants. And so when we think about what obedience actually means for discipleship, I think we have to think about it in these terms. First, obedience is a declaration of our trust in God. When we follow his commands, we affirm that he knows what is best for us and for his world. And so we can think about it this way Obedience is like following a detour sign that warns the bridge out ahead, and so the detour disrupts our plans. We were planning to go straight to grandma's house and we were gonna cross this bridge and we were gonna get there real, real quick. The detour sign is disrupting our plans. It's something that gets in our way, but that detour sign also protects us. It keeps us from just running off that bridge, and if we're smart. We're going to follow that detour sign, even if it means we have to go to grandma's on a different route. And I think that we don't always think about obedience as a detour sign. We don't even think about obeying a detour sign, but really that's more the dynamic. It paints the picture for us and, I think, god's commands. They do disrupt our routines or our desires, but ultimately they're going to guide us toward life. God's laws and God's commands are not something that is like faking us out, like the bridge is still operational. He's just taking us on this long detour. No, he's protecting us and as we obey him, he's going to lead us on paths that turn us into the type of people he requires us to be. I would say. Second, obedience is about transformation and as we align our actions with God and his will, we're going to be conformed more to the image of Christ, and I think this is what we mean by when we say we walk by faith. But the reality is, is we're conformed to the image of Christ? If you think about Christ in the gospels and what Christ did in the gospels, christ was consistently not determining his own way. I think you see this especially in the book of John, where Christ often talks about following the will of the father. He's doing a father's will. He's not doing this of his own accord. This is, he's being directed by the father and this is the subordination of the son to the father. I don't think that's eternal, but I think it as Jesus comes down and he is to be human, he comes down in the incarnation. Part of what he's committing to is following the Father's voice, allowing the Father to direct his steps, and this is Jesus showing us the fruits of obedience. Now you might sit back and say well, gosh, james, jesus ended up getting crucified. Yes, he did. He ended up getting crucified. And so does that disprove obedience? I don't think so, because he was crucified, yes, but he was also resurrected and glorified, and he's the only person who have ever had both of those happen to him. Had other people resurrected? We had other people raised from the dead, but Christ is the only one who has been resurrected and glorified and ascended and sit on the right hand of the father, and he shows us what it means to be truly human. To be truly human is to obey the voice of God, to follow God, even when we aren't comfortable doing so, and if we look at Jesus's prayer in the garden of Gethsemane before going to the cross, we see that Jesus is not excited about going to suffer and die. He would prefer that there was a different direction. He's asking God whether he can take a different route and God's saying no, you really do need to follow the detour. We have to go through this. And so Jesus submits to the father's will, and I think that's an important illustration or picture of what it means to be conformed to the image of Christ. What we're doing is we're not trying to be more moral. That's sort of a fruit, maybe, of what we get when we conform to the image of Christ. But at the bottom line, what we're trying to do is we're trying to be led by God. We're trying to live on terms given to us by God, or the way I usually refer to it is we're trying to true ourselves. To a reference point I would say finally, obedience is just missional. Particularly in the Old Testament, israel's obedience revealed God's wisdom to the nations. It was the way that Israel sort of shown out the light to the nations and showed the difference that God makes to life in this world. And I would say, just as Israel's obedience reveals God's wisdom to the nations, our obedience serves as a testimony to the world today. It points to a kingdom where love and justice and mercy reign, and that those things are empowered. These are not just abstract values that we have gotten really good at implementing. That's not what it is. These things are rooted in and emerge from a deep sense and allegiance to God, who is real. God is reality, and so we get to love, we get to practice justice, we get to practice mercy. We don't have to cheat people, we don't have to shun people, we don't have to hate people. We get to be these people because God is real and we know where our true security lies, and so the obedience is an aspect of what we do on a missional level. End of the day, obedience is not about earning God's favor. It's about living in harmony with his design and participating in his mission, truing ourselves to that reference point. It's an act of love or allegiance, trust and discipleship, and this week I'd just encourage you to reflect on how obedience plays a role in your relationship with God. Are there any areas where he's calling you to trust him more deeply? Are you? When you approach the biblical text. Are you reading it, as Bonhoeffer talks about, against yourself, or are you so enamored with your own thoughts that really what you're doing when you're reading the biblical text is just trying to find ways that it authorizes you to do what you wanted to do anyway? So think through those things. Read the Bible against yourselves, really try to lean in and ask yourself am I living life on God's terms or am I making God into some sort of constructed deity that looks suspiciously more like me every day? And so we want to be living life on God's terms. Hey, thanks everybody today for joining me on PREPPED, and until next time, let's just continue to follow Christ with a heart of obedience and love. Obedience is not merely about filling a duty. It's about being transformed into the likeness of Christ and becoming a reflection of God's character to the world. And I think that transformation is an instance. It's a lifelong process aligning our lives with his will, and as we trust in him, our obedience becomes a powerful testimony of his faithfulness and his love. It's in those moments of trusting him beyond our understanding that our faith is deepened and our lives become a living witness to his grace. So this week, just consider how you might take small steps of obedience that not only deepen your relationship with God but also reveal his goodness to those around you. And let's continue this journey together, embracing that transformative power of obedience and love. Thanks again, everybody, for joining me on this episode of PREPPED. We'll catch you on the next episode, take care.

31:55 - Speaker 2 (None)
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