All Sermons

Jesus Christ and Unity of the Bible Part 2 By Graeme Goldsworthy

I want to talk to you, in this session, about Jesus Christ and the unity of the Bible.
And the first point that we've got down there is that biblical theology is the study of how the Bible is about Jesus.
Now, just a few sort of prefatory comments there.
There are a lot of people who wouldn't see that as what biblical theology is about.
If you know anything about the history of biblical theology, some of you may have seen a book by Brevard Childs
that came out a few years back called The Biblical Theology in Crisis.
And he was speaking about the particular brand of biblical theology that was around in the United States
during the 1940s and 50s and so on, which was a kind of, I suppose you'd say, Barthian reaction to liberalism.
And it was an attempt to rescue the study of theology in the Bible
from the impasse between the battle of the fundamentalists versus the liberals.
And Childs concluded that biblical theology had not succeeded.
And indeed some of the proponents of it had sort of faded out.
There was George Ernest Wright who wrote on biblical theology.
The first book I was ever urged to read came out of that stable and that was John Bright's Kingdom of God.
One of my teachers at Moore College urged us all to read John Bright's Kingdom of God.
And it still remains an amazing piece of work given the fact that John Bright was of the reformed stable
but had imbibed a fair bit of sort of the higher critical perspective on things.
And so didn't see the authority and even the unity of the Bible as perhaps most of us would.
I'm making assumptions about you all but if they're not true you can forget it.
So there was this problem about, you know, what the nature of biblical theology was.
But at the same time, and somebody asked me a bit earlier about the work of Gehardus Vos.
At the same time we were being urged, as soon as Vos appeared in the reprint that I think Eerdmans and did Banaras Truth put out there,
to get hold of Vos and read it.
And Vos's biblical theology Old and New Testament is a rather interesting book.
Because Vos did an enormous amount to get biblical theology back on the map from a reformed point of view.
But the interesting thing about his book was that A, his understanding of the structure of biblical theology
was one that I personally can't really go along with.
Secondly, he completely ignored the form of prophets.
So he jumped from Moses to the writing prophets.
And when he got to Jesus he only got as far as the teachings of Jesus.
So he had nothing on the death and resurrection of Jesus which I thought was just incomprehensible.
And I came to the conclusion the guy must have died before he finished it but it wasn't true.
He kept on for years.
And somebody reminded me, Peter, that you really have to read Vos's biblical theology
in relationship to some of his other works like The Poor Line Eschatology and so on.
And that little volume of his collected works that Richard Gaffen, isn't it, his editor,
contains, for instance, his inaugural address at Princeton.
And, you know, things like that help you to see that this man had a lot to offer
in terms of getting biblical theology on the map from a reformed and evangelical point of view.
And there are people who have followed him.
Another book that was very influential in my life and others I think came out in the 60s
and that was Edmund Clowney's book on biblical theology and preaching.
And there have been several since.
The latest is the one by Charles Scobie which is a massive tome of over a thousand pages
called The Waves of Our God, which I wrote an extensive review for the Reformed Theological Review.
It's probably the best thing that's come out on biblical theology in recent times
though there are lots of things about it that I don't particularly like.
Now, why am I saying all this?
I think that there is a method that we have to engage in in doing biblical theology
which is actually more gospel-centered than other methods that people who you'd expect to be more gospel-centered
have engaged in, if I can put it like that.
That is, I think that given the nature of the gospel, given that Jesus Christ come in the flesh,
the high point of God's revelation.
Here is the word of God made flesh.
But if we want to understand how the Bible is put together, we must start with him.
And we start with him and while we're doing this biblically, we might have it also in our minds
the theological structure, that is we climb on the backs of those who have gone before us.
We stand on the shoulders of the great reformers and so on.
Not simply to slavishly follow in tradition, but because why keep on reinventing the wheel?
And so, from my point of view, to do biblical theology is to engage as a systematician as well as a biblical theologian and an exegete
in the whole nature of the biblical data.
And that includes, for instance, asking yourself, where for instance did the reformers start?
And to me, the four solas of the Reformation, grace alone, Christ alone, faith alone, Bible alone
are all perspectives on the same great theme of the unity of the Bible.
So, you might say, well, scripture alone, the Bible, we'll stand on scripture.
But if at the same time you're standing on the truth that salvation is by God's grace alone,
then you are dealing with another perspective and that feeds you into the grace alone which is found in Christ alone
and which is apprehended by faith alone.
And all these are different perspectives on the same great reality that God has,
as Hebrews puts it, in former times in this diet this man has spoken to our fathers by the prophets,
but in these last days he has spoken to us by his son.
And so, it seems to me that the implication of these things is that to do biblical theology
you have to try to see it from within the framework of the Gospel
and ask yourself, as I tried to do in the book I did on preaching,
in what way can we say that Jesus was a biblical theologian?
And biblical theology is not something that was invented, as a lot of people think,
and if you read books on the history of biblical theology they'll take you back to 1787
when a German guy, Johann Philip Gabler, gave his inaugural address of the university town of Altdorf
a dissertation in Latin on the proper distinction between biblical theology and dogmatics.
And people say, there's the first person to really distinguish biblical theology as a discipline.
Not so. I think that's nonsense.
And in fact, Gabler was more interested in preserving dogmatics than he was in preserving biblical theology.
He was a child of the Enlightenment, and so he brought the whole baggage,
the whole philosophical baggage of the Enlightenment to bear.
So for him doing biblical theology was trying to work out what was the historical framework,
the mythological whatever, and what was the pure biblical theology,
sort of the ethical teaching that endures, so you throw away the hacks and you keep the good stuff.
And this was all so that he could deal with the challenge of philosophy to dogmatics, in fact.
I believe that biblical theology has been around since God started speaking to mankind.
