There is undoubtedly a widespread crisis in preaching from the Old Testament today, and consequently in preaching Christ from the Old Testament. Less and less sermons are being preached from this part of the Bible, and those that are preached do not appear to command the same interest or respect as New Testament sermons.
Several surveys have found that only 20% of Christian sermons are from the Old Testament. Michael Duduit, the editor of Preaching, bemoaned the fact that “I annually receive hundreds of sermon manuscripts from ministers in a variety of Protestant denominations.… Less than one-tenth of the sermons submitted to Preaching are based on Old Testament texts.” [1] The relatively few Old Testament sermons that are preached are often topical rather than textual and contextual.
This imbalance in the spiritual diet of most Christians is one of the main reasons for many of the spiritual problems in the modern church and in the modern Christian. The challenging question is posed by Gleason Archer: “How can Christian pastors hope to feed their flock on a well-balanced spiritual diet if they completely neglect the 39 books of Holy Scripture on which Christ and all the New Testament authors received their own spiritual nourishment?” [2]
We will briefly consider eight reasons behind this malaise.
1. Liberalism
First, there has been a prolonged and sustained critical attack on the Old Testament by liberal scholars. This has shaken the confidence of preachers and hearers alike in this part of the Holy Scriptures.
2. Ignorance
It is almost impossible to preach from large parts of the Old Testament without a knowledge of the historical context and geographical setting. However, while this knowledge was once widespread in many churches, many hearers now know little or nothing of biblical history, and preachers find it hard to interest their hearers in it.
3. Relevance
In addition, the historical and geographical details mentioned above seem to distance the preacher and hearer from modern reality. The fact is that we stand approximately 6,000 years from the earliest recorded Old Testament event and over 2,000 years from the most recent. This opens up a “relevance gap” in the minds of many modern preachers and hearers. This is widened further by the fact that the New Testament makes it clear that many Old Testament practices are now terminated. So, why study them?
4. Dispensationalism
Dispensational theology, with its rigid division of Scripture into different eras and methods of salvation, tends to relegate the Old Testament to a minor role in the life of the church and of the individual Christian. However, it is surprising how many even in Reformed circles have a latent dispensationalism, which becomes patent in their confused and inconsistent view of Old Testament salvation—with ideas ranging from salvation by works, through salvation by faith in the sacrificial rituals, to salvation by a general faith in God plus a sincere attempt to obey His law. These legalistic views of Old Testament salvation inevitably produce less preaching from the Old Testament, and certainly less preaching of Christ and His grace from the Old Testament.
5. Bad Practice
It must be admitted that one of the reasons why so many, even in Reformed and evangelical churches, have minimized Christ in the Old Testament is because they have seen so many bad examples of preaching Christ from the Old Testament—examples which expose the whole exercise to the just ridicule of a mocking and cynical world. However, the malpractice of some should not lead to the non-practice of others.
6. Laziness
Preaching Christ from the Old Testament is more demanding than preaching Him from the New Testament. It requires greater mental and spiritual labor to prepare and present Christ-centered Old Testament sermons in a comprehensible and engaging way — especially when we are not practiced in the art. For a busy pastor with two or three sermons to prepare each week, the well-worn paths of the New Testament seem much more inviting than Leviticus, Chronicles, or Nahum!
7. Lack Of Models
Many sincere and devout pastors want to preach from the Old Testament, and they feel guilty about their failure to do so. However, when they look around for preaching models to follow, they find few men whose practice they can learn from. Then, in the absence of the living practice, they look for principles of interpretation that would teach them the practice, and this too is largely lacking.
8. Academic Credibility
Finally, there has been a tendency in academic circles, even in Reformed and evangelical academic circles, to minimize the place of the Son of God in the Old Testament. Passage after Old Testament passage is being evacuated of Christ to the nodding approval of the scholarly community, and few are brave enough to stick their heads above the parapet and question this trend. Little surprise then that preachers turn away from the Old Testament and towards the New in order to “find Jesus” and “preach Christ crucified.”
What then is the solution to this crisis in Old Testament preaching? How can we fight and even reverse these trends? Well, we must attack on all fronts. We must combat the liberals. We must teach our congregations biblical history and geography, while also demonstrating the abiding relevance of the Old Testament. We must resist both patent and latent dispensationalism. We must identify and avoid bad practice, however inviting it may appear. We must be willing to put in the hours, the sweat, the toil, and the tears, as we break up this hard and untilled ground. We must search for, value, and learn from good preaching models. And, in their absence, we must search out biblical principles of interpretation to guide our practice. Finally, we must, in faith, stand up in front of the JCB’s of the scholarly community and refuse to let them scoop Christ out of the Old Testament.
