Preaching Christ in All the Scriptures

Sinclair Ferguson emphasizes the importance of seeing Christ as the central theme throughout the entire Bible. Ferguson argues that all Scripture points to Jesus and that effective preaching must consistently reveal this connection. He illustrates how various Old Testament passages foreshadow Christ’s coming and work, urging preachers to faithfully present Christ in every sermon.

The following unedited transcript is provided by Beluga AI.

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Jordy, thank you so much and let me add my welcome to the one already given to you. We are so glad that you’re here. So many of you are Christian workers in our community, many pastors and spouses here. We always look forward to this occasion when we can come together and my having just walked into the room a few moments ago, I hope you’ll give me a chance to get to see some of my friends I haven’t had a chance to hug yet when we’re dismissed in just a little bit.

When we get together, it’s always great to have a good reason to get together besides just renewing our friendship and our commitment to ministry here in Memphis, but to hear the word of God and today we’re just especially privileged to have Dr. Sinclair Ferguson with us.

Many of you know Sinclair through his books, which are many, and some of which are in our bookmark. You can purchase those at a good discount today if you like. He is known as obviously a theological professor at Westminster Theological Seminary, and he is known as an outstanding preacher of God’s word.

And the reason I’m so glad, Sinclair, that you’re here is that we all appreciate your biblical exposition, your care with the word of God and it’s always richly theological and even as important as that, it’s always richly applicable and it’s wonderful when you have someone who has a very fine mind and a dedication to the task of expounding God’s word who’s also dedicated to the task of pastoring God’s people and Sinclair’s work has always been richly pastoral. Doesn’t hurt that he’s an excellent communicator as well.

As you know, Sinclair is the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Columbia, South Carolina, a very old church. It was founded in 1795. I think our state of Tennessee was established in 1796, the next year. And when you have an old church, sometimes you have old people, Sinclair was just telling me that their organist has been there 38 years, and he has the shortest tenure of any organist they’ve ever had. He was only kidding.

But it’s a wonderful church right in the heart of Columbia, South Carolina, and we have many things in common here at Second Presbyterian Church with First Presbyterian in Columbia, including Sinclair’s and my predecessor, Dr. Dick DeWitt. Dr. DeWitt was at First Presbyterian in Columbia and also here before I came at Second Presbyterian in Memphis.

We also share some other pastors through the centuries, and we’re grateful for our common bond that way, but especially our common bond in the Reformed faith and our common bond in the Lord Jesus Christ, who happens to be the theme of our Christian Life Conference this weekend. So glad that you can be here for lunch. We know you’re busy people on the weekend, most of you, but if you’re able to take in Friday night and Saturday morning, Dr. Ferguson and Dr. Alistair Begg will be preaching, lecturing tonight and tomorrow morning.

We know that you would enjoy that very much on this wonderful theme of the names of the Lord Jesus Christ. And I’m just delighted we have someone like Sinclair to come and preach for us this noon. How about if I’ll lead us in prayer, and then I’ll ask Sinclair if you’ll come forward.

Father, we are deeply grateful for the privilege of being fed once again with the food that’s been lovingly set before us, to be fed in our spirits with the fellowship that we’ve already enjoyed around the tables, and then to be fed by your Word through one of your servants who studies your Word and studies you and serves in your church. We pray that as he ministers to us today and throughout this weekend, we will be your faithful students, learners, disciples, your faithful children. Speak, O Lord, for your servants listen. Amen.

FERGUSON Americans are the only people in the world who applaud before you’ve actually opened your mouth and said anything worthwhile, which reminds me of the situation that one experiences in churches of the Dutch tradition where they have this wonderful tradition when you go in, some of the elders will go in with you and one of the elders will be deputed to shake your hand before you go into the pulpit, and this is a sign of their confirmation of your ministry.

And the first time that that ever happened to me, I said to him, is this a lovely tradition that you’ve got here, the shaking hands when visitors and your own minister on the way into the pulpit? He said, oh, he said, that’s not the handshake that really matters. The thing that really matters is whether or not you get a handshake when you come down out of the pulpit. It’s a delight to be here. We do have an organist who’s been our organist for thirty-eight years. He really has been organist for thirty-eight years.

He is also actually the shortest tenured organist that the church has ever had, and if anything, he’s filled with fresh zeal. And I would say it if he were here, but since he’s not here, I’ll still say it. In some parts of the world, there is an adage, really a riddle, what is the difference between an organist and a terrorist?

