Preaching the Word Today
Chapter 10: Preaching the Word Today
Phillip Jensen
Asking a preacher to write on preaching is a courageous invitation. Some, like Paul, have a reputation for weighty writing combined with weak speech, while with others it is the reverse. Few are, like Kent Hughes, gifted in both. It is in thankfulness to God for the gifts of Kent as both a preacher and a writer, to say nothing of pastor, host, friend, and dearly loved brother in Christ, that I offer this essay.
Forty years ago when I was training for a preaching ministry, two essays made a profound impact on my thinking and on all my preaching since. One was an essay by D. W. B. Robinson, then vice principal of Moore College, entitled "The Theology of the Preached Word." The other was a book by Ed Clowney entitled Preaching and Biblical Theology.
I remember reading Ed Clowney's book assuming that I would get all kinds of hints and tips about how to preach. To my amazement I received an account of biblical theology. There was no advice on how to use microphones, notes, and pulpits - no discussion on how long to preach or whether to use illustrations from personal life or from the Bible. I wondered if I had misread the title of the book. Slowly it dawned on me - for it was so foreign an idea - that the theology of the Bible is the most important ingredient in the training of the Christian preacher. Anything else, important in its place, is mere trivia in comparison. Having been helped in this way, I thought it time for me to discuss the theological basis of preaching in this essay.
Preaching the Words of God
In 1 Peter 4:11 Christians speakers are called upon to speak "oracles of God." The apostle Peter warned: "The end of all things is at hand," and so called upon his readers to behave appropriately. We are to "be self-controlled and sober-minded." But that is not the end of the matter. There are other ways to behave, given the end of all things. We are to love one another, show hospitality, and use our gifts to serve each other - especially those who speak are to speak "oracles of God."
This is the Christian preacher's task: to speak God's Word to his people. It is a task that has all the appearance of arrogance and all the reality of humility. For how can a human speak God's oracles? The Bible refers to humans speaking or writing God's words. There is a frequent ascription of dual authorship. God's words may be clothed in our words. The words of men are called the Word of God. The Old Testament prophets, conscious that they were speaking God's Word, commenced their speech with the bold claim "thus says the LORD . . ." The New Testament, when quoting the Old, sometimes jumps between ascribing the same words to men and to God. For example, in Hebrews 3-4 the words of Psalm 95 are said to be spoken sometimes by the Holy Spirit, sometimes by "he," i.e., God, and sometimes by David.
Paul spoke to the Thessalonians his own words. But in those words God spoke. The Thessalonians rightly heard the apostle's word not as the word of men but as it really was: "the word of God which is at work in you believers" (1 Thess. 2:13). Preaching God's Word requires an understanding of the nature of both God's Word and human speech.
The Nature of the Word of God
God's Word is described as living and active - at work in you believers. It is powerful and creative, actively fulfilling God's purpose in the world. Like a sword it pierces and divides our very being. For when, and as, we deal with the Word of God, or more accurately when the Word of God deals with us, we deal with God himself: "No creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account"(Heb. 4:13), for God and his Word are indivisible.
Yet this existentially powerful Word of God has form and content as well as utility. It is expressed in the normal propositions of human language. It is possible to misrepresent God and his Word. There are not many gospels but only one. And that gospel can be distorted, denied, twisted, or contradicted. It is not endlessly malleable. There is a pattern of sound words: a tradition that was received and handed on, a faith expressed in words that was learned, held on to, and fought for. The gospel proclamation falls into the category of true or false, not opinion and interpretation. Our preaching of it is faithful and accurate or faithless and inaccurate. Effectiveness is not the only criterion of judgment - false prophets can be effective. Truthfulness is more important than effectiveness.