However, the first step is to establish a strong foundation of biblical presuppositions to undergird all our Old Testament sermons, and we shall begin by turning to the New Testament. Now, it may seem strange to begin an article on “Preaching Christ from the Old Testament” by turning to the New Testament. Nevertheless, starting with the New Testament is the most important step of all if we are to rightly preach Christ from the Old Testament. Failure to do so is one of the main reasons, perhaps the main reason, for so many Christ-less Old Testament sermons today.
Many view Christ simply as the “End-point” of the Old Testament, the destination of the Old Testament. He is that. However, He is also the “Start-point” of the Old Testament, the one we must begin with when we approach the Old Testament. By this we mean that we must start with Christ’s view of the Old Testament. We shall follow His example in this article by considering His words on the Emmaus Road (Luke 24:25 –32). In further articles in the series we shall examine the prophets’ view of the Old Testament, as described to us by Peter (1 Pet. 1:11-12). After that, we shall notice the Jews’ view of the Old Testament. We shall then reflect upon our view of the Old Testament, before concluding with Abraham’s view from the Old Testament.
I. Christ’s View of the Old Testament
II. The Prophets’ View of the Old Testament
III. The Jews’ View of the Old Testament
IV. Our View of the Old Testament
V. Abraham’s View From the Old Testament
I. Christ’s View Of The Old Testament
Let us join the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:25 –32), and notice three points:
- Foolish Ignorance
- Full Interpretation
- Faith’s Insight
You will be familiar with the backdrop to this encounter on the Emmaus road. Christ was crucified on Friday. On the Sunday following, two of His wider circle of disciples decided to leave Jerusalem and travel to Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. As they talked of “all these things which had happened” (v. 14), and “reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them” (v. 15). However, they were prevented by God from recognizing Him at that time (v. 16). Jesus noted their depressed postures and unhappy faces and asked them the cause of their sadness (v. 17). They proceeded to give an account of Christ’s life and character (v. 19), His sufferings and death (v. 20), their consequent disappointment with Him (v. 21), and, due to a lack of bodily sightings, their skepticism regarding reports of a resurrection (v. 21).
Having patiently listened to their story until this point, Christ then intervened with a rebuke of their foolish ignorance and unbelief: “O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken: Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?” (Luke 24:25 –26). Jesus told them that their account of Christ’s life and death exactly matched the predictions of the Old Testament prophets. They had believed some of the prophets’ writings — the parts which spoke of Messiah’s glory. But they had not believed all that the prophets had spoken — especially the parts which spoke of the Messiah’s sufferings and death. He therefore rebuked them for foolish ignorance. The word for “fool” here is ἀνόητος anoetos, denoting an individual who sees things from a distorted viewpoint. Jesus then proceeded to display the divine viewpoint on His own death by showing from the Old Testament Scriptures that the Messiah had to suffer such things and only then to enter His glory.
How foolish — to believe only part of what God revealed through the prophets! How ignorant — to be in the dark about the necessity of the Messiah’s sufferings despite all that was made known in the Old Testament! Matthew Henry said:
He does not so much blame them for their slowness to believe the testimony of the women and of the angels, but for that which was the cause thereof, their slowness to believe the prophets; for, if they had given the prophets of the Old Testament their due weight and consideration, they would have been as sure of Christ’s rising from the dead that morning (being the third day after his death) as they were of the rising of the sun. [3]They looked for another glorious Exodus redemption, but they ignored the bleeding Passover Lamb which preceded it. They looked for the final and glorious Davidic King, but they ignored the murderous persecution of David which preceded this. They looked for the spoil-dividing, conquering king of Isaiah 53:12, but had forgotten the sin-bearing, suffering Servant that preceded this.
2. Full Interpretation
Having rebuked their foolish ignorance, Christ then gave the disciples a full interpretation of the Old Testament Scriptures in the light of recent events. Notice that! It is absolutely critical. Christ used New Testament light to interpret the Old Testament Scriptures. In other words, contrary to many of the humanistic theories of modern hermeneutics and homiletics, Christ read Himself back into the Old Testament. He used the light of New Testament events to preach from the Old Testament. We shall look at this in more detail a little later.