And the answer is, you can still negotiate with a terrorist, and I am very happy to announce in Memphis, Tennessee, in Second Presbyterian Church, which incidentally stole our deputy organist a year ago to be their organist, and she’s sitting here, I hope, blushing with shame and repentance and regret. I’m delighted to say that our organ is still in good hands. But Sandy, the day may come, and we will perhaps knock on your door again.

I’m somewhat embarrassed that Sandy introduced me as somebody who handles the Scriptures well for the reason that I don’t actually have a Bible with me, and I don’t actually have a text.

But if I did have a text, if I did have a text, because what I want to say to you is thematic rather than exegetical, if I did have a text, I suppose it would rather obviously be the narrative in Luke 24 with its two incidents that both point in the same direction, the walk to Emmaus. Where, as an evangelical Christian, it seems to me to be extraordinarily significant that the risen Son of God, who has now conquered all of His enemies—sin, death, and Satan—He has conquered all of His enemies. When He speaks to these disciples on the road to Emmaus, He doesn’t first of all say to them, “Don’t you see that I am the Son of God?”

The first thing the Son of God does in His resurrection power and glory, in order to expound His own significance to them, is actually to turn to the Old Testament Scriptures. And that seems to me to be an extraordinarily significant thing. A significant thing, perhaps, in the burgeoning resurgence in our days of neo-orthodoxy that very much wants to demean the role of Scripture in connection with the person of Christ. But as it were, almost the first act of the person of Christ in his state of exaltation is to point these disciples back to the Scriptures.

And he, of course, wouldn’t we who preach God’s Word love to have been hovering around in the shadows there? He takes them through from memory. That’s a very interesting question about the nature of Jesus’ memory. My own conviction is that he almost certainly knew the whole of the Old Testament off by heart. They weren’t able to pull Bibles out of their pockets.

You know, here’s the scroll of Isaiah, stranger, tell us what this means. He walked them through the Scriptures and pointed them to, in the period of time they had, the things that focused attention on himself, and their hearts burned within them. Or, as William Barclay, whom I almost never quote, but at least on this occasion rather marvelously translates that in his translation, “They say to one another, and those of you who are Wesleyan Methodists will appreciate the translation, ‘Were not our hearts strangely warmed as he walked with us on the way?'”

And then, I think sometimes we stop there and don’t realize that as they ran back and shared the news, Jesus had appeared to the disciples. When Jesus appeared to the larger group, interestingly, he did exactly the same thing again. He took the Scriptures and indicated that this was not just one off, and I think in Luke’s gospel the intention is that we understand that in his visiting seminars with his apostles and that small group of disciples, he was constantly showing them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself, which really is the only possible explanation, isn’t it, for the transformation in Simon Peter’s preaching ability.

That sermon he preaches in Acts 2, he could never have preached that sermon unless he had been to, in the best possible sense, the Jesus seminar of those intervening weeks. The understanding of Scripture that he has, his ability to draw in passages of Scripture to extol and exalt the Lord Jesus, is when you think about the fact that less than two months ago, this man was denying the Lord Jesus Christ, and now he is a supreme homiletician with a magnificent hermeneutic because he’d learned how to preach Christ from all the Scriptures.

And when Sandy asked me for a title for today, I thought simply because our theme for the conference is our Lord Jesus Christ in all the Scriptures, that it might be helpful for us together. I didn’t realize that pastor’s wives would be here, but your wives are like my wife, need I say any more? And in many ways I think it may be helpful for us to be here as couples and to reflect on our ministry together and this whole question of the focus. of our ministry on our Lord Jesus Christ.

I’ve chosen this subject for another reason, and the second reason really is this, that the issue of preaching Christ has, for me at least, become a matter of increasing concern. And I say that for a number of reasons. If Alistair were already here, I’d probably ask him to tell us this story, but I remember him telling me on one occasion that very shortly after he came to the United States, he was playing golf with somebody, just one other minister. They were therefore locked together for eight hours in a golf buggy.

And at one point, this man turned to him and said to him, so Alistair, what’s your thing? What’s your thing? And the implication, well, I mean Alistair thought, you know, they never told me before I came to the United States if I was going to be a minister of the gospel here, I needed a thing, you know, something that was distinctive. But to me, it’s a very striking thing, the extent to which that is true, that if you’re going to be a model minister in these days, people expect that you will have your thing.

