Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture

The Application of Biblical Theology to Expository Preaching

Graeme Goldsworthy

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781467430593
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

While strong, gospel-centered preaching abounds, many Christian pastors and lay preachers find it difficult to preach meaningfully from the Old Testament. This practical handbook offers help. Graeme Goldsworthy teaches the basics of preaching the whole Bible in a consistently Christ-centered way.Goldsworthy first examines the Bible, biblical theology, and preaching and shows how they relate in the preparation of Christ-centered sermons. He then applies the biblical-theological method to the various types of literature found in the Bible, drawing out their contributions to expository preaching focused on the person and work of Christ.Clear, complete, and immediately applicable, this volume will become a fundamental text for teachers, pastors, and students preparing for ministry.

CHAPTER 1

Nothing but Christ and Him Crucified

The Preacher’s Dilemma

Evangelical preachers have an agenda. We want to proclaim Christ in the most effective way possible. We want to see people converted and established in the Christian life on the surest foundation — the word of God. We want to see people grow in their spiritual understanding and in godliness. We want to see churches grow, mature, and serve the world by reaching out to it with the gospel and with works of compassion. We want to impact our local communities through evangelism and ministries of caring. We want to strengthen our families and to nurture the children in the gospel. And at the heart of this agenda is the conviction that God has charged us with the ministry of preaching and teaching the Bible as a prime means of achieving these goals. Evangelical preachers stand in a long and venerable tradition going back to the apostles. It is a tradition of the centrality of the preached word in the life of the Christian congregation. We believe that preaching is not some peripheral item in the program of the local church, but that it lies at the very heart of what it is to be the people of God. We understand the activity of preaching as the primary way in which the congregations of God’s people express their submission to his word. Of course the sermon in the church service is not the only way that the word of God comes to us. We encourage people to study the Bible in the privacy of their homes, to attend small group Bible studies, and even to undertake some more formal training in Bible and theology. But none of these things, important as they are, should detract from the primacy of preaching. In chapter 4 I will consider the question of the essential nature of preaching.

What did Paul mean when he wrote 1 Corinthians 2:2, “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified”? It is clear that he wrote in all his epistles about a great deal more than the death of Jesus Christ. It is also clear that the main subject of all his writings is the person and work of Jesus. Yet he also writes about matters concerning his personal life and the lives of his fellow Christians. This particular passage in 1 Corinthians is a useful place to start our investigation, for in it Paul repudiates the worldview of the pagan, the philosopher, and even the Jew who attempts to get a handle on reality apart from the truth that is in Christ. “We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:23-24). The reason for this Christ-centeredness is so that the faith of his readers “might not rest on human wisdom but on the power of God” (1 Cor. 2:5). This means that the only appropriate way to respond to God’s revealed power and wisdom is by being focused on the person of Christ. Elsewhere Paul defines the power of God as Christ and his gospel.¹ We will need, therefore, to take up the question later in this study of what the gospel is.²

The problem we face as preachers is not a new one. Throughout the ages Christian preachers have struggled with the question of the centrality of Christ and how this affects the way we handle the text of the Bible. It is an obvious problem for the preaching of the Old Testament, but, in a more subtle way, it also exists for the preacher of the New Testament. If a passage is not directly about the gospel events of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, to what extent are we obliged to make the connection? Would Paul really have us preach sermons in which we end up making the same platitudinous remarks about Jesus dying for our sins? Can the Old Testament speak to us from within itself and without any attempt being made to connect it to the gospel?

There is no doubt that many Christian preachers, in effect, do preach from the Old Testament about God in the Psalms, or the life of faith exhibited by one or other of the heroes of Israel, without connecting it specifically to the person and work of Christ. Furthermore, it is not only in the more academic books of theology or biblical studies that the Old Testament is dealt with in isolation from the New. Many books and inductive Bible study guides are written specifically to edify Christians from the Old Testament but without any explicit Christian content. A number of factors seem to be at work here, particularly among evangelical writers. There is, first, the correct assumption that the Old Testament is Christian Scripture and that, despite the difficulties in doing so, it must be appropriated for Christian people. Second, there is the recognition that the people of the Old Testament believed in the same God that we as Christians acknowledge. But then there is also the questionable assumption that the people of the Old Testament primarily function to provide patterns of faith and behavior for us to imitate or, conversely, to avoid.

