Tag: OT

Live at The Gospel Coalition Conference – 2

~ Bob Hayton

Here is a brief overview of each of the plenary sessions from yesterday’s conference. I’ll have more to say about books and the Band of Bloggers event I went to later.

The music was led by Keith and Kristyn Getty. It was more upbeat and lively than I expected, which was actually nice. The Irish flair was there with even a bagpipe solo. They are introducing a fairly new song of theirs, “By Faith” and also did an even newer one. Prior to session 2, the music at one point dropped out and the congregation was heard more clearly singing “O Church Arise”. The 5,000 or so voices singing that song together was powerful. Praise to Jesus for bringing together his people in places like this conference center (the massive McCormick Place in Chicago) and all around the world…

Session 1: Al Mohler – Studying the Scriptures and Finding Jesus (John 5)
–Download audio–

Mohler explains the problem of a Christless Old Testament, and explains how studying the Scriptures is supposed to result in finding Jesus. He shows how so many people are practical Marcionites, claiming the New Testament is the Christian book, the OT is Hebrew Scriptures. Basically, some would have us do synagogue lectures when we teach from the OT. Don’t get me wrong, his tone wasn’t combative at all. It was a very helpful and hope filled lecture on the importance of seeing Christ in the OT.

Session 2: Tim Keller – Getting Out (Exodus 14)
–Download audio–

Keller showed multiple links from the Exodus account to the New Testament. He explained that the story of the Israelites could be described as this: They were slaves in bondage with no hope and a sentence of death, finding redemption by hiding under the blood atonement, crossing over from death to life, then having a promise of going to a new country. They’re not there yet, but they’re on the way and God has given them his law and a worship system so they treasure and remember His work for them. Keller then says, that’s exactly how you would describe the people of God today, too. He goes on to discuss the layers of bondage and the redemption and how it was accomplished (all by Grace).

Session 3: Alistair Begg – From a Foreigner to King Jesus (Ruth)
–Download audio–

Begg gave us sketches of the beautiful story of Ruth. He showed how Boaz, particularly, was the goel, kinsman redeemer and foreshadows Christ. He also drew parallels from the locale of Ruth’s story and then David’s childhood tending sheep there in Bethlehem, to Christ and the Bethlehem shepherds coming at his birth in Bethlehem. Much to see Christ from in this book.

Session 4: Round-table discussion – Tim Keller, John Piper, Crawford Loritts, Don Carson, Bryan Chapell
–Download audio–

Highlights from that are really anything Keller or Carson said. Loritts emphasized the role of the preacher’s walk with Christ too, in preaching. Piper emphasized not ignoring the context of the OT text itself when preaching from it.

Keller explained his preaching as a fourfold trajectory often: 1) What you should do (as evidenced by this OT text); 2) You can’t do this (due to your sinfulness); 3) Christ has done it for you (i.e. the Gospel applied); 4) Until you rest in what He’s done, you can’t do it (living the gospel life).

Piper mentioned Graeme Goldsworthy’s book on Preaching the Whole Bible As Christian Scripture as containing a line that really got Piper thinking and has changed how he preaches. Goldsworthy said “If a Muslim liked your sermon, you didn’t preach a Christian sermon. If a Jewish person liked your sermon, you didn’t preach a Christian sermon.”

Carson brought out the Temple theme as one of many trajectories that are traced through Scripture and which really do point to Christ. He stressed everything doesn’t point to Christ the same way, but when you are in a text that addresses one of these types or trajectories that aligns to Christ, you have a warrant for going to Christ. Carson was also asked by Chapell, “Can you preach Proverbs without going to the New Testament?” Carson immediately responded, “Why would I want to? It wouldn’t even occur to me to do so.” He also pointed out that it’s the same with texts like Isaiah, too. Carson then went on to stress that the NT relates to the OT yes in terms of not only prophecy (OT) and fulfillment (NT), but also message hidden (OT) and message revealed (NT). Personally I find that very helpful, yes some things are plainly clear, but other things were hidden until Christ clearly revealed them.