Christ’s Old Testament sermon here might be entitled, The Things Concerning Himself. It had two main points — Christ’s sufferings and Christ’s glory. Notice three stages of development in His points —“beginning at Moses,” He goes on to “all the prophets,” and then expands into “all the scriptures” (v. 27). And, just a few verses later (v. 44), Luke mentions a similar incident where Christ interprets the Old Testament Scriptures with the benefit of New Testament light, again in these three stages.
But let us return to the two main points of this sermon where Christ preaches The Things Concerning Himself from the Old Testament— His sufferings and His glory. How we would love to have had this sermon preserved for us in Scripture! Which particular Scriptures did He apply to himself? What types did He expound? We aren’t told. Why did the Holy Spirit deliberately omit these details? Well, some scholars tell us that we may only preach Old Testament types which are specifically identified as such by the New Testament. This severe, rationalistic, man-made restriction would doubtless also have been applied to this incident if some of the details of Christ’s sermon had been revealed to us. We would have been forbidden to preach from any Old Testament verse not specifically mentioned by Christ here. Instead, the silence allows faith to meditate on the possible contents from all three parts of the Old Testament — the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings.
A. Christ’s Sufferings
If there was one supreme characteristic of the Old Testament, it was blood — specifically sacrificial blood. The covenants with Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses were all inaugurated with sacrificial blood. The covenant with David was inaugurated with warnings of blood-shed for covenant-breakers (2 Sam. 7:14). The religious rituals and ceremonies of the Old Testament were saturated in sacrificial blood. The Tabernacle and the Temple were drenched in sacrificial blood. If the Old Testament Scriptures were prophetic— and they were — who could possibly imagine that the embodied fulfillment would be bloodless?
Another major theme of the Old Testament was the pattern of “suffering before triumph” in the major characters of the Old Testament — Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, Jonah. Who could see such repeated patterns in the lives of godly Old Testament saints, at least some of whom were specifically set forth as types of the Messiah (e.g. Moses, David), and fail to conclude that the Messiah’s life would follow a similar pattern?
Also, how many Psalms — the very warp and woof of Israel’s spiritual life — set forth the cycle of weeping enduring for a night before joy rises in the morning (e.g., Psalms 22; 52– 60; 69)?
No wonder Christ asks, “Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?” (Luke 24:26).
B. Christ’s Glory
Christ did not have to convince the disciples that the Messiah would be glorified. However, they differed from Him in their view of what constituted “glory.” There is no question that the glory of the Messiah was presented in the Old Testament using the emblems and symbols of earthly glory — crowns, scepters, robes, thrones, courtiers, servants, praise, military power, etc. However, none of these things were present when Christ walked along the Emmaus road. Yet Christ suggests in verse 26 that He has already entered into “his glory.” So much of Christ’s sermon here must have involved explaining the spiritual realities behind the earthly symbolism in order to show that His kingdom was not “of this world,” that His glory was primarily spiritual and heavenly, that His throne was “within them,” and that His mightiest weapons were the Word and the Holy Spirit.
3. Faith’s Insight
Probably never had a journey passed so quickly! When it looked as if their traveling companion was about to part from them on the outskirts of Emmaus, we are not surprised to read that the disciples constrained Him to stay with them and continue the Bible study. Having succeeded in persuading Him, they sat down to a meal. Then, as Jesus “took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them…their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight” (vv. 30-31). Then turning to one another, they reflect on their recent journey and say, “Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?” Let us look at the three stages of this “spiritual heartburn.”
A. He Opened The Scriptures
What does Christ find as He opens the door of Genesis, then Exodus, then Leviticus, etc? He finds Himself! Matthew Henry said, “Jesus Christ is himself the best expositor of scripture, particularly the scriptures concerning himself.” [4] If He tells us He is to be found from the very first book of Scripture, “beginning at Moses,” then let us find Him there. To deny His presence there is to pretend to be a better exegete of Scripture than the One who inspired it!
