All Sermons

Preaching From the Old Testament By Donald Macleod

21/10/1986 Montville New Jersey

Our concern this morning is with the hermeneutics, the interpretation of God's Word, and we face
that problem at different levels as translators of God's Word, as theologians, but above all
as preachers of the Gospel.
And I happen to think that all theology and all that goes before it exists in order to proclamation and that is at this point we face most acutely the dilemmas caused by hermeneutics.
My experience and reading and skill in this area is very limited.
I am conscious that at the moment it is a seat in cauldron in academic circles.
There is much debate as to demythologising God's Word.
There is debate as to whether all truth is relational, a debate not only among liberals but also among those of orthodox Calvinist persuasion.
And I'm going to avoid these areas almost entirely this morning and do something very
much more elementary and unambitious.
The task we face in hermeneutics is to take God's Word out of its original setting and
context into the world of today and into the life of God's people in our time and place.
That means that we are called upon to transport the Word of God over three massive barriers
into the world of our own time.
There is the barrier, first of all, of language.
God's Word is given to us in Hebrew and Greek.
Both of these are dead languages for all practical purposes.
We have to translate that Word and expound that Word not only in the language of our
own race but in the idiom of our own time and place.
And that idiom is something which is enormously variable.
It changes from decade to decade.
It changes depending on where we're sitting geographically, not only from East to West
America, but even in different parts of Scotland we have different kinds of English.
And it depends also on social context.
The vocabulary of different social groups varies significantly.
I don't want to make too much of those problems, but we must be alert to them.
We are called upon to take the language of classical Hebrew and re-express it in the
language of those we ourselves today happen at this particular point to be addressing.
I would simply want to say this.
It is not the privilege of any of us to address an entity called modern man.
We only address particular limited facets of that universal.
And there are far too many simplistic definitions of modern man in circulation.
And we must ourselves be careful that we are looking at our own particular group to whom
God has called us to minister.
The second barrier is the barrier of time.
The New Testament is 2,000 years old.
It comes from a very, very different period in human history.
Before the Renaissance, before the Enlightenment, before modern science and technology.
The world of that day, they faced problems which we don't face.
The problems of slavery, the problems of food offered to idols.
We have to take the principles which were relevant to that kind of age and apply them
to our age with its very different range of problems.
Nuclear technology, massive emphasis on abortion and on personal freedoms.
How can we take the principles of this time-conditioned Old Testament and make it relevant in a very
different time in which God has placed ourselves?
And thirdly, there is a cultural barrier.
How can we carry the Word of God from the agrarian and almost primitive economy and
sociology of Old Testament Israel and apply it in the highly industrialized and highly
technical society of modern North America?
We have a very different political system, different expectations.
How can we make relevant to our time and place the economic, moral, social and political
principles of Old Testament Israel?
That is the task.
A threefold barrier of language, time and culture.
And I think that that task is much more difficult for the Old Testament than it is for the New.
It's more difficult because the language barrier is much more formidable.
It's more difficult because the number of AIDS available is much more limited.
I think it's still safe to say that the apparatus of Old Testament scholarship has not caught
up with that of New Testament scholarship.
But even more important, I think this.
I think that there are far fewer models of really outstanding Old Testament preaching
available to us.
It is our privilege through recent publications to have access to many models of outstanding
New Testament preaching.
The work of Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, the work of Reverend John Stott, to mention only two.
These men have shown us, in a very lucid and inspiring way, how to take the word of
the New Testament into the church of the present time.
There is very much less available by way of consecutive exposition from a Reformed perspective
of the Old Testament Scriptures.
And that means that we have very, very few models.
And that leaves us, I think, often struggling.
It seems to me as one, it differs profoundly from Dr. Lloyd-Jones on such things as the
cristiology and the sealing of spirit baptism, that I yet owe him an immeasurable debt because
to hear him preach was in itself an education, and to read his sermons is itself an education
in homiletics, with all the great emphasis on finding a point of contact, the emphasis
on ordinary development, and above all the emphasis, the remorseless emphasis on application.
Now we lack that with regard to the Old Testament, and that, I think, is a great problem at the
present time.
Well, let me move on to share with you a few thoughts which I think are fairly non-academic,
non-technical, very personal on this particular problem of preaching from the Old Testament.
I want to share simply a few very basic principles.
The first is this, to remember that all scripture is given by inspiration of God, and that the
primary reference of these words is a reference to the Old Testament.