Yet this single unchangeable gospel message of God came in a complex history of revelation spanning many centuries. While the Word of God is unitary, it has many writers and books, two testaments, and many ideas and concepts, and it covers a couple of thousand years of known history apart from its descriptions of the beginning and the end of the world. While God spoke at many times in many ways to our fathers, his many words did not give a confused and contradictory message. God was communicating a message to Israel - his plan for the salvation of mankind that always centered on the coming of his Son. All that came before was preparation for this great event. God's fragmentary speech to the fathers was in accordance with, but overwhelmed by, his great proclamation through his Son. For the Son was the full revelation of the Father.
The prophets of old did not always understand what they were prophesying, but the Spirit of Christ was within them predicting the sufferings of the Christ and the subsequent glories. Their prophecies were not their own interpretation of the events that were to unfold but they "spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit" (2 Pet. 1:21). For God's Word is his interpretation of the events that he sovereignly planned and executed.
Yet in all this revelation, though some things in them may be hard to understand (2 Pet. 3:16), the words themselves are not difficult. God's Word is expressed in normal human speech. It was written in straightforward common languages. It does not use either mythological or mystical language but the plain statement of the truth to be understood by everyman. Indeed, even the eloquent words of wisdom were eschewed. The words of God were to be taught to children, and all the people were held responsible to obey them.
Preaching God's Word Explicates the Text
The activity of preaching the Word of God requires the faithful exposition of the words that God has given us in the text of Scripture. It is fashionable today to claim to be "an expository preacher" - so fashionable in some circles that the word "expository" has become meaningless. As an alternative to the word expound we could use exegete or explicate. Behind each of these words is the idea of explaining the meaning of a text. Because it is God's Word to us, explaining the text will involve explaining its implications for us.
Explicate is not a word currently in use and so it is slightly more useful and precise. It means (1) to explain something, especially a literary text, in a detailed and formal way; and (2) to explain and develop an idea or theory and show its implications.141 Explication is not the work of controlling the text but of being controlled by the text. It is not explaining things about the text but explaining the text itself.
Sometimes the text's meaning is so transparent that there is little more to do than read it and spell out its implications. Sometimes the text requires considerable effort from the preacher to place it in its right context within the theology and narrative of the Bible in order to explain its meaning to the congregation. This differing degree of effort is determined not only by the text but also by the congregation. Preaching to a biblically literate congregation is a very different experience from preaching to a congregation that has never before been taught the Bible and different again from preaching to a congregation that is not yet Christian. But the aim is always the same: to say what the text means.
Preaching God's Word in Human Words
Given the nature of God's special revelation by his Word, preaching God's oracles requires great care. Given also that God's Word came to us in the common grace of human language, we are able to speak God's Word to people. God's oracles are a given deposit that we have received. We must not misrepresent him or them, but faithfully handle the word of truth. It is the task of faithful men to teach others what they have heard: to follow the pattern of sound words and to guard the good deposit. For preaching is not a matter of novelty but contending for the faith once for all delivered to the saints.
Our activity of preaching involves the normal way God has created us to speak, listen, and learn. The New Testament acknowledges the importance of speaking to the hearers' ability to understand. First Corinthians 13 and 14 and Hebrews 5 contrast the talking and thinking of children and adults. Those texts also spell out the importance of speaking in a language that the hearer can understand.
To understand our hearers is important in preaching the Word of God today, for preaching is not an activity void of hearers. We do not preach to the air. We preach God's words to others. But who are the others and how much do they affect our preaching of God's Word?
Preaching God's Word is Pastoral Preaching
It has long been taught that we must exegete the Scriptures and exegete our audience. Some would even say we need to also exegete our culture. But while this image of exegeting our audience or the world may be right in any exercise of normal communication, it generally fails to appreciate the nature of special revelation that is our work in preaching the Word of God. It is right in the fairly simple areas of making the words simple, the diction clear, the microphones turned on, etc. But it misses the point of how God's Word exegetes people.
It is not the preacher but the Word of God that exegetes our audience. The Word of God is the interpretation of the society to whom we are preaching. That is why we are preaching it and not our own wisdom, learning, or opinions. What enables the Christian preacher to preach Christianly is that he is preaching God's Word, not his own. It is the special revelation of the Word of God that teaches us of people's sinfulness and need to repent, of Christ's sacrifice for our sins, resurrection, and return in judgment. It is this special revelation that explains the nature of our hearers' spiritual state and pilgrimage in life.
