Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Preaching Old Testament Theology in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
Lament (like the one I quoted the other day from Jeremiah 20), or the entire book of Lamentations … Frequently, chunks in Jeremiah and also chunks in Ezekiel, sometimes in Isaiah and elsewhere are written with lament. There are huge historical sections like Isaiah 36–39. There are parts of Jeremiah that are not only historical but autobiographical. Parts of Jonah, parts of Daniel, and parts of Hosea are autobiographical.
Apocalyptic (whatever that is; I’ll say a bit more about that on the last day). Large chunks of Ezekiel and of Daniel, but also the so-called Isaianic apocalypse, Isaiah 24–27. Then there are specific visions: Isaiah 6; Ezekiel 37. There is bold social denunciation. Many, many, many sections in the Prophets, but perhaps paramount amongst the prophets in this regard is Amos, to whom we’ll return in a moment.
There are calls to repentance: national, priestly, and individual. There are predictions, which strangely are what we associate prophesy with, primarily, although in fact it forms a relatively small part of the prophetic corpus. Predictions that are short-term and immediate and specific. Predictions that are for the longer haul, where God will come down from heaven and lay bare his arm. Predictions that are demonstratively typological, about which I’ll say a little more in a moment.
There are dialogical devices. I’ve already referred to some of those that you find in Malachi and elsewhere. All of this and much more as well make up what we call the prophetic literature. It is not as if one can say, “This is a genre narrowly defined. You do the following 16 things and live.” It is more complex than that.
So in one short talk, what I will do is not much more than prime the pump, as it were. Stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance, to coin a phrase. If you don’t think the phrase is coined, you haven’t been reading the Authorized Version recently. So let me offer some suggestions then as to how to handle such material in your preaching.
1. Recognize that the Prophets are a great quarry for a number of extraordinarily important themes.
These include many, many facets of the doctrine of God: the sovereignty of God, the uniqueness of God (Isaiah 40–45), and the love of God (Hosea, Malachi). I remember being in England when the Berlin Wall fell and Roy Clements was preaching from parts of Isaiah. I remember how the whole congregation sat there, stunned, as he read parts of Isaiah 44 and 45, and then broke off and kept on talking as if he were God, but an updated presentation.
“This is what the Lord says—your Redeemer, who formed you in the womb: I am the Lord, who has made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens, who spread out the earth by myself, who foils the signs of false prophets and makes fools of diviners, and overthrows the learning of the wise and turns it into nonsense, who carries out the words of his servants and fulfills the prediction of his messengers, who says of Jerusalem, ‘It shall be inhabited,’ of the towns of Judah, ‘They shall be built,’ and of the ruins, ‘I will restore them,’ who says …” He goes on and on and on:
“I am the Lord who says to the foreign office pundits, ‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Where were you when I declared that the Berlin Wall would fall? Where were you when you were making your prophesies? Six months ago, where were you when I, the Lord, declared, ‘I open doors and I shut them.’ ”
Do you see? “The sovereignty of God brought …” No one really saw that happening, did they? Where was the National Security Agency? Where were the foreign office pundits? And the whole church, wondering how on earth we’re ever going to evangelize China or get into communist countries behind …
People were talking at missions conferences as if the world were closing down. “A smaller and smaller percentage of the world is open up to missionaries.” Occasionally you’d hear a preacher venturing forth, “Yes, but remember, God is in charge.” There are huge swaths thus of text that deal with God’s power and sovereignty over the nations or God’s power and sovereignty over against other gods and would-be gods. This can be preached with extraordinary power and fervency.
A. Then there are, in the Prophets, massive questions connected with social justice.
Countless passages. Think of some of these passages. “They are full of superstitions from the East; they practice divination like the Philistines and clasp hands with pagans.” How many Australians read horoscopes every day? Stupid, silly superstitions from the East.
“Their land is full of silver and gold; there is no end to their treasures. Their land is full of horses.” Read, automobiles. “Their land is full of idols; they bow down to the work of their hands, to what their fingers have made.” This is the great lie of Romans 1! Worship the created thing rather than the Creator. “So man will be brought low and mankind humbled—do not forgive them.” That’s Isaiah 2. “The Lord alone will be exalted in that day.”
