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.

The first principle we saw yesterday is an essential hermeneutical tool with which to relate historical developments in the Old Testament back to the promise of God and forward to the coming of Christ. At the same time we are able to treat these incidents (and the people involved in them) as real in their own right. For one of the dangers inherent in biblical-theological preaching is to minimise historical actuality in our anxiety to preach Christocentrically. The result can be as damaging to the integrity of our handling of the text as was patristic allegorising.  Sensitivity to the war in the heavenly realms being played out in history enables us to expound the concrete-historical and individual experiences of God’s people, yet simultaneously to interpret and place them within the big picture, the meta-narrative of the whole Bible. The historical is thus taken seriously for its own sake, while at the same time it is preached as part of the story of the all-conquering Christ.

This—it needs to be underlined—is not the only principle to be employed. But it does not require great imagination to see how events in Old Testament history illustrate it: the narrative of Adam and Eve against the serpent; the story of Cain and Abel, of the City of God and the Tower of Babel, Israel and Egypt, David and Goliath. The Book of Job is simply a dramatic microcosm of this. The conflicts and the miracles of Elijah and Elisha need to be read within this perspective. A submerged axehead or a poisoned stew are trivial problems, the miraculous reduced to a Harry Potter piece of magic, unless we recognise that these events take place in the context of a deadly conflict with eternal significance for the kingdom of God. Daniel’s life story and his apocalyptic visions are to be read through the same lenses. Indeed the opening words of the Book of Daniel indicate that we are entering a conflict narrative. There is war between two kingdoms. Here we have both the onslaught of the powers of darkness and this world (‘Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it’) and the righteous purposes of God through which his kingdom will continue and prevail (‘the Lord delivered Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand . . .’). Under fierce attack it requires extraordinary miracles to preserve the kingdom (now a remnant of four, exposed to destroying fire and the mouths of lions, Daniel 3 and 6). In the midst of this the kingdom (and king!) of this world is seen to be temporary and it and we are given intimation that it is the rock cut without human hands that will grow and fill the whole earth. Only those who see history this way (Daniel and his three friends) can sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land, in enemy occupied territory (Ps. 137).

In a similar way the opposition to the rebuilding of Jerusalem in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah is part of the unfolding of Genesis 3:15. These books provide conflict narratives in the confined space of God’s chosen city, illustrating that the exhortations of Ephesians 6:10-20 are as relevant in fifth century BC Jerusalem as in first century AD Ephesus.

We stand on the other side of the empty tomb; what was ‘not yet’ for Ezra and Nehemiah is ‘already’ for us. But there is also a ‘not yet’ for us; the conflict in the mopping up operations of war is as bloody and potentially fatal as in the decisive battle. We too, in the light of what Christ has accomplished, live in the ‘not yet-ness’ of the completion of the final Jerusalem.  This world is as full of the Tobiah, Sanballat and Geshem of Nehemiah’s day as it is of the Mr Talkative and the Giant Despair and Vanity Fair of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

Understanding the principle of promise and fulfilment in terms of an ongoing kingdom-against- kingdom cosmic-conflict helps us to apply the message of the Old Testament as Christian preachers today.