It is also the Word of God that tells us about the audiences' reception of the word of our preaching. It warns us of the deceitfulness of sin, the uselessness of controversies over words, and the difficult times in which we live, where people with itching ears choose preachers who tell them what they want to hear.
It is the Word of God that identifies that our problems with hearing are sinful, not intellectual. Those who have been regenerated by the Word of God may eagerly long to hear all that God has said. Yet they still need to be warned daily not to harden their hearts. Those who have not yet been regenerated by the Word of God have a veil over them, for the god of this world has blinded them from seeing the truth. Yet in what we preach, the light of the glory of Christ may break through, bringing them new life.
These are the real truths about our audience that we need to understand. They are not taught to us by observation but by revelation. Yet having once heard these truths, they can be observed daily by our audience as we preach the Word of God. These truths do not lead us to fatalistic indifference to our hearers' reception of the Word. The New Testament itself shows the apostles passionately reasoning, arguing, pleading, persuading, and appealing to people to be reconciled to God. The letters of Paul are just such pastoral arguments and appeals.
Yet only God can open the eyes of the blind and draw the sinner to himself. Paul's advice to Timothy is undergirded with the knowledge that "God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth" (2 Tim. 2:25).
Preaching God's Word Is Evangelistic Preaching
Because God's Word is unitary, to preach it faithfully will be to preach the whole counsel of God. Because God's Word centers on the person and work of Jesus, to preach the whole counsel of God will be to preach evangelistically.
Preaching the whole counsel of God does not mean preaching detailed exegetical sermons on every verse of all sixty-six books of the Bible. Preaching the whole counsel of God is to declare repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ to one and all. For the whole counsel of God is contained in the gospel of the grace of God - that is, the proclamation of the kingdom. It is the same message to Jew and Greek, to slave and free, to male and female, to old and young.
As we expound the Bible we are to declare this gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. If we truly explicate the passage before us, we will always be preaching this whole counsel of God. Placing any part of the Bible into its context and explaining what that passage means will always lead to an exposition of the gospel. For the context of the Bible is God's Word to mankind. And each passage of the Bible is part of that Word. We are only preaching each part or passage properly when we do so from the framework of the gospel.
Every sermon should be evangelistic, for every sermon should make the gospel clear. Those who use the gifts God has given to them to speak should speak the oracles of God.
The essence of evangelistic preaching is not the extraverted personality of the preacher. It is not the warmth of his handshake or the humor of the evangelist's jokes. It is not the method of "the appeal" or the existence of "an altar call." These are but the expressions of any good human communication. The essence of evangelistic preaching is the Holy Spirit speaking by humans the sufferings of the Christ and the subsequent glories - the very subjects that the prophets in the Old Testament preached with limited knowledge but which have now been announced to us.
Preaching God's Word Depends on Systematic Theology142
Again, because the Word of God is unitary, preaching God's Word will always display our systematic theology. Expository preaching is sometimes put in opposition to systematic theology. This is a sad mistake. Expository preaching in particular will reveal our competence or incompetence as systematic theologians.
The preacher who prides himself on being "a simple Bible man" does not understand himself. He may claim to just "preach the passage" in front of him without being bogged down by theology or doctrine or systems. Yet he rarely preaches the passage in front of him. Rather, he will unconsciously preach the church tradition from which he comes. Or worse, he will preach his own hobbyhorses and ideas. For without a consciously self-aware and well-considered theology that is open to being framed, corrected, and developed by the text of Scripture, the preacher's own frame of reference will overwhelm the text. That frame of reference may be his church's tradition or maybe his own personal experience, but it will not be the Bible.
