Notes

Notes

Notes

One

[1]. Norman Cousins, Human Options (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1981), 100.

[2]. This is not to say that there isn’t logic involved in the writing of a song or imagination in the conducting of a scientific experiment. Creative activity depends on both sides of the brain, and the more we can build a bridge between the two, the more creative we can be.

[3]. If you have read the best detective fiction at all, you probably know that a change took place between the earlier Sherlock Holmes and the more recent Hercule Poirot. While Holmes often mentioned the need for imagination in detective work, he majored on facts and not feelings. More than once, he infuriated Dr. Watson who thought his friend acted like an impersonal calculating machine. Agatha Christie’s Poirot is a psychologist who sees meanings in how people speak, what they say and don’t say, and how they react to questions. His “little gray cells” investigate the suspects’ right brains as well as their left brains.

[4]. Michael J. Reddy, “The Conduit Metaphor—A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language,’’ in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), 284–324.

Two

[1]. Blaise Pascal, Pensees and Provincial Letters (New York: Modern Library, 1941), 95. This is number 177 of the Pensees and is quite a confession from a man who was primarily a mathematician and scientist.

[2]. Quoted in John R.W. Stott Between Two Worlds (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 238–39.

[3]. Halford Luccock, in the Minister’s Workshop (New York: Abingdon, 1944), 112. Luccock’s chapter on imagination, though brief, is one of the best I’ve read on imagination and preaching.

[4]. See Clyde S. Kilby, Christianity and Aesthetics (Chicago: InterVarsity, 1961), and his essay “Christian Imagination,” in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981), 37–46.

[5]. Dwight E. Stevenson, in the Biblical Preacher’s Workshop (Nashville: Abingdon, 1967), 86.

[6]. Ryken, Christian Imagination, 37.

[7]. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, vol. 49 of The Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 292.

[8]. Alexander Whyte confronts this fear in his sermon on the Apostle John: “Do not be afraid at the word ‘imagination,’ my brethren. It has been sadly illused, both name and thing. But it is a noble name and a noble thing. There is nothing so noble in all that is within us. Our outward eye is the noblest of all our outward organs, and our inward eye is the noblest of all our inward organs. And its noblest use is to be filled full of Jesus Christ.” Bible Characters from the Old and New Testaments (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1990), 481.

[9]. This is not to suggest that fancy can’t teach us anything about the “real world.” You can’t read Gulliver’s Travels or Animal Farm or 1984 without learning something about the foibles of society today. C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series enlightens while it entertains. Perhaps the closest things we have to “fancy” in Scripture are Jotham’s story (fable?) in Judges 9 and King Jehoash’s story (fable?) in 2 Kings 14:8-10, where we find talking trees and bushes. Our Lord’s parables dealt with a real world; and even though some of the people in His parables did unusual things, what they did was believable.

[10]. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 2 vols. (London: James M. Dent and Son, 1906), 1:499.

[11]. Colin Duriez, A.C.S. Lewis Handbook (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1990), 127.

[12]. Quoted in George Morrison, The Wind on the Heath (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1931), 282. George Morrison is one of my favorite preachers, a man who combined imagination with solid biblical truth and always exalted Christ and His Gospel. I once had an interesting discussion with Dr. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones about Morrison’s sermons. The Doctor thought they were “nothing but poetry” and lacked doctrinal substance, but he didn’t change my mind. I still read Morrison’s sermons and profit from them.

[13]. Quoted in The Harper Religious and Inspirational Companion, ed. and comp. Margaret Pepper (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 249.

[14]. William Temple, Readings in St. John’s Gospel (London: Macmillan and Co., 1939), 1:68. Italics in the quoted passage are mine.

[15]. Kilby, Christianity and Aesthetics, 19.

[16]. Note that Jesus made it clear to His disciples in v. 63 that He wasn’t speaking in literal terms. We feed on Jesus Christ as we feed on His Word.

[17]. R.W. Dale, Nine Lectures on Preaching (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1887), 52. Dale’s treatment of the imagination in his second lecture is quite good. I especially like his statement that “every word that stands for a spiritual idea was at first a picture and a poem” (p. 47).

