Preaching Old Testament Texts
From The Forum Magazine, Spring 2014 - view the full issue here
One of the earliest heresies in the Christian church swirled around the issue of preaching the Old Testament. In the second century, Marcion, the son of a bishop from Sinope, advocated a ban on preaching from the Old Testament. Marcion claimed that the Christian faith was essentially a religion of love and, by contrast, Old Testament religion was an oppressive system of law. Furthermore, the creator God of the Old Testament was, in his opinion, arbitrary, capricious, vindictive, and mean. He argued that the God of the Old Testament had nothing at all to do with Jesus who came to reveal the true God, a supreme God of love. Marcion fenced off Jesus from the Old Testament. By rejecting the connection between the creator God of the Old Testament and the one whom Jesus called his Father, the heretic Marcion became one of the first to argue against preaching Christ from the Old Testament.
The Christian church, by contrast, has always embraced preaching the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ using Old Testament texts. Over and against Marcion, the church affirmed in no uncertain terms that the God who reveals himself in the Old Testament is the same God who reveals himself in the New Testament as the Father of Jesus. Not only is the God of the Old and New Testaments one and the same, the church taught that the God of the Bible exhibits consistency of character. After creating the world and seeing it fall into sin, God in love consistently acts to save and redeem what he has made. In light of this, the church has always affirmed that that the Bible is not a collection of loosely related religious texts but an overarching story of God who created the world, saw it fall into sin, and who then was not content to leave it to suffer in broken, sin-infected degradation. The Bible tells the story of God, who moved to save and redeem his sin-decimated creation, an initiative that eventually culminated in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Consequently, preaching the good news of what God has done and is doing to heal, bless, redeem, and save finds its focus in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Preaching using texts from the Old Testament requires this same focus.
Preaching Christ from the Old Testament not only assumes the consistency of God and his character from testament to testament, but it also assumes the consistency of human nature. People in the Old Testament are not all that different from people in the New Testament. People throughout human history, though created in the image of God, are infected by sin, inclined to turn from God, and to suffer the consequences of turning away.
In light of this inclination, the pastor who uses an Old Testament text is always looking for a couple of important features. First, he or she has an exegetical eye peeled for how sin has affected those within the world of the text. How is sin manifested in this part of the biblical story? The preacher then looks for the ways in which God is acting, has acted, or promises to act to save and redeem those fallen creatures. Since God’s saving action in history culminates in the death and resurrection of Jesus, the sermon will always move to show how God’s saving actions in the text are consistent with and find their clearest expression in the good news of the gospel, the high point of which is the cross and resurrection. This anti-Marcion preaching project assumes that the whole Bible is not only revelation, but redemptive revelation, a story intending to introduce us to the God who created and who then moves to save, heal, and bless.
The particular flavor of sin may vary from text to text. There are multiple ways in which human beings choose to turn away from God. God’s human creatures find ways to break all of his commandments. But the tactics that God uses to call back those who have turned away, to heal, to restore, and to bless also come in a variety of flavors.
So, how might this work in particular texts? The preacher might consider along these lines the story of the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22. God has called Abraham out of his Canaanite culture and made a covenant with him. God separates Abraham out from the rest of humanity to form in him and his family a bridgehead for saving the whole creation: “In you,” God tells Abraham, “ will all the nations of the earth be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). Then after giving a son to elderly Abraham and Sarah, God asks Abraham to sacrifice that son. Such a request would have been thought commonplace in the Canaanite culture Abraham once embraced. The flavor of trouble in this text comes from the request being God’s as it raises the question, Is this God who has called Abraham like the other gods of Canaan? Does he, too, demand child sacrifice as a way of maintaining a positive relationship with him? This then prompts a question for us today. What does God expect from us—what sort of sacrifice?
But then, the saving character of God comes shining through the story as the angel of the Lord calls Abraham away from sacrificing Isaac and provides aram-sacrifice in place of his firstborn son. This is the same God who institutes an interim system of animal sacrifice which points ahead to the ultimate sacrifice that God would provide for a rebellious and sin-stricken humanity— the self-giving sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. God not only sacrifices himself on the cross, but in the resurrection of Jesus moves to restore humanity to son- and daughter-ship with God.
Take another example: the book of Proverbs provides the preacher with perhaps less obvious opportunities for preaching the good news of the gospel; but her instinct ought to be toward preaching Christ. Proverbs 26:4-5, for instance, offers an interesting Old Testament preaching possibility. Verse 4 advises the reader not to answer a fool according to his folly, “or you yourself will be like them.” The very next verse advises the exact opposite tactic: Answer a fool according to his folly, “or they will be wise in their own eyes.” This text raises the issue of how a person is to decide if a proverb applies in a given situation or not. Proverbs are wisdom sayings—wise and time-tested practical observations about how the God-created world works—but Proverbs 22 points out the limits of wisdom. Knowing the proverb is not enough; one also has to know if the proverb applies in a given situation. Here is the trouble in the text: how is a human being supposed to know how wisdom applies? Where does one receive the wisdom to apply the proverb? Does one answer a fool according to his folly, or not?
Proverbs itself points the reader to God in his or her effort to apply wisdom. Proverbs 1:7 observes that the “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” The wise person learns and applies wisdom within a healthy and living relationship with the living God. God gives persons in right(eous) relationship with him the insight to apply wisdom to a given situation. As the highest expression of God with us, Jesus—the wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:30)—is God’s final and decisive effort to bring foolish sin-estranged people back into relationship with him. On the cross, Jesus opens up for humanity a healthy relationship with God, and through the resurrection power of his Holy Spirit, draws people into a relationship alive with the life-giving guidance of God. Of course, many other examples from the other genres of Old Testament texts could also be cited.
Preaching the Old Testament demands giving voice to the historical-redemptive trouble and grace of the text and then showing how the text leads toward Christ. Preaching shows what the Old Testament text discloses about the fallen character of humanity and the God who constantly moves to save, redeem, and bless. After showing that trouble, the sermon then shows how that same trouble or one like it applies to our context. After first showing trouble, the sermon moves to set God’s grace over and against it—God’s grace both then and now.
(John Rottman, Professor of Preaching, emeritus)