At the end of the discussion, Chapell fired off a list of helpful resources for preaching Christ from the OT. I thought that list (plus Bryan Chapell’s own book, Christ-Centered Preaching) was excellent. You’ll have to listen to the audio though since he gave it out so quickly.

At the end of the roundtable discussion Tim Keller, John Piper, Dr. John Woodhouse and Lane Dennis (president of Crossway), presented a book written in Carson’s honor, commemorating his long service to the church and his 65th birthday.

The 2011 Gospel Coalition National Conference: See You There!

~ Bob Hayton ~ 5 Comments

Over the years, I’ve blogged about quite a few conferences, from the sidelines. I eagerly downloaded the audio after the fact and helped spread the word about conferences such as Together for the Gospel Conference, The Gospel Coalition and others. This time, I get to go!

If you’ll be at The Gospel Coalition conference next week, I want to know. I’d love to arrange to meet you in person. The theme of this year’s conference is right up my alley: Preaching Christ in the Old Testament. Already, TGC is compiling a stellar listing of top-notch resources on this issue. You can learn more at their Preaching Christ in the Old Testament page.

I’ll try to bring some “live blog” updates if I have time. But I plan to be soaking up the ministry of the word at the conference. I’m also thrilled to be going with my fellow biblioblogger Shaun Tabatt, and we’ll both be attending the Band of Bloggers event Tuesday night.

Use the Contact page here, or message me on Twitter or Facebook to get in touch. Hope to see you there!

On another note, I’ll be meeting Phil Johnson in person the Sunday before TGC here at my church in St. Paul, Beacon of Hope. I’ve been following Phil’s blogging ministry off and on since his solo Pyromaniac days. He was a big help to me early on when I first started blogging about my journey out of extreme fundamentalism. Phil is in town for the Psalm 119 conference and will speak at our church in the services and for a special Q & A, dinner event following. If you live in the Twin Cities, contact me for more info.

The Old Testament: All about Christ, or Not?

~ Bob Hayton ~ 21 Comments

Fascinating debate recently about how to read the OT. The first two statements below are from Professor Mark Snoeberger of Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary.

First:

But since I’ve spent almost all my study time in the OT during the last two months, it’s almost as though I’ve left the Gospel Carnival behind. Kind of like going for a drive in the country, but better. It’s been very refreshing, but the funny thing is that, despite the fact that I have been spending considerably more time than normal in my Bible for the past two months, I’ve read virtually nothing about Christ, the Cross, or the Gospel.

Now some of you are probably shaking your heads right now and saying, “This guy doesn’t know how to read his Bible–it’s ALL about Christ if you know how to successfully navigate between the lines!” And I’m not blind to the redemptive thread that winds through the Bible. But the thing is, when I stop reading between the lines and just start reading the lines, Christ and the Gospel do not emerge as major OT themes. In fact, they’re not themes at all.

and then in the first comment under this post:

Revelation concerning the common or civic sphere, on the other hand, begins with the dominion mandate, takes peculiar shape with the Noahic Covenant and the second table of the Law, and dominates the theocratic period.

Dispensationalism, I think, can be demonstrated to be a variation of this latter model (some would say a perversion) that offers multiple adminstrations–not just two. The various purposes of God are inter-connected, but what is key is that they are not limited to redemptive concerns. What binds them together is not so much the Gospel as it is the manifold glory of God. It’s BIGGER than the Gospel.

Let’s take one example: the OT sacrificial system. There are diverse understandings within dispensationalism on the OT sacrifices, but one that I have felt comfortable embracing is John Whitcomb’s theocratic understanding of the sacrifices, viz., that the sacrifices were only incidentally connected with being redemptively right with God; instead they were concerned with being theocratically right with the (K)ing and with the covenant community. That these sacrifices became a pattern for the redemptive arrangement in the death of Christ is not accidental, of course. And God certainly arranged history so that there is a continuity of form. However, it seems to me that rather than seeing the OT sacrifices as anticipating Christ, it is better to say that God modeled Christ’s sacrifice retrospectively after the theocratic system.