It is of the Old Testament that Paul said, it is Theopneustos, it is breathed out by
God.
At every single point in the Old Testament, we face the Word of God Himself, so that to
say the Old Testament says is to say God says.
We face there not simply the Word of Man, we face there the Word of God, and that seems
to me to have several very important implications.
It means, for example, that we can never set any part of the Old Testament over against
another part of the Old Testament, or set the Old Testament over against the New Testament.
I believe without embarrassment in the principle of progressive revelation.
I prefer to express it in the formula cumulative revelation, where God doesn't repudiate anything
that's gone before, but He builds on all the previous layers of revelation in carrying
His Church further forward in understanding His own will and His own purpose.
Now it seems to me, elementary though it is, that we have absolutely no right to set the
Pentateuch over against the prophets.
Or to set the Law over against Isaiah.
Or to set Ecclesiastes over against the Psalms.
Because the entirety has come from God Himself as the single final author of the Old Testament.
And since there is no possibility of God being confused or God's thought having to be revised
or God having to publish His recantations, we have to accept that there is an underlying
unity between every successive phase of biblical revelation.
It also follows from the same principle that all Scripture is inspired by God, that the
Old Testament in its entirety is normative for the Christian life.
I remind you again that for decades the Old Testament in the Septuagint was the canon
of the New Testament Church.
I remind you in fact that what happens in the formation of the New Testament canon is
the gradual addition to the inherited Old Testament canon of the emerging corpus of
apostolic writing.
The Church of God never, never lacked canonical Scripture.
And that means that wherever I face the Old Testament, the Law, the Prophets, the writing,
I face what the early Church accepted with no embarrassment whatsoever as being utterly
and totally normative.
That itself is one major embarrassment to the view that the Law is no longer binding
upon the Christian, because the Old Testament canon was deemed binding in its entirety in
the early years on the formation of the Old Testament Church.
Wherever we face the Old Testament, we are facing normative and canonical Scripture.
To move on just from beyond that, because it's all inspired, because it's all canonical,
it is all profitable, profitable for the people of God.
Now of course we can ourselves identify all those parts which we find most moving and
most interesting.
I think that B. B. Walton was correct to remind us that equality of inspiration does not mean
equality of interest or equality even of theological importance or equality of emotional and devotional
impact.
Obviously the Gospel according to John and Ecclesiastes are at different levels and terms
of their inspirational quality, but they are absolutely equal in terms of their inherent
inspiredness.
But every single part is profitable, and I mean by that particularly that even those
parts which are superseded are still profitable.
There are certain elements of the Old Testament and of the New Testament which I think belong
to the transitionalism of progressive revelation, and yet even in those parts which are superseded
there is still so much what is profitable for the Church of God at the present time.
For example, we may say that the civil and the penal criminal code of the Old Testament
is no longer binding on the Church of God today since the collapse or termination of
the theocracy, if we take a non-theonomist position.
And yet I think that there are very great lessons for politics and jurisprudence in
those elements of the criminal code of Israel even though as a corpus they are inapplicable
to our current situation.
We have, for example, an intriguing detail in architecture that when a house are to be
built you are to build a parapet on the roof.
Even Dr. Martin's house doesn't have a parapet.
But there is still something in that principle which is relevant, that we must be alert to
the safety of anybody who may come onto our premises of property, whether as guests or
as workmen or whatever.
You must have a regard to the well-being of others.
There is something for me profoundly significant too in this, that the Old Testament criminal
code doesn't anywhere prescribe imprisonment as a form of punishment.
And that seems to me to raise very, very serious questions about the humaneness of our own
prison system.
Now, I mustn't go too far down that road, but I think it's fair for me to say that
with the introduction of what is called in Britain social legislation rather than lawmaking
based on divine absolutes, the signs are already emerging that the law courts will impose not
simply irresponsibly trivial sentences, but will also unequally impose irresponsibly draconian
sentences because they have lost their grounding in biblical absolutes.
I am intrigued too by the fact that whereas corporal punishment was certainly enjoined
in the Mosaic code, yet it was severely limited, lest the victim become contemptible in the
eyes of the inflictor or in the eyes of society.
Now just as we can go back to the New Testament epistles and their teaching on food offered
to idols and find still great lessons in the context of teaching, which is in a direct
sense no more relevant to us, so you can go back to the Old Testament and its transition
elements and find teaching which is equally relevant and precious in our particular situation.
I think too we must bear this in mind.
Just because all scripture is inspired, these men often said more than they knew.