[18]. Luccock, Minister’s Workshop, 116.

[19]. I recall another chat with Dr. Lloyd-Jones about this very subject. He told me he had been preaching in the Gospel of John and that some people said he wouldn’t be able to handle it well because he was too accustomed to the analytical mind-set of Paul in the Epistle to the Romans. “But I sought to enter into the mind of John,” said the Doctor, “and in spite of what they said, I did it!”

[20]. A.J. Gossip, In Christ’s Stead (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925), 200.

[21]. Henry Ward Beecher, Yale Lectures on Preaching: First, Second and Third Series (New York: Fords, Howard and Hulbert, 1881), 109.

[22]. Though I disagree with his theology, I must confess that to me the master of “homiletical anticipation” was Harry Emerson Fosdick. I will be reading one of his sermons and starting to disagree, and when I turn the page, I find Fosdick saying, “But at this point, somebody is thinking—”; and then he reads my mind and heads me off at the pass! He may not convince me, but at least he does me the service of acknowledging that I am thinking.

Three

[1]. John Calvin, Commentaries (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981), 1:80.

[2]. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 1:61, 72, 341.

[3]. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (Boston: Beacon, 1985), 41. This is a facsimile edition of this important work which was first published in 1836. The introductory essay by Jaroslav Pelikan is an excellent summary and interpretation of Emerson’s “natural philosophy.” The Christian theologian may not agree with everything Emerson wrote, but his emphasis is needed today.

[4]. The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 76–77. Oddly enough, the name of the preacher who paled against the snowstorm was Barzillai Frost, about whom Emerson wrote in his journal four months later, “Here is friend B.F. [He] grinds and grinds in the mill of a truism and nothing comes out but what was put in.” (See Emerson, Journal, vol. 5, 481.) On hearing the church bells ring on Sunday morning, Jan. 3, 1853, Emerson’s friend Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal: “The bells are particularly sweet this morning. I hear more, methinks, than ever before. How much more religion in their sound, than they ever call men together to! Men obey their call and go to the stove-warmed church, though God exhibits himself to the walker in a frosted bush today, as much as in a burning one to Moses of old” (The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 1, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen [New York: Dover, 1962], 511).

[5]. G. Campbell Morgan, Westminster Pulpit (London: Pickering and Inglis, n.d.), 3:27.

[6]. Charles H. Spurgeon, The New Park Street Pulpit (London: Alabaster and Passmore, 1859), 4:330.

[7]. Joseph Parker, The People’s Bible (London: Hazell, Watson and Viney, 1900), 16:176.

[8]. A.W. Tozer, Born after Midnight (Harrisburg, Pa: Christian Publications, 1959), 92–95.

[9]. Luccock, Minister’s Workshop, 112.

[10]. For a perceptive essay on Blake and imagination, from which I have borrowed several ideas, see Northrop Frye, “Blake’s Bible” in Myth and Metaphor, ed. Robert D. Denham (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1990), 270–86. The late Northrop Frye was trained for the ministry but moved into education and became a well-known literary critic and teacher of literature. It was Frye’s belief that a knowledge of the Bible and the Greek and Roman myths was basic to an understanding of great literature. I will have occasion to mention him often in this book.

Four

[1]. David Buttrick, Homiletic: Moves and Structures (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 113.

[2]. H. Grady Davis, Design for Preaching (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1958). Both Buttrick and Davis were bold enough to abandon some of the classical homiletical armor and face the giant of sermon preparation using equipment meaningful to preachers ministering in the atomic age. Davis dared to develop a new vocabulary for homileticians, and Buttrick enlisted the aid of current communications theory. I can’t conceive of a serious preacher of the Gospel ignoring these books.

[3]. Buttrick, Homiletic, 132.

[4]. Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology (London: SCM, 1983), 26. McFague presents an excellent discussion of both metaphors and models, and her documentary notes and bibliography are especially helpful.

[5]. Emerson, Nature 32. I quote Emerson’s examples even though I’m aware of James Barr’s warning that “the etymology of a word is not a statement about its meaning but about its history.” The Semantics of Biblical Language (London: SCM, 1983), 09. The fact that some people carry “word studies” too far certainly doesn’t mean we should discard them completely.