If this is the case, then the the Mosaic system has its own meaning, known plainly by the OT saint, without reference to Christ. It was not intrinsically anticipatory.

Over and against this, Brian McCrorie in the comments here shared my basic view on this matter:

Ben I don’t think I fundamentally disagree with you. However, I would only add that we should not only interpret the OT on it’s own terms, but also interpret it canonically (ie, the Bible as one book)

If we simply isolate the OT from the NT, and interpret it “on it’s own terms”, and not canonically, would we ever come to the conclusion that Jonah could be a picture of Christ? Furthermore, I don’t need an OT text to explicitly tell me the rock in the wilderness was Christ when Paul tells me as much in 1 Cor.

If we isolate the testaments we may not even (like some comments above) see how Adam prefigured Christ. But it blows my mind that someone who has the NT would even question the correlation of the first Adam to the second, or King David to his greater Son whom he calls “Lord”.

The bigger question in all of this I think is how or if we can do what the NT writers do. For instance, we don’t have explicitly or implicity (that I know of)in the NT that Joseph was a type of Christ. But the correlations are almost as clear as day. I agree with James that Keller’s references to Esther and others are much more of a stretch. However, that doesn’t make his hermeneutic “special”, he’s just trying to follow the pattern of intertextual canonical interpretation. How confidently we do that today without divine inspiration is the sticking point (at least for me).

Lastly, I wanted to comment on something Keith said:
“How could God, ‘retrospectively’ do anything when he decreed it all outside of time?”

Marriage from the perspective of Eph 5 is a perfect example of this. We know now, this side of the cross and through later revelation, that marriage was instituted to be a picture of Christ and the church. In other words, the cross and the church preexisted (in the purpose of God, not strictly in time) the marriage of man and woman. Why then would we be surprised to find the events and words of the OT orchestrated and inspired to point to Christ? We’re not necessarilty reading Christ and the NT back into the OT. It’s almost as if we’re going back before the OT, now with the knowledge of God’s ultimate plan climaxing in Christ. We have now what angels and prophets once only dreamed of seeing. Please don’t make me go back to that day.

and then:

Here [is an] illustration supporting canonical reading (or reading the NT back into the OT):

Black box: Imagine a FAA flight inspection team reviewing data and clues from the site of a plane crash. All their information is leading them down a path of understanding the cause of the crash. But when they find the black box they have the pilot’s definitive word on how and why the plane went down. Wouldn’t they then go back and look at all the collected data and see how all along it pointed to that particular failure. But without the black box it wasn’t clear. The recording didn’t change the data (NT revelation doesn’t alter the OT), but shed new light on its proper and full interpretation. Furthermore, without the box, the collected data could never have been fully understood. Why would any inspector then go back and disregard the recording, or separate it from the data, and try to interpret the two separately? Instead, he would interpret the (less clear) clues with the definitive recording….

By isolating the OT and having a hermeneutic based on original authorial intent instead of a wider canonical interpretation based on divine Authorial intent, we are severely limiting our understanding of the text. We can better locate, appreciate, and interpret the signs and symbols pointing to Christ in the OT only as we see them through the lens of the NT. Lastly, we must be very careful to isolate the OT from the NT because, in my opinion, the function of OT revelation (as well as parables, for example) is not simply to reveal, but also to conceal. We weren’t meant to get all the information on God’s redemptive plan from the OT. Throughout the OT God gives us clues which only later can be identified for what they were. My guess is that originally God intentionally concealed the whole story (like any good writer) from all people, but particularly from rulers and authorities, and ultimately Satan himself. How else can we explain Satan killing the King of the Jews only to realize the salvation of the world and his own defeat?

I encourage you to read the comments where Brian made these statements above. There is an in-depth discussion of this question and all participants are quite irenic and charitable. Makes for great reading. The comments at Snoeberger’s blog will just puzzle you more than anything. If that is the result of dispensationalist thinking, I say beware.

