Preaching the Old Testament

You do not need a theory of how to preach the Old Testament before you have watched someone do it, and the New Testament gives you an apostle doing it in 1 Corinthians 10:1-13. The setting matters. The Corinthians were confident. They had knowledge, they said, that an idol is nothing (8:4), and some of them were eating in idol temples (8:10). They had been baptised and they shared the Lord's table. Paul could have answered them with an argument. Instead he preached them an Old Testament text, or rather a cluster of them, from Exodus and Numbers.

Look at what he does, in order. He begins with privilege. Our forefathers, he calls them, though most of his hearers were Gentiles, which tells you at once that he considers Israel's history to be the church's own family history. They were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea; they were all baptized into Moses (10:2); they all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ (10:3-4). Then he turns: nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them (10:5). And then he names the sins one at a time, idolatry, sexual immorality, testing, grumbling, each with its Old Testament judgment, and lays each one beside the Corinthians' temptations.

Notice two things about that sermon, because together they are the whole of this lesson. First, Paul reads the wilderness christologically. The rock was Christ. He means that the pre-incarnate Son was present with Israel and was the source of their provision, and he can say it without explanation, which suggests the Corinthians had heard such things before; Jewish tradition, in Pseudo-Philo's Biblical Antiquities, probably from the first century, and later in the Tosefta, spoke of a well that travelled with Israel through the desert, and Paul may be correcting or claiming that tradition. Second, Paul reads the wilderness exemplarily. These things took place as examples (10:6), and were written down as warnings for us (10:11). He draws a direct line from Israel's conduct to the Corinthians' conduct, and the line is a moral warning.

The two readings are not rivals in Paul. The first serves the second. Because Christ himself was with Israel, Israel's fall is a warning to people who have Christ: privilege did not save them and it will not save you. The warning of verse 12, that the one who thinks he is standing firm should be careful not to fall, gets its force from the claim of verse 4. And the sermon ends with grace rather than threat: God is faithful, he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear, he will provide an escape (10:13). Christ, warning, grace, in one paragraph. Whatever you concluded in the last lesson about the debate between the schools, this is a passage where neither school has to give anything up.

And look at the phrase that gives the anchor its weight. The warnings were written down for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come. The Greek is ta tele ton aionon, the ends of the ages, and the picture is of two ages meeting, the old one reaching its goal as the new one breaks in. Paul is saying something about where his readers stand in history: at the point to which the Old Testament was heading. That is the location from which every Christian preacher reads the Old Testament. You do not read Exodus as a Jew in Moses' day read it, because you cannot; you are standing on the far side of the cross and the empty tomb. And you must not read it as if Moses' day did not matter, because Paul's whole argument depends on its having happened.

The previous lesson named Sidney Greidanus's seven roads from an Old Testament text to Christ, each one taken from the practice of the New Testament itself. Here they are with an example of each. Use them as a checklist, not a formula: a given passage will usually travel one or two of them well, and the rest badly or not at all. The Hermeneutics track worked typology and its controls in detail, in the second lesson of its fourth module, so this lesson does not repeat that argument; it asks what the roads look like from the pulpit.

Redemptive-historical progression. The passage is a step in a story, and the preacher shows where the story goes. The flood, the call of Abraham, the exodus and the exile are not separate lessons but chapters of one plot whose resolution is Christ. This is the widest road and the safest; almost every Old Testament narrative can travel it, because every narrative stands somewhere on the line from creation to new creation. The preacher's question is simply: what has God done before this point, what has he not yet done, and what does this episode contribute to the promise he is keeping?

Promise and fulfilment. The Old Testament makes specific promises, and the New Testament announces that they are kept. The seed of the woman who will crush the serpent's head (Genesis 3:15); all nations blessed through Abraham (Genesis 12:3, which Paul in Galatians 3:8 calls the gospel announced in advance); the son of David whose throne will be established forever (2 Samuel 7:12-13); the servant pierced for our transgressions (Isaiah 53:5). This road is the one Walter Kaiser trusts most, because the promise is there in the text for its first hearers. Its discipline is to preach the promise first as its first hearers heard it, in its own setting, and then its fulfilment, so that the congregation hears God keeping his word rather than the preacher finding a proof text.