You will have your special emphasis. And if you think about the people who are held before us, the people who are interviewed in the preaching magazines that you either get free or perhaps subscribe to, the models that are held up to us of ministry, there is usually something distinctive about their ministry. It would be an interesting exercise and save me a good deal of energy if we just went around the tables, and those of you who are married, asked your wife, what is the distinctive thing about your husband’s preaching ministry?

Or your associates, what is the distinctive thing about your ministry? Now the thing that concerns me, and this is just an arrow shot at a venture from a relatively little exposure to the entirety of North American evangelicalism. But my concern is that one might hear all too infrequently on these occasions, his thing is to preach only Jesus Christ and Him crucified. And actually if you think of the dominant models of ministry in our time, just flash a few names through your mind of people that you perhaps greatly admire and respect.

And I say this very conscious of the fact that God gives particular individuals particular burdens, granted that God gives particular individuals particular burdens. Peter’s burden and Paul’s burden were different, Isaiah’s burden or Isaiah’s burden, Ezekiel’s burden were different. Granted that, and the patterns of their ministry were different. I don’t think Isaiah could have been lying on his side any more than he would have flown in the air. He just wasn’t a lie on your side kind of individual. Different burdens.

But to me, the great question is, no matter what the particularity of my burden may be, often that is related to the context of my regeneration and conversion and the location of my ministry, it ought to be true. It ought to be possible to say of every gospel minister, and especially those gospel ministers we most admire, the thing that is manifestly, absolutely at the core and center of this ministry that makes it apostolic is that you can never, sitting under that ministry, you can never escape from the centrality of Jesus Christ.

And I say that’s a concern to me because I am not convinced that that would universally be said. And I think it’s worth us asking ourselves whether we suspect that it would be said of our ministry. The thing about him in his ministry, now I recognize he has a special burden and he’s got unusual gifts in this area, but over the piece, you sit under that ministry and the thing that you will be persuaded to say is, this ministry is Christ-centered, Christ-dominated, and Christ-full.

And if anything else, and this might well be the secret, this minister is Christ-intoxicated. Now, I think that there are indications that the concern I feel about this is possibly an accurate concern. I think I can put it in the form of a question. I think, think yourself into your study and then think yourself into your bookcases and the books that you have on your bookshelves.

When I was teaching in Philadelphia, I used to have a Mongolian dictionary very carefully placed in my bookshelves because I knew if students were in my room and I answered the phone, the only place they could politely look would be along my bookshelves. And out of the corner of my eye, I used to watch them when they came to row three and they moved along and saw the Mongolian Dictionary. Well, what would stick out on your shelves?

How many books about Jesus Christ and Him crucified do you have on your shelves written in the last 25 years when there has been an extraordinary avalanche of evangelical publication? How many books that focus on the cross of Christ, that great text that perhaps you preached at the beginning of your ministry, I am determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified?

² For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. (1 Corinthians 2:2, ESV)

Actually, it’s far greater to be able to preach that text when you’re on the way out than it is when you’re on the way in.

And then compare that number with the collection of books you’ve got on Christian counseling, on how to be the church. Now, that says something. I don’t think I need to do the mathematics for you. I’d be amazed if there are many of us in this room who have a larger section on Jesus Christ in our shelves than we have on many other topics. That says something, not simply about my book selection.

It may say something about my book selection, but it does actually say something about the ethos in which we live, the times in which we live. Most of you probably, I hope you all have, John Stott’s splendid book on the cross of Christ. It’s now, I think, about 25 years old. And it was really, when it was published by InterVarsity Press, it really was a replacement for a book that had been published 70 years before.

And there was almost nothing in between James Denny’s book on the death of Christ and John Stott’s book on the cross of Christ. And you may have, perhaps you’ve got some of Leon Morris’s, late Leon Morris, who died I think last year, wonderfully resourceful works on Christ and Him crucified, but my guess is that you probably don’t have very many. And I think that says something very, very significant about the influences to which we are exposed and to which we tend to expose others in explicating what is it that is really central about our ministry?

What is it that is really central about our ministry? Now, there’s something of an historical explanation for this, and I think it’s important for us as evangelical ministers, as I take it most of us are, to be like the men of Issachar, men who understand the times. We are living in the wake, in one way or another, we are living in the wake of the Enlightenment and under the impact of Immanuel Kant on the whole thought processes of twentieth and twenty-first century men and women.

