13 September 2022
The professor of a well known seminary on Homiletics, once played tapes from a top-rated radio station on morning broadcasts relating to meditations from a Bible verse or two, to seminary students and asked them if anyone can discern error in what the preacher says.
Rarely does anyone spot a problem. The preacher quotes his text accurately, he advocates moral causes, and he encourages loving behaviours. The professor then pointed out that the radio preacher is not a Christian; in fact he represents a large cult in their region.
Some students answered that their lack of protests results from the radio preacher’s care to avoid saying anything controversial; the preacher has hidden his heresy beneath a veil of right-sounding orthodoxy.
The professor surprisingly told them that the students have completely missed the point and the problem: the radio preacher has not hidden his heresy; he exposes it every time he speaks in what he fails to say. Unfortunately, for genuine believers, those who are responsible for Bible messages and those who lead Bible study also fail frequently to differentiate between an application that purports to be biblical and one that actually is.
This brings us to this point: The insights of biblical theology are critical for messengers who want to expound a text so as to stay true to the passage and consistent with the gospel. We have looked previously at Biblical storyline and Biblical theology; the latter is the attempt to tell the whole story of the whole Bible as Christian Scripture – it is a story that has an authoritative claim on our lives as Christians, because it is the story of God’s glory in salvation through judgement.
A message or application that merely advocates morality and compassion remains sub-Christian even if the sharer can prove that the Bible demands such behaviours. By ignoring the sinfulness of man that makes even our best works tainted before God and by neglecting the grace of God that makes obedience possible and acceptable, such messages or applications necessarily subvert the Christian message. A message that teaches others that their works win God’s acceptance inevitably leads people away from the gospel. Moral maxims and the promotion of ethical conduct alone fall short of the requirements of biblical message and application.
We must not exhort fellow believers to do whatever the Bible requires of them as though they could fulfil those requirements on their own, but only as a consequence of the saving power of the cross and indwelling sanctifying power and presence of Christ in the person of the Holy Spirit. All biblical messages and applications must fully take into consideration God’s grace in salvation and in sanctification.
A textually accurate delivery of a message or application from the Bible does not guarantee Christian orthodoxy. Exhortations for moral behaviour apart from the work of the Saviour degenerate into mere pharisaism even if the messenger advocates the actions with biblical evidence and good intentions.
It may be as good as a secular ‘dissertation’ which advocates moral values and moral actions which are acceptable to the particular community; however, it is certainly not a biblical message or a biblical application for the believer.
The revelation of God in Scripture is inseparably linked to the activity of redemption; this means that in order for us to expound biblical revelations from any passage or text we must relate our explanation to the redeeming work of God present in the text. However, the redemptive dimension of a particular Scripture may not seem prominent in that text itself; the redemptive features of a text sometimes appear in seed form (because God’s revelation is progressive), Still, to expose the revelation properly we must see its redemptive content and context. We must relate even seed-from aspects of the text to the mature message they signal, or for which they prepare us, in order fully and rightly to interpret what the passage means.
We come back again to the subject of exegesis and correct biblical interpretation. Correct biblical and theological interpretation requires the expositor to discern how any text’s ideas function in the wider biblical message.
Starting with the text, we ask, what is the point of this text? Paying attention to grammar, genre and historical background, we attempt to understand the author’s original intent. We then look for the point of the text in the context of the larger passage or biblical book; we consider the point of the text in the light of where the text falls in redemptive-history. In what period or history of God’s saving work does it occur? We next look for the point of the text in the light of the whole canon, that is to say, in the light of Christ’s work on the cross and His promised return.
Once we identify the key themes that are running through our particular text, and once we are clear where in redemptive history our text falles, then we are in a position to trace the theme through the whole Bible. The result is that we are now able to teach or preach the text, as the case may be, not as if it is unrelated to the rest of Scripture but as it really is, one section of an entire tapestry that is inextricably and organically related to the whole.
The applications of the text can then be directed to Christian, the church, and also directly or indirectly to the non-Christian and the community as part of the communication of the gospel of God’s redemption.
Biblical theology encourages us to constantly connect every passage or text we share or preach to what God has done in the past and what He has promised to do in the future. It provides us with a worldview, a storyline that challenges the stories of our own culture; it focuses the main point of every passage or text within the grand storyline of the Bible, the story of God’s actions to redeem a people for Himself, through the judgement of His Son, to the praise of His glorious grace.
Biblical theology is nothing other than an understanding of the story of what God has done for us in Christ, applied to our lives today. So the applications of Bible study and Bible messages must be ‘tied up’ and ‘immersed’ in this biblical redemptive story; for us to do this effectively, we must read widely in Scriptures, and always with a view of how the passage we are reading fits into the whole, how it prepares us for Christ, how it is leading to the consummation of the kingdom of God. This is how Scripture understands itself; in Scripture we have the words of life, the only words that will feed Christ’s sheep and bring life to the dead.