Must Every Lesson or Sermon Focus on Jesus Christ?...Continued from page 2

This is not to say that, after the meaning and message of the Old Testament has been established on its own terms, we must act as if the New Testament were not available at all. The New Testament really does exist, and we can (and must) often use it in our summaries to our major points and/or to the whole message, pointing out how the beginning, middle and end of the unified plan and message of God in the total Bible fits so nicely with what also is taught in the Old Testament text. I have argued elsewhere for the unity of the "promise-plan" of God that encompasses the whole Bible and therefore shows one divine mind, one plan and one story of salvation in all 66 books.¹¹ It is against this backdrop of viewing the grand plan and story of the Bible that I find agreement with my friends Chapell, Greidanus and Miller. But I must not prematurely infuse New Testament values and meanings back into the Old Testament in order to sanctify it before I independently establish, on purely Old Testament grounds, the legitimate meaning of the Old Testament text. If I perform such an infusion, I only pretend that I am accurately giving the Word of God exactly as He wanted it taught and preached from the Old Testament passage. So let us first do our work of true exegesis on the Old Testament text. Then, having gotten the meaning God revealed at that point in time, let us see how our Lord developed that same word, if there is further development on into the rest of the Bible.

1. Bryan Chapell, Christ-Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005).
2. Sidney Greidanus, Preaching Christ from the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999).
3. Calvin Miller, Preaching: The Art of Narrative Exposition (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 62-65.
4. Chapell, Christ-Centered Preaching, 281-88.
5. Greidanus, Preaching Christ from the Old Testament, 227-29.
6. Ibid., 228.
7. Ibid., 230.
8. Ibid., 232.
9. Christopher J.H. Wright, Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament: Rediscovering the Roots of Our Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 28.
10. Greidanus, Preaching Christ from the Old Testament, 233.
11.Walter C. Kaiser Jr., Toward an Old Testament Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1978), and Kaiser, The Christian and the "Old" Testament (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1998).

From The Majesty of God in the Old Testament, by Walter C. Kaiser Jr. Copyright © 2007, Walter C. Kaiser Jr. Published by Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, Michigan. 
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