Or how about a passage like this? “See now, the Lord, the Lord Almighty, is about to take from Jerusalem and Judah both supply and support: all supplies of food and all supplies of water, the hero and the warrior, the judge and the prophet, the soothsayer and the elder, the captain of fifty and the man of rank, the counselor, skilled craftsman and clever enchanter. I will make boys their officials; mere children will govern them. People will oppress each other—man against man, neighbor against neighbor. The young will rise up against the old, the base against the honorable.”
One of the curses of God in a decaying culture is that he makes stupid people governors. That’s what the text says. Boys in place of statesmen. Do you find a Winston Churchill around these days? No, we have Clinton. It has to be said! It is a mark of decay in a culture when God appoints fools and simpletons and people who are interested in power in places of prestige and power in government rather than people of integrity, statesmanship, and honor. That’s what the prophets were saying.
Or how about this? “Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you alone live in the land.” How do you like that for capitalists in the congregation? “Woe to those who rise early in the morning to run after their drinks, who stay up late at night till they are inflamed with wine. They have harps and lyres at their banquets, tambourines and flutes and wine, but they have no regard for the deeds of the Lord, no respect for the work of his hands.
Therefore my people will go into exile for lack of understanding. Therefore the grave enlarges its appetite. Woe to those who draw sin along with cords of deceit and wickedness as with cart ropes. Those who say, ‘Let God hurry, let him hasten his work so we may see it.’ Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.”
Isn’t that the very heart of Western drama and culture? Isn’t it? You confuse the categories. Otherwise, it’s considered an unsophisticated play. You’re not allowed to have good guys and bad guys or good gals and bad gals. Now you have to have everything all mixed up. Do you know the latest television program with Sean Connery? It seems as if he alone knows who the good guy and who the bad guy is in the whole thing.
Then at the end it’s all reversed, and all the good guys and bad guys change hats. That is considered sophisticated. Well God knows that there was a time when all our heroes and our antiheros were too simplistically drawn, but now we live in a world where you’re not allowed to have any heroes. It’s considered simple. Good is bad and bad is good. Light is dark and dark is light. It all depends on your point of view.
“Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight.” Oh, my word. When the American Republic was founded, (although many of the Founding Fathers were not, in fact, Christians, many of them were deists) almost without exception they bought in to the Judeo-Christian worldview in which they believed in the doctrine of depravity so that the undergirding philosophy that defended democracy was, as Churchill would later put it, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.”
The reason why you go after democracy is precisely because you don’t trust anybody. As Lord Acton put it in the last century, “All power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” So what you do is devise a system of government in which nobody has too much power and in any case you can turf the blighters out every few years.
Now the whole theory, in other words, of democracy in the Federalist Papers right through the deists and the theists without exception is this: You need a system of government in which at the end of the day you don’t trust anybody too much, because we believe in sin. Not anymore. Now you have Clinton, or whoever his opponent is. It doesn’t matter. Republican or Democrat, it doesn’t really matter.
The same thing takes place in Australia. The same thing takes place in Britain. It takes place in France. It takes place in Germany, all through the Western countries. Now you speak of “the great wisdom of the American people.” Oh, rubbish. People don’t vote according to their great wisdom. They vote according to their greed.
So you appeal for your particular policies to the insight and understanding of the Australian people. “The Australian people want …” Oh, you bet your life they want. They want and want and want, and they don’t want to be taxed to pay for it, either. That’s called greed. That’s why most of the Western countries are living beyond their means. Does the church have anything to say about that? It’s called integrity.
“Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight.” Democracy is only going to work when you believe that people are sinners. “Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine and champions at mixing drinks.” Am I completely mistaken in suggesting that in Australia there’s still a sort of macho image of the strong person knocking down another pint? I’ve just barely started. I’m still only in Isaiah 5. I haven’t got to Jeremiah yet.
I remember hearing a wonderful sermon once. It was one of those where the whole congregation was breathless in the fear of the Lord. The preacher took a long chunk of Amos and quietly read it. You remember how Amos runs? “This is what the Lord says. ‘For three sins of Damascus, even for four, I will not turn back my wrath, because she did this and that and that. For three sins of Gaza, even for four, I will not turn back my wrath …”
And so on and so on and so on. “For three sins of Tyre, and even for four, I will not turn back my wrath.” And on and on and on. “For three sins Edom, and even for four. For three sins of Ammon … For three sins of Moab, and even for four … For three sins of Judah, and even for four … For three sins of Israel.’ ”
What the prophet does is he’s circling in and in and in until he gets to his home turf. The preacher simply read this. You have to read a chapter and a half of Amos to get the point. Then he said, “Thus says the Lord. ‘I am against you, O Communist China. You have butchered people and buried integrity. In the name of freedom, you have slaughtered 50 million people.