Makes me excited that I’ll be going to the Gospel Coalition Conference this year where the theme is preaching Christ from the Old Testament. Maybe that’s why the Conservative Evangelicals have such an appeal to young fundamentalists, they get what the message of the Bible is all about.

“Reclaiming the Old Testament for Christian Preaching” edited by Kent, Kissling & Turner

~ Bob Hayton ~ 7 Comments

Over the last few decades, a revival of interest in the Old Testament seems to have come over the evangelical church. Numerous resources for preaching the Old Testament and for understanding the various genres we find in the first two thirds of our Bibles have been produced. The tide is turning, and more and more we hear of careful preaching through the Old Testament again.

We still have a long way to go, however. Most conservative pulpits major on the New Testament. After all, the relevance of NT books to the Christian living today is much more apparent. Popular expositors have even given us commentary after commentary on the New Testament, to the almost complete exclusion of the Old Testament. Theology-heavy sermons from the doctrinal portions of the New Testament can serve to keep people out of touch with the reality of the story of Scripture. And ironically, in an age where everybody’s story has value, the grand overarching storyline of the Bible is silenced by the Church’s neglect of the first 39 books of her Bible.

Many of the resources being published that are seeking to revive a focus on the Old Testament are locked away in scholarly tomes or couched in some liberal theological garb, effectively kept away from the average pastor’s and Bible teacher’s reach. A new book by InterVarsity Press aims to bring scholarly resources into an accessible and highly useful format. Reclaiming the Old Testament for Christian Preaching, edited by Grenville J.R. Kent, Paul J. Kissling and Laurence A. Turner, actually manages to live up to its title’s bold claim. In an accessible and user-friendly format, the book brings together contributions from a wide array of OT scholars.

After a brief introduction, the book moves on to cover OT narrative plot, OT narrative characters, the Law, Lament, Praise Poetry, Wisdom literature, the Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Apocalyptic literature, and the Minor Prophets. It also has a chapter on preaching from difficult texts and another on preaching Christ from the Old Testament. The chapters aren’t too long or overly detailed; instead, they are delightfully readable. They are structured in such a way as to clearly convey the primary difficulties and recommended approaches for the particular genre surveyed. Almost all the chapters include helpful footnotes and recommendations for further study. And each concludes with an example sermon which puts the theory into practice.

As I read through this book, I kept earmarking page after page where helpful insights were shared about the various parts of the Old Testament. The sections covering narrative plot and characters were especially helpful and full of examples. Laurence Turner stressed placing each narrative in context to its larger narrative, and on sticking to the flow of the author as much as possible when developing a sermon. Paul Kissling discussed a unique strategy of comparing the speech of the characters over and against the narrator’s account, as a way of finding the main point of a given story. Christopher J.H. Wright’s chapter on preaching the Law was also superb. He stressed the connection Law has with grace as seen in the historical setting given in the Pentateuch. He also unpacked the lesser-known missiological aspects of the Law: namely, Israel living out God’s Law as a testimony to the nations, and the application this has to the Church today.

Federico Villanueva’s chapter on Lament was particularly insightful as he writes from the standpoint of a non-Westerner (he ministers in Manila). Tremper Longman’s chapter on wisdom literature, particularly his discussion of Ecclesiastes and Job, was also very helpful in finding ways to grasp the main point of these books and how best to apply it to today’s Christians. Similarly, Grenville Kent’s discussion on the Song of Solomon was also very helpful. Even though he steers clear of a direct allegorical interpretation, he finds value in analogy and metaphor. His discussion of where God makes an appearance in the Song, and why, is worth quoting here:

So if Yahweh had appeared directly in the Song, the culture may well have misunderstood him as condoning fertility religion or even as just another fertility god. The Song clearly separates worship and sex. it is ‘a non-mythological, non-cultic, non-idolatrous, outright, open celebration of God-given sexual love’. (pg. 130, quote from John G. Snaith The Song of Songs (Eerdmans, 1993), pg. 5.)