That whenever anybody heard the word of God and started to make connections between what God spoke to them,
however he spoke, whether it was a prophet who had a dream,
or whether it was somebody who listened to the words of a prophet saying, thus says Yahweh,
and made a connection between that and what God had said in past times.
They were doing biblical theology.
And if I'm right about being Christ-centered, then to me the unity of the Bible
is something that we really start with in the New Testament,
and ask what is the nature of the unity that they perceived?
What is the nature of the unity that is there?
Now when I look at some of the biblical theologies that are around today,
written by conservatives, evangelicals, reform people and so on,
I sometimes wonder as to why they structure them the way they do.
It seems to me they start in the Old Testament and they say, well, here's an important guy,
here's something that's significant, here's something else that's significant.
But I don't see that happening in the New Testament.
What I see happening in the New Testament,
and you can check this out just by getting your concordance and looking up some of the names
and seeing how often they occur, as I said in the last session,
it seems to me that whatever else you want to say about the Old Testament,
the New Testament writers keep focusing on Abraham and they keep focusing on David,
and I ask myself why.
What is so significant about them?
And it seems to me that when we look at, it's not just the beginning of Matthew's Gospel,
but I take the way Paul deals with it in his sermon in Acts 13,
and the way Peter does it in his sermon and Dave Pentecost in Acts 2, and so on.
That what you have got there is a recognition that something happened between Abraham and David,
which is of great significance in structuring the whole story, if you like.
And it seems to me that the New Testament has picked it up in a very important way.
So, my understanding of biblical theology and the unity of the Bible starts from that angle,
and I don't want to be simplistic,
and I recognize that in trying to find the unity of the Bible,
there is always the danger of appearing even simplistic when maybe you're not being,
but I think that there is quite an important way and a quite valid way of being what we might call reductionistic.
Now, reductionistic is one of those terms which becomes a dirty word.
What it means is that you just reduce everything down to the simplest and ignore all the complications.
But I sometimes use the analogy with an x-ray.
If you want to see how the human frame is constructed, then do an x-ray.
Not a scan, just an x-ray.
So, all you see is a shadow.
You can pick out just the skeleton.
Now, we know that the human being is more than a skeleton,
but a human being wouldn't be a human being without the skeleton.
Couldn't stand up for a start.
And it seems to me that it is quite valid to in some way try to understand the skeleton of the Bible
at the same time as acknowledging the complexity and the diversity which hangs on that skeleton.
And it seems to me that the New Testament gives us adequate grounds for saying
that the key to the structure of that skeleton is the process that goes from Abraham to David.
So that, when I'm talking about these things, I've done this sort of thing at all sorts of levels.
I've done one hour talks for, you know, budding scripture union leaders.
I've done one hour talks for the Cambrian youth conventions and things like that.
And I can spread it out to last a year.
I tell people one of the ways you must start is just get an idea of the sequence of events.
People look at you sort of like you're mad when you tell them that if they're having trouble with the history of the Bible,
you can really get it under your belt in 10 minutes flat.
It's no big deal.
You will spend the rest of your year getting in the details.
I mean, if you ask me now to give you a list of the kings of Israel, I couldn't do it to save my life.
I just couldn't.
I just don't think it's that important. I know where to find them.
But what I do think is important is to get a basic sense of the sequence of events and the key persons and events
that lead from the beginning of the Bible to the end of the Bible.
And that's what this little diagram does, which has been reproduced.
And as I keep telling people, I didn't invent this diagram.
There was somebody put it up on a blackboard at college when I was a student.
I think he was a visiting lecturer.
And who it was, can't remember.
But blessed be he, because it is stood in good stead and it's been reproduced in all sorts of ways.
And what this point says, when you do it like this, you can say, well, you don't have to be Einstein to work out
that there were certain events that are focused on.
And even, you know, even those difficult chapters in Genesis 1 to 11,
you realise when you read through how important they are for laying the foundation for a guy called Abraham
who comes along in Genesis 12.
A lot more to it than that, but that at least is what you can say about Genesis 1 to 11.
That it is preparing the way for a person who then becomes so significant, not only that he, you know,
he and his descendants fill the rest of the book of Genesis, but he keeps on popping up all the way through
and when you get to the New Testament, he keeps on appearing too.
So certain events happen between him and David and David and his son Solomon.
Interesting thing about Solomon is that I see Solomon as the sort of the pinnacle of the whole thing
until he went bad on us.
I was challenged not so long ago, somebody said to me, look, if Solomon is so important in your thinking,
why doesn't the New Testament mention him?
Now there's only two or three references to Solomon in the New Testament and they're basically negative.
But I think I can explain that one in that the promises were made to David
and Solomon was a part of his existence, the one who was simply used to bring them about.
But David is the one who theologically has seemed to be the key figure.
So you can then see how after Solomon, things broke up, the kingdom divides into two.
There's the decline and the exile of the north, there's the decline and the exile of the south,
there's the exit periods, there's the return and everything sort of, really, you know,
all the expectations of a return of glory when they get back out of exile just don't come true.
Things go very flat in the period of Ezra and Nehemiah, three post-exilic prophets come along to explain why.
End of Old Testament period, big changeover on the world scene from Persian to Greek to Roman rule in the empire.
Romans, with the ordinary language of the Roman empire, namely Greek being spoken,
is where you pick it up in the New Testament.
Jesus comes, end of Old Testament with the new creation and so on.
Now that's not terribly difficult but it seems to me that that enables us to start putting the thing together
and saying, well now what are the details which go into that?
So biblical theology in my view is dealing with the unity of the Bible by examining how the parts relate to the whole
which means you really have to study the parts too.
You have to go into the details.
