Biography
Philip Yancey is an author and editor-at-large for Christianity Today magazine. Philip is an eight- time winner of the Gold Medallion Book Award, given annually by the Evangelical Christian Publisher's Association. Some of the books include Where Is God When it Hurts?, The Jesus I Never Knew, and What's So Amazing about Grace? Philip's articles have appeared in more than 60 publications, including Reader's Digest and The Saturday Evening Post. He also writes a regular column for Christianity Today. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

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          and 30 Good Minutes.

"The Bible Jesus Read" 
I've been discovering a new book, but actually it's not a new book. It's one of the oldest books in the world and it's actually not just one book. It's 39 books. Christians call it the Old Testament. Some of my Jewish friends prefer the phrase the first testament" and they may be right because although the Old Testament is old chronologically, it's as up to date as any book I know.

You know, I've found that a lot of Christians tend to focus on just the Letters of the Apostle Paul. I went through this Bible and I marked it and that represents only about 10 percent of the Bible. Ninety percent of the rest of the Bible goes unread by a lot of Christians and I think we are missing out. I think that we are the one impoverished if we ignore 90 percent of the rest of the Bible.

It takes work, I admit. The Old Testament is a little harder to read. It's a little more difficult than other parts of the Bible and sometimes you have to do a little preparation and study to understand it, but it's very rewarding. I tell in my book how one year I had the idealistic vision I was going to read all 38 plays of Shakespeare in one year. So I chose one night, Wednesday night, and every Wednesday night I would pull out my big volume of Shakespeare and I would read a play, and I've got to tell you, the first few times I tried that it was tough work. It's hard just to follow a play, to keep track of all the characters. And, of course, the language is several hundred years old. I had to keep looking at footnotes to figure out certain words. After about a month, after three or four of those, it was one of the most important, enriching nights of the week for me.

I enjoyed it and I began to see why the plays of Shakespeare are our greatest literature. The Old Testament is that same kind of book. It takes a little preparation. It takes a little more work, but it's very rewarding because it's God's word to us. It's true stuff, the story of God dealing with human beings in history. The other thing that I love about the Old Testament is that it's common ground that we Christians have with Jews and Muslims. All of those people, over half of the people in the world, actually revere the Old Testament and accept it as sacred scripture, and I think it's a good step to start out on common ground with other religions instead of immediately jumping into the things that we disagree with. Why don't we start on those things we agree with?

Now in the next few minutes I want to tell you some of the surprises I've found in the Old Testament. I've found that there are certain times that are very important for us as Christians to have the Old Testament to turn to. The first of these times is what I call "failure times." One of my surprises when I got into the Old Testament was to learn how human some of the heroes were. I asked myself, Who is the greatest person in the Old Testament? Could it be Moses? Well Moses started out his life by committing murder. "Could it be David, King David?" Well, David not only committed murder, he committed adultery.

The Old Testament is not about perfect people by any means. It's about great people who failed, but who had the humility and the honesty to admit before God when they did fail. If you want to really appreciate a person like King David, I would recommend this. I would recommend getting a video of Richard Nixon in the days of Watergate as he stands before a camera and says, "I am not a crook!" Republican president. Then I would recommend going to a videotape of President Clinton, a Democratic president, who says, "I did not have sex with that woman" and then later he had to amend some of those statements.

Compare that to Psalm 51, which was the poem that King David wrote after he was caught red-handed in the act of adultery and many other crimes. His response was very different. He didn't try to deny; he didn't try to cover up. Instead he said, "I have sinned before God and God only." I have sinned. I think that was the true greatness of King David. He wasn't perfect, but he admitted failure. I see that all the way through the Old Testament. One thing I love about the Old Testament is that it shows every stage of our life with God.

