Fantastic jump into a pool of muddy water Peter! It seems as though many preaching practitioners prefer the easy way out when it comes to communicating the Old Testament through homily. Short-cuts of allegorizing, spiritualizing, exhortation to imitate characters, moralizing or, with OT texts, jumping to Jesus is common and simultaneously disastrous. Your tips are a wonderful beginning point. They are helpful in assisting the preacher to think bigger and better!

Here is another tip that relates to preaching OT narrative and other biblical genres as well. Sidney Greidanus gives voice to this tip in his book, The Modern Preacher and The Ancient Text. In it, he introduces a theocentric versus anthropocentric hermeneutic for homiletics. Though this is nothing new, and has certainly been addressed in homiletic/literary circles before by Ryken, Von Rad and the like, the central idea is fundamental to consider when preaching OT narrative.

According to Greidanus, God is the central character and not any other – Saul, David, Elijah, Nehemiah are all secondary. More than this, Greidanus argues that narrative (to be clear, all of Scripture) is making a theocentric point not an anthropocentric point. Now, I am not convinced that this is the case all of the time, in every pericope of Scripture. However, it is fodder for thought.

When considering the point of narrative, it is not enough to simply consider the characters. It is not enough to consider plot – background, inciting incident, rising action, climax and denouement. All of these aspects of narrative are necessary to interpretation, however, without consideration of God, his role, interaction, characterization, etc. narrative becomes nothing more than human-driven moralizing. Certainly, we hold Scripture to a higher standard than this. It is why we refer to Scripture as Revelation, not Humanities 101.

So, enough pontificating in my first post! Here is a summary:

– When working at preaching an OT narrative, do not forget to consider God.
– Ask, what is being said about God?
– Think about how the narrative and its characters depict God.
– Wrestle with how the points being made about God within the narrative contour and give shape to what the secondary characters value and how they live.
– Finally, being that we are all characters similar to Saul, David, Elijah and Nehemiah – a part of the same biblical story, how do we relate to this God?

Last Sunday I preached in a small church not far from us. I was assigned a passage that I would never choose for myself, at least not as a one-off message. The raising of the Shunammite’s son by Elisha (2Kings 4:8-37). There are always short-cuts when preaching an Old Testament narrative, but I’m not comfortable with them. For example it is easy to tell a story and then jump to Jesus (and preach a New Testament message). But the story stood as inspired long before the New Testament was added. Or it is easy to tell the story, ignore the theological context/content and then draw out some human-level moral principle – “so let’s be like person X.” Again, that usually is not the point of the narrative. The challenge is to avoid the short-cuts and preach the intended truth of the passage in its context with the full theological implication, but to also be sure to apply the message specifically to the listener today. On one hand, it is easy to do a historical lecture, but leave your listeners untouched by the truth of the passage. On the other hand, it is easy to springboard from a story to all sorts of possible applications that do not honor the meaning and purpose of the passage. And if there can be a third hand, then it is also relatively easy to force Jesus and the New Testament back into the Old Testament and end up preaching a different passage. So how to avoid the easy options and instead preach the passage itself?