The big temptation in looking at the big picture is that you only look at the big picture in broad,
that is you stand back and you say, isn't that marvelous?
But you really have to get close to it too and it means that doing biblical theology and exegeting in preparation for sermonizing
and so on means standing close and standing back.
Doing both the close reading and then putting it in the context of the big picture.
So in what way does the whole thing fit together?
We'll come onto that in a moment.
Biblical theology, if you look at a lot of the biblical theology books around, can be done in a very fragmentary way
and it often is, even by conservatives.
It can be done in a thematic way which concentrates on a very, you might say, truncated part of the whole biblical picture.
I'm not saying that that's invalid, all I'm saying is that that needs to be then complemented by looking at the total thing.
So in technical terms we make a distinction between what we call synchronic study and diachronic study
which is just two flashy words which mean when you're doing synchronic study
you're looking at something which happens synchronously, whatever the word is.
In other words you say, what happened in the time of Solomon? What's going on there?
And you're able to get close to the text and look at it.
Or what happened at the time of the exile?
Get close to it and see what's happening there.
Diachronic study is through time.
Looks at the way one thing leads to another, leads to another, leads to another, comes to the climax
and then you're able to stand back and see the whole picture.
So you're doing sort of the cross section and the through section all the time.
Now, recognition, pardon me, I don't know, Scott.
Just got to stop drinking coffee, it breaks.
Recognition of this helps us to, thank you.
My problem is how do you suck one of these and speak at the same time without choking?
Thanks for that.
I'll press on.
It's a perennial problem I have and I just have to live with it.
What I'm getting at is that when we do the both it helps us to avoid our preaching becoming legalistic and moralistic. Why?
Because having done the cross section, the sort of the close reading of a particular text,
we then ask the question, how does this fit into the big picture?
Which must involve us with the question of how does this relate to Christ?
And that to me is the key issue.
So that brings me then to the second point.
But let me, before I do that, just come back to another sort of generalized picture of this.
See, one of the things that struck me when I was sort of working on this is,
how does the New Testament sort of get it together?
Is there one sort of really essential concept that it focuses on?
Now there are probably lots and I've been criticized and I'm happy to wear criticism
for focusing on one particular concept which is the kingdom of God.
And some people said, no, why don't you, you know, you really should focus on, say, the covenant.
And I think I'm as happy with covenant theology as the next person.
I find it a very useful way to sort of get the unity of the Bible.
And I see no problem because it seems to me that what the covenant is is essentially the vehicle.
And what the kingdom is is what is contained in that vehicle.
That is, the revelation of God's kingdom is actually the content of the covenant promises.
So I see no difficulty in that.
So that when I have used this type of, yeah, I think you can see it,
the idea that the kingdom of God, you know, just on every man's discussion of what a kingdom involves,
it involves the king who is God, it involves people who are ruled for the people of God,
and it involves it happening in some place. It never happens in a vacuum.
And so you can then follow this through various stages of biblical revelation
and see how these three dimensions are actually presented and how they relate.
So that at the creation you've got God relating to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden,
which is sort of the focal point of the whole created order.
Sin enters in and you've got Genesis, I mean, you could put Noah in the ark,
you know, God relating to Noah and his family in the ark,
and the ark being the place where it happens.
That's perfectly valid in my view.
So wherever you go in the biblical story,
it's about essentially how God deals with his people and makes the people for himself
and the process by which that happens.
The context in which it happens.
So it's never just an idealistic thing,
it actually happens in a particular identifiable place.
So from Abraham you see how God has revealed himself
as making the promise to the descendants or seed of Abraham
that they will be God's people in the land of Canaan,
and how with Moses God reveals himself further as Yahweh the covenant keeping God
and as the saving God and he brings Israel out of Egypt to Canaan,
and how the climax of the process then is under David
where the same God focuses these promises which were made to the seed of Abraham
now to the seed of David,
and the promise which had been summarized in beginning say Leviticus 26 12
but is there in seed back in Genesis 12,
I will be your God and you will be my people,
now becomes individualized into a representative way,
not I will be your God, you will be my people,
but I will be his father, he will be my son.
And so Solomon or the son of David is identified as the son of God.
And so you have, as you're doing this,
you are building up a theology which involves all kinds of things
if you have eyes to see that they're there,
and one of the important aspects of the theology here
is the one who is in the place of the many,
and none better than David,
but even before you get to David you have the whole theology of priesthood
and prophet, prophetism, etc, etc, and the king himself.
So the king comes representative of the whole nation,
and the king's son becomes representative of the whole nation as the son of God.
And you've reached the high point with David and with Solomon building the temple and so on,
and then we find the whole thing going down the gurgler, it just disintegrates.
And you say, well, what can happen now?
And at this point along come the prophets,
and they say exactly the same things but in different, in different terms,
and I like to tell people, oh boy, prophets,
you know, there's such a lot of stuff to read, how can anybody get a handle on it?
All the writing prophets have the same three points.
It's so simple, I mean, the complication is simply that they're in different,
in a variety of historical context,
they're addressing a variety of social issues amongst the people of God,
but that's the same three points.
You have broken the covenant, point one.
God must judge you, point two.
God is faithful to his side of the covenant and will restore a remnant and bring in his kingdom, point three.
All the prophets say that.
So that what the prophet's saying is, yes, this same Jehovah God
will bring a remnant of Israel out of David's line,
and he will restore them to the land which has its focal point in Zion and the temple and so on.
You can see what's happened then, I think I can see what happened,
and that is, between Abraham and David you have a process in history
which builds up, you might say, the ingredients of the kingdom and of salvation
as the way you get into the kingdom, and you can spell them out, you can make a list.
God makes, God elects, if you like, and calls.
He promises to Abraham, what?
That there will be people, there will be a land, and a relationship with himself,
and that through those people a blessing will come to all the nations of the world.