[6]. Eva Feder Kittay, Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 39.

[7]. Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 15.

[8]. Cited in Leland Ryken, The Liberated Imagination (Wheaton, Ill.: Harold Shaw, 1989), 137. Conrad wrote this in the preface to his novel The Nigger of the Narcissus.

[9]. In the play, M. Jourdain asks his philosophy teacher: “What? when I say: Nicole, bring me my slippers, and give me my night-cap,’ is that prose?” His teacher replies, “Yes, sir.” Then M. Jourdain exclaims, “Good heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.” Moliere, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, act 2, sc. 4.

[10]. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980). Though the book was written primarily to defend a semantic theory that the authors espouse, it is still one of the best introductions to the study of the place of metaphor in everyday life. Their second book, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989), explains how metaphor works in poetry and helps us understand what a poem means. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, by Lakoff (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987), deals with metaphor, semantics, and psychology and is, I must confess, beyond me. (Now there’s the conduit metaphor!) For a simple introduction to metaphor, see Terence Hawkes, Metaphor (London: Methuen, 1972).

[11]. Kittay, Metaphor, 5.

[12]. Aristotle, Poetics, in The Works of Aristotle in The Great Books of the Western World, vol. 9, p. 694 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952).

[13]. It’s worth noting that the word translated “captivated” in vv. 19-20 (NIV) can also mean “intoxicated.” The water has turned into wine! Is there some connection here with our Lord’s first miracle at a marriage feast (John 2)?

[14]. Paul makes the same point in 1 Thes. 4:6, where “take advantage” (NIV) also means “to defraud.” There are two ways to get money out of a bank. You can rob the bank, creating a whole new set of problems for youself; or you can become a depositor, commit yourself to the bank, and have the privilege of making use of its assets. Sex outside of marriage is like robbing the bank. Marriage is the commitment that enriches life as husband and wife live together in the will of God.

[15]. Cited in McFague, Metaphorical Theology, 201. Lewis could write not only stimulating theological essays and novels but also captivating children’s stories, the mark of a person with a healthy imagination.

[16]. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1963), 151–52.

[17]. McFague, Metaphorical Theology, 17.

[18]. Bible students will recognize a reference to Ezekiel 34, where the prophet denounces the political leaders (shepherds) of the nation, who exploited the people and were blind to their needs.

[19]. See Kittay, Metaphor, 316ff. Sometimes it takes a metaphor to explain a metaphor.

[20]. Quoted in Eugene H. Peterson, Answering God (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 69.

[21]. See Aristotle Rhetoric 3.10.

[22]. The story is told about two farmers who met at the market one Monday morning. One asked, “What did your minister preach about yesterday?” The other replied, “Oh, the same old thing—ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong!” The first farmer smiled and said, “You’re fortunate! All we ever get is ding - ding - ding - ding!”

[23]. See Mark 5:25-34.

Five

[1]. Whyte, Bible Characters, 244.

[2]. McFague, Metaphorical Theology, 26.

[3]. Walter Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), 85. This book explodes with so many exciting concepts that one reading will never do. Brueggemann explains the relationship between poetry and proclamation, between information and imagination, in a way that is itself imaginative and creative.

Six

[1]. Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. Press, 1964), 135.

[2]. Ellen Y. Siegelman, Metaphor and Meaning in Psychotherapy (New York: Guildford, 1990), 42.

[3]. Philip Keane, Christian Ethics and Imagination (New York: Paulist, 1984), 63.

[4]. Cynthia Ozick, “The Moral Necessity of Metaphor” Harper’s, May 1986, 62–68.

[5]. Harvey Cox, Religion in the Secular City (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 204. See also H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 149–60. This appendix, entitled, “Metaphors and Morals,” shows the important place that symbols play in both language and faith.

[6]. Luccock, Minister’s Workshop, 112.

[7]. Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet, 84.

[8]. Ibid., 109–10.

Seven

[1]. Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant (New York: Seabury, 1975), 71.

[2]. Ibid., 72.

