Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 68:2 (Jun 2025)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

Book Reviews

Delighting in the Old Testament: Through Christ and for Christ. By Jason S. DeRouchie. Crossway, 2024, 337 pp., $32.99.

In 2017, Brent Strawn wrote The Old Testament is Dying, which included a detailed description of the devaluation of the OT in modern Western Christianity. The situation has not improved much in the last several years. Many Christians have a hard time understanding, much less delighting in, the OT. One of the key problems is the perceived cultural and theological distance between the OT and NT on the one hand and between the OT and the life of the church today on the other. This has been a perennial issue in the history of Christianity.

Building on much of his earlier work, Jason DeRouchie has written Delighting in the Old Testament to provide the reader with a “rationale for thinking about the Old Testament like Jesus and Paul did” (p. 2). He seeks to guide the reader “in faithfully reading the Old Testament and properly responding to its claims” (p. 2). According to DeRouchie, we can only delight in the OT when we know who it is really about and what it is for.

The book is divided into four parts with three or four chapters each: “Reading Well,” “Seeing Well,” “Hoping Well,” and “Living Well.” The first section provides a “biblical-theological foundation for Christ-centered interpretation of the Old Testament” (p. 16). DeRouchie argues that the OT is Christian Scripture. This entails that the OT is most meaningful for those living in the messianic age. In other words, the OT is in many ways more relevant to followers of Jesus than it was to the original audience. Further, he argues that OT authors themselves understood this reality. He grounds this understanding in several NT texts (e.g., 1 Cor 10:11; John 8:56; 2 Tim 3:15). DeRouchie makes a clear distinction between what the OT authors understood compared with their original audience: “We can say that the Old Testament authors themselves (though not most of their contemporaries) already visualized much of the fulfillment that the New Testament identifies as culminating in Christ” (p. 23). To summarize, the OT was written primarily for Christians. The prophets had a clear sense of something about Christ and the time of his coming. However, “the full meaning of an Old Testament text at times transcended the human author’s understanding” (p. 34). This means that to read the OT rightly, one needs the lens and light of Christ. We need to read the OT “forward, then backward, and then forward again” to get the full meaning (pp. 68–69).

The second section on “Seeing Well” unpacks and illustrates a Christocentric approach to th...