So your theology of mission begins at least back at Genesis 12.
The whole book of Genesis seems to deny that possibility of ever coming true.
Even when Pharaoh dies, Abraham has to go and haggle for a place to bury in the land that God has promised him.
But to cut the long story short, when you get to the end of the book of Genesis,
the people who are the descendants of Abraham through Isaac and Jacob are not in the promised land
they are in slavery.
That's where we meet them in the beginning of the book of Exodus, they are in slavery.
The king arose who knew not Joseph.
You say, why didn't God just make it rain in Canaan so that the sons of Jacob didn't have to go down to Egypt
and find themselves, you know, their descendants later on in trouble?
And I think it's a reasonable question, I think we can, in the light of what scripture does then,
surmise the answer that these people had to learn that you don't just wander into the promised land
or you're just born in the promised land, the only way into the promised land is by a mighty,
miraculous act of salvation, of redemption, out of slavery.
And so the Exodus.
So what have we got? Election and calling, promise, anti-promise, slavery,
redemptive event, structuring of the people of God in the Sinai covenant,
entry into the land, theocracy, kingship,
holy city of God, temple at its center.
And then it all fades away.
What do the prophets do?
It's faded away because you sinned, God is judging you, but God will be faithful.
How will he be faithful?
He's made a promise to you, he's calling you.
This is what the promise is, there will be a mighty redemptive event
and even though this redemptive event is coming 600 miles across the desert,
Isaiah insists on describing it as coming through the deep waters like they were coming through the Red Sea again.
He will bring you into the promised land, he'll make a new covenant, not like the old one
on tablets of stone, but this time written on your heart.
He will raise up a new David, he'll come back to the new Jerusalem, there will be a new temple,
the desert will blossom like the rose and we're back in the Garden of Eden.
Ezekiel even describes the restoration of the temple as something which will take place in a new Garden of Eden.
So what's happened?
Seems to me that the Old Testament has provided the basis upon which the New Testament has done what it has done.
That is, Jesus fulfills all these things, how has Jesus fulfilled all these things?
Well, Jesus is God, Jesus is the true Israel, Jesus is the new temple as the focal point of the created order where God meets human beings.
Jesus is all those things.
So on that basis, the New Testament then sees, as the little boy said, if Jesus was God who looked after things up there while he was down here,
and we recognise that the Gospel then, to be the Gospel implies and forces us to confront the doctrine of the Trinity.
We cannot have the Gospel if there is no Trinity.
And that to be a human being you have to be a man or a woman in Christ.
That is why you can't simply moralise without Jesus.
And all this is in respect to the new creation.
Now the new creation, and here we come onto the whole question of how the New Testament structures the eschatology, that is the fulfilment thing.
And here I am indebted to Gerhardus Faust, because in his Pauline Eschatology he used a diagram, which I have used ever since and which I pinched for my book on the book of Revelation.
To show the relationship of the fulfilment of all prophecy in Christ at his first coming.
The fulfilment as it goes on in the people of God now, as Christ is present amongst us by his Spirit and the preaching of his Gospel.
And how fulfilment will take place at the confirmation when Christ returns in glory.
So that the structure of these things in Christ is that the new creation is Christ himself.
2 Corinthians 5.17, if anyone is in Christ there is, as you know the Greek is ambiguous, there is a new creation.
Or he is a new creation, now who is the new creation?
The person who is in Christ or Christ?
I think Paul is saying it is Christ. If you are in Christ, that is where the new creation is.
What did Pietistic Evangelicals read? If Christ is living in your heart, you are a new creation.
Paul doesn't say that. He doesn't say that.
And Paul's perspective on being in Christ is so vital to our understanding of these things.
It is when we understand what it means to be in Christ that we also understand what it means for Christ to dwell in us.
That Christ may dwell in your heart by faith.
But the more important perspective I think for Paul is that we are so united to Christ by faith.
That is one, as I heard one person put it, when God looks at us, what he sees is Jesus.
Because what belongs to Christ's perfect humanity has been attributed to us by faith.
What I am suggesting to you, and we don't have time for me to give you what I think is the whole box and dice there,
but perhaps just to summarize that last point I can do it this way.
I won't do it progressively, you can see the whole thing there.
What you've got is, in the history of Israel, you've got from Abraham to David and Solomon,
the covenant promises, God, land, nation, the exodus, redemption, the covenant law, the entry and possession,
the Davidic kingship, the holy city of Zion and the temple.
And that's really the whole box and dice. You've got nowhere further to go than that.
And when we come tomorrow to look at Solomon, I'll try to highlight to you why I think that even in one kings,
this is seen as having reached the pinnacle before Solomon goes bad in 1 Kings 11.
And what the prophets say when things have gone bad is that they speak of the renewed promises that God is still with them.
That there will still be a nation of a remnant of faithful people, they will come back to the land,
there will be a new exodus from exile, a new covenant written on their hearts, a new entry and possession,
a new Davidic king, a new Jerusalem, and a new temple.
And you come to the end of the Old Testament and it hasn't really happened.
They've come back from Babylon and you've got Ezra and Nehemiah, they build a new temple,
and the old people who could remember the former temple, you know, wept out of disappointment
because the glory of this temple was nothing even compared with Solomon's.
And, you know, the whole thing is just, you know, leaves them flat.
And so Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi come along and say why this is in various ways.
This isn't the kingdom of God. Why? Well, we can say from our perspective because it wasn't God's time.
But they lay it on them in terms of their human responsibility to God's covenant.
And they're still faithless. They're still, from that point of view, theologically in exile.
End of Old Testament period, 400 years in the gap, and then Jesus comes into Galilee proclaiming the gospel
and saying the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe the gospel.