For three sins, even for four, judgment stands upon you and Ichabod is written over the land.’ Thus says the Lord, ‘I am against you, O Russia.’ ” Gradually he moved around (this was in England). He moved from there to Germany and their history. Then France. He then took a swipe at the Americans, and then Ireland.
Gradually you began to see his point. He clobbered Wales, then Scotland. There wasn’t much left. Not many places to hide. Not only was this understanding the prophet of Amos, which could then be expounded chunk by chunk, but it was understanding that there are styles for doing things. There are ways for doing things.
I don’t know if you noticed yesterday, but in the sermon on Proverbs, one of the reasons I went through quite a lot of proverbs and summarized them … What I tried to do, it took me a long time to prepare, was in proverb after proverb try to summarize it with a pithy point. You can’t take a proverb and expound it. You kill it.
You make the proverb and then you give it a modern, contemporary analogy. Or you do it in two quick sentences and then move on to the next one. Thus the form of your sermon is reflecting the form of the text. If you take a large narrative text and then explain it away, you’ve lost the power of the narrative.
If you take discourse and simply pick one holy thought out of it and then string endless stories, you’re not teaching people how to think through discourse. Likewise, with the prophets here. If you come across Amos and you explain what he does. He wanders all around and says, “Gaza does these nasty things and Tyre does those nasty things.”
Then you sit down and say at the end of the sermon, “Amen,” or if you simply say, “And in the same way, God has some bad things to say about Australia,” you’ve got a dilute sermon and you haven’t listened to the form of the text. There are some things to be learned, not only from the content, but even from the form.
You can’t duplicate every form. You can’t do that every Sunday. It’s not the sort of thing that you can turn on and off and act out in every situation. But there are some telling things to be learned from the way the prophets worked things out. Now be careful about the prophets who go around naked and things like that. You can’t duplicate everything.
B. There is also a strong appeal in some of these Prophets to personal fidelity to the covenant and to national fidelity to the covenant.
But, warning now against everything I’ve said in my first point, beware of the wrong kinds of association between Israel and your nation. Australia is not as likely to make those sorts of mistakes as America because you have two quite different beginnings.
You have a mythology connected with being the armpit of the empire, the place where all the people were dumped. You’ve arisen out of the primordial ooze and, “Look what we’ve made of ourselves, despite Britain.” America has a mythology instead of the Puritans coming here to plant a nation of freedom. This was the New Jerusalem.
You read all the early Puritans at the time of the American Revolution, all the way up to the time of the American Revolution on the American side, and they’re preaching Old Testament texts and seeing that God has raised up a nation for such a time as this and so on and so on. Quite frankly, it’s horrible exegesis. So beware of the wrong kinds of association between Israel and your nation.
If there is connection, direct connection, to be made between the text and where you are, the obvious connections (now there are more extended ones) are between the nation and the church. In terms of a biblical theological line, that is where the locus of the people of God runs.
But there is another level. Namely, the profound principle reflected again and again and again in the Prophets, who also dare to address not only Israel and Judah but also Babylon and Assyria and Egypt and a whole lot of other people, the fundamental principle articulated in the Proverbs. “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” God is sovereign over all nations. But then you must be careful in the application that you do not set it out in covenantal terms but in moral terms. The covenantal terms you will restrict to the people of God.
2. Keep the larger flow of historical movement in mind.
Now we may do more or less of this in any particular sermon, but in dealing with the Prophets generally, you have to do this constantly. This is really following on to things I’ve been saying all week. You must identify where you are. Are you in the pre-exilic period or the post-exilic period and what does that have to do with the reading of a particular prophet?
You are not going to read Zechariah exactly the same way you read Hosea, precisely because one is tied to a pre-exilic and one to a post-exilic situation. Therefore, the kinds of applications you make are also going to be shaped by those sorts of considerations.
Now this is important, not only in understanding where you are across the Bible’s storyline but also for understanding the movement of thought within a book. Many preachers never get around to reading commentaries right through. They use commentaries like reference books, only for looking up hard bits.