Whatever our emphasis on grammatical and historical exegesis and whatever attention we pay in
the elaboration of such exegesis to the intention of the author, we must bear in mind that there
is clear biblical indication that the actual message which God intended to convey transcended
and exceeded that of the intention or the grasp of the human authors.
We know from 1 Peter 12 and chapter 1 verse 12, for example, that the Spirit of Christ
led the prophets, and these prophets were often asking, what does this mean?
What time am I pointing to?
If I may be provocative for a moment, it seems to me that I understand Isaiah 53 better than
Isaiah himself.
Just because I stand at a different point in Revelation history, I do not believe that
Isaiah could ever have written down the Chalcedonian Creed.
He did not have that grasp, that synthesis of the various elements of the Christology
when she was propounding.
I believe that he proclaimed a divine Messiah, that he proclaimed a human Messiah, an exalted
Messiah, a suffering Messiah, and a vicarious atonement.
But I do not think that he ever synthesized these in one particular insight in his own
mind.
And I do not feel that in my preaching I must not go beyond what those who first heard him
would have understood or what he himself thought he was saying in that particular affirmation.
I believe that when Job said, I know that my Redeemer lives, there was an author behind
that affirmation higher than Job himself.
And I believe that we have every right to read, understand, and preach on these words
in the light of Incarnation and in the light of Pentecost.
Yet we remind you simply of the way Peter preaches at Pentecost in Acts chapter 2.
He's expounding Joel, and Joel has spoken of the great cosmic and astrophysical signs
of the last days, and Peter says, pointing to Spirit baptism, this is the act.
It doesn't mean that when Joel spoke of the sun and the moon has been affected by all
kinds of physical change, that he knew that what he was saying was that one day God would
pour his Spirit on all his people.
But Peter interprets the prophecy in terms of and in the light of its New Testament fulfillment.
Now I still want to say that in preaching, yes, you pay attention to the occasion.
Why do the prophets say this?
What was his intention in saying it?
How were those who first heard him have understood him?
But I believe he must also go beyond that to ask, what did God mean?
And in the light of the New Testament revelation of the nature of God to the work of atonement,
how do I take this language in my own personal situation?
Let's remind ourselves also of this, that the Old Testament is our primary source for
many doctrines.
It is our primary source for many doctrines.
Even if we grant that the New Testament carries revelation significantly further forward,
it does not mean that at every point the New Testament is richer and more explicit than
the Old Testament.
And I believe, in fact, that it causes enormous problems in a church after preaching this
entirely from the New Testament, because then significant areas of doctrine are almost completely
omitted.
I believe, for example, that for a Christian doctrine of man you must go primarily to the
Old Testament.
That is where God defines for us what being a human being actually is.
Now except that the corpse stone is put on that by the incarnation in which Christ comes
as the mortal man, but the foundation is laid and developed to a very high degree in the
Old Testament itself.
I believe, too, that it's such a question as whether Christians ought to be involved
in politics that we get into enormous trouble, because we answer that question simply in
Old New Testament terms.
We point to the Apostolic Church, a church under persecution, and we say, well, Paul,
he took no part in politics, therefore we take no part in politics.
But that is to forget that all scripture is inspired by God and that our canon is the
Bible in its entirety.
We must go back to man like David, man like Solomon, Solomon who is in my view the modern
politician because he says to God, Lord, I can't do it.
I can't govern with so great people.
I simply haven't got the equipment for the job.
And he goes on his knees to God and asks for charisma for the Spirit of God to come
and help him do a decent job of this impossible task to which God has called him.
I think you've done it in a non-Christian, non-biblical culture, rising to the top in
the educational system, in the national bureaucracy, and at last in the imperial government.
And if we want a total biblical answer or perspective on politics, we have no right
to say, look at the words in red print in the New Testament or look at the example of
the Apostle Paul.
We have to look, take what we call in Scotland, a conjoined view of the teaching of the Word
of God in its entirety, and I believe also that if we want the foundations of a biblical
doctrine of God, then again it is to the Old Testament primarily that we have to go.
And I believe again that we get into very great difficulties because we ignore the importance
of that old angle.
It's in the Old Testament you find explorations of the righteousness of God, that you find
expositions of the holiness of God, that you find some of the key ideas in the whole concept
of grace, and that you find even what I think is indispensable teaching on the love of
God.
If I can just digress for a moment, I believe that enormous damage is being done by the
fact that with regard to the ideal of love, people are setting agape and eros over against
each other.