And so the New Testament picks it up and says here in Jesus Christ, who is the son of Abraham
and the son of David, the covenant king, he is the one who is our passover, sacrifice for us, et cetera, et cetera.
Just a few of the ways in which the New Testament identifies Jesus with all the terminology of the Old Testament.
Here's the new temple, the dwelling of God with us, he is the new creation, and so on.
So everything that happened in the history of Israel but went flat after Solomon
and which was promised by the prophets but never came to fruition has been fulfilled in Jesus.
So Jesus, through his death and resurrection and ascension to heaven, is the new Israel who dwells before God in glory
as the acceptable human being, the human, and this is why of course the bodily resurrection is so vital.
He died bodily, he was buried bodily, he rose bodily, he ascended bodily, and he remains bodily.
Because that means we have a human, a man for us in heaven.
Okay, now, so my second point in your outline here is that Jesus and the apostles, the New Testament authors were also biblical theologians
and I've really been talking about this as we've been going, in fact I've been talking about most of this stuff as we've been going.
So other point too, just make these points if you want to sort of scratch a few things down.
That Jesus' view of himself as the fulfiller of scripture is seen in his frequent reference to his mission in Old Testament terms.
And that the Gospel writers I think make it pretty clear that that to them is important.
Of course in the end, and one of the key texts that I often use in this regard is the post-resurrection appearance of Jesus in Luke 24
where it seems to me that what he is saying is, look if you want to understand the scriptures the only way you can understand the Old Testament
is in terms of him. And so with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, and there they are sort of wandering home, tails between their legs
thoroughly demoralised, totally disillusioned because they, as they put it, we had hoped that he had been the one to redeem Israel
but he's dead now, how could he possibly be the redeemer? And Jesus quite really rips into them.
In a sense the English translations I think soften it so much, you know, oh how foolish you are and how slow of heart to believe.
He's calling them fools and unbelievers, stiff-necked Israelites, the kind of people the prophets used to get stuck into.
Was it not necessary that the Messiah, the Christ, should suffer these things and then enter his glory?
Can't they read their Bibles and see that the Messiah had to suffer?
Now, you can start to surmise what passages you think they ought to have been thinking of in these terms.
But I think it's probably more than just the suffering servant and things like that.
I think it probably goes deeper into the whole history of Israel as the representative people of God.
You know, their suffering in Egypt and this sort of thing.
Because what you see, and this attaches to my understanding of how typology works and how Jesus fulfils all things
is that even when you're dealing with disobedience and sinfulness and idolatry in the Old Testament
you are still looking at something which in a sense testifies to Jesus.
You say, come on, come off the grass, we know Jesus was without sin.
Yes, he was without sin but God made him who was without sin to become sin for us.
And so if we really want to understand what was going on in the unbelief of Israel, what was going on in the idolatry of the Canaanites
and how serious that is, then what better place to understand it than by looking at the cross.
Because at the cross the wrath of God is given its most exemplary expression against all unbelief and idolatry and covenant breaking.
So in Luke 24, we're told then in verse 27, beginning with Moses and all the prophets he interprets to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.
Now I know that you can't establish a complete doctrine on a verse like that, particularly as there is a certain ambiguity built into it.
The things about himself in all the scriptures is not saying that all the scriptures are about him, but I believe that is the implication of it.
Again, later on in that chapter when Jesus appears to the larger group of disciples in Jerusalem, in verse 44, he said to them,
These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets and the psalms,
which is obviously the title used for the third section of the Hebrew canon which we now know as the k'tuvim, the writings, must be fulfilled.
So the three sections of the Hebrew canon, the Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi'im, the prophets, and the k'tuvim, the writings, are about him and must be fulfilled.
And on this basis he opens his mind to understand the scriptures.
Now you can add other passages like, you know, one that comes to mind is John chapter 5, where Jesus is in dispute with the Jews.
John 5 verse 39, you search the scriptures, the Old Testament, the Hebrew canon if you like, because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that testify of me.
Now I think, you know, you're starting to get a picture that as far as Jesus is concerned, the whole of the Old Testament is about him.
It still leaves the question hanging as to how individual parts of it are about Jesus.
But let's start with the big, the broad sweep first, that in some way the Old Testament is relevant to our understanding of Jesus and vice versa.
In fact I would say primarily vice versa.
So that while it is true that you must know the Old Testament to understand the terminology used to describe him in the New Testament,
because Jesus is God's final and fullest word, then it is the Gospel which must explain to us and interpret to us the Old Testament.
So both the Old Testament interprets the New Testament, the New Testament interprets the Old Testament, but the primary emphasis would be on the New Testament interpreting the Old, in my view.
So in John 5 he goes on then, they testify on my behalf, and yet you refuse to come to me that you might have life.
It ought to be blindingly obvious to you that I am the Messiah, because the Scriptures that you search are about me, and yet you refuse to come to me.
And then the argument goes on a bit, and in verse 45 he says, do not think that I will accuse you before the Father, your accuser is Moses, on whom you have set your hope.
But if you believed Moses, you would believe me. Why? Because he wrote about me.
Now it's pretty clear that Jesus means the Pentateuch is about him.
So how is the Pentateuch about Jesus? That's the burning question for us as preachers and teachers of the Bible.
But that it is about him seems to be clear from Jesus' words.
And you can find other passages and all sorts of other ways in which Jesus picks up Old Testament themes, I mean John is full of them.
Destroy this temple in three days, I will raise it up again.
I am the good shepherd. What are we looking at? We're looking at Ezekiel 34.
I am the true vine. What are we looking at? All those passages about Israel being the vine that doesn't bear fruit.
And so on. So many of these passages.
And of course, once you do that, then you're in a better position with the interdependence of the two testaments to understand the sayings of Jesus in the light of the Old Testament, and to understand the Old Testament in the light of the sayings of Jesus.
