Preaching the Old Testament as Christian Scripture

This is a paper that I recently wrote for Dr. John Walton at Wheaton College Graduate School on how to preach and teach from the Old Testament. Please be aware that much of this was footnoted in the copy I turned in to Dr. Walton. Unfortunately, I'm not able to bring these over into a blog post. If anyone happens to read this I would love to get feedback. God Bless!!

Preaching the Old Testament as Christian Scripture

Since the inception of the Holy Spirit’s New Covenant ministry, the Church has been characterized by the proclamation of God’s message of salvation through the written Word of God. Throughout the narratives of Acts, the apostles are shown to preach the gospel wherever they go. Interestingly, as they proclaim the good news of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, the apostles preach on the basis of Old Testament texts and frequently cite the Old Testament as they describe the work that Christ has accomplished. This pattern continues into the New Testament epistles where we find the apostles laying down doctrine and exhorting local congregations by citing the Old Testament. It goes without saying that, in the Apostolic period, much of New Testament scripture had not yet been penned and those works that had been penned were not in wide circulation. Thus, we find the apostles supporting their message about Jesus Christ from the Old Testament scriptures. In comparison to the period of Apostolic preaching, today there is a sad neglect of the Old Testament in the Church’s teaching and preaching. I believe that this situation derives from two primary factors; a lack of understanding how to faithfully interpret the Old Testament and secondly, an inability to apply the Old Testament to the lives of New Covenant Christians. Therefore, what the Church needs is a recovery of the ability to exegete the Old Testament scriptures in their original historical, literary and theological context followed by the ability to fully articulate the theological significance of Old Testament pericopae as they pertain to Christians living under the New Covenant. The act of proclamation is thus the fruit and culmination of the process of careful exegesis and theological development.

Ideally, the full process of exegesis should undergird the act of preaching or teaching an Old Testament pericope. The preacher thus should go through the process of examining the literary aspects of the text from the top down. Issues of genre and rhetorical strategy need to have particular importance at this stage for a proper contextual understanding of the passage. Once this stage has been completed then the preacher should examine the exegetical details of the passage. This would include the process of lexical and syntactical studies, discourse analysis as well as any historical background issues that may affect the interpretation.

Expository preaching that works systematically through a book of the Old Testament is ideally suited for such an exegetical approach as all these steps are necessary for understanding the Biblical book in its entirety as well as relating each preached pericope to the message and rhetorical thrust of the work as a whole. However, even when preaching solitary sermons on a text or topical studies that center on one or two passages of scripture, it is necessary to engage in the whole process; even if to a lesser extent. The goal in this exegetical process is to understand the message in the text in the way that the original author and the original recipients would have understood it. It is by this triangulation of the three points of the hermeneutical spectrum; author, text and reader that the preacher can maintain his link to meaning as we best understand it. Unless one goes through the labor of understanding the details of the text, he is cut off from the authority inherent in the message that the Holy Spirit inspired into the text.

While the exegetical work in the text is certainly foundational and indispensable to the enterprise of interpretation in order to maintain the link to inspiration and the authority of the Holy Spirit; it is not the last word when it comes to the interpretive process. Revelation was given to us so that we might know God and His ways and plans more fully. In this way, the text of Scripture is no mere historical artifact; it is the authoritative revelation of the God with whom the Church is in Covenant relationship. Therefore, for our knowledge about God and His ways and purposes is to be authoritative, it must be based on what is communicated about Him through the text of Scripture. In this way, the interpretive process must not be satisfied only with the historical exegesis; it must press on to the theological dimension.

The first aspect of the theological dimension relates directly to what the text under examination for preaching communicates about God. Every text, in some way or another, will communicate something to us of the character or purpose of God. Even texts where there may be a conspicuous absence of direct mention of God may lead us to greater understanding of His providential ways of governing the world and its systems. It is important, therefore, to understand that this first aspect of theological reflection flows directly from the pericope at hand.

However, just as historical exegesis is not the stopping point for interpretation but necessarily leads into the theological process, the theology which is explicitly drawn from the exegetical detail work in the text is the foundation for further theological reflection across the canon to understand God’s ways and purposes in the full light of progressive revelation. This is especially true when it comes to the task of preaching. It is important and necessary to demonstrate how there are trajectories in every OT text that find their telos in Christ and His salvific work on behalf of God’s people. Thus this step is, in a sense, a bridge between the theological reflection stage and application stage for the Church. While it is true that the Old Testament texts contain knowledge about God that is true and authoritative on its own, Christians living in the New Covenant era inaugurated by Christ’s death, burial, resurrection and ascension cannot end the theological process merely with grasping a texts original theological significance. Any knowledge of God at this stage of redemptive history is mediated by Christ who is YHWH revealed to us in the flesh and who represents the culmination of God’s saving work on behalf of His people.