They tell us that in the New Testament the word eros never occurs.
They tell us therefore the love of God is something different from eros.
And the love of God lacks the distinctives of eros, and they forget one elementary fact,
that that distinction is simply not drawn at all in the Old Testament, and that in the
Old Testament the same word serves to express the divine love and sexual love, and indeed
that I think is a necessary enrichment of the New Testament concept of agape, that in
the love of God there is passion and there is commitment, there is exclusiveness and
there is jealousy.
And if you simply build on a lexicon definition of agape, you're going to be, I think, in
enormous trouble.
You must go back to the much broader teaching of the Old Testament.
And then one last point under this heading.
The Bible in its entirety is indeed inspired by God, but we must distinguish with regard
to the Old Testament particularly between what it records and what it endorses.
Now I think that this is indeed open to abuse.
But what I mean is this, that in the area of experience and experiential godliness,
which again is one of the distinctive inputs of the Old Testament, the Old Testament particularly
describes with ruthless fidelity the weaknesses and the failings of even outstanding men of
God.
And I think it's very important for us to grasp that.
I find sometimes Job expressing the most horrific doubts, maybe about life after death.
I find him so dejected.
I find him quarrelling with God.
I find him even reacting to God blasphemously, throwing terrible insults at God.
You know, he says once, you know what kind of God you are.
Suppose I were to wash myself and make myself never so clean.
You know what you do, God?
You throw me back in the ditch.
That's the kind of God you are.
Now I think that in the tremendous drama and histrionics of Job, which I regard as an authentic
historical record, but it is a record of high drama, of tremendous tension between
God and the soul, and I don't think that everything Job says was nice, I don't think
everything Job says was right, I don't think all he says was defensible, and homiletically
I have this great fact that there is the way Christians sometimes feel, and you must
say to your people, God's child can talk to God in that way, and you mustn't write
a man off because he talks to God in that way, nor must you write yourself off because
there have been times in your life when you've argued with God, and when in your heart there
have been dreadful thoughts about God.
And you take Elijah under the juniper tree, utterly and totally dejected, to some extent
the reaction to the high drama of Mount Carmel, physically and emotionally drained after
that high watermark, to some extent it sheared human fear and cowardice.
What is Jesse going to do now?
And there he is moping under his juniper tree, a modular grand example of clerical paranoia.
I alone am left.
Well, you see, it doesn't mean that the Bible is homologating and condoning the moods
of Job, or the moods of Elijah, but it is recorded for us as indicating the possibilities
for our believing experiences, and it leaves me room to comfort those of God's children
who, in the face of pressure such as maybe you and I have never known, show signs of
coming apart at the seams, and you say to them, well, I don't want to condone what
you're doing, but it's happened before to God's children, and Job almost came apart
at the seams, and so did Elijah, and so for that matter did the Apostle Paul himself press
down, he says, beyond measure, and say to us that, don't think for a moment that I took
it all in my stride.
One day, one time, I prayed to God three times to take something away that God didn't want
to take away, and God and I couldn't agree on it until he showed me the reasons for its
presence in my life.
But I must move on.
That is my first principle, all scripture giving me inspiration of God and then all
its implications as I try to highlight them.
The second principle is this, the unity of the covenant.
We must, of course, do justice to the diversity of the forms of administration, to the patriarchal,
the Sinaitic, and the New Covenant, and in all of these there are significant differences
as all of us would allow.
But it remains, I think, a firm New Testament emphasis that there is one great covenant
of grace on the model of God's covenant with Abraham, and the law, the law of Sinai did
not annul that covenant.
It was added.
It came in as a supplement.
It came in as a temporary form of the administration of that covenant, but it did not supersede
it.
And even in the New Testament, we are still living under that Abrahamic covenant.
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law that the blessing of Abraham might come for
the Gentiles, that we must promise the Spirit through faith.
There is continuity between Abraham, Sinai, and the New Testament.
That for me is the great and enduring foundation of exemplarist preaching from the Old Testament.
I believe that we are all involved in the one covenant.
We are saved by the same faith and the promises of God.
We are sustained by the same Spirit.
We are exposed to the same pressures, and we may therefore, in my judgment, use the
Old Testament in a thoroughly exemplarist way.
And I think that the Lord himself endorsed that principle when he said to us, remember
Lot's wife.
There was nothing particularly Christological or redemptive historical in Lot's wife, but
she was an example of the consequences of disobedience, and I think that she herself
breaches the whole denial of exemplarist preaching.