Typology. A person, event or institution in Israel's history corresponds to Christ by God's design, and the later reality is greater. Adam is a pattern of the One to come (Romans 5:14); the snake lifted up in the wilderness corresponds to the Son of Man lifted up (John 3:14); the sacrifices are a shadow of the good things to come (Hebrews 10:1); One greater than Jonah and Solomon is here (Matthew 12:41-42). A type is real in its own day. The bronze snake really healed, and Solomon really was wise. The correspondence is not invented by the reader but woven into the history, and the New Testament usually signals it by a greater-than: the reality outstrips the shadow.

Analogy. As God was to Israel, so he is in Christ to the church. The God who heard Israel groaning in Egypt hears his people now; the God who disciplined Israel in the wilderness disciplines his children now (Hebrews 12). This road is used constantly by Paul and Hebrews and James, and it is where the previous lesson's debate becomes practical: analogy can be drawn through Christ, as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, or it can be drawn directly, as the same God then and now. Both are legitimate. What makes analogy fail is drawing it between the human characters only, Israel then and us now, without asking what God was doing in the text.

The remaining roads are shorter. Longitudinal themes trace a single subject across the canon, such as the temple, from Eden through the tabernacle and Solomon's temple to Christ's body and the city with no temple in Revelation 21. New Testament references follow the New Testament's own use of a passage: if the passage is quoted or alluded to in the New Testament, start there. And contrast recognises that some Old Testament texts point to Christ by the distance between them and him: the law of retaliation in Exodus 21:24 and Jesus' 'But I tell you not to resist an evil person' in Matthew 5:39, or the imprecatory psalms set beside the prayer from the cross. Contrast is not a dismissal of the earlier text. Exodus 21:24 limited vengeance in its own day; the contrast shows how much further Christ takes the same movement.

Allegory, in the sense that matters for the pulpit, assigns to the details of a text meanings that the text itself gives no reason to see. It has a long and learned history, and you should not caricature it. Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish contemporary of Paul, read the Pentateuch as an allegory of the soul's ascent. Origen, in his On First Principles in the third century, taught that scripture has a body, a soul and a spirit, a literal, a moral and a spiritual sense, as a human being does. The medieval church developed four senses, the literal, the allegorical, the moral and the anagogical or heavenward, summed up in a thirteenth-century rhyme usually attributed to Augustine of Dacia: the letter teaches what happened, allegory what to believe, the moral sense what to do, anagogy where you are going.

Two famous examples show both what attracted the method and what is wrong with it from the pulpit. The letter of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians, written near the end of the first century, says at chapter 12 that Rahab's scarlet cord (Joshua 2:18) showed in advance that redemption would come through the blood of the Lord. And Augustine, in his Questions on the Gospels, made the Good Samaritan a map of salvation history: the man going down from Jerusalem is Adam, Jericho is mortality, the robbers are the devil and his angels, the priest and Levite are the ministry of the Old Testament, the Samaritan is Christ, the inn is the church, and the innkeeper is the apostle Paul. Every one of those identifications teaches something true. Not one of them is taught by the passage, and the second destroys the answer Jesus actually gave to the question who is my neighbour.

Allegory has serious defenders today, and fairness requires saying so. Henri de Lubac's Medieval Exegesis, published in French between 1959 and 1964, argued that the spiritual senses were not arbitrary but an expression of the conviction that the whole of scripture is about the mystery of Christ, and a number of recent writers in the movement known as theological interpretation have argued that modern readers lost something real when they abandoned patristic reading. And the ancient interpreters had controls of their own. Augustine's On Christian Teaching held that a reading which builds up love of God and neighbour is not a pernicious error even if it misses what the author meant, but that such a reader should be corrected, as a traveller who leaves the road and reaches the destination by crossing a field is still mistaken about the road. Thomas Aquinas, at the very opening of the Summa Theologiae, held that all the senses are founded on the literal, and that only from the literal sense can an argument be drawn.

