Must Every Lesson or Sermon Focus on Jesus Christ?...Continued from page 1

What exactly is meant when we use the phrase "Old Testament sermon"? Do we simply mean a sermon that is derived entirely from the Old Testament? Or do we mean a sermon that was formerly valid but is no longer kosher for believers in the post-Old Testament era? How could those who lived in the Old Testament era have done any less, or any more, than to limit their teaching and preaching to what revelation was available up to that time? It is not as if the revelation did not come from God or that it was of some inferior quality, was it? Or did those Old Testament saints get it wrong?

What makes a sermon a Christian sermon or lesson? Must all sermons and lessons based on the Old Testament move inexorably on to the New Testament if they wish to earn a "Christian sermon rating" (CSR)?

But the discussion grows even more complicated. Greidanus boldly claims that redemptive-historical preaching does not ask, "What was the author's intended meaning for his original hearers? But, how does the redemptive-historical context from creation to new creation inform the contemporary significance of this text?"⁸ In that same context, Greidanus favorably quotes Christopher Wright: "We may legitimately see in the event, or in the record of it, additional levels of significance in the light of the end of the story?i.e., in the light of Christ."⁹ But notice that Wright carefully uses the word "significance." Greidanus, however, goes on to affirm dangerously "that a passage understood in the contexts of the whole Bible and redemptive history may reveal more meaning than its author intended originally."¹⁰ Such a view of the plurality of meaning that exceeds the truth-intentions or assertions of the original authors who stood in the counsel of God ultimately runs the risk of forfeiting the divine authority that is to be found in the passage; this view could be taken to imply that the human author wrote his text in a purely automatic and mechanical way, as if it were dictated or whispered word for word in his ear without the human author having a proper idea of its messianic or future redemptive meaning. But if the meaning God intended exceeds the meaning the human authors recorded, where shall we locate this additional surplus meaning? If it is not in the grammar and syntax, it must be somewhere between the lines! But if it is between the lines, whatever else it is, it is not written. And if it is not written, is it inspired? The apostle Paul makes it clear that only the graphe, what is written, is inspired (2 Tim. 3:15-17). Now we are really in a jam!

All too often the depth that many search for as contemporary believers, and the depth that God intended His human writers of Scripture to get?and which they did get, for they recorded it in the text?is missed in our day. As a result, too frequently we feel we must run to the New Testament as quickly as possible to enhance what some wrongly regard as the minimalistic Old Testament meaning with a super-spiritual meaning infused from the New Testament, thus adding Christian values to an otherwise "Judaistic sermon" to help the church or those in our modern world. But how wrong such judgments and procedures would be!