But the simple Bible man is not the only incompetent theologian. The modern liberal who rejects God's inspiration of the Scriptures is committed to the rejection of any systematization of theology. He also fails to understand how much he is preaching his tradition. Being modern and fashionable does not make it any less human tradition. The Bible, with all its diversity, is unitary in its authorship and message; it must be preached as a whole even when it is being preached in its parts. Each part must be considered in the light of the rest. No part is to be preached as being repugnant to another. The failure or capacity to understand the whole is critical to dealing with any part properly. An ill-considered systematic theology will produce ill-considered expository sermons.
Preaching God's Word Depends on Biblical Theology143
Similarly, preaching God's Word reveals the preacher's biblical theology or lack of it. If the preacher's systematic theology lacks an overall biblical theology, there will be a failure to place each text within its biblical context. Rather, there will be the temptation to place the text into a doctrinal system without reference to where in the biblical revelation it comes.
The Word of God comes to us in two testaments. These have a complex but clearly explicated interrelationship. The promise of the Old Testament meets its fulfillment in the New. There is a narrative of revelation that runs right through the whole Bible; it is not a random collection of books, nor a collection of random experiences or inspired insights into the supernatural. God sovereignly organized the affairs of humanity. He spoke by his prophets interpreting these affairs for us in order to prepare us for the coming of his Son. Understanding this narrative as it develops is essential to understanding any text within the Bible. This is particularly apparent when preaching on the Old Testament. The jump from the Old Testament text to the twenty-first century without passing through the New Testament is a common failure of those who lack a biblical theology.
But the failure is also apparent in New Testament preaching. Preachers often ignore the New Testament writers' concerns of the Old Testament being fulfilled. They only think of the twenty-first century exegetical or doctrinal significance of the text, thus unwittingly distorting what God said.
The Problem of Preaching the Word Today
For all of the foregoing importance of preaching God's Word, there is something of a crisis in confidence in preaching today. Preaching is an unattractive activity in the twenty-first century. The very word has negative connotations.144 The individualism and moral relativism of Western culture make all preaching seem arrogant, self-righteous, opinionated, and oppressive. "Who are you to tell me how to live!"
A society hell-bent in the defiance of God will not want anybody declaring the words of God. Rather than listening to the message, it will ridicule the activity and shoot the messengers. Part of this spiritual resistance to preaching today is the intellectual culture of modern Western society.
Some thinkers question the possibility of conveying meaning with words - not only between author and reader, speaker and listener, but especially between one age or culture and another. Some say that it is an impossible task to explicate a text. Others suggest that it is simplistic to think that you can communicate accurately by words. Still others complain that it is arrogant and power-tripping to think that you can speak for God. Add to this the problems that some have expressed about the use of religious language in particular, and the difficulties of preaching seem insurmountable. If we have such trouble talking to each other, how can we ever preach God's Word?
While Christians may not believe the more extravagant forms of these propositions, they still feel the effects of the arguments, and the confidence of the preacher is undermined.
The Triumph of Technology
The dismissal of the Divine in the university departments of divinity has meant the rejection of the Holy Bible. This book is treated like any other book and is no longer considered holy. Its inspiration is like the inspiration of Shakespeare. Its authors are many, not one. It has no single central message but a broadly common ethos or culture or provenance.
Systematic theology is therefore cut off at its roots. Biblical theology is an impossibility. All emphasis is upon the human authors - their differences and developments or the historical background explain their meanings. One can talk of Pauline theology or Petrine or Johannine theology but never the Bible's. The New Testament department does not have to converse with the Old Testament department, except about the trivia of academic standards, appointments, and budgets. The departments need not be in the same faculty: one studies the Hebrew Bible in Semitic studies; the other, the New Testament in Graeco-Roman studies.
The background historical contexts in which the biblical authors wrote become determinative in understanding the texts. Such "scholarship" will understand the New Testament in the context of any contemporary historical background but never allow the Old Testament to play its part. It ignores the New Testament authors' explicit and specific identification of the Old Testament as the proper context in which to understand their writings.