The chapter on Isaiah, by H.G.M. Williamson did a great job stressing the literary unity of Isaiah. He traced the theme of righteousness and justice showing how such wide themes inform the specific context of any given passage in the book. Daniel Block challenges us to preach Ezekiel, and offers several helpful charts and analyses of the book and its central message. Alison Lo gave a wonderful, yet brief treatment of the Minor Prophets. She excelled at relating the context and themes of those books to today’s world and its problems. She also discussed the interrelation of the books as a wider whole (the “book of the twelve”), and provided a fascinating outline of Zephaniah.

Gordon Wenham’s discussion of various “difficult texts” in the Old Testament was in the whole, masterful. Some may disagree with his stance on Gen. 1 — explaining the wider context of the ideas about the world of the time (and thus not getting into a discussion of whether the six days are literal 24 hour days), but his comments on the imprecatory psalms, the “eye for an eye” law, apparent divine-sanctioned genocides, and OT slavery are both helpful and wise. R.W.L. Moberly’s chapter on preaching Christ from the Old Testament cites a lot of material that applies to this concern. He stresses that the wider context of the Old Testament includes the canonical grouping of the books and their use by the Church. He sees a second narrative (the NT) interpreting the original narrative in a sense similar to a detective story where at the end, all the initial elements of the plot make perfect sense. He also allows for imagination to impact interpretation and helpfully walks through some examples in how to think through this in a practical manner.

The chapters in the book are not all of equal value. The praise poetry, and apocalyptic literature sections were not as helpful to me. Some of the contributors may not be as immediately accessible as others. But the beauty of this book is how it offers a manual for the preacher who is choosing an OT text to preach. This book won’t be the only resource consulted, but it offers a sensible approach and several helpful points for encountering just about any text in the Old Testament. Throughout, it stresses a literary and canonical approach that focuses on the Old Testament we have, not imagined historical reconstructions. This ensures the book’s usefulness by people of a variety of particular persuasions within evangelicalism.

I trust tools such as Reclaiming the Old Testament for Christian Preaching, will encourage many pastors to pick an OT book for their next sermon series. This book will prove useful for any Bible student, and I highly recommend it. May the beauty of the Old Testament captivate the hearts and minds of more teachers and preachers, and be preached with power to the congregations that God has entrusted to their care.

Disclaimer: This book was provided by Inter-Varsity Press for review. I was under no obligation to offer a favorable review.

Pick up a copy of this book at Amazon.com or through IVP direct.

Quotes to Note 24: Christopher J.H. Wright on the Gospel-Rootedness of the Law

~ Bob Hayton ~ 2 Comments

I am currently reading through a fantastic little book entitled Reclaiming the Old Testament for Christian Preaching (edited by Grenville J.R. Kent, Paul J. Kissling and Laurence A. Turner, InterVarsity Press 2010). The book is a collection of essays on how to preach from various parts of the Old Testament. On the section dealing with the Law, Christopher J.H. Wright does a great job in pointing out how the law is both rooted in, and pointing forward to God’s grace. I thought I’d share a brief excerpt here from Wright’s section on the gospel-rootedness of the Law, for your benefit.

“No sooner has God got Israel to himself at Mount Sinai than he points them back to his own initiative of saving grace: “You have seen what I have done …now then, if you obey me fully…” [Ex. 19:4-5, author’s translation]. Grace comes before the law. There are eighteen chapters of salvation before we get to Sinai and the Ten Commandments. So the structure of the book supports the fundamental theology.

“I stress this because the idea that the difference between the Old and New Testaments is that in the OT salvation was by obeying the law, whereas in the NT it is by grace, is a terrible distortion of the Scripture. It is a distortion that Paul was combating, but has somehow crept into common Christian assumption. We need to preach rigorously against it. It is sad that in so many churches that have the Ten Commandments on the wall, they leave out the opening words of God, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you up out of slavery…” (author’s translation). That is posting the law without the gospel that grounds it. Paul makes it clear [regarding the OT] that salvation came through faith in God’s promise, and that obedience was a response to God’s saving grace.”

(pg. 48, emphasis and words in brackets are mine)