[3]. I dealt with this in chapter 3. Blake saw Bacon, Newton, and Locke as enemies of true humanness because they so emphasized what was scientific and “real” and minimized the imaginative and the poetic. Bellah adds: “When we remember that Jefferson’s three intellectual heroes were Bacon and Newton and Locke, and that Jefferson was, like most of the Founding Fathers, a once-born man, we will begin to understand the growing prevalence of single vision in the early decades of the republic.”

[4]. Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1965), 41. Chambers defines imagination as “the power God gives a saint to posit himself out of himself into relationships he never was in.”

[5]. Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York: Quill, 1978), 131.

[6]. Quoted in Rollo May, The Cry for Myth (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 57.

[7]. “The Place of Pornography,” Harper’s, November 1984, 33. Her statement that pornography is “sex . . . without consequences” doesn’t suggest that people who violate God’s standards of purity don’t reap what they sow. Rather, it means that there is a spirit of lawlessness in those who defy these standards, but they never think about the consequences. Along with Decter, the symposium for the article included the editor of Harper’s, Lewis H. Lapham; Al Goldstein, publisher of a popular sex-oriented magazine; novelist Erica Jong; Susan Brownmiller, founder of Women Against Pornography; Jean Bethke Elshtain, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts; and civil liberties leader Aryeh Neier. The fact that pornography is a 7 billion dollar plus business in the United States alone says something about its strength.

[8]. Mark Schorer, “The Necessity of Myth” in Myth and Mythmaking, ed. Henry A. Murray (Boston: Beacon, 1968), 357.

[9]. Siegelman, Metaphor and Meaning, 9. For helpful information on the important role of imagination in education, see Kieran Egan and Dan Nadaner, eds., Imagination and Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988), and Kieran Egan, Imagination in Teaching and Learning (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992). See also the research paper by Howard Gardner and Ellen Winner in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979), 121–39. Gardner and Winner note “the puzzling appearance, during middle childhood, of a penchant for literalness” (p. 134).

[10]. Clifton Fadiman, The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), 452.

[11]. Egan, Imagination in Teaching, 4.

[12]. For an interesting discussion of television from the secular point of view, see “Television Looks at Itself,” Harper’s March 1985. Eight leaders in the television industry—producers, writers, executives—give us the “insider’s” perspective on what television is and how it ought to work.

[13]. Mander, Four Arguments, 132.

[14]. Ibid., 200.

[15]. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Viking, 1985), 31. In the third act of his play Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw has the statue say, “Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.”

[16]. Quoted in Malcolm Muggeridge, Christ and the Media (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), 67.

[17]. Postman, Amusing Ourselves, 111.

[18]. Quoted in John Fiske and John Hartley, Reading Television (London: Methuen, 1978), 190.

[19]. Muggeridge, Christ and the Media, 81.

[20]. Ibid., 92. For a fascinating discussion of the importance of words in the Christian faith, see Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985). Ellul’s examination of the media, from a philosophical and theological point of view, is penetrating and disturbing.

[21]. Ibid., 88.

[22]. USA Today, 16 March 1992, p. 1D.

[23]. Neil Postman, U.S. News and World Report, 19 January 1981, 43.

[24]. I don’t like it when gifted communicators are put on television and turned into actors. The old Bob Newhart “telephone routines” are priceless because they give us the freedom to build our own images, but, to me, Newhart is not that funny on television. Likewise with Bill Cosby, one of the best monologue comedians of our generation. When Garrison Keillor is on television, I enjoy it more with my eyes closed. “The pictures are clearer.”

[25]. Andrew A. Bonar, Memoir and Remains of Robert Murray M’Cheyne (London: Banner of Truth, 1966), 29.

[26]. On the place of imagination in ethical behavior, see Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1963). Using the insights of “cognitive science,” Johnson explains the function of imagination in making moral decisions. As evangelical Christians, we would question Johnson s position concerning moral absolutes, but this should not hinder us from learning from him. At least he emphasizes the importance of the imagination in making enlightened moral decisions.

Eight

[1]. Quoted in Eugene Peterson, Answering God (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989), 69. This is an excellent book on the Psalms as vehicles for personal prayer. The chapter on “metaphor” is especially good.