Well, it is true that you need to look up a lot of commentaries sometimes for hard bits and treat them like reference tools. Nevertheless, commentators themselves have a stance. They have an interpretive style. They are arguing out of a corner. Sometimes to understand a commentator who’s commenting on a book, you need to understand enough of the commentator only by reading through the whole commentary (or very large chunks of it).
The best of them in this regard are superb. So I challenge you. Whether you do it in your preaching or not, read Alec Motyer’s commentary on Isaiah right through. Whether you agree with every jot and tittle or not, it is a great commentary for unpacking the flow of the text. Do not ever again preach on the Immanuel prophecy until you’ve read Motyer, who unpacks it within the context of the flow all the way from chapter 6 to chapter 11.
3. Be alert for certain recurrent and sweeping themes that bear on relationships between the Testaments.
Now the first point is that it’s a great quarry for picking up certain great themes in biblical and systematic theology, but now I’m talking about another set of themes. I don’t know how best to present this without giving you some examples and fleshing them out a bit.
For those of you who have been doing this sort of thing for years, what I will outline here, nothing is new. For those of you who have simply not preached this way, some of this may be a bit daunting. Let me start in this way. At the risk of oversimplification, Old Testament expectation regarding what will happen at the end funnels down one of two tracks.
Either God himself is going to come at the end (“I myself will rend the heavens and come down. I will lay bare my arm.”) or God will send his servant David. Then that’s connected with huge Davidic prophesies that ultimately track back to Samuel 7 and related items. At the risk of simplifying Old Testament eschatological expectation, it runs down one of those two tracks. Every once in a while, the two tracks converge, they come together, sometimes in startling ways.
For example, in a chapter that we all know because it’s cited every Christmas, these two come together tellingly. Isaiah 9: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death the light has dawned. You have enlarged the nation and increased their joy …” And so on and so on.
“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. He will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God …” That is the way the Hebrew should be rendered. “… Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom.”
Notice, he’s the Mighty God. He’s the Everlasting Father, but he reigns on David’s throne and over his kingdom. “The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this.” Not only do you have these two themes coming together, but the opening of that oracle in chapter 9, verses 2 and following is accomplished by Jesus at the onset of his ministry in Matthew 4.
Let me mention another one along the same lines, a stunning passage, Ezekiel 34. This is one of the great recurrent themes of shepherds and sheep. It crops up again and again in Scripture. This is perhaps the most telling one. Here all the way through, the Lord presents himself as the one who will be the shepherd of the sheep on the last day.
“Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Lord says: Woe to the shepherds of Israel who only take care of themselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock.’ ” There are clergy like that too, you know.
“You have not strengthened the weak. You have not healed the sick. You have not bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays. You have not searched for the lost.” You have sat in manses and archiepiscopal palaces and wonderful situations in the countryside. “My sheep wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. They were scattered over the whole earth, and no one searched or looked for them.
Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, because my flock lacks a shepherd and so has been plundered and has become food for all the animals, and because my shepherds did not search for my flock but cared for themselves rather more than my flock, therefore, O shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: This is what the Lord says: I am against you, O shepherds.”
Then, verses following: “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I myself will search for my sheep.” Can’t trust anybody else. “As a shepherd looks after his scattered flock when he is with them, so will I look after my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places where they were scattered. I will bring them out from the nations and gather them. I will bring them into their own land. I will pasture them on the mountains of Israel.
I will tend them in a good pasture. They will lie down in good grazing land. I myself will tend my sheep. I will search for the lost and bring back the strays. I will bind up the injured. I will shepherd them. As for you, my flock, I will judge you” Who’s going to do it? Is there any doubt? And I’ve read only half the references.
“I will save my flock. I will judge between one sheep and another.” Then all of a sudden: “I will place over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he will tend them; he will tend them and be their shepherd. I the Lord will be their God, and my servant David will be prince among them. I the Lord have spoken.”
You not only have grist for the mill here in calling clergy to proper ministry, not only clergy, but anybody who’s involved in shepherding ministry in the people of God. Also beyond all of that, you have one of these great messianic themes, do you not? God himself comes. Lo and behold, he comes, and it’s David who’s here.