People speak about today as being postmodern, and sometimes people think that that means it’s something new, when in actual fact it means that in one way or another we are still being defined by the processes that were unleashed at the time of the Enlightenment. And I guess if you’ve been to any seminary anywhere, you will remember the rather dramatic response to the Enlightenment that you find in the writings of Friedrich Schleiermacher. First of all in his speeches on religion to its cultured despisers, and then in his major work of theology, The Christian Faith.

And you’ll remember how Schleiermacher, in a sense, was the great seeker-sensitive theologian of the modern period. The gospel was being demeaned. The gospel was being sidelined, particularly in the light of the Enlightenment. And Schleiermacher came along and said, but the real gospel, you’ve missed the real gospel. And for Schleiermacher, the real gospel was, its essence was, this, what he called this sense of dependence upon God. He was really the first theologian to make subjectivity and self-consciousness a great virtue in theology.

Kant had said, you know, the noumenal realm is out of bounds to us, and so the whole history of theology was collapsed. But Schleiermacher came along and said, no, no, we haven’t lost the Christian faith, because the very essence of the Christian faith is this inward sense of dependence upon God. And in its many manifestations, as Schleiermacher sought to do in the Christian faith, he, of course, had to take the Trinity and put it in an appendix, because he saw no place for it in his consciousness, subjective theology.

And he read off the gospel from the variety of moments of experience in the sense of dependence. dependence upon God, and at least until the 1950s, Schleiermacher was abominated by evangelicals. But today, the place where Schleiermacher’s approach to the Christian gospel is most clearly seen in the Western world is among evangelicals, consciousness theology, the theology of the inner person, the project of the self, the reading of theology out of the center in spiritual experience.

That’s why so many of the books that are on your shelves and on my shelves, actually at the end of the day, are about how can we manage in a Christianized way the project of the self, which is the great project of 21st century man. And it’s in everywhere. It’s in every, it’s in absolutely every glossy magazine you ever see. And often when you turn on your television set, you see that it is also placarded in a Christianized form, in the thought farmers and thought leaders.

Now, at times you may think they are not particularly thoughtful, but these are the thought leaders of the masses of the Christian church. And so there is this very, this is like second century Gnosticism. Nobody knows where it came from. Nobody can pin it down unless they happen to be a teacher in the philosophy schools.

And there is that kind of atmosphere about the life of the church in days in which we live where if you haven’t told me what I’m supposed to do and how this is going to change my life, then you haven’t really touched my existence.

As though knowing Christ were not the very epicenter of the Christian’s existence, as Paul, you remember, says in Philippians 3 as well as in Philippians 1, where for all practical purposes he says, “Since the whole desire of my being in glory will be Christ, here and now, as far as I’m concerned, to me to live is Christ and to die is gain.”

²¹ For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. (Philippians 1:21, ESV)

And so, in a sense, the minister of the gospel who wants to preach Jesus Christ and Him crucified and to be able to say at the end of his ministry, whether it be in one congregation or at the end of his life, I was determined to do that and by God’s grace I did it, does need to realize that to a very large extent, not just in liberalism but in evangelicalism, he may well be swimming against the tide.

Now, that atmosphere it seems to me, now this is not a matter of somebody sitting down and thinking I’m going to adopt Schleiermacher’s approach. I’ve never met anybody, least of all an evangelical, who says I’m going to approach it that way. What I’m saying is, that’s the atmosphere that to a certain extent, contrary to what we may have anticipated, evangelicalism has tended to breathe in and it has had a tendency to turn the gospel on its head. Let me try and illustrate what I mean.

Many years ago, many, many years ago, like more than thirty years ago, for a short period of time, I sat under a ministry that employed the Lectio Continua method, the systematic book-by-book exposition of the Scriptures, and while I was there, the section of Scripture that was being preached was one of the Gospels. But it was preached in a surprisingly non-Christ-centered way. It was preached in a surprisingly non-Christ-centered way. Now I learned something then as a young man.

I learned that Lectio Continua, the systematic exposition of the Scriptures, isn’t necessarily the same thing as the Christ-centered exposition of the Scriptures. And actually, the hermeneutical principle that was being subconsciously employed was what I’ve come to call the find Waldo hermeneutical principle. You remember Waldo, the wee guy in the red and white stripes and the funny wee hat? And I don’t know that there were any words in those books. I can’t even remember who wrote these books, but they weren’t really written, were they? He was quite the genius.