There is often a failure to think through how the link between the people and events of the Old Testament are to be made with us as, presumably, New Testament people. This failure leads to some major defects in preaching, not the least of which is the tendency to moralize on Old Testament events, or simply to find pious examples to imitate. But, as Edmund Clowney puts it,

preaching which ignores the historia revelationis, which “again and again equates Abraham and us, Moses’ struggle and ours, Peter’s denial and our unfaithfulness; which proceeds only illustratively, does not bring the Word of God and does not permit the church to see the glory of the work of God; it only preaches man, the sinful, the sought, the redeemed, the pious man, but not Jesus Christ.”³

Clowney also rightly points out that we have to be very selective in the way we find examples to follow in the Old Testament saints.⁴ After all, we know how the Old Testament has always been an embarrassment to some because much of what are regarded as pious deeds in ancient Israel would simply not pass muster today. This raises the related issue of moral problems in the Bible. The Old Testament is the source of many such moral problems for those who would treat it seriously. Death and destruction, slaughter and pillage, are standard fare in the narratives of Israel’s conquest of Canaan. What do we learn from such situations? If the narratives of Elijah teach us to “walk close to the Lord” as I heard one speaker put it, what are the implications for this walk with God of Elijah’s command to slay all the prophets of Baal? Most of us have worked out some way around these moral dilemmas created by the Old Testament. An evangelical is not likely to feel at home with the assessment of old liberalism that the Old Testament depicts a primitive and, therefore, substandard form of religion. But, the problem remains. What, for example, can we say about the imprecations of Psalm 137, which are approving of those who take Babylonian babies and dash them against a rock!⁵

Inductive Bible study books⁶ are a prime source of the problem, not because there is anything wrong with applying this technique to the study of the Bible as such, but because this method alone is insufficient. If we give a group of Christians the task of reading a portion of the Old Testament in conjunction with some prescribed questions aimed at getting them to look carefully at the text in order to be able to understand what is being said, this is good as far as it goes. But the technique either makes enormous assumptions about the ability of people to see how this portion of text actually fits into the total unity of Scripture and, thus, how it relates to Christ, or else ignores the necessity to do so. Many people would not find that a problem. Parallels between the people of the Old Testament and ourselves are all that some readers need to be able to feel deeply that this is the word of God to us today. I have to say that I do find it a problem, not because I am uninterested in what the Bible has to say to us, but precisely because I am interested. The burning question is whether the predominant attention given to the examples of faith and unbelief in the Bible is really focusing on what God primarily is wanting to say to us.

The point can be illustrated from a more obvious area of biblical teaching. It is quite clear that the New Testament shows us that the person of Jesus Christ is worthy of imitating. In fact the imitation of Christ is an important dimension in the teaching about the Christian disciple’s existence. Yet, most Christians would understand that the imitation of Christ is not the center of the teaching of the New Testament. We are saved and made into the image of Christ not by our efforts to imitate him. Such an idea reduces the gospel to ethical effort. We recognize that the gospel tells us of the absolutely unique work of Christ, both in his living and his dying, by which we are saved through faith. We cannot imitate or live the gospel event as such. We can only believe it. We cannot work our way to heaven by moral endeavor. We can only depend on the finished work of Christ for us. We cannot command other people to live or do the gospel. We must proclaim the message of what God has done for them in Christ. We follow the New Testament in calling on people to live out the implications of the gospel, but we cannot urge people to actually live the gospel, for that was the unique work of Christ. This distinction between the gospel and its fruit in our lives is crucial. If we reject the notions of liberal Christianity that reduced the work of Jesus to ethical example, the implications are far-reaching for the way we handle the Bible. It is clear from the New Testament that the ethical example of Christ is secondary to and dependent upon the primary and unique work of Christ for us. Yet this does not seem to be clear to many when it comes to the Old Testament. The message of the Old Testament is too easily reduced to the imitation of godly example and the avoidance of the ungodly example. This raises the questions of the nature of the Bible’s unity, the relationship of the Testaments. To these we must turn later.