One time I had the idea of going to a beautiful place in Colorado--Breckenridge, Colorado--and reading the entire Book of Psalms. I was going to be there for several weeks so I thought, "I'll just read ten psalms a day." I would drive out to a beautiful spot by a lake with a beaver dam and mountains in the background and I thought, "This will be such a wonderful devotional experience." Instead I found it was very confusing. I would read these psalms and one would be just on top of the mountain, a very happy, jubilant psalm. The next one would be in the slough of despond. I would get to Psalm 23, for example, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want" and I would look around me and it would seem so wonderful. But just the psalm right before that is Psalm 22 that Jesus quoted from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" At first it confused me how both of those psalms could be so close together and I would run into that every day.

I was helped later when I read a wonderful little book by Kathleen Norris who was a New York poet who started going to a Benedictine Monastery. In that monastery the monks would recite the psalms all the way through every month. So each day they would recite a number of the psalms, and as she looked around at these monks reciting the psalms--which they knew by heart--she realized that not every one of those monks was in the place of Psalm 23 today. Some of them were in the place of Psalm 22 today.

The wonderful thing about the Book of Psalms and the wonderful thing about the Old Testament in general, is that it's got something that reflects every stage of our life with God. Some people are just barely hanging on to faith. They're confused by things going on in their lives. They are confused by things going on around them or in the world. They feel like failures. For those people, the Old Testament is a book of comfort because it takes people like David, like Moses, people who are failures, and it gives a wonderful example of people who are not cast aside by God when they make a mistake. All he asks is our honesty and our humility and God can work even with failures.

Another thing I found about the Old Testament is that it's very good for "doubt times," times of doubt. Every once in a while I get asked to speak at college campuses and when I go, it's a little intimidating because some of these chapel services are required and the kids are sitting there reading magazines. The last thing they want to do is hear another chapel speaker. I tell them what I appreciate most about the Bible is that even for those people like you who don't want to be here, the Bible is for you. It's full of doubt. There is a wonderful quote from William Safire who said about the Book of Job, "I started my journey into this Book of Job with doubt in my faith, but I've come out with faith in my doubt."

You see God included a lot of the arguments that philosophers have used against him. I challenge these college students by saying, "I dare you to find a single argument against God used by Bertrand Russell or Voltaire or David Hume that isn't already included in the Bible." God is so big that he actually includes the arguments that people would later use against him.

The last time that I find the Old Testament especially comforting is what I call the "dark times." I'll tell you a story that was very important to me as I got into the Old Testament. It's a story about my father-in-law. My father-in-law was a great Bible teacher. He actually was a missionary in South America and founded a Bible school where he taught many people the Bible. When he came back from the mission field and lived in Florida, he always had a Bible class going, either in his church or as a visiting lecturer in another church or correspondence school. His favorite book in all the Bible was Romans. He loved the New Testament.

Well, late in life, as he approached his 80s, my father-in-law got sick. He had a disease that was very difficult. It was a degenerative nerve disease and he gradually began losing the capacity of parts of his body. At first he could not walk any more because he lost the use of his legs. He would have to be in a wheelchair and still he would insist on teaching the Bible. He would come in the wheelchair. His voice got more and more difficult so he put a microphone right up close he could keep teaching. Then he was completely bedridden. Gradually over time he actually lost most of the use of his arms. He could do very little for himself. He couldn't dress himself. He couldn't easily feed himself. Then, finally, the disease kept working and it affected his ability to swallow and even to breathe. After about three years, he died.

I have a journal. In fact, I brought it with me right here. It's a notebook that my father-in-law kept those last three years. He could only write in it for two of those years because in the last year he could no longer hold a pen and write. If I go at it from one direction, it's a list of all the people that he prayed for and it's about 30 pages long. My name is in there and everyone in the family, people from South America, and people from his classes. Even when he could do so little else when he was bedridden, he could still pray. It's very moving for me to go through, page by page, and see the people that he prayed for each day.