So when Jesus talks about being the good shepherd, you cannot avoid going back to the shepherd passages in the Old Testament, which would include the shepherd psalm, the Lord is my shepherd.
But would also include passages like Jeremiah 23 and Ezekiel 34, where the shepherds are the rulers. It's a kingly figure.
So when Jesus claims to be the good shepherd, he is claiming to be their king, amongst other things.
Okay. How are we going? We go to 12 o'clock. Okay.
Now, my third point then is, and so we've really only scratched the surface of that point about Jesus and the apostles as biblical theologians, but I've mentioned passages like Acts 2 and Acts 13 and so on.
And what I hope you will do is that as you read the preachings and the sermons in the Acts and so on, and the sayings of Jesus, that you'll have a sharpened awareness of the antecedents to this, that they speak as people who believe the Old Testaments to be their scriptures.
In point three, I mentioned the structure of biblical theology, and I've already talked about the fact that most biblical theologians who do the, both the sort of the synchronic and the diachronic thing, have a sense of what some call epochs, that is, stages in biblical revelation.
And I've suggested to you three basic stages in Revelation, and summed up in this way here, and I've done it in diagrammatic form, but here you have the kingdom of God and the way of salvation as a means of getting into the kingdom of God, as it is expressed in Israel's history between Abraham and Solomon, or the first part of Solomon's life, and particularly David, of course.
And then, what do we say about the period after that, from 1 Kings 11 on, particularly to the end of 2 Kings?
In one sense, revelation goes into reverse. It's not a revelation of the kingdom, but in another sense it is, because wherever you go in the Bible, whether it's Old or New Testament, salvation and judgment are the two sides of the one coin, and of course the cross is the obvious example of that.
But you cannot have salvation without judgment, because the judgment of God is the righteousness of God bringing in his kingdom.
And so you have those passages like in Psalm, what is it, 98 or something, where, you know, let the floods clap their hands and the hills rejoice before the Lord. Why? Because he comes to judge.
We don't sort of think of God's judgment as a cause of rejoicing, but the Psalmist did, because he understood that judgment is the other side of the coin of salvation.
So wherever you find salvation being expressed in the Bible, you will find judgment with it. It's unavoidable, because salvation obviously has to be saving you from some negative condition.
And in order to save you from the negative condition, that negative condition has to be put under judgment, and dealt with.
And that's why I say, it is therefore, if you bear that in mind, it is not difficult, or not as difficult as you might think, to proceed from those texts which deal with judgment,
to the whole question of how that relates to Jesus, and how it helps us to understand something of the depth and the dimensions of the Gospel.
Okay, so the structure of biblical theology then to me is, this is one way of doing it, but it seems to me this fits best into the structure that the New Testament acknowledges.
Okay, that you simply do have a process which goes from the promise made to Abraham, and reaches its zenith with Solomon building the temple and dedicating it,
and you even have the Queen of Sheba coming along to fulfill the last part of the promise to Abraham, that through your descendants, shall the nations of the earth be blessed.
So you have this sort of, she sort of representing this process, which Isaiah and Zechariah see as happening alongside the restoration of the temple,
that when the temple is restored, the Gentiles will flow in.
And so you come from that temple theme to the fact that the restoration of the temple in Jesus' terms is his resurrection.
And it's at that point, as he returns and he pours out his spirit, that the whole business of the Gospel going out to the world and the Gentiles comes in.
So that mission, Christian mission is the demonstration that we are in the last days.
That we've hit the eschaton.
Okay, so Jesus, so you have, what the prophets do is recapitulate the same terminology.
What you've got in the right hand column is the same structure, but this time what the prophets describe is this very great difference.
This was temporary, it was flawed, you might say it was full of fluff and beetles, and it failed.
What the prophets describe is perfect, glorious, and forever.
And Jesus comes proclaiming that he is it.
And that to me is the three aspects of biblical revelation.
And you can look at it from whatever angle you like, you can pick out the covenant.
You can pick out any number of themes.
And one of the advantages of having a biblical theological approach to things is it gives you a tool for working through things.
But can I just say a word about that?
Working through a theme is not taking a word book and just picking out a word and working through words.
Now sometimes there are significant words that you can follow through.
But very often significant words will often be dealt with not by using the word, but by using the concept.
So what you really need to do is not look for words, but look for the concept.
And then engage in lateral thinking, and ask yourself what are other concepts which feed into this?
And you'll find, you know, if you get, do a bit of practice at this, it takes on the most unlikely things.
Not so long ago I received an email from the Social Ethics Committee or something in the Diocese of Sydney saying,
from a lady who was sort of chairing it or something, she said,
Would you be able to draw up for us an outline of a biblical theology of the family?
And then in brackets, Peter Jensen says you can't do it.
Is that the challenge?
So I thought, now what do I do? What goes into this?
So I started doing a bit of lateral thinking. What goes, what are the biblical concepts which go into it?
So I fed them back a diagram which had, you know, family down the middle, went back to creation and, you know,
man shall leave his father and mother and clear to his wife, fatherhood, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera,
coming through to, you know, the fulfillment of all these things in the Gospel.
So I sent that off, waited for reply and I think it was, you know,
thanks, that's just what we wanted sort of thing.
But it was, to me, and I don't know how useful it would be, but in the end it was a challenge to sort of take,
here's an important burning issue. What is the way to go about it?
And I think biblical theology is such a potent weapon that we can employ in all these things.
And there are so many books written on themes about Christian living and so on, which simply ignore the biblical theology issue.
But what a biblical theology perspective does is to help you to see, to see the thing more in its biblical perspective,
instead of just taking, you know, a few sort of key verses out here, which often leads you to,
not only to moralize, but to often become quite legalistic.