The Centrality of the Gospel

The central message of the New Testament concerns God incarnate, Jesus of Nazareth, who did for us what we could not do for ourselves, in order to bring us, a lost people, back to God. The whole of Scripture is filled with the sense of the divine initiative in salvation. In the Old Testament the sin of Adam and Eve, which brings the judgment of God, is not the end of the story because God has a plan of mercy and grace. The narratives of Noah and Abraham are eloquent of the sovereign work of God to bring rebellious humanity back from the brink of destruction. The covenant of God made with a chosen people is before all else a covenant of grace. God elects his people, makes significant promises to them, and acts to bring about the fulfillment of these promises. Only after the great redemptive act in the exodus from Egypt is Israel given the code of conduct in the law of Sinai: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exod. 20:2). They are already his people through what he has done in the past. They could not save themselves from Egypt and from their bondage to foreign gods; they could only stand still and see the salvation that God would achieve for them (Exod. 14:13-14). Then, having been saved by grace, they are bonded to their God in the covenant of Sinai. This primacy of grace, which is at work all the way through the Old Testament, points us to the centrality and primacy of the gospel of grace in the New Testament.

The nature of the relationship between the salvation revealed in the Old Testament and the gospel of Jesus Christ is something that we strive to understand on the basis of our biblical theology. This is not an easy task, and it is one that is readily shelved in favor of a more platitudinous and moralizing approach to the meaning of the Old Testament for us. The consistently Christian and biblical approach is to start with the New Testament and, specifically, with the gospel.

First, the gospel is central to our thinking in an experiential sense. Through the gospel we are brought to acknowledge the lordship of Christ, our need, and his grace to save all who believe in him. We may have had a lot of information about the contents of the Bible, and even have entertained sincerely religious thoughts before we believed the gospel. But the gospel is our means of contact with the truth about God. Indeed, the message about Christ is the point of turning. Conversion, whether gradual or sudden, is a turning from a worldview and personal commitment in which we ourselves are at the center. For the secular mind, conversion is the point when all facts in our universe cease to be marshaled against the God of the Bible and are seen to testify to his reality. The gospel is the starting point for our eternal life with God. It is the means of becoming reconciled to God so that we have assurance of God’s favor and of the gift of eternal life. It is the means by which we are born again and know the indwelling of God’s Holy Spirit.⁷

Second, the gospel is central theologically. Though we have already touched upon the matter, we must never forget that, in both Testaments, what the people of God are called upon to do is always based upon what has already been done. Jesus is presented in the New Testament as the one who fulfills the promises of God by achieving for humankind the salvation that is otherwise beyond our reach. Against the backdrop of the complexity of the history and prophetic expectations of the Old Testament, Jesus proclaims himself to be the goal of all the purposes and promises of God. Where the Old Testament describes the goal of God’s work in terms of a remnant of the chosen people, the promised land, the temple, the Davidic prince, and a whole range of images and metaphors, the New Testament claims simply that the death and resurrection of Jesus fulfills them all. The mighty acts of God, interpreted by his prophetic word, and by which he revealed his nature, are declared by the preaching of Jesus and his apostles to be preparatory for the person and work of Jesus. The God who acts in the Old Testament is the God who becomes flesh in the New Testament in order to achieve the definitive saving work in the world.

At the heart of this saving work is not the ethical teachings of Jesus, but his obedient life and death, his glorious resurrection and his ascension to the right hand of God on high. In a remarkable way the resurrection is portrayed as the event that encapsulates and fulfills all the theological themes of the Old Testament. This is not in any sense to denigrate the ethical dimension. The Bible shows us that God is lawful and that the freedom we have in Christ is not lawlessness. It is a matter of perspective, as I will say in a number of ways in this study. So often distortions of Christianity come about not by introducing totally foreign elements but by getting certain elements that are manifestly biblical out of perspective. The ethics of the Bible are put out of perspective when they are given exclusive or prior claim over the grace of God. To put it another way, the gift of God is always prior to and the basis of the task we are given, to live godly lives.

Preaching and Biblical Theology

In the course of writing this book I have consulted a wide range of books on preaching. A survey of the history of preaching would show us that the nature of preaching has undergone many changes. The place and nature of the sermon have, from time to time, been under attack from various quarters and in different ways. Most preachers today will have access to the contemporary literature, but few would have the inclination or the resources to examine the development of preaching over the centuries. As evangelicals we will have some notion of apostolic preaching drawn from the New Testament. Beyond that, unless we have a special interest in patristics, or medieval preaching, or in some other historical period, we will probably confine our reading and understanding to some of the many available contributions to the literature of our time. My own impression of the modern literature is that it is predominantly weighted towards matters of effective communication and methods of sermon preparation. I find that questions regarding the nature of Scripture, which provide...