I believe that there is substantial and essential continuity between my spiritual life and Abraham's
lives, that his call out of the mouth of the colonies has elements of essential continuity
with all conversion to God.
I believe that in the great trial of his faith on Mount Moriah, the whole Church of Jesus
Christ stands with them, exposed in all different ways to the trial of our faith.
I believe that we can wrestle with Jacob at Bethel.
I believe that we can stand with David in his struggles, with Moses in his struggles.
I believe that we can go back to Psalm 51 and say to ourselves, there is no greater
statement of repentance anywhere in the New Testament.
The psychology of the soul returning to God under the New Covenant delineated with all
inspiring insight and thoroughness of detail.
I believe I can stand with the psalmist in Psalm 42 and say, like as the heart punts
for the brooks of water, so my soul punts for thee, O God.
And I can stand with him and say, why are you cast down, my soul, why?
Sharing the same temptations to despondence he has faced the Old Testament people of God
and finding the same arguments and the same logic carrying us out of the slough of despond.
One great example of Old Testament preaching.
Lloyd-Jones's exposition of Psalm 73, I don't want to harmonicate all its details,
but it does show that God's people go through these trials of faith and they have to stand
in the house of God and try to get their minds going and understand, I went to the house
of God and I understood and then build a whole possibility of emergence from the pit
of that great fact.
I stand with the psalmist in Psalm 130, Lord, from the depths to the eye-cry, dejected for
the very same reasons as dejected the psalmist, the state of the church of God and his old
spiritual condition.
And we find him there saying, I wait for God, my soul to wait, my hope is in his word.
Unity, identity of covenant, worshipping the same God, attacked by the same enemy, sustained
by the same promises, therefore preaching on an exemplarist model.
My third principle was progressive or cumulative revelation.
But I shall just name that, I'll move on to my next principle, which is this, the true
nature of biblical prophecy.
Now I want to emphasize this for a reason because I do think it causes enormous homiletical
problems.
I think if we go to the Old Testament prophets with the idea that this is all about prediction,
we must look for the rapture, we must look for the second coming, we must look for the
millennium.
If we go with that concern to find in prophecy only prediction, we're going to be in enormous
difficulty.
Or if we go to the prophets only to find Christology, then again we're going to be in enormous difficulty.
I think that prediction was a substantial element of prophecy, both in the Old Testament
and in the New Testament form of that particular charisma and its activity.
But I do not believe that prophecy was primarily foretelling.
I do not think at all that it is a capitulation to liberalism to say that the prophet was
first and foremost a forth teller.
The Navi, the prophetic, was the man who had stood in the audience chamber of God and came
forth with a message which God required him to speak.
Now that message was sometimes prediction, but prediction was only a fraction of the
total output of those great divine spokesmen, and it will, I think, serve to keep us right
if we remember one thing, that the outstanding prophet was Moses.
But what is today called law is really prophecy, and that reminds us of the wide variety of
material that we have in those prophets.
It is broadly Torah, which is instruction.
A great deal of it is divine demand, a great deal of it is didactic teaching material,
some of it is predictive, some of it is history.
1 Samuel, 2 Kings were deemed prophecy by the Old Testament Church.
Deuteronomy, it's the work of a prophet.
So it may be pure doctrine, it may be pure law, and it's still prophecy, because what
is a prophet?
It's very beautiful for us in the story of Moses' calling.
Moses said to God, Lord, I'm not eloquent, I can't preach.
And God argues with them, and in the narrative becomes, as I may say so, irritated.
And he says to him, I will give you Aaron, and stop making excuses, and Aaron, he will
be your Nabi, he will be your prophet, he shall be a mouth for you.
That's what a prophet was, a prophet was God's mouth.
Sometimes prediction, very often didactic, very often law.
But even more frequently in the classical prophets, the prophets were the critics of
God's people.
I want to return for a moment to Hosea chapter 6, because it brings to the point that I want
to emphasize.
These men were not simply foretellers, but these men to a substantial degree, their calling
was to serve as the judges and the critics of the people of God.
It's put with tremendous force in verse 5 of Hosea chapter 6, therefore I have hewed
them by the prophets.
I have slain them by the words of my mouth, and my judgment goes forth as the light.
The prophets were the hearers and the slayers of the people of God.
They came and they said to the Old Testament church, this is what God thinks of you.
It is in a way, you see, classical G. Adams, nothetic counseling.
It's a question of saying, this is what is wrong, this is God's judgmental affirmation,
this is wrong.