They masqueraded, I think, as children’s books, but it was, you know, when the children were in bed, it was mom and dad who were trying to find Waldo. You got these… For those of you who have never heard of Waldo, this little fellow would be hidden in a double-page spread picture of people. And the trick was, the only function of this book was to give you the amusement of spending ages trying to find Waldo in the crowd. Now, what do I mean by the find Waldo hermeneutic?

I mean that the driving question of the exposition is really this. I’m thinking now about the Gospels. The driving question is, where are you in this story? Where are you in this story, blind Bartimaeus, woman at the well? Think of every encounter of Jesus, and the Gospels are full of these Jesus encounters. And the great drive is towards the question, where are you in this story? When I don’t think any of the four Gospels was written about you. They were written for you, but they were not written about you.

And so the real question, when I’m expounding for an example, a Gospel, and you would think a Gospel would be the place where it would be impossible not to preach Jesus Christ and Him crucified. In fact, even under the Lectio Continua method, and within the context of Reformed theology, the find Waldo hermeneutic may still prevail, where what I’m really interested in, and actually sadly what I may really become known for as a Bible teacher, is how I found you in the story.

Now, it’s not my business to find you in the story, it’s Jesus’ business to find you through the story by His Holy Spirit in His Word. My business is to find Jesus in the story. And we say, yes, but I do that, do I really? Here is the real test of whether, when I say, that’s…

That’s exactly what I do, whether that really is exactly what I do. Are my best energies, is my greatest sense of, if I can use an Eric Liddell expression, my greatest sense of the pleasure of God in my ministry?

Is that when what I am doing, as it were, as if the only thing that really mattered to me, because at the end of the day it’s the chief thing that matters to me, is I’m finding ways of putting on display, that is expounding, the glory and majesty and grace and power and kindness and tenderness and firmness and holiness and patience and grace of the Lord Jesus Christ? Or, do I actually feel at my biggest and strongest when I’m talking about your condition, your sin, and your need?

Do you remember what was said about Thomas Hooker, the great New England preacher in the seventeenth century? Everybody said of him, when Hooker preached, you would have thought that he could have picked up the king and put him in his pocket.

Now, you feel something of that when, I’d be amazed if you don’t have some sense of that, that when you preach, your mind is at its sharpest, and yeah, I know we miss the place, but when you preach, your mind is at its sharpest, your voice is at its best, your command of language, yes, I know we stumble and fall, your sense of your own identity and your destiny is enlarged, but for some strange reason, and I think I understand, but I want to say to the Lord, “Lord, I don’t understand why you do that.”

When we are enlarged, actually everything tends to be enlarged, warts and all, grievous personal attributes and all. One who may be just a little angular when you’re talking to him, when he is enlarged, can become almost intolerable in the pulpit, and he doesn’t know it. For all I know, you may be hating every single word I’m saying, but I feel enlarged in the saying of it, you see. But you see, the real issue is, does that enlargement most come, or to put it in the language of the old divines, does the sense of anointing?

Now I know we can be desperately wrong, and we’re usually desperately wrong either when we’ve emotionally gone over the top or emotionally we’ve sunk into the miry clay and cannot find a place to stand. But when we are most enlarged in soul in our ministry, is it, and does it happen frequently? Because we are extolling and exalting and setting on display the majesty and the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And as I think about people whom I know or of whom I have heard, I’m trying to think of whether there are very many of whom their colleagues or their friends or their congregation have ever said to me, “you know, they… absolute dominant thing about his ministry is the way in which he extols the Lord Jesus Christ.” Now, of course, there is a reason for that. There’s a psychological reason for that, a personal reason for that.

The psychological and personal reason is because it’s actually far easier for a sinner to speak about his or other people’s sins than it is to speak about the Savior.

Some of you who are English literature majors at college or university may have at one time or another in the dim and distant past read so much of the literature on John Milton’s Paradise Lost, where at least when I pretended to be a Milton scholar, which is a long time ago, much of the discussion circulated around this question, and I think if you’ve read with any patience Milton’s Paradise Lost, you probably ask this question, why is it that just in the language that’s used, the sense of vibrancy and power of description, why is it if you simply take that, the hero of Paradise Lost is Satan, and God takes a rather second place?

And since that is a question, probably only two of you are interested in the question, I remember being enormously helped as a student by C.S. Lewis’s little book Preface to Paradise Lost, which almost nobody has ever read, but is one of his most brilliant books. It’s just full of sparkling brilliance. And Lewis comments, if I remember rightly, in that book, well, the reason for that is obvious. The reason for that is obvious.

