Proclaimer Blog
Preaching Christ from the OT, part 5
Summer series . Some years ago, we asked Sinclair Ferguson to write a brief paper for us on preaching Christ from the Old Testament. Over the next week or so, we’re going to publish an edited version online as part of our summer series. It’s worth some time.
We want to develop an instinct to preach Christ. This is the general principle. But it can be broken down into at least four subordinate principles which I’ll outline over the next five posts. Principle 1 is the longest, so I’ll split it into two!
Principle 1. The relationship between promise and fulfilment
Genesis 3:15 is in a sense the most basic text in the whole Bible: God puts enmity between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman; the seed of the woman will bruise the head of the serpent, and the serpent will crush the heel of the woman’s seed. Romans 16:20 and Revelation 12:9 both make crystal clear from the perspective of Christ’s completed work that Genesis 3:15 promises the ultimate cosmic conflict between our Lord Jesus Christ and Satan and the powers of darkness.
Of course Satan is not mentioned by name in Genesis 3—a point of some hermeneutical interest in itself—but when Paul writes that ‘the God of peace will bruise Satan under your head shortly’ (Rom. 16:20), and John sees in Revelation 12:9 that the serpent has grown into a dragon, it is clear that the New Testament writers thought of Genesis 3:15 as a reference to the coming Messiah, and to his conflict with Satan. The war about which the book of Revelation speaks then merely climaxes an antithesis and antagonism that has run through the whole of Scripture. It is a Library of Military History, with Genesis 3:15 and Revelation 12:9-20:10 as the bookcase. Not only so, but it follows that the whole of Old Testament Scriptures traces the outworking of this promise of God until it is consummated in Jesus Christ, and finally publicised throughout the universe in his triumphant return. Jesus’ programmatic statement, ‘I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it’ (Matt. 16:18) speaks of this cosmic-conflict context, represents its high point and promises victory in it. Everything between Genesis 3:15 and Matthew 16:18 can, in one way or another, be tied to the fulfilment of that promise; every twist and turn in redemptive history following Matthew 16:18 expresses that conflict, flows onward to its denouement and to that extent can be pinpointed on the map of redemptive revelation.
This is the story of the building of the kingdom of God in all its various stages, over against the kingdom of this world. The promise that the kingdom/reign of God/heaven will come/ is near/has arrived is therefore a structural key to redemptive history. From Genesis 3:15 to the end the Bible is the story of God the Warrior coming to the aid of his people in order to deliver them from the kingdom of darkness and to establish his reign among, in and through them. This is what gives weight to the words of John the Baptist that ‘the kingdom of heaven is near’ (Matt. 3:2). Breaking the prophetic silence of the centuries his message was of God’s impending eschatological war-triumph. Judgement-wrath represented by the judgement axe was, for John, the inevitable implication on the dark side; forgiveness and the reign and kingdom-blessing of God was the food news for all who repented.
This kingdom-conflict-conquest-victory theme can be traced in all kinds of narrative perspectives and dimensions of Old Testament revelation. The central point is to see the Old Testament as intimately (although of course not exclusively) connected to this fundamental idea that there is a radical antithesis driving through the whole of redemptive history, between the building of the kingdom of God by his king, and the efforts of the powers of darkness to destroy that kingdom. Recognise this and much of Old Testament Scripture can readily be understood in terms of its position in the central nervous system of the Old Testament. It should be possible to move from all of these different points to this backbone promise that runs through the Old Testament Scripture to Jesus Christ.