It is of little wonder that most pulpits today lack preaching flavored with the aroma of the gospel, when pastors to a great degree do not have any clue on how to put their Bible together. This is the reason why, at least in some circles of Christendom, preaching is merely an articulation of ethical and moral imperatives and has nothing to do with gospel indicatives. There is no exegetical faithfulness in making distinctions between descriptive and prescriptive passages. Little or no thought is given to what unifies the whole Bible. Some even question whether there is any such unity, even venturing to speak against the Old Testament.
We need to rediscover and appreciate with deeper levels of insight the bond between God’s partial and preparatory words of promise spoken through Israel’s prophets and his final word spoken in Jesus, the Son who is the Word (Heb. 1:1–2; John 1:1, 14). The contemporary sense of estrangement of the Old Testament from the New Testament is an anomaly in the history of the church. From the apostolic period through the Church Fathers, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Reformation, the church maintained a hearty confidence that God’s role as the primary author of Scripture, speaking his message infallibly through distinctive human voices, secures the harmony and unity of the Bible’s message from Genesis to Revelation. Admittedly, some like Marcion denied that the Lord who addressed Moses on Sinai is the Father of our Lord Jesus. The church, however, condemned such aberrant repudiation of the Old Testament as contradictory to the teaching of Jesus himself. Others failed to recognize the diversity within the Bible’s unity, especially the fact that the Messiah, in bringing Old Testament promises and institutions to fulfillment, also has transformed God’s covenantal modes of relating to his people. Nevertheless, despite such anomalies in relating the Old Testament to the New Testament, the heartbeat of the church as a whole has coincided with Augustine’s pithy maxim: “The old is in the new revealed, the new is in the old concealed.” [1]
The answer to all of these is given by our Lord Jesus Christ Himself in Luke 24, when He expounded the Scriptures to the disciples on the road to Emmaus and showed how the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms were all about Himself. Pastors would do well if they realize how the whole Bible is all about Jesus Christ. We need preachers who are committed to a redemptive-historical reading of the Bible and expounds its central theme – the person and work of Lord Jesus Christ, the full and final revelation of God.
How would a Christocentric reading of Scriptures look like? How would preaching Christ from all of Scriptures look like?
Here is an interesting short clip of Tim Keller giving us a feel of how Christ is all though out the Old Testament. He thus shows how the Bible is basically not about us, but primarily about Jesus Christ. The video ends with an implication for preachers. May those of us who are called to preach Christ take heed.
Footnotes
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[1] Dennis. E. Johnson, Him We Proclaim: Preaching Christ From All The Scriptures, Pg 4