It is so much easier for a sinner, psychologically, to find powerful ways of expressing that which is evil than it is for him to find powerful, expressive ways of extolling the glories of the ultimate good to those who are sinners. And actually, tell me if I’m wrong. I may be wrong about you, but I don’t think I’m wrong in the generality.

I think that’s true of many evangelical ministers, that it’s far easier for us, and sometimes we are at our most creative, our most investigative, and I mean creative in the best sense, when we’re exploring the human condition. And we are at our poorest when it comes to extolling and magnifying Jesus Christ as the only remedy for the human condition, and as the remedy for every human condition, and as the final remedy for all human condition, indeed as the final remedy for cosmic ills.

And it’s because of that that I feel it behooves me very, very much to keep asking myself the question, is my ministry of the Word really Christ-centered? And at the end of the day, when, you know, whenever this kind of thing is discussed, perhaps especially in seminaries, the question arises, two questions arise really. One is, how do we do this? And the second question, which is sometimes the really driving question, is how do we do this from the Old Testament Scriptures?

I’m not sure that exploring those questions actually ever leads to the answer, because I think the answer is not so much to be found in hermeneutical principles or homiletical methods, but in my spiritual condition, in my passion for Jesus Christ, in my personal growth in the knowledge of Jesus Christ, in my pursuit of Jesus Christ, in the way in which for myself and for my own soul, I want to bring to bear every possible illuminating insight of Scripture and all of Scripture together to help me to understand, to know, to love, to cherish, to be unreservedly devoted to the Lord Jesus Christ.

And sometimes when we are enlarged in preaching, I think sometimes sadly, and I speak this by way of open confession, as I always want to be the person to whom my own preaching of the Word most ministers, it’s a question that I often know I need to ask. Now, to the hermeneutical, homiletical questions. How do we learn to preach Christ? And the second one, how do we learn to preach Christ from the Old Testament?

You know, I think in the first instance, the answer to both of these questions is what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3:6, “We are ministers of the new covenant.” And actually, for most of us, because the ultimate problem is not the hermeneutical problem of how do we preach Christ from the Old Testament, it’s actually the problem of how do we preach Christ from the New Testament.

Almost everything I’ve said up to this point can be summarized by saying the problem is not the difficulty or ease of preaching Christ from the Old Testament. The problem is, am I actually preaching Christ from the New Testament? Can I go through the Gospels with my best energies? Now, you see, this is why I say we are probably a somewhat mixed multitude theologically along the conservative spectrum. But probably most of you know that I’ve probably got some floating Pelagian genes somewhere in me and stray Arminian dreams, genes, and all the rest of it.

You know, I’ve been brought up in the Reformed faith and I’m in the Reformed faith. And sometimes you know we who are in the Reformed faith can be so castigating of, for example, our charismatic brothers and sisters for being so obsessed with experience. When in actual fact we are similarly obsessed with experience, only we’ve changed our mathematics from an Arminian mathematics to a Reformed mathematics. Give you a very simple illustration of this.

If I had porridge for every time people have said to me, regeneration causes faith, faith causes repentance, repentance and faith cause sanctification, when they’ve discussed the ordo salutis. And you see I, in my bolder moments I say, could you tell me where Jesus is in all this? Oh, but the great chain of salvation. Yes, but dear one, if you exclude the person of the Lord Jesus from the great chain of salvation, your chain’s not worth the steel it’s made out of. It’s not the chain of salvation that saves.

It’s not ordering the elements of the ordo salutis at their best biblical, logical form in the Reformed faith that saves; it’s only Jesus Christ that saves. And so, you see, in so many ways, it’s possible for us to substitute theological method, theological positions, strength, even giftedness, yes, even divine burden. But you see, no minister of the gospel is ever allowed to be in the position where he says, “Now you know my burden is convicting sinners of their sin,” to which somebody needs to say to him, “you are his wife.”

That’s not the center of gospel ministry. And convicted sinners are not saved sinners, even if they’ve been convicted by the Reformed ordo salutis. Now, I don’t know how many times one can say this using different words. The way to learn to preach Christ is, first of all, to preach Christ from the New Testament, because that is what that 27-volume book actually is. It’s the New Testament of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I can’t remember. In fact, I don’t know.