These are the Old Testament foundations for what ultimately becomes the doctrine of the incarnation. Not to see them from the Christian vantage point is to be blind. It is important from the Old Testament to lay out the foundations. Nor is this something that I’m just seeing without warrant. Jesus himself alludes to several phrases in here.
For example, when it is said of him that he looks over and sees the people a sheep without a shepherd. Or when he says in John 10, “I am the good shepherd.” That’s just one such theme that’s bound up with Christology, the Davidic dynasty, the eschatological coming of God to save his people. It’s bound up with styles of ministry, what you’re really there for.
Doesn’t it remind you along another line of the kind of thing that’s said of Timothy? “I have no one like him who cares for your souls.” This passage is linked to all kinds of things. It’s linked also to 1 Peter, chapter 5, isn’t it? “Be a shepherd of the flock of God.” What kind of shepherd? Not eager for money, caring for their souls, not lording it over them. Ultimately modeled on the great shepherd. Suddenly, this is tied to all kinds of things. This is only one of a fairly substantial number of passages in the Prophets dealing with shepherds and the flock of God.
Let me pick up another theme along the same sort of line that ties your whole Bible together: the temple. Now if you’re going to have a biblical theology of the temple, you’ve really got to go back farther, of course, to the foundations of the tabernacle. But if you follow the line of the tabernacle-come-temple, then you move not only from the foundations in Exodus 32–34 but ultimately to the entrance into the Promised Land and setting up the thing in Shiloh. It’s captured by the Philistines and returned.
Ultimately, the capture of Jerusalem, bringing it to Jerusalem, and finally, the building of the temple there. The great sacrifice under Solomon in the Davidic dynasty. The shekinah glory comes upon the temple. The great prayer of Solomon in this regard. Ultimately you get the exile. First, the northern, then the southern kingdom, and then the great passages in Ezekiel (now we’ve come to the prophets again) where, on the one hand, you find the priests in a little anteroom of the temple, bowing to the east worshipping the sun god.
Then ultimately in his vision the glory lifting up from the temple, departing from it. The glory departs and the temple is nothing but a God-damned forsaken shell. Even when the new temple is built, there is no report anywhere of the glory coming upon it. None. Then it is written, “The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us and we have seen his glory.” “ ‘Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it again.’ This he said of himself.”
Then you come to the church, which can be configured as a temple. In 1 Corinthians, chapter 3, it’s the church that is the temple and God indwells it. In 1 Corinthians 6, we individualize so quickly, we go to the individual usage of the metaphor. There it’s the body, our individual bodies, that are the temple of God, but that’s a derivative metaphor. It’s the whole people of God that are foundationally the temple in Paul’s thought.
Then you move on the book of Revelation. The new heaven and the new earth, or configure differently, the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven. “I saw no temple in that place, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple.” That is, you no longer need a mediating structure to bring you to God precisely because you are in the presence of God all the time.
How is the city built? Strangest architecture you’ve ever seen. It’s built like a cube: as long and as wide and as high. What’s the only cube in the whole Bible? The Most Holy Place. Image piled on image piled on image piled on image in order to teach us that finally what heaven means, what the new heaven and the earth means, what the temple means is that ultimately we are in the unshielded presence of the blazing glory of God and delighting in it forever.
If you are preaching from Ezekiel, therefore, you have some kind of obligation to make the connections backward and to make the connections forward. What you will not do is preach on this sort of passage and talk about whether or not the glory is in your church building! You build the structures of biblical theology. You work out the way these things operate in Scripture.
The same sort of thing could be said about marriage and whoredom. I’ve started editing a series of books called New Studies in Biblical Theology. The first one came out by David Peterson on sanctification, Possessed by God. The second one is not far from going to the press and it’s simply called Whoredom. Boy, that’ll get your attention, won’t it?
All this book is doing is simply tracing the notion of spiritual apostasy across Scripture. It is bound up itself with the theme of marriage. So that the author begins with an analysis of Genesis 2, marriage, how it’s structured. Then ultimately in the pre-prophetic material, about 16 times in the Pentateuch, you get these warnings against apostasy.
In these particular passages, it’s likened to adultery. “You abandon me, this covenant God, and you go whoring after other gods.” Eventually that theme becomes powerful in the Prophets, does it not? Climaxing in Hosea, but certainly not restricted there. There the people of God are pictured as mares, nags in the field, neighing after every stallion that comes along. Waiting, waiting to be taken on by the next god. You’re meant to be full of revulsion. You’re meant to be disgusted by this imagery. “But,” God says, “that’s exactly what you’re doing to me.”
