Don't all of us have a secret desire to be on the stage, dressed in amazing costumes,

involved in a play with a director, with our own starring roles, with a character-driven

plot and lots of intrigue and excitement in our story? Imagine then that you are intimately

involved in an award-winning three-act play, and you are already quite far into act two.

But here's the catch. You can only fully understand act two if you have a knowledge of

act one. And when you finished act one, the curtains were dropped, and you can not only not

look back on that part of the play, you can't even remember it. Do we know anything about

act one at all? Yes, we do. Quite a bit, actually. And that's what we're going to talk

about today.

Welcome to Meridian Magazine's Come Follow Me podcast. We are Scott and Marine Proctor,

and this is the first lesson of the new year, as we excitedly jump right into our wonderful

studies of the Old Testament. The Old Testament strikes many as a formidable, unapproachable,

hard to understand ancient book. The 1184 pages can seem daunting. The 39 books of the

Old Testament can sometimes seem confusing. Getting through 929 chapters can be overwhelming.

Leviticus or Isaiah can stop a reader dead in her tracks. So, as we begin this full year

of study of the Old Testament, let's start with a few tools and methods of approach that

may help this process of study not only not be painful, but be delightful and fulfilling.

The Old Testament might better be named the Old Covenant. This is the story from the

beginning of time of God's dealings with his children and how he binds them to him by immutable

covenants, starting with Adam and Eve, then Enoch, then Noah, then Father's Abraham, Isaac,

Jacob, Joseph, then Moses. Know therefore that the Lord thy God, he is God, the faithful God,

which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand

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