Sidney Greidanus has done much work on how to preach the Old Testament scripture Christianly in a hermeneutically responsible way. He outlines six broad ways in which the Old Testament texts can find their telos in Christ. Each of these ways is gleaned from ways in which the New Testament authors are shown to understand and interpret the Old Testament texts in light of the Christ event. These include the way of redemptive-historical progression, promise-fulfillment, typology, analogy, longitudinal themes, and contrast. Thus, any text can be shown to have trajectories that lead to Christ’s work in at least one or possible several of these ways. It is by careful understanding of redemptive history and the careful application of these categories based on an accurate exegesis of the text that safeguards the theological process from fanciful conclusions. It can thus be said that for Christians, the Old Testament is to be understood to have its own authority as it did for the Covenant community in the OT. Now, in addition, it also has authority in as much as it provides the categories by which we understand the culmination of YHWH’s saving and redeeming work through Jesus Christ.

Once the detailed work of exegesis and the Christo-telic theological reflection are completed, it is important for a preacher to grasp how to apply the text and its accompanying theology to the gathered Church. Unfortunately, preaching in the contemporary, Evangelical church is often shallow and moralizing to the extent that much of Western Christianity is theologically impoverished and legalistic. Western Christians are so pragmatically driven that unless they have an “action step” to take home with them from a Sunday service, they feel that the preacher has not made application. Against this, it must be asserted that having our view of God enlarged is certainly a sure starting point for application if not a sufficient application in and of itself! Seeing the grandeur and sovereignty of YHWH played out across the OT narratives and beautifully expressed in the prophetic and poetic books should be enough to move the Church to worship. In this way, the process of theological reflection based on the exegesis of the passage is directly applicable to New Covenant believers.

In addition, I believe that it is possible to preach ethics from the Old Testament in a hermeneutically responsible and non-legalistic manner. Unfortunately, the vast majority of preaching from the Old Testament in the American church, which attempts to focus on ethics, tends to try to exhort Christians from the moral examples of the characters portrayed in the OT. The sad fact of such preaching is that it gives people a standard, whether real or fabricated, without the accompanying theological motivation necessary for the ethic to not be legalistic. Whenever right action is done from improper motivation, it is just as sinful as doing the wrong action. However, anything done from the motivation of wanting to see God’s Name honored through Christ will be pleasing to God. Therefore, the Church needs to recover a theocentric approach to ethics.

In addition to gaining a proper motivation for honoring God through preaching His glory from the Old Testament, there needs to be an accompanying emphasis on the Gospel. It is through the work of the Spirit which was purchased by Christ’s atoning and victorious death on the Cross that Christians are able to live lives that honor God by exalting His glory. It is ultimately in the Gospel that Christians find the proper motivation and necessary power to please God in their lives. This primacy of the Gospel in the Christian life is what necessitates the Christo-telic interpretation of the Old Testament. Unless Christians are continually brought back to the Gospel or shown how Old Testament texts culminate in the Gospel, any ethical exhortation a preacher makes will be in danger of producing legalism in the life of the congregation.
It is through the process of top-down and bottom-up exegesis and canonical theological reflection that is based in the exegesis of the text that we can see preaching and teaching as the culmination of the entire interpretive process. It is essential to recognize that each of these elements must be in place in order to maintain our link to scripture which is the authoritative, inspired Word of God. However, there is no value in the detailed exegetical work or theological process unless it produces fruit for the sake of the Church. These texts were meant to be understood and God was meant to be seen for the sake of His Covenant community of which we are a part. In addition, we must also remember that each step of the process of preparation for teaching and preaching needs to be done in conscious dependence on the Holy Spirit. As the One at Work to inspire the texts of scripture, it is through his agency that our hermeneutical models and ways of drawing application from the text will ultimately be successful.

Bibliography

Broyles, Craig C., Editor. Interpreting the Old Testament: A Guide for Exegesis. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001.

Chapell, Bryan. Christ-Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon. Second Edition. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005.

Chisholm, Robert B. From Exegesis to Exposition: A Practical Guide to Using the Hebrew Bible. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1998.

Goldsworthy, Graeme. Gospel-Centered Hermeneutics: Foundations and Principles of Evangelical Biblical Interpretation. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Academic, 2006.

----------------------. Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000.

Greidanus, Sidney. Preaching Christ from the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999.

----------------------. The Modern Preacher and the Ancient Text: Interpreting and Preaching Biblical Literature. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1988.

Stuart, Douglas. Old Testament Exegesis: A Handbook for Students and Pastors. Third Edition. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001.