In the New Testament, the same language is picked up: Yahweh and his people, Christ and the church. It’s tied even more tightly to marriage by Paul, especially in Ephesians 5. I don’t think you can understand Christian marriage until you understand the relationship between God and his people. I don’t think you can understand the relationship between God and his people until you understand something about Christian marriage. They’re tied that closely together.
You’re reading along in that passage and you think he’s talking about marriage, then he says, “But I’m really talking about Christ and the church.” Then you read a little farther, but nevertheless that’s the way it works out in your marriage. But that’s not the end of it. It’s not just some sort of moralistic conclusions about how you should live. It ultimately goes on to the book of Revelation. How does the book of Revelation end? With the marriage supper of the Lamb.
In human relationships, we know of no sort of interpersonal relationship more delightful, more pleasurable, more intimate, or more knowing than sexual union in a happy marriage. God himself dares to speak of the union of his Son with his people on the last day in those terms. Paul says, “I have betrothed you to Christ as a virgin to her husband.” Now the final chapters have the marriage supper of the Lamb.
Those themes are everywhere in the Prophets so that they are designed to incite disgust over infidelity of a spiritual nature. They are designed, in the larger canonical structure, to incite anticipation in union with Christ on the last day. Now I have only picked up a few themes. There are many more of the same order.
The new birth theme. Where does that come from? I’ll come to John 3, of course, whenever I come to it this week. It’s coming up somewhere. John 3 is tied finally to Ezekiel, chapter 36. Ezekiel, chapter 36 is one of the new covenant chapters. The new covenant chapters in the Prophets are many: Jeremiah 31; Ezekiel 36.
Then with (or without) the new covenant language being used, hinted at, or made explicit in various ways and expounding the doctrine of the Spirit. Thus you have Joel cited by Peter on the day of Pentecost. “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh: men and women, young and old … in those days.” Ezekiel, chapter 36: “I will sprinkle clean water upon them, and they will be clean. I will pour out my Spirit and they will have a fresh heart.”
You’re not long into this kind of literature before you discover that that is tied to the epistle to the Hebrews and new covenant language, even at the Lord’s Table. In the Pauline heritage of the words of institution. “Do this in remembrance of me,” he says, with respect to the bread. Then the cup. “This is the blood of the new covenant.” Or, “This is the covenant in my blood poured out for many for remission of sins. Do this in remembrance of me.” Where does this new covenant language come from? What does it mean?
It’s tracked out in all kinds of ways, but it forces you to ask (if you’re a biblical theologian at all) “New covenant? What’s the tie to the old covenant? What’s the sequence?” That is picked up, for example, in Hebrews 8, 9, and 10. That is tied in turn also … Since the old covenant is tied so strongly to priestly sacrifices and priestly ritual and that sort of thing then, of course, you’ve got to ask, “What is this new priest after the order of Melchizedek doing in there?” That’s bound up with new covenant themes as well.
I would love to unpack those themes from Hebrews, but unless those structures of thought are firmly in your mind, then when you’re preaching on the relevant Old Testament passages, you won’t make the connections forward. To those of you who are Old Testament theologians or Old Testament scholars or preachers very much interested in the Old Testament, let me tell you quite frankly: you are as obligated to work forward as the New Testament theologians are to work backward; it’s still one canon.
Before leaving this subject (that is, preaching from the Old Testament; in fact, more generally, before leaving Old Testament genres to turn to the New tomorrow) I want to reflect with you just a little on the fact that …
4. There are diverse ways you may move from reading of Scripture to the actual shaping and emphasis of your sermon.
It’s one thing to work at these sorts of themes and canonical structures and so on. It’s another thing to ask yourself, “How then do you work it out in the structure of your sermon?” In some ways, that’s a harder subject. Because there is less material there that you can simply say, “Go away and learn. Read. It’s all there in the book.” It’s more complex. There are several ways of doing things.
A. One of the ways you can do it is by reserving the first few minutes of your sermon to an extended theological introduction.
If you do that, you mustn’t make it heavy so that you’ve turned everybody off for the rest of the sermon. But it is possible to build a framework into which the text you are using now fits.
