Which of the 4 "Do nots" listed at the beginning do you find most people struggle with?
I believe that most people struggle with the “do not” of reading the new testament as if the old testament does not exist. It is very easy to look at the old testament as an outdated, no-longer-relevant text of an ancient people. This is especially true given the lack of understanding of jewish religion and culture. I am a gentile; why should I care or consider what the jews did for thousands of years? Furthermore, God has moments of harshness and destruction in the old testament, going as far as genocide. People would rather ignore and dislocate those events from Jesus and the new testament, with his message of grace and repentance. This has also been stretched to the point where some people ignore the commandments of God because they take the forgiveness they’ve received for granted, despite instructions in the new testament and Jesus himself not to do so.
How does putting Christ as the center of the 2 Testaments change the way you interpret the Bible?
While viewing the Bible with Christ as the center is not new to me, what really challenged my thinking was not viewing the old testament as if everything was all about Jesus. I can absolutely see how Jesus fulfilled the covenant that God made with the Israelites, and how every aspect of his life pointed toward a foundation laid in the old testament, but to read the old testament with the understanding that the point was not always Jesus is somewhat trivial to me. I feel like I now have permission to view the old testament peoples as simply living in relationship with God, with God sending Jesus as a step, albeit the central one, in his story of our world.