With the discriminating eye of the cynic, the modern scholar can deconstruct the author's writings so as to explain what he "really" meant. Only the expert - never the ploughboy - can know what was meant. The priesthood of all believers is no longer replaced by the sacerdotalism of the sacramentalists but by the arrogance of the academy.
This is the triumph of technology over theology. The highly educated liberal and the uneducated fundamentalist are one and the same. They are not reading the Bible they preach - one out of fear of education, the other out of the pride of education. This triumph of technology over theology is the conquest by the bureaucrat. The rules are kept; the controls are all in place. We are now managing the text. The reader rules the author. We have tamed the living and powerful Word of God. We have tamed God. We can no longer hear God's Word.
It is ironic that within this godless world there is ultimately no place for exegesis. As modernity gives way to postmodernity the very notion that text had a meaning to exegete disappears into the mist.
The Triumph of Meaninglessness
It is because God created humanity in his image that any language and knowledge of God are possible. Without God we cannot know what another person means. In a godless world talk and language are not about meaning but about power and control. So trying to exegete the speaker's words is a failed enterprise. Instead we turn to interpretation and hermeneutics.
Interpretation was once thought to be a noble enterprise. It was the "explanation or establishment of the meaning or significance of something."145 That assumes that some speech had meaning. But over time and under the growing skeptical relativism of the Western intellectual tradition, interpretation has come to mean "an ascription of a particular meaning or significance to something." As skepticism moves to solipsism, interpretation comes to mean "the way in which an artistic work, for example a play or piece of music, is performed so as to convey a particular understanding of the work."146 The preacher now dominates the text in the name of interpretation.147
Hermeneutics takes the concept of interpretation one step further. Hermeneutics is today defined thus: "(1) the science and methodology of interpreting texts, especially the books of the Bible; (2) the branch of theology that is concerned with explaining or interpreting religious concepts, theories, and principles."148 Apparently not only the Bible needs to be interpreted but also its own science and methodology of interpretation. This could be because of its uniqueness in being both the Word of God and the word of man, but it tends rather to be because of its antiquity and particularity. The Word spoken in one particular context so long ago needs interpretation for today.
If the term hermeneutics means simply the study of interpreting texts, there could be little objection to it. It would then be the study of how we read, comprehend, and understand the Scriptures. It would be an unnecessarily technical term about an everyday activity. But the discipline of hermeneutics has been introduced into Christian studies in the context of uncertainty and subjectivity in line with the more recently developed meaning of interpretation.149 Modern hermeneutics imaginatively connects us in our cultural context with the biblical cultural context, thus bridging the gulf between ancient text and modern reader. For example, by demythologizing the ancient world's miracles, we can preach to the modern world of science and technology. Armed with this new imaginative technology, we are able to revise whatever part of the Bible is uncomfortable for modern belief. For the mid-twentieth century, it was the miraculous; for the twenty-first century it is the ethical, especially sexual and bioethical morality. We end with people speaking of "my hermeneutic" and "your hermeneutic" as if there is no science and methodology but the same subjective relativism of those who speak of "my truth" and "your truth."
The Bible as Interpreter
These modern problems arise because people fail to come to terms with the Bible's description of God, of itself, and of us. They fail to see the Bible as interpreter. They also fail to see the Bible as a contemporary word to us.
The Bible is an interpretation. It does not simply record facts; it interprets them also. For example, in 1 Corinthians 15 the fact of Jesus' death is interpreted for us in the little phrase "for our sins." And the meaning of that interpretation is placed within the qualifying phrase "in accordance with the Scriptures" (1 Cor. 15:3).
The Bible is God's interpretation of God's own sovereign plan for the world and us. It is not the human authors' interpretations but God's interpretation. As the apostle Peter says: "No prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit" (2 Pet. 1:20-21).
Therefore, if it is true at all, it is "the" interpretation. God puts his plans into effect through the Word he speaks. He is good and can be trusted to make himself and his plans clear to those who need to respond. As the Scripture is read or preached, we are guided by its living and powerful message because we are dealing with God - or rather being dealt with by God.