And this is God's directional affirmation, this is what you put in its place.
And the prophets stood in the name of God and they confronted the people.
And I say to you, it's there by the yard that are inches of prediction, that are centimeters
of Christology, but there are yards of judgmental affirmation and counseling.
You see it in the little part of the same chapter, indeed, right through Hosea.
You see a prophet there in Hosea 6 and verse 8, what's he saying?
Gilead is a city of evildoers, product of the blood, the priests are banded together,
they murder in the way to shechem, yea, they commit villainy.
And chapter 8 verse 1, the prophet says, a vulture is over the house of the Lord because
they have broken my covenant, that's prophecy.
Nothing on the rapture, but it's still prophecy, there is a vulture over the house of the Lord.
And I say this in practice, if you're going to expound Hosea or Amos, please first of
all read them through and ask yourself, do my people need this?
Do they need to be hewed and flayed?
Do this mind church need to be slain?
Because that's what you'll be doing if you are really faithfully expounding this book.
You will not be preaching the glories of Calvary, you will be showing up the problems
of the church of God.
And that's why the Reformation, there was so much emphasis on expounding books like
Daniel because John Knox thought that's what the unreformed church needed.
It needed to be hewed and to be slain.
But I must move on.
My fifth principle is this, the danger of a false Christocentrism.
Now, just a few moments of the principles which I think are involved here.
It is indeed true that the whole of Revelation is the unfolding of the implications of the
proud Evangelion in Genesis chapter three, the prophecy of the seed of the woman.
But that does not mean that every part of the Old Testament is teaching about Jesus
Christ.
And I say a false Christocentrism because I think there is great confusion in this whole
concern and it's this, that something is not Christ-centred unless it is speaking about
Christ himself.
Well, I think the correct principle surely is this, Christ is not the object of every
part of the Old Testament, but he is the subject, the mediator, the great prophet from whom
it's every iota has come.
And the correct approach in the Old Testament in my view is this, not to ask ourselves what
does the story of David and Bathsheba tell us about Christ, which I think is a ludicrous
question, but to ask ourselves what is Christ saying to me in the story of David and Bathsheba.
It is coming from him.
I would say this to you, could not really apply this Christocentrism even to the New
Testament, because there are many parts of the New Testament of which Christ is not the
subject.
First Corinthians seven, for example, the problems of marriage and divorce.
It would be absolutely ridiculous to approach that chapter from, quote, our redemptive historical
perspective and ask what is the Christological horizon of his words.
What do they say about Christ?
They have the mind of Christ.
They are the words of the living Christ, speaking to us today in rebuke as many as I love by
reprove and chasten.
Christ is not always talking about himself.
He is sometimes talking about us, the continuing function of prophecy, hewing us, slaying us,
encouraging us.
And what we must find, as I said, is not what is it saying about Christ, but what is Christ
saying to us in this particular passage.
Now I have this time my lecture and I should have spent more time on that, I must apologise.
I just want to close on a different note and it's this.
The Old Testament as part of the Word of God was given by God to his people, not to seminarians,
not to professors, not to preachers, but to the people of God.
Therefore, our confessions on the 17th century tell us it must be rendered into the vulgar
tongue and it must be read by the ordinary people of God who in the use of the ordinary
means can come to an understanding of its essential message.
Now my concern is a very direct and practical one.
It is a disservice to the people of God to convey the impression that the Bible is so
complicated that unless you've been to seminary and have yards of books and lexicons, then
you can't make head or tail of it.
And it does often happen in preaching that the man in the pew says, wasn't it clever,
I never saw that, I could never have seen that.
If you listen to Lloyd-Jones, you left the Church with the impression that, why didn't
I see it before?
Because it was so obvious, it was logical, it was there for the ordinary people of God
using their sanctified common sense.
And I think that you must always preach so that God's ordinary child, man or woman,
is encouraged to believe that with ordinary application he can understand the passage
for himself.
And that's why principles which have been discovered only this enough in the 20th century
and which are the position of only a few scholars are, in my judgement, ipso facto suspect because
they have plied it up to the emergence of this particular school, this was a closed
book.
And that can't be true.
And you must always preach so that God's people are not discouraged.
A sermon should be a model of Bible study and an occasion for people to go and do it
for themselves.
Though I must close, shall we pray.
Lord bless thy word to us, continue with us, enable us to enjoy thy benefits and blessings
through this day with thankful hearts, for Jesus' sake, Amen.
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