I teach Old Testament and one of the things students often struggle with is how foreign and distant the text can seem from us. There are huge gaps between us and the Old Testament’s original readers: gaps in terms of time, location, and culture. And that means it can be quite a bit of work to try to bridge those gaps so we can interpret the Old Testament well and discern its relevance.

But every time a student raises this issue, I’m reminded about a wonderful and profound truth those gaps teach me about our God.

The reason the Old Testament seems so foreign and distant to us is, of course, because it wasn’t spoken or written to us. It wasn’t written in our language, or through our worldview. It was written in Hebrew, through an ancient near Eastern worldview, because that is how the people to whom it was…