My most recent publication since retiring, having time to write, was a study on prayer, a book that I've called,
Prayer and the Knowledge of God, which starts with a dogmatic theological examination of prayer in the light of the Trinity,
and then moves on into a biblical theology.
And the reason I did that was I, again, hunted around, I scranched around in the section on prayer in the Moore College Library
and things like that, and all the books I'd collected over the years on prayer.
And apart from one book, as some of you will know, Wayne Speer's book on the theology of prayer,
nobody that I could see dealt with it from a biblical theology perspective.
So the result was the sort of thing that you so often hear, and I can remember a sermon I heard preached,
which really got me riled, you know, the gist of the sermon was something like this,
Jesus had got up a great while before day and went out into the hills to pray.
If Jesus needed that, how much more do we need to?
So everybody came away saying, all guilt ridden because they don't get up at three o'clock in the morning, pray for five hours.
I thought, this is not good enough.
We need a theology of prayer which helps us to understand what it is and which will motivate us,
not because we feel guilty, but because we feel so privileged.
That was my hope, whether I succeed is another matter.
Anyway, where are we?
Yeah, so I've talked about the structure.
I think the last thing I'd want to say here then is to come back to the question of the kingdom of God
and just say, look, this is not the only way, but to me, it is one of the most all-embracing themes that exist in the Bible.
That wherever you look, that the key issue that the Bible is dealing with is how God relates to his people.
And once you do that, you see, the first question you ask about even the narrative material,
in fact, especially the narrative material in the Old Testament, is not what does so and so do,
what does Samuel do here, what is David doing here, but what is God doing?
And I think that's the key to the narrative material.
What is God doing?
And as soon as you ask that question, you're in a better position, you see,
because Samuel lived for a certain number of years and he fades out and hardly gets another mention.
But God is always there, revealing himself as the gracious saviour, judged God of his people,
who not only is doing great things then, but he's revealing the way that he is moving towards the grand consummation of all things.
And when I talk about this, I'm often reminded, and I think it's a great passage to remind yourself of,
how in Colossians chapter 1, Paul describes Christ as the one in whom, through whom and for whom all things were created.
And to me that is saying something like this, that if you could have, just to use a sort of a manner of speaking,
if you could have looked over God's shoulder in the heavenly drafting room when he was drawing up the blueprints for creation,
what would you have seen on the blueprint?
Would you see a blueprint of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, a blueprint which you then had to revise because it all went wrong?
And I say no, you wouldn't, what you would see is the blueprint of Christ in his Gospel,
because that from all eternity was the purpose of creation.
Now as soon as you start looking at it like that, and you go back to the Old Testament narrative and you start telling the story,
then you can only tell the story properly if you tell it in that type of context.
There is, in recent times, there has arisen a new kind of emphasis in preaching,
which is really, I suppose, an example of postmodernism, and that is the sort of narrative preaching, telling the story.
And I've looked at a few examples of this when I was working on the stuff I'm preaching.
And you know, you read guys who say, telling the story, telling the narrative of Ruth is all you need to do.
Never mind making application, let people do that.
But my point is, you have not told the story of Ruth or of Elijah or of Samuel or of anybody else.
You have not really finished the story until you've seen it as part of the big story.
And so you have not finished with Ruth until you've seen how she contributes to the revelation of God in Christ.
You've not finished with Elijah or with Dad.
But what do we do?
We see Ruth as an example for godly women, we see Elijah as an example for godly people to walk with God.
I remember hearing Passion Talks, we need to walk close to the Lord just as Elijah did, etc. etc. etc.
Fine, fine.
We'll talk about exemplary preaching.
But if exemplary preaching is all we do, then we will miss out, I think, on the real issue.
That's all I want to say at this stage. Anybody got some questions?
Peter?
I just wanted out of left field, I think, if I could ask you.
You've said a couple of times how the prophecy of the Old Testament is fulfilled in Jesus.
What do you see, if anything, as being the place now in prophecy or in fulfillment of the Jewish people?
Let me say what I don't see first.
And here I know that I can be treading on holy ground in some people's view.
I do not see the present state of Israel as in any way related to the prophecy concerning God's purpose for the Jews.
Because I see Jesus as the fulfillment of Israel and therefore that rules that out.
But having said that, I am of the opinion that what Paul is saying in Romans 9 to 11 is that God still has a plan and purpose for the Jew.
But it is somehow related to Christ.
That is, the only way of salvation will be for them to come to Christ.
How that will happen, I'm not sure.
It probably is happening in Jews being converted to Christ.
As one of my teachers put it, as far as Paul is concerned, it could happen in the Canary Islands.
It's got nothing to do with the land of Palestine because that's all now fulfilled in Christ.
You may be aware of Donald Robinson wrote some articles on this.
He was of the opinion that when Paul talked about the saints in the New Testament epistle, he was referring to Jewish Christians.
And that he makes a distinction between spiritual Israel and spiritual Gentile.
I'm intrigued, and I said so in the essay I did for Peter O'Brien's first shift on Paul's theology, biblical theology and Paul's mission.
That when Paul, I think it's in Acts 13, gets a bit set up with the Jews because they reject him every time he preaches in the synagogue.
He shakes off the dust from his seat and says he's now going to the Gentiles. What does he do?
The very first thing he does, he goes to a synagogue.
Why does he do that? Well he does that it seems to me because that's where he's going to find the Gentiles, the God-fearers.
And what do I deduce from that? Well, very tentatively I deduce from that that Paul's theology of the relationship of Jew to Gentile
stems all the way back to Abraham, that he sees the salvation of the Gentiles coming through the Jews in some way.
So in Romans he says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel, power of God to salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first.