In this Emmaus encounter, we are given the most fundamental principles of Old Testament interpretation — BC and AD events find their meaning in Christ. J. C. Ryle underlines this in his commentary on these verses:
Let it be a settled principle in our minds, in reading the Bible, that Christ is the central sun of the whole book. So long as we keep Him in view, we shall never greatly err, in our search for spiritual knowledge. Once losing sight of Christ, we shall find the whole Bible dark and full of difficulty. The key of Bible knowledge is Jesus Christ. [5]Graeme Goldsworthy cuts this key even sharper when he writes:
While we come to understand the New Testament in the light of what goes before it in the Old Testament, it is God’s fullest revelation and final word in Christ that gives meaning to all things. Thus Christ, and therefore the New Testament, interprets the Old Testament. [6]The New Testament teaches us to examine the Old Testament through Christian eyes, to study it in the light of the gospel. Goldsworthy expands upon how to navigate this backwards-then-forwards exegesis:
We do not start at Genesis 1 and work our way forward until we discover where it is all leading. Rather we first come to Christ, and he directs us to study the Old Testament in the light of the gospel. The gospel will interpret the Old Testament by showing us its goal and meaning. The Old Testament will increase our understanding of the gospel by showing us what Christ fulfills. [7]
From our starting point with Christ we find ourselves moving backward and forward between the two Testaments. Our understanding of the gospel is enhanced by our understanding of its Old Testament roots, and at the same time the gospel shows us the true meaning of the Old Testament. Such an interrelationship between the two Testaments would be difficult to represent in the actual writing of a biblical theology. Nevertheless, we must try to do so by highlighting Christ as both our starting point and the goal to which we move. Christ is the place we start because he shows us what the unfolding message of the Old Testament is really concerned with. [8]Vern Poythress is also a strong advocate of this “New then Old” movement in interpreting the Old Testament. He writes:
If I am right in thinking that the New Testament completes the story that God began in the Old Testament, it is quite proper for me to look back now in the light of the full story and see what more I can learn from its first half. [9]B. He Opened Their Eyes
The two disciples were not blind. They saw Christ with their physical eyes. This opening, then, is not a giving of physical sight. Rather it is the giving of spiritual sight. In addition to opening up the Scriptures to them, Christ opened the temporarily shut eyes of their faith.
This opening seems to be associated with the breaking of bread and giving of thanks. Although these two “outer circle” disciples were probably not in the upper room when the Lord’s supper was instituted, perhaps the other “inner circle” disciples had told them of it in the interim and they suddenly realized that they too were sitting at the Lord’s table as He broke bread. Perhaps they simply recognized His table manner with which they would have been familiar. Most likely, however, they saw the scars of the nails in His hands as He broke bread. We don’t know for sure. All we know is that they now saw their dining companion in a completely new light, and this was the doing of the Lord.
C. He Opened Their Hearts
They didn’t see Him for long, before He vanished. But it was long enough to change their whole view of the world and their recent past. As they reflected on the spiritual privileges they had enjoyed over recent hours, they began to recognize that the faith that had finally flourished at the table had its beginning on the road. These strange feelings, that unusual warmth, the spiritual excitement they felt as He opened the Scriptures on the road was faith being fed and nourished and revived from its stupor. Michael Barrett sums it all up:
The problem was dullness of heart; the need was for a Christ-centered study of the Old Testament Scriptures. [10]They don’t compare notes now but compare hearts as they review Christ’s sermon on the road. Their cold hearts had been warmed. Their dark hearts had been enlightened. Their dull hearts had begun to glow again. Their plans to settle down for the night were then torn up. They must tell others. Not tomorrow but tonight. They care not about the darkness, the danger, the distance. Forthwith they speed back to Jerusalem, hearts burning, tongues proclaiming, “The Lord is risen indeed and hath appeared to Simon” (Luke 24:34).
Principles of Interpretation
- Christ is present, revealed, and is to be looked for in every book of the Old Testament, from Genesis to Malachi.
- Old Testament texts must be interpreted by the definitive event of the gospel.
- Christ is the starting-point for Old Testament interpretation.
- M. Duduit, “The Church’s Need for Old Testament Preaching,” in Reclaiming the Prophetic Mantle, ed. George L. Klein (Nashville: Broadman, 1992), 10.
- G. L. Archer, “A New Look at the Old Testament,” Decision, August 1972, 5.
- M. Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (Iowa: Word Bible Publishers), 837.
- Ibid., 838.
- J. C. Ryle, Commentary on Luke, Vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1986), 501.
- G. Goldsworthy, According to Plan (Illinois: IVP, 1991), 52.
- Ibid., 54 –55.
- Ibid., 76.
- V. Poythress, The Shadow of Christ in the Law of Moses (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1991), vii.
- M. Barrett, Beginning at Moses (Greenville: Ambassador-Emerald, 2001), vii.
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