If I flip it over, though, on the other side he started a journal of his life with God. Now remember, he was a great Bible teacher and he loved the Book of Romans. He didn't have a lot of energy but each day he would usually write down just one verse from Scripture, something that he learned from that verse. He kept it for about two years so there are over 700 entries. As I went through these 700 entries, a fact stood out to me. It was amazing. Of those 700 entries, I could only find nine that were from the New Testament. When his life was falling apart, when he was losing his life, when it looked like God was turning against him, Hunter Norwood found comfort and solace in the Old Testament: in the Psalms, in the Book of Job, in Jeremiah, in Habakkuk. That's where he found comfort in those dark times, in times of failure, in times of doubt and times of darkness. I am glad that Hunter Norwood had the Old Testament to turn to and I'm glad that we do, too.

Interview with Philip Yancey
Interviewed by Floyd Brown

Floyd Brown: Philip, I really enjoyed your talk today. It's just terrific. In reviewing your book there are a great number of questions I have. You couldn't write about the whole Old Testament for lack of space, why did you chose the books that you used for your book?

Philip Yancey: Well, you're right. There are 39 books in the Old Testament and there are already plenty of great books that just give a guided tour all the way through the Old Testament. Why did I chose the books I choose? Well, frankly, it's because they're the ones I have the hardest time with us, that have been hard for me to figure out. A book like Ecclesiastes, how did that get in the Bible? It's such an interesting book. It's like modern existential philosophy. Or the Book of Job, for example. I've studied Job and the problem of suffering for years and when I write a book, the last thing that I want to do is write a book that I already know the answers to.

I deliberately chose those books in the Old Testament that I have always struggled with figuring that will keep me entertained as long as I'm writing this book.

Brown: You spend a great deal of time on the Book of Job and in some of your writings of the past. Let's talk just a little bit if we can about the Book of Job and your choice to spend so much time with it. There is so much pain and suffering in the world. Will you expand on that a little bit for us?

Yancey: Yes, I will. I was a young magazine reporter and I was doing some of those drama in real life stories for Reader's Digest. These are people who are attacked by grizzly bears and caught in snow storms and things like that, and they told me something that really troubled me. They said that what made it worse for them was they would be in a hospital bed trying to recover and Christians would come, well-meaning church people, and they would bring more confusion than help, because they would all have these different theories. Some would say, "Well, Satan has caused this." Another would say, "No, it's God. He's punishing you." Others would say, "Well, no. It's God but it's because he likes you. He wants you to be an example to other people." And they're mainly lying there trying to get better and their visitors are making them feel worse. Well, we have a story like that in the Bible, don't we? That's the Book of Job, where Job is struggling with these issues and his friends come in with all these theories and they make him feel worse, too. So I went back to the Book of Job because it just recreated the very scene that I was involved in as a young writer and I understood why God put it in the Bible because a lot of people think it's the oldest book in the Bible. It's the oldest question, why bad things happen, and I think it's great that God includes that kind of wisdom that we are still studying and still scratching our heads and trying to figure out thousands of years later.

Brown: You point out in the book that a perfect example of that is Africa. As one of the great Christian continents in the world, they've still got all the hunger and all the disease, and right over across the sea there all these nations that are not Christian and are really prospering.

Yancey: Right, right.

Brown: What would say to somebody from Africa? Why me, Lord?

Yancey: That's right. Well, I would point them right back to the Old Testament because the wonderful thing is in the prophets especially. You've got people in Israel who are asking that very question. They are saying, "Look, we're being faithful. We're going to the temple and our nation is being stomped on by these big empires." In those days it was Assyria, Babylon. "How can this be, God?" And the wonderful thing about the Old Testament is that God talks. He answers their questions. He speaks back both to Job and each one of the prophets, so that's why even though it's called the Old Testament, it's a very up-to-date book. It asks questions that we are still asking today.

Brown: How would you suggest to someone who has had difficulty in interpreting the Old Testament or the First Book. How would you suggest that they approach reading it, learning it, and appreciating it more?

Yancey: I would say probably the worst thing to do is to read it like any other bookand start at page one and just read it all the way through. I guarantee you if you are a newcomer, you are going to get bogged down around Leviticus or Numbers. Choose some books that are accessible, like the Psalms. Start there and then gradually work your way out.

Brown: Thank you very much. Great book. I suggest highly that our audience get a copy of it. Philip, thank you so much.