Aquinas's rule is the one a preacher needs, and the Reformers took it further. The Antiochene school of the fourth and fifth centuries, Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, had already objected that the Alexandrian allegorists dissolved the history; they spoke instead of theoria, a vision of the higher reality that rises out of the literal sense rather than replacing it. Luther, who allegorised freely in his early lectures, came to distrust the method and insisted on the plain grammatical sense. Calvin's commentaries are relentless on the point. The reason is not that allegorists say false things. It is that the congregation cannot check them. A hearer can open Joshua 2 and see that the cord was the sign the spies gave Rahab so that her house would be spared; he cannot open it and see the blood of Christ, because it is not there. A sermon whose connections only the preacher can see teaches the congregation that the Bible is a code only clever men can read, which is exactly what the Reformers said the medieval church had done.

So the test for the pulpit is simple to state. Could a careful hearer, with the passage open, see the connection you are drawing, once you had pointed it out? If the connection depends on the passage's own words, its place in the story, or the New Testament's explicit use of it, he can. If it depends on a colour, a number, a piece of wood or the sound of a word, he cannot, and you should not preach it, however edifying the destination.

The opposite ditch is quieter and far more common. It is the Old Testament sermon that would be no different if Jesus had never been born. Joseph forgives his brothers, so forgive your family. Nehemiah plans before he builds, so plan before you build. Ruth is loyal, so be loyal. Each of those sentences is a true thing, and none of them is false to the text exactly. What is wrong is what is missing: the God who is acting in the story, the promise he is keeping, and the place of the story in the line that ends in his Son.

This is not the point at which the last lesson's two schools divide, and it is worth being exact about that. Walter Kaiser does not want sermons of that kind any more than Edmund Clowney does. Kaiser's alternative to christocentric method is not a moral lesson; it is the promise-plan of God, preached as the author meant it, with God as its subject. Kuruvilla's alternative is the theology of the passage, which is first of all about God. The critics of the redemptive-historical school object to a forced connection to Christ. They do not object to the passage's own theology, and they do not recommend a sermon in which God has become a supporting character.

The church has been here before, from the other direction. Marcion, in the second century, rejected the Old Testament altogether as the book of a lesser god, and the church excommunicated him and closed ranks around the Old Testament as Christian scripture. Few preachers now would say what Marcion said. A great many congregations, though, are taught as if he had won. They hear the Gospels and the letters, the Psalms when someone is grieving, and almost nothing from the books that make up three quarters of the Bible. Romans 15:4 says everything written in the past was written for our instruction, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. A congregation that never hears the Old Testament preached has been denied most of that instruction and much of that hope.

So the two ditches have something in common. The allegorist and the moraliser both hurry past what the passage is actually saying about God at that point in the story. One hurries to a hidden meaning; the other hurries to a lesson for living. The road between them runs through the passage, not around it: hear what God is doing in the text in its own time, and then follow the lines the New Testament itself has drawn from it to Christ, and then ask what it requires of the people in front of you.

Take Exodus 17:1-7, which is one of the passages behind Paul's sermon, and walk it the whole way, marking each decision as you go.

In its own time. Israel has left the Desert of Sin and camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink (17:1). Two chapters earlier God had given water at Marah, and in the chapter before he had given manna. The people contended with Moses, and Moses names what they are really doing: 'Why do you test the LORD?' (17:2). The verb rendered contend is rib, a word at home in the law court, the vocabulary of bringing a case against someone. God's answer is strikingly formal: take some of the elders as witnesses, take the staff with which you struck the Nile, 'Behold, I will stand there before you by the rock at Horeb' (17:6), strike the rock, and water will come out. The place is named Massah and Meribah, Testing and Quarrelling, because they tested the LORD, saying, 'Is the LORD among us or not?' (17:7). Before you reach for any road to Christ, notice that the passage is already about God: his presence questioned, his patience, and his provision for people who put him on trial.

