Bible and Bible Reference Survey 2007...Continued from page 3

Similar to Goldsworthy, is Dennis Johnson’s Him We Proclaim: Preaching Christ from All the Scriptures (P&R).  Johnson devotes about 150 pages to defending the idea that all of Scripture points to Christ in some way, and that this was the way the apostles handled Scripture.  The second portion of the book then explains and illustrates the approach.  Seeing all Scripture as pointing to Christ in some way significantly strengthens preaching, helping us to avoid mere moralizing and instead to focus more squarely on the glory and grace of God.  Johnson includes a helpful appendix outlining an approach to sermon preparation from this perspective.

Sidney Greidanus, long-time proponent of this approach, has produced an amazing book, Preaching Christ from Genesis: Foundations for Expository Sermons, (Eerdmans, pb., 518 pp).  I don’t know if anything else like this exists.  When you preach through Genesis you need this book.  It is not simply a commentary on Genesis, nor a set of sermons from Genesis.  This book is an attempt to flesh out Greidanus’s Christocentric approach to preaching the Old Testament (see his earlier Preaching Christ from the Old Testament) in a specific book.  Greidanus defends the approach, discusses literary and historical interpretive issues in Genesis, and expounds a model for the preaching of narratives.  Then he goes through Genesis section by section following the same process in each section analyzing the passage and noting various ways to connect to the gospel.  The book closes with 5 Appendixes, two that summarize the steps of sermon preparation and three which are sample sermons from Genesis.  In my mind this is an indispensable tool for preaching Genesis.

Walter Kaiser differs somewhat with the books just mentioned, but in the end the divide is not too wide.  He has written The Majesty of God in the Old Testament: A Guide for Preaching and Teaching (Baker, pb., 174 pp.). This great little book provides a homiletics refresher as Kaiser walks through the study and preaching of 10 Old Testament texts.  Beyond simply giving help for these 10 passages, Kaiser models the preaching of the OT with a concentration on the character of God.  Kaiser strongly exhorts us to recognize the awesomeness of God in the Old Testament.

Lastly, but perhaps the best place to start, Dale Ralph Davis has written a wonderfully straightforward, readable book entitled, The Word Became Fresh: How to Preach from Old Testament Narrative Texts (Christian Focus; pb., 154 pp.).  Davis, like Goldsworthy, laments how complicated we have sometimes made biblical interpretation and instead outlines a basic approach to careful, sensible reading which opens up the theology of Old Testament narratives.  This is one of those books that makes you want to preach after reading it!