That’s what I tried to do in part yesterday on the Wisdom sermon. I worked out a larger theology that dealt with God speaking and human beings as image-bearers speaking the nature of truth and how these kinds of things are tied together in Revelation in order and structure. You’re building a whole biblical theology into which the importance of words and speech then fit as one contributing element.
I heard a sermon once where somebody used about 20 minutes of a 55-minute sermon merely to give a kind of biblical theology of doubt, its diverse causes and remedies in Scripture. (I’m not suggesting that everybody should be preaching 55-minute sermons; this was merely an illustration.) Sometimes it’s intellectual. Sometimes it’s moral. Sometimes it’s want of information.
Sometimes you have to wait until the next stage of redemptive history. Sometimes it’s a combination of things. Sometimes you’re just tired and worn out, like Elijah running away from the queen. Poor chap was not only discouraged spiritually, the guy is plain flat-out exhausted. So the angel lets him sleep and gives him a little snack. Sometimes the most godly thing you can do in the whole world is go to bed and have a snooze.
Now after working out all of these different kinds of doubt and how to handle things, then he gradually funnels in, finally, to a particular kind of doubt and deals with the text, which was John 20 and Thomas. You’ve done two things by proceeding like this.
First, you’ve provided a biblical theological framework. This is useful in itself. It helps people get balance and perspective. Secondly, you have avoided the trap that preachers who stick only narrowly to one text very exclusively sometimes fall into. Namely, giving the impression that all doubt is handled by the thing handled in this particular passage, which just isn’t true. So it gives the impression that either the passage or the pastor is a bit of twit because, “At the end of the day that’s not my experience at all. That’s not going to handle my doubt.”
Now you can’t do that in every sermon, it would get much too repetitive, but it is a useful thing to be done. It may be that you shouldn’t try to give the whole typology of temples every time you come across any temple reference. On the other hand, you may give part of it on an occasion and then expound a chunk of something. Another way of handling it (I use it rarely myself, but once in a while I do, and I did this morning) is to …
B. Take two passages.
I purposely did not work out the typology between Ezekiel 37 and the new covenant today due to time constraints. I think there are profound links built right into the Canon itself. I didn’t bother teasing them out today, partly because I’ve been talking about them and partly because if I were in a sequence in a church I would’ve teased some of them out already in Ezekiel 36 and John 3. Now I’m in Ezekiel 37. I don’t have to tease them all out again; I just preach both passages.
People are beginning to see how some of the connections are worked without necessarily having them all in place in every occasion right away, but they’re beginning to see how these things work out thematically. It’s not that there’s a god in the Old Testament and there’s another god in the New or he’s changed gears or he’s doing something different.
It’s still fundamentally the same kinds of principles that are at stake: God, by his Spirit, through the ministry of the Word, brings about life out of death. Then, of course, there are some interesting questions that some of the more alert in the congregation will ask. “Is that in any sense prophesying? Is it looking forward to something, or does it just happen?” Then you’re into the whole realm of typology, whether you like it or not.
C. Sometimes one can do this sort of thing in a more restrained way.
That’s what I tried to do with the Genesis 39 sermon. That sermon was shaped toward the immediately moral questions, but then because of the way the thing was literarily constructed, you’re forced to ask questions about how Genesis 39 fits with Genesis 38. Then you’ve got some of the FOIL questions between Judah and Joseph, if you recall.
Then you ask how that fits into the larger book of Genesis and the Pentateuch, and Joseph’s temptation is thus tied to the preservation of the whole nation. Toward the end, I also reflected just briefly about how that ultimately lead to the preservation of the messianic line, which brings forth Jesus, without whom the whole thing is a purposeless exercise in any case … there is no forgiveness from sin, there is no hope.
I don’t think that you should try and track out everything under every occasion. How much you track out will vary enormously, but usually you can at least put in some brief paragraph, some brief few sentences that are suggestive, if on other occasions you track out in massive detail.
I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn here if I mention that I’ve scanned over about half the questions that have come in. There was one questioner who yesterday asked if I was not perhaps a bit guilty of preaching just like a rabbi? By which he meant that I was using the Old Testament without reference to Christ or the new covenant.
