Trying to read the Old Testament as a new believer almost always means hitting a wall at some point.
Maybe it was the genealogies in Genesis, pages of names you cannot pronounce leading to more names you cannot pronounce. Or the laws in Leviticus that seem to have no relevance to modern life. Or a story that seemed violent or troubling or just plain strange, and you were not sure what to do with it.
You are not alone. The Old Testament is difficult, and pretending otherwise does not help anyone. What does help is understanding why it is difficult and how to approach it in a way that opens it up rather than leaving you more confused than when you started.
Why the Old Testament Feels So Foreign
The Old Testament was written over roughly a thousand years, in a cultural context very different from ours, for an audience whose assumptions about the world, about God, about history and law and worship, were shaped by experiences we do not share.
When you pick up the Old Testament, you are entering a world that predates democracy, human rights law, modern medicine, and most of what we take for granted about how the world works. The people in these stories lived in the ancient Near East, where their neighbors practiced child sacrifice, where kings were considered divine, where land and livestock were the primary measures of wealth, and where the idea of a God who was both all-powerful and personally invested in ordinary human beings was radically new.
Understanding that context does not make the difficult passages disappear, but it does help you read them more accurately. It is the difference between reading a letter addressed to someone else with no context and reading it with the backstory in hand. The words are the same, but what you understand about them changes entirely. When God gives specific laws to Israel that seem strange to us, those laws are often correcting or limiting practices that were common in surrounding cultures. When stories unfold in ways that seem brutal, they are often happening in a world where brutality was the norm and God was working within that world to move people toward something better.
Many of the laws and stories that seem baffling at first reading were actually remarkably progressive for their time and place. Regulations about rest for workers, protections for foreigners, limits on retribution, these were radical concepts in a world that offered none of those things. Seeing the Old Testament in its historical context does not solve every difficulty, but it does reveal a God who was consistently moving His people toward justice, mercy, and care for the vulnerable, even when the starting point was far from where we are today.
This is one of the reasons I encourage new believers to build a New Testament foundation first. When you understand who God revealed Himself to be in Jesus, you have a lens for reading the Old Testament that helps the harder passages make more sense. You are not reading blind. You are reading backward from the fullest picture of God's character.
The Old Testament Is Not the Whole Story
The most helpful thing you can understand about the Old Testament is that it was never meant to be the final word. It is the beginning of a story that finds its completion in Jesus.
Jesus himself put it plainly.
"Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets.
I did not come to destroy but to fulfill."Matthew 5:17 (NKJV)
The entire Old Testament is moving toward Him. The sacrifices and the temple and the priesthood and the prophecies are all pointing forward to something they could not fully contain yet.
This is why the New Testament writers quote the Old Testament so often. They were not adding a sequel. They were showing how everything that came before was preparing the way for what God was doing in Christ. The lamb sacrificed in Exodus foreshadows Jesus as the Lamb of God. The suffering servant in Isaiah 53 describes the crucifixion in striking detail centuries before it happened. The covenant God made with Abraham finds its ultimate fulfillment in the new covenant through Jesus's blood.
When you read the Old Testament with this in mind, it stops being a collection of disconnected ancient stories and becomes a unified narrative that builds toward the moment when God enters history as a human being and does what all the laws and sacrifices could only point toward.
This is one of the most exciting things about growing in your understanding of the Old Testament. The more you read, the more connections you see. A phrase in Psalms echoes something in Genesis. A prophecy in Isaiah lights up when you read the Gospels. The whole thing is woven together in ways that become more visible with time, and that experience of discovery is one of the genuine rewards of staying with it.
How to Read the Difficult Passages
When you hit something in the Old Testament that troubles you, here are a few practical approaches that help.
First, ask what is going on in the surrounding context. A verse that seems troubling in isolation often makes more sense when you understand the broader narrative. Who is speaking? Who are they speaking to? What has just happened and what is about to happen? Context resolves a lot of confusion.
Second, ask what this passage reveals about God's character or His relationship with His people. Even the difficult stories are doing something. They are showing us what happens when people walk away from God, or how God responds to human failure, or what faithfulness looks like in an imperfect world.
Third, give yourself permission to sit with the tension. Not every difficult passage resolves neatly, and it is okay to hold genuine questions. The goal is not to have an airtight answer for everything. The goal is to engage with what the text says and trust that God is big enough to handle your questions.
A few tools that help enormously are a good study Bible, which includes notes that explain historical and cultural context right on the page, and resources like The Bible Project, which offers free videos that explain the structure and themes of each book before you read it. Starting with that kind of background can transform your experience of even the most difficult sections.
Another approach that helps is to read the Old Testament alongside the New Testament rather than in isolation. Reading a Psalm in the morning and a chapter of a Gospel in the evening keeps both parts of the story active in your mind at the same time, and you will start noticing connections that would not have been visible otherwise. The Old Testament does not exist apart from the New, and the New Testament constantly reaches back into the Old. Reading them together mirrors how they were meant to work.
Where to Start
If you haven't read much of the Old Testament yet, here is a suggested order that builds context as you go.
Start with Genesis, at least the first twelve chapters, which set up the foundational story of creation, the fall, and God's promise to Abraham. Then skip to Exodus to see how God rescues His people and forms them into a nation. Read the Psalms alongside whatever else you are reading. They give you emotional and devotional language for the full range of human experience.
Once you have that foundation, the wisdom literature (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes) and the major prophets (Isaiah especially) will make much more sense. The minor prophets and the historical books can come later, when you have more context for where they fit.
You do not have to read it all at once. You do not have to understand everything before you can benefit from it.
The Old Testament rewards patience and return.
The more time you spend in it, the more the connections become visible and the more it opens up.
And when you hit a passage that genuinely troubles you, give yourself permission to set it aside and come back to it later. You do not have to resolve every difficult text before you can keep reading. Some passages will make more sense six months from now, after you have more context. Some may take years. That is okay. The goal is not to master the Old Testament in a single pass. The goal is to keep engaging with it, honestly and consistently, and to let it shape you over time.
None of this has to be figured out in a hurry. My book, The Way Through, was written for the moments when following Jesus feels more complicated than anyone warned you. And if it is Scripture itself that keeps tripping you up, my free guide When the Bible Doesn't Make Sense walks you through how to approach the passages that leave you stuck.