I’ve looked at this page, or even if there is this page in my English Standard Version, but it’s certainly there in the King James Version. Despised, incidentally, by seventeenth-century evangelicals, and therefore something of a mystery that it should be the great version of some of our evangelical brethren. Now then, the second question. You may be saying, just tell me something practical.

The second question, how do I learn then, assuming I’ve begun to learn how to preach Christ from the New Testament, when the woman comes and breaks the alabaster box, oh yes, at some point I’m going to say something about the way in which Christ has worked on her. But she isn’t saying by doing that, look at me and my alabaster box. It’s Jesus who says, you know, people will be talking about this until the end of time. What she’s saying is look at Jesus.

Once I’ve learned to do that in the New Testament, how do I learn to do that in the Old Testament? Well, I have a barrel-load of principles, but let me reduce them to five. I think, and just in case you’re still trying to understand what it means to listen to somebody who doesn’t actually have an accent speak, and you have no idea what I’ve been saying up until this point, let me give you a mnemonic.

The mnemonic, and this is very carefully crafted, I’m hopeless at these things, always admired students who could take my thirty-six lectures and then reduce them to one side of a five by three card full of mnemonics. That’s like your greatest scholarly work being reduced to a footnote in somebody else’s greatest scholarly work. That’s like your greatest scholarly work being reduced to a footnote in somebody else’s greatest scholarly work. The mnemonic is a curse, and it’s very carefully chosen for two reasons.

One because it just works and no more, and the other is because that’s what the work of Christ is really about, isn’t it? Galatians 3:13, Christ became a curse for us. Just incidentally (in brackets), when was the last time you preached that? What do I mean by that? Well, I mean when we come to the Old Testament Scriptures, when we’ve an understanding of Christ as the one whose ministers we are in the pages of the New Testament, among the principles that we employ to get to Christ from anywhere in the Old Testament Scriptures.

From anywhere in the Old Testament, Scriptures are one or other, and sometimes all, of these five principles. I say curse, but actually, it’s not spelled that way. It sounds that way, but it’s not spelled that way, so I’m slightly cheating. The first principle is covenant, isn’t it? It is the principle, however you understand it, that when God has come in saving mercy to His people, He characteristically throughout the ages has come by making His covenant with them.

Now, I happen to be persuaded that actually the opening chapters of Genesis are covenantal in form, and I’m particularly persuaded that Genesis 3:15 is a covenantal style promise. But you do notice, at the very least, that as God marches through history, one of the things with which he employs to tie together the whole purpose he has from Genesis 3:15 onwards as a reflection of his divine purposes.

He ties that together by the unfolding of his covenant mercies, and this is why, of course, when our Lord Jesus comes and gives to us the Lord’s Supper, He speaks about the Lord’s Supper pointing to His work and says, “This is the new covenant in my blood.” This is why the rest of the New Testament, although the word “covenant” is infrequently used, and the reason for that is because the covenant is actually Jesus Himself, it’s very evident that that whole covenant idea that we find holding the Old Testament together, and every single book in the Old Testament, incidentally, is an expression of that covenant to one extent or another.

We understand there is no place we can go from north to south, east to west in the pages of the Old Testament Scriptures that isn’t, as it were, almost undergirded, if not haunted, by this covenantal notion.

And insofar as that is true, we have a main track to get us to the Lord Jesus Christ who is the consummation and fulfillment of all of these covenants and of the great undergirding covenant grace of God that has given expression to them. So there’s covenant. There’s not only covenant, but there is something else. There’s covenant, and then in addition to that covenant, there is union. I mean union with the Lord Jesus.

We all probably understand the principle along the lines of justification, the Westminster Confession of Faith, says, along the lines of justification, we who come after Christ are justified by the same event in history, which is now 2,000 years’ distance from us. We are justified by one and the same event in history that those who came 2,000 years before Christ were justified by.

Now I guess most of us understand there’s one way of salvation in the Bible, there’s one Savior in the Bible, whether you’re looking forward to that Savior coming and holding on to the promise or whether you’re looking backwards and holding on to the promise that He will save you that has now been accomplished in history. We understand that principle along the lines of justification. We don’t so often think about it along the lines of sanctification or along the lines of providence.

We see that very clearly in the New Testament Scriptures, that the whole of, think about Paul’s language or Peter’s language or the language of Hebrews, that the whole of the Christian life is a union and communion with Jesus Christ in His dying and His rising.