And then in Acts 13, having shaken off the dust of the Jews, he then trundles off to a synagogue and preaches to Jews and God-fearers.
And that seems to me to be saying that Paul understands that in some way the salvation of Jew and Gentile are very closely knit.
Which indeed it is in Romans 9 to 11.
Is that a paradox of today?
Well, yeah it's a difficult one, I'm not sure.
I think at least it means that we should be very concerned about the Jew and in one sense they ought to be
at the top of the list of our priorities
for evangelism.
Now you try that if you know anything about what's gone on in Sydney recently with
the fact that we had, well, in this last period when I was down there from 95 to 2000, we had at least three Jewish students.
One who became a Baptist and is now a Presbyterian minister.
Another who went off and did some work in a Jewish, Messianic ministry.
And the third who was ordained as an Anglican with a specific ministry to Jews in mind.
Now, I won't say all hell broke loose, but certainly a great deal of it did in that
this was seen by, the Jewish fraternity in Sydney just could not cope with the idea that we were targeting them.
And it was seen as anti-Semitic and the rest of it, when of course the true motivation is the complete opposite.
What we're trying to say is this is your God, we want to give it back to you.
You gave it to us, we want to give it back to you.
It really belongs to you.
And we're only riding into the kingdom of God on your cape tails as it were.
Beyond that, I wouldn't like to say, I mean I'm not going to speculate about what manifestations of this will occur as the Confirmation approaches.
Anybody want a word on that?
Just to get your thoughts on, you were saying that in the difficulty of going from the Old Testament to the New Testament,
but in some aspects I wonder whether that's a logical step to go that way.
But when you're in the New Testament and you're going back and saying in John 6, which is on the bread of life,
how much time you devote to unpacking what mannerism and things like that from the Old Testament before you come back to the New Testament.
Well, I think what I was trying to get over to you is that it's both.
It's both and.
You're going in both directions at once.
And I think that's what you do all the time.
A theological term which has gained certain popularity due to one particular dogmatics lecture at Moore College is the word perichoresis.
Which actually means dancing around together.
Another word, you know, that is sometimes used is co-inherence.
Verne Poitras uses that word a lot.
And it simply means that there is no, it's not just a matter of starting it here and moving through to there.
It's a matter of, but even then there will be a priority.
Now as I understand it, as I said before, the priority comes from Jesus as God's final and fullest word.
You might say God's clearest revelation. Word has become flesh and lived amongst us. You can't get clearer than that.
So while Jesus and the New Testament writers and the apostles all interpret his work and being in the light of the Old Testament.
So in that sense the Old Testament interprets Jesus.
There is another sense in which you will never understand the Old Testament until you see it as that which finds its fulfillment in Jesus.
So it's got to be both ends, but it seems to me the priority belongs to the gospel as the interpreter of the Old Testament.
Is that answer? Anything else?
This one is not clear in my head that even the questions are the only answer.
Yeah well it's just seeing what the answer is going to be like.
The structure of the biblical history of the diagram.
That is the, how shall we say, that's what you deduce to be the actual run of the chronology of the biblical documents.
The documents were written frequently at a different time.
I mean for example the documents about Abraham were presumably written at the time of Moses and for the situation that he faced with the Israelites in the wilderness.
The documents about say first kings would have been written subsequently for a particular need originally in the people later on.
In other words what I'm trying to wrestle with is the idea of how do we relate the theology that is, you kind of feel for what I'm trying to get at here.
The difference between the actual chronology as we think we've worked it out and the function of those documents in the life and the history of Israel where the order of it makes a difference.
Well yeah I think I know what you're getting at.
I mean the extreme form here, I'm certainly not accusing you of this, came out in the hyles Geschichte theologians you know.
Well it began with people like Barth and others who followed that and you know Old Testament theology Gerhard von Rath and so on.
Where a distinction was made between, and they used two German words, one was Geschichte which can mean a story or can mean history.
The other was Histori.
And Bultmann is the most extreme form of this where the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith are really two different things.
They put that back into the Old Testament.
The history of Israel as presented in the documents and what really happened are two different things according to them.
Now from my own point of view, I think what they show us is we're learning a great deal about the complications of trying to understand how history functioned in those days.
How people wrote history.
And we know from the fact that it used to be the thing to try to harmonize the gospels.
In other words to build a chronology of Jesus so that they all had virtually the same chronology.
So you have to end up then on that grounds with two cleanses of the temple because John has at the beginning of Jesus' ministry and the synoptics have it at the end.
I think now most people, even conservatives and you know, rat bags like us would agree.
Well, I don't want to speak for you but to me I find no problem in the fact that say John arranges his material in a basic chronology because he starts here and he moves through to a climax with the death and resurrection of Jesus.
But other than that he is more concerned about the theological arrangement of things.
So I find no difficulty in at least the hypothesis that John, the temple cleansing comes early because he wants to deal with that theological theme.
Without necessarily saying that it happened early in Jesus' life.
So with the Old Testament, it does get a bit complicated in one sense but you really have to have a very, very skeptical view of the Old Testament documents as history.
Not to come up with a fairly basic symmetry of things. That is the structure that I have suggested there.
I don't know how, you know, how even the most radical.
The sort of thing they would say is, well you know, there was Martin Note and people like him who said that we really don't know anything about Israel before the formation of the 12th clan league.
The whole history of Moses and the Exodus is up for grabs.
I wasn't into that radical stuff and Greg's booking his watch.
Yep, okay.
Right.
Yeah, we better leave it there.
Thank you again. I'll say thanks for the food and then we'll head off.
Our great God, we thank you that you provide us with so many good things, especially your Son and the Word that we've been learning.
We thank you for the food and the conversation that we're about to have.
We pray that we might use it, that we might be obedient as your children and to encourage one another. Amen.