When was the last time you read a book of the Old Testament in a deep and sustained way?

Chances are it's been a while.

Even if we embrace the whole Bible as God's inspired and inerrant word as we should,

the truth is that it can be easy for us to focus much more attention on the New Testament than we do the old.

In our interview today, I'm talking with Greg Lanier about the many ways that the Old Testament

stands as an indispensable foundation for the new. We discuss how the New Testament writers read

the Old Testament for themselves, why they believed it so clearly pointed

to Jesus as the Messiah, and why we as Christians today should be more eager to dig into the

whole Bible for ourselves. Greg is Associate Professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological

Seminary in Orlando, Florida. He also serves as associate pastor of River Oaks Church and is the

author of a number of books, including Old Made New, a guide to the New Testament use of the Old Testament

from Crossway. Let's get started. Well, Greg, thank you so much for joining me today on the

Crossway podcast.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

So today we're going to talk about how the New Testament writers use the Old Testament

and what they said, what they wrote down in the scriptures that we have from them.

But before we get into that, I just want to, I guess, get your thoughts on a broader

trend that I think we've probably all seen. Crossway has done surveys in the past that have shown

that as a general rule, Christians spend more time reading and studying the New Testament than

they do the Old Testament. And there's probably lots of reasons that we could give for

why that might be. My guess is that one obvious reason is that the Old Testament can sometimes

feel more intimidating to us than the new, a little harder to understand. I wonder, do you resonate

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