Peter was with me at the time, and my initial reaction was, “This questioner is a Moore College graduate,” (I’m allowed to say that here; I’m not sure I could say it in another city) because Moore College is very, very strong, rightly, on tying the whole Bible together. It’s rightly strong. It is very strong on biblical theology.
But in my experience (this is my thirteenth or fourteenth time to Australia) I have found some Moore College graduates who have that image so strongly in their mind that they feel they’re letting down the side unless they devote at least 50 percent of every sermon to Jesus. In all fairness, I really don’t think a rabbi could’ve said all that I said in any of those sermons.
A rabbi wouldn’t have taken Joseph and ended up with Jesus or the messianic line that ends up on the cross. I really don’t think a rabbi would’ve handled the question of truth that ultimately ends up in truth in incarnation on the Wisdom sermon. I don’t think so. But I’m not sure that to be faithful to Scripture in these canonical and biblical theological structures you have to beat the same drum all the time in every sermon.
What you do have to do is beat it often enough so that people get these sorts of biblical and theological structures well and truly in their minds. I’m not suggesting for a moment that the staff of Moore don’t see this. I have found some graduates from Moore who don’t see this, it seems to me. And if I say any more along those lines people will be intimidated from asking questions, which isn’t quite the point.
All I’m saying is you have to make some judgments along the line about how much you emphasize these points of continuity. It may be, you could well argue, that if I had preached on, let’s say, Genesis 39 and that was the first time I had touched the Old Testament for some time and I had drawn any lines in Scripture recently, it was about time I did so a little more, and that one should’ve devoted more attention to where this was ultimately going.
Yes, yes, yes. But on the other hand, if it’s part of a preaching program in which you’re constantly working through these sorts of questions and you’re alert to them and you’re teasing them out and making reference to them all the time, then it may be that when you get to Genesis 39, you don’t want to lay it on any more thickly than that or else it sounds too much like a one-string violin with your finger stuck on one place, too.
D. How you will go forward, how you will choose what elements you put in, will in part be shaped by what specific kind of application you will make.
I need to be careful here, because it is possible that you’re looking for an application that, quite frankly, this Scripture won’t yield. In which case, change your text.
Sometimes people think of a very good sermon and then hunt for a text. “My people need this.” Therefore, you give them this and because you’re doing a sequence of expositions, you find it in that text because, “They need this.” Then the connections between text and this become very thin indeed.
On the other hand, there are many instances where you come to a certain point in Scripture and the application could be slanted or swung in several different directions. For example, you might come to Ezekiel’s watchmen. Now you have to explain who they are in the context, how it works in the context. You have to explain something about how the concerns for people in leadership to bear responsibility touches more broadly based considerations than just watchmen in a tower.
It’s bound up also with the false shepherds, isn’t it? But how will you apply it? How will you swing it? That depends. It depends in part on where you are at that moment in the life of your congregation and your reading of what’s going on in your church and your denomination and your nation.
It may be that it will be very localized and individualized and what you’re really trying to do is encourage ordinary Christians and Sunday school teachers and people like that to take their ministry very seriously. You have warnings to give. Do you ever give personal warnings to your own children and young people? “They will die, but their blood I will require at your hand.” Yes, that’s part of an application, isn’t it?
Or it may be also that it’s tied to larger, let’s say, denominational questions. Does a denomination have the right to avoid questions of judgment? Shall we be like the people the prophets denounced? “Peace, peace when there is no peace.” “Your blood I will require at their hands.” Or it may be that you’re preaching at a preacher’s conference. It might be a nice, polite, middle-of-the-road, comfortable evangelic sort of meeting but it’s so dilute and wishy-washy that you ask for a show of hands, “How many have preached on hell anytime in the last five years?”
“Where were those who warned people of the wrath to come?” “Your blood I will require at your hands.” In each case you’re making a slightly different application. How you handle it, how you slant it, how you shape it is, in fact, in part going to be constrained by pastoral considerations, isn’t it? There is a dynamic, to use hermeneutical terms, between the first horizon and the second horizon. Every application is not absolutely constrained by the donor text.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, preaching from the Old Testament Prophets authorizes all kinds of fire and vision. It takes you out of narrow individualism to massive concerns in the nation and the church and integrity and eschatology and Christology. This is the place for big thoughts, massive movements. Here you preach not the odd little verse, but swings of thought.
Hear the Word of the Lord. Amen.
