Proclaimer Blog
God is my rock. Isn’t he?
We had a really good Cornhill+ study day with Garry Williams the other week and I’ve been meaning to post something that I found partiucularly helpful. He’s always good value – and he was very helpful on the constant need to let Scripture interpret Scripture.
He took as an example the biblical imagery of “God as a rock.” Imagine, he said, that a slip of paper had fallen from the sky simply saying “God is my rock” (Psalm 28). As a standalone statement it is open to extreme misinterpretation. We might deduce God has no life in him, for example, or that he gets in the way of things and so on.
Of course, we don’t do this because we understand that metaphors or statements about God tells us some things and not others. The richness of imagery is intended to create a complete set of self-interpreting set of images which need to be – at one level – taken in the round. One can only be understood in the light of all of the rest.
This has two implications for preaching. First, we have to know the Scriptures ourselves. We cannnot hope to interpret wisely and well unless we know the Scriptures to interpret the Scriptures. There is perhaps something here to convict us for Bible knowledge amongst Christians (and therefore, probably, among preachers) is in serious decline.
Second, perhaps this is more of what it means to preach the whole counsel of God: not primarily that we must tackle all the Bible in a systematic way not repeating anything until we have finally got around to Obadiah. Rather, we preach the Bible passage in front of us interpreted by the whole counsel of God.
And on that basis, God is my rock.