And there’s just a plethora of texts that underscore this, that the Christian living in the present era is, as it were, being squeezed throughout his life into the shape of Jesus Christ, being made like Christ as Christ was crucified and as Christ is risen, sharing in the fellowship of His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death, sharing in His resurrection, being conformed to Him. That is of the quintessence of what’s happening in your life if you’re a Christian believer. But that’s not just a New Testament phenomenon.

Look at any of the extensive biographies of God’s saints in the Old Testament Scriptures and you will see that that pattern in a proleptic fashion, that is in anticipation of the reality.

The man or woman who has held on to the promise has, as it were, held on to a wire down which the electricity of the cross runs and when it touches him, his or her life will be conformed to this pattern of dying with Christ, rising with Christ, suffering with Christ, triumphing with Christ, union and communion with the coming Christ in His afflictions, union and communion with the coming Christ in the triumph of His resurrection. That’s what many of the Psalms are about. You can’t understand many of the Psalms.

You will artificially read the Psalms as a Christian unless you understand the reason why we see those similitudes of Christ in David is because David’s faith is focused on the promise of the coming One and the shape and pattern of the coming One’s life, as it were, bounces back. Joseph’s a tremendous example of this. Old Testament’s full of those examples. And that’s why when we expound these passages and these characters, we don’t simply say, He was suffering, are you suffering? We don’t simply say, you’re not doing very well. He did better under similar circumstances.

We understand that what’s happening here is the embedding into their lives of the pattern produced by union with the Lord Jesus Christ. The third thing that we see is the rather glorious pattern of Christ’s redemptive victory. What do I mean by that? I can put it very simply, I think. The first promise of the gospel, the protevangelion in Genesis 3:15, does not have a single word about the forgiveness of sins.

Genesis 3:15 implies the forgiveness of sins, and that’s, I think, also implied later on in Genesis 3, but it’s not a promise of forgiveness; it’s a promise of conflict. It’s a promise of rescue through conflict. Now, of course, the New Testament picks this up in a multitude of different ways. Jesus, the divine warrior, but it does that really as the consummation of that pattern of conflict, redemption in the conflict that we see so largely in the pages of the Old Testament.

You just need to run through the Old Testament to see that there’s this constant antithesis. Jerusalem and Babylon, people of God, people of this world, runs right through the Bible into the ministry of Jesus Christ. And so, for example, when at the end of the day you are going to preach on David and Goliath, you’re not just going to say, now we need to be like David, you’re going to understand that this is part of the ongoing conflict into which we’ve been caught up because of our relationship to Jesus Christ. So let’s see anew.

And, well, I said five, but four will spell out the word adequately and then I’ll be done. The seed. His seed, your seed. Him, your seed, especially the whole of the Bible. Remember how one of the philosophers said that you can sum up the whole of Western philosophy by saying it’s a series of footnotes to Plato and Aristotle, and actually until relatively recently that’s probably the truth. You can say the same, in a way, about the Bible. It’s a series of footnotes to Genesis 3.15, until the seed comes.

In the whole of the Old Testament, talk about find Waldo, it’s finding the seed, the seed, the seed. It’s such a dominant expression in the Old Testament, isn’t it? I mean, all these begats, and then the way that, you know, the marvels of it, I mustn’t get into any more except to say this: you must have noticed as you, I think the book of Ruth is a marvelous illustration of all these principles, actually.

And if we had a moment, I could expound that to you, but not least because the boring old family tree with which the book of Ruth ends, that’s scandalous to me. I was in my late 50s before I took any interest whatsoever in anybody’s family tree, especially my own family tree. I have no interest in family trees. So, any book that ends with a family tree, books that begin with family trees are bad enough, with family trees, till I realize, of course, that’s the family tree of David.

And eventually, when I plow on in my Bible reading and turn over the white page between the Old and the New Testament, I discover it’s the family tree of the Lord Jesus Christ. What is Matthew saying, incidentally, in Matthew 1:1-17? He’s saying, keep your eye on the seed, because the seed, in this instance, the seed will at least enable you to preach Christ everywhere between Genesis 12 and Matthew 1. Well, I’m sure I’ve gone over my time.

You’ve listened with great patience and much endurance, and it’s been a privilege to open my heart and bits and pieces of the Word. Heavenly Father, in all of this, we desire only one thing, that our being together here in the joy of fellowship, surrounded by this comfort, hosted graciously by this church, that you might move us onward, even just one step, with an increased passion to know nothing except Jesus Christ, and in everything we know, to know Jesus Christ and Him crucified. And we pray this in His Name, Amen.