Obsession with how we are to interpret God's interpretation of us will only deflect us from understanding the clear message he has spoken. It is like the person looking at the lenses in their spectacles rather than looking through the lenses at the world that the lenses have now brought into clear perspective.
The Bible is unique and may require a different way of reading than any other literature. But its difference lies neither in its antiquity nor in its particularity. Its uniqueness lies in its divine inspiration and consequent continuous power and authority. This places the readers in an unusual position. We cannot be the controllers or determiners of the text but must be the prayerfully obedient servants of the text. It is important to remember that it is not by our brilliance that we come to understand the Word of God but by the work of the Holy Spirit. The activity of Bible reading and preaching is profoundly spiritual.
Unlike reading a fellow human's writings, we are reading the writings of our Creator, Ruler, Judge, and God. The right framework for Bible reading is obedience. The right posture for Bible reading is on one's knees. The right context for Bible reading is amongst the family of those who live according to its message.
This in no way removes responsibility for intelligent reading of the text. Just the reverse: to fail to read the text intelligently is to fail to love God with all our mind. To distort or ignore his Word - to twist it out of our personal instability so as to make it mean what we want it to mean - is to treat God's Word (and God!) with contempt.
Yet the exercise of reading and comprehension is not different from reading any other text. It requires mastering dead languages to gain greater precision in our reading. It will be helped by knowledge of the background historical setting in which the text was written. But these major intellectual activities of common grace are minor matters in reading the words of God's special revelation. Scholarship may create more doctoral theses in background studies, but greater learning of the Scriptures will not necessarily come from these studies.150 There are very few changes in our understanding of Scripture since the time of the Reformation, when we were freed from institutional censorship to read the text of Scriptures for ourselves.
Unlike other areas of empirical scholarship where the community of scholars is increasing the sum total of knowledge by their research, biblical scholarship has a more humble task. For the Bible scholar at the end of his life has no more knowledge than the apostle had two thousand years ago. The biblical scholar is not pursuing "neo-orthodoxy" but "paleo-orthodoxy." A lifetime of working on the text of Scripture is not enough for a sinful person to master the subject. Whatever we discover has been known before. While we can and should build on others' scholarship, we can never move by scholarship into a fuller understanding than the apostles possessed. All biblical scholars are sinners being shaped by what they read, and we are sinners being transformed by what we read.
The preacher must learn to trust the interpretative power of the Bible. We do not need to be clever or scholarly but faithful to what the Bible is saying. God can be trusted to make himself clear to the hearers. His Word will deal more wisely with them than any cleverness we may devise.
Understanding That the Word of God Is Living and Abiding
According to 1 Peter, the imperishable seed by which our regeneration comes is the living and abiding Word of God. Similarly, Isaiah taught that "the Word of the Lord endures for ever." The relationship of the Word of God to time, place, and culture needs to be understood from the teaching of the Word of God itself, not from worldly theories of interpretation and hermeneutics. For though God's Word has the particularity of being spoken or written in a particular context, it comes with a message beyond that context. It is not that we have to bridge a gap between it and ourselves, for God spoke the Word with us in mind.
Hebrews 3 and 4 uses Psalm 95 to show the contemporary nature of the Word of God. The psalm was not written in Moses' day but centuries later, in David's day. The people were already well settled in the Promised Land of rest at the time of the writing of the psalm. Yet the events of the Exodus are recalled to warn people to listen to the Word of God properly lest they fail to enter God's rest. This is because the events of the Exodus were written down not for the sake of the generation who perished in the wilderness but for the sake of the generation upon whom the end of the ages comes - that is, Christians (see 1 Cor. 10:6, 11). Furthermore, God's "rest" that was typified by the Promised Land is the reality into which we enter through Jesus Christ's death and resurrection.