The canon around it. Numbers 20:2-13 records a second incident, in which Moses strikes the rock twice instead of speaking to it and is barred from the land. Psalm 95:8 turns Massah and Meribah into a warning to every later generation, and Hebrews 3:7-11 quotes that psalm to Christians. Psalm 78:15-16 and Isaiah 48:21 celebrate the water from the rock as God's wonder. Deuteronomy 32:4 calls God himself the Rock. And then 1 Corinthians 10:4: they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ. Beyond those, Jesus stands up at the feast in John 7:37 and calls out that anyone who is thirsty should come to him and drink.

The roads. The New Testament reference road is open, and authoritative: Paul says the rock was Christ, so the preacher may say that the one who gave Israel water in the desert is the one who gives his church life now. Analogy follows closely: the people at Massah are in a wilderness between redemption and arrival, and so is the church, on whom the ends of the ages have come, and the same God provides for both. Contrast is available through Psalm 95 and Hebrews 3: the hardened heart of Massah is a warning to Christians who also ask, in their own thirst, whether the LORD is among us or not. The longitudinal theme of water in the wilderness runs from this rock through Isaiah 43:19-20 to John 4:14 and Revelation 22:17. Promise and fulfilment is not really available here; the passage makes no promise about a future deliverer, and forcing one would be a mistake.

A disputed reading, and a judgment call. Some preachers in the redemptive-historical tradition read the passage further, following Edmund Clowney in The Unfolding Mystery (1988). The scene is a lawsuit. The staff is the staff that struck the Nile in judgment. The people are the guilty party. And God says he will stand by, or upon, the rock, and Moses is to strike it. On this reading the rod of judgment falls not on the people who put God on trial but on the rock where God stands, and the water of life flows from the one who was struck, which the preacher then connects to the cross and even to John 19:34, where blood and water flow from Jesus' pierced side. The reading's strength is that its details are in the text: the legal vocabulary, the staff of judgment, the elders as witnesses, God's standing at the rock. Its weakness is that the text never says God is struck, the Hebrew preposition can mean by as easily as on, which is how the BSB renders it, and the staff struck the Nile to turn it to blood, not to punish the Nile. Mark this as the kind of call you must make with your eyes open: it is a reading built from real details, and it goes further than any New Testament writer explicitly goes. If you preach it, say so.

Two sermons to avoid. The allegorist's sermon makes the staff the cross, the elders the apostles, the water baptism, and the rock the church, and nobody in the congregation can check any of it. The moraliser's sermon says that when life is dry you should pray like Moses rather than grumble like Israel, which is true and turns the God who stands at the rock into an extra in a lesson on attitude. A sermon that holds the road might take as its main idea: the God whom his thirsty people put on trial stands with them and gives them water, and in Christ he still does, so do not harden your heart when the wilderness is dry. That idea comes out of the passage, travels two roads the New Testament has built, and still asks something of the hearer.

You have a passage and a main idea from the second module, and from the last lesson you have a paragraph connecting your passage to Christ. Now test it against what you have just learned. With your Bible, your notebook and a phone for the free tools, do the following four steps.

First, if your passage is from the Old Testament, write down what God is doing in it in its own time, in one sentence, before you mention anything later. If your passage is from the New Testament, find on Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible every Old Testament passage it quotes or alludes to, and write one sentence on what each of those passages meant in its own setting. A New Testament sermon that ignores the Old Testament roots of its passage is missing half its material.

Second, go through the seven roads one by one: redemptive-historical progression, promise and fulfilment, typology, analogy, longitudinal themes, New Testament references, contrast. For each write either the connection your passage makes on that road, with the verse that warrants it, or the word none. Expect most of them to say none. Two good roads are enough for any sermon.

Third, put your connection from last lesson to the hearer's test: could a careful listener with the passage open see this connection once you pointed it out? If not, cross it out and use one of the roads you found in step two. Then put your main idea to the opposite test: would this sermon be any different if Jesus had never come? If the answer is no, you have fallen into the other ditch, and you need to rewrite the main idea so that God's action in the passage is its subject.

Fourth, rewrite your main idea in one sentence that keeps three things: what God does in the passage, the line from the passage to Christ, and what the passage asks of the people who will hear it. Keep the sentence short enough to say aloud in one breath. That sentence is the spine you will build the sermon on in the fourth module.