What happened, under God's sovereign control, was written in his Scriptures for Christians' instruction (Rom. 15:4). The Old Testament is the Christian Bible, not the Bible of the Jews. To ignore or reject the New Testament is to reject the Old also. Non-Christian Jews have the veil over their minds and hearts that prevents them from hearing the message of the Old Testament. Even the prophets who prophesied knew that they were not serving themselves but us (1 Pet. 1:12). The great heroes of faith did not receive what was promised for they, too, were waiting for what God has provided for us (Heb. 11:39-40).
Thus the Old Testament, written hundreds of years before the New, and in different cultural settings, is consistently assumed by the New Testament writers to be God's contemporary Word to them. It was not as if the New Testament writers were ignorant of the times and cultures in which the Old Testament was written. The writer of the book of Hebrews understands that David referred to the events of Moses' time, clearly ignoring Joshua's generation entering into the "rest." Yet Hebrews can take David's psalm as the word not just of David but also of God, and not just for David's day but also for today.
Similarly, Jesus warns the Sadducees about ignoring the Word of God: "Have you not read what was said to you by God: 'I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? He is not God of the dead, but of the living" (Matt. 22:31-32). Jesus knew that this was spoken to Moses at the burning bush. If it were not spoken later than the patriarchs, the point of the argument would not stand. But for Jesus this saying of God, written in the book of Exodus, was not said just to Moses but also to "you" Sadducees.
Sometimes the human authors knew that their writings were for another day or another audience than the original. For example, Daniel was told that the revelation in Daniel 12 was for later, while Paul was conscious of writing to both Colossae and Laodicea. On other occasions, the writer had his original audience in mind while God had other destinations or generations in view. For example, one wonders if Moses understood that the law against muzzling the ox "was written for our sake" (1 Cor. 9:10).
Whether or not the human author was conscious of writing for another day and another audience, God intended his words for those upon whom the end of the ages has come. For the biblical view of history places much more importance on the distinction between B.C. and A.D. than it does the number of revolutions that the earth has made of the sun.
Consequently, the basic assumption with which we approach the Word of God is that though it was written in a particular context, it was written for the context in which we find ourselves. It is God's Word for "today." The preacher does not need to "make the Bible relevant." It is always relevant. Preachers need to trust its relevance. It will speak to people today in ways and on topics that preachers would never imagine to raise.
Preaching the Word Today
Hearing and preaching God's Word today is not in the end an intellectual but a spiritual issue. It is the Word by which we are regenerated. It is a word that we need today and every day to warn us to continue in the faith.
Consider the problem of the children of Israel. They were at Mount Sinai with Moses when he received the oracles of God. But they refused to obey him. And their initial rejection of the Word of God was perpetuated in their behavior as they traveled in the wilderness. As Psalm 95 makes clear, the Creator God was their shepherd, but they failed to obey his Word and so perished.
The psalmist's lesson to his hearers is forceful: "Today when you hear his voice do not harden your hearts." Hearing God's Word is an everyday experience. But importantly, hearing God's Word is a spiritual matter of the heart. It requires a soft heart. The challenge that the psalmist brings, and Hebrews reiterates, is to hear God's Word today without hardening your heart.
The most natural place to preach God's Word is in the congregation of God's people, for the church is gathered by the Word of God to hear the Word of God. Like the children of Israel at Mount Sinai who were gathered by God to hear his covenantal word, Christians have been gathered by God to hear his Word. It is a better, more gracious word than Abel's cry for retribution. For our Lord's death, murdered as he was by his own people, just like Abel, was a sacrificial death declaring forgiveness and mercy.
The warning is corporate and not just for individuals. As God says: "Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called 'today,' that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin" (Heb. 3:12-13). Our concern is for each other's hearts. So we have this corporate responsibility to take care and to exhort one another every day as long as it is called "today."
The time to preach God's Word is in the last days, as we love one another and use the gifts that God has given to us when "whoever speaks, as one who speaks the oracles of God." This is "preaching the Word today." It is an activity of fellow pilgrims. We love one another by mutual exhortation to hear the Word of God today and today and today.