[2]. Siegelman, Metaphor and Meaning, 67.

[3]. Ibid., 65.

[4]. G.K. Chesterton, “A Defense of Nonsense,” in Great Essays, ed. Houston Peterson (New York: Washington Square, 1950), 318.

[5]. His essay of that title is found in Of God and Man (Harrisburg, Pa: Christian Publications, 1960), 116–18.

[6]. McFague, Metaphorical Theology, 17.

[7]. Quoted in Siegelman, Metaphor and Meaning, 55.

[8]. Siegelman, Metaphor and Meaning, 44.

[9]. Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education (New York: Macmillan 1929), 139.

[10]. Ibid., 140.

[11]. Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1989), 54. This is a new edition of Brooks’s Lectures on Preaching, delivered at Yale University in 1877 as a part of the annual Lyman Beecher Lectures series. In my opinion, almost everything written in America on homiletics and pastoral work since then is a footnote to what Brooks says in these lectures. While Brooks’ statement is a valid one, he confessed that he didn’t always practice it. He told Dr. George A. Gordon, “When I am interesting I am vague; when I am definite I am dull.” See Edgar DeWitt Jones, The Royalty of the Pulpit (New York: Harper and Row, 1951), 20.

[12]. I’m aware of the hermeneutical dangers that exist when we try to squeeze more out of a Hebrew or Greek word than is really there. But many Bible words contain imagery that ought to be liberated and put to work making God’s truth vivid and exciting. It’s true that “the etymology of a word is not a statement about its meaning but about its history”; but don’t let James Barr’s warning make you so timid in your exegesis that you become paralyzed. See James Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (London: SCM, 1983), 109.

[13]. Benjamin Reach’s Tropologia: A Key to Open Scripture Metaphors was first published in London in 1855 and has been reprinted by Kregel (1972) with the title Preaching from the Types and Metaphors of the Bible. The book is worth studying but please don’t adopt Reach’s approach to metaphor. Spurgeon said it best in his Commenting and Commentaries, “Although our honored predecessor makes metaphors run on as many legs as a centipede, he has been useful to thousands. His work is old-fashioned, but it is not to be sneered at” (London: Banner of Truth, 1969), 155. Benjamin Reach was the second pastor of the church that eventually became the Metropolitan Tabernacle. He served for thirty-six years, from 1668 to 1704.

[14]. Quoted in Conrad Cherry, Nature and Religious Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), 5. Cherry agrees with Bellah that “religious imagination” declined in America after Jonathan Edwards, but he feels that it was revived under Bushnell. He calls Bushnell’s approach to theology “religious romanticism.” Cherry’s book is an excellent survey of the place of imagination in theology and preaching in America from Edwards to Bushnell, a period of about 150 years.

Nine

[1]. For an interesting enumeration of the things in Genesis that find their fulfillment in the Book of Revelation, see The Companion Bible (London: Lamp Press, n.d.), Appendix 3, 5.

[2]. That the word “taste” here means much more than “sample” is indicated by its application to the death of Jesus: “ . . . so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone” (Heb. 2:9). To taste something is to experience it.

[3]. I have not been able to discover when the Jews added wine to the Passover menu. It’s not included in the original instructions (Ex. 12) or anywhere else in the Mosaic Law.

[4]. The Book of Exodus abounds with typology and symbolism, all of which have been adequately dealt with in available commentaries both critical and devotional. The expositor must take care not to spiritualize the text so that it loses its meaning in the “application.” Scriptures such as Romans 15:4 and 1 Corinthians 10:1-13 give us the authority to make spiritual applications from the Old Testament Scriptures, but they don’t give us license to make everything in the Old Testament a type or an analogy. I’m reminded of the lady who said to a guest preacher, “I just love to hear you preach! You find so many wonderful things in the Bible that aren’t even there!”

[5]. The chapter on “redemption” in Leon Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956) remains one of the best treatments of this important subject. See also Morris’ The Cross in the New Testament (Eerdmans, 1965) and John R.W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1986).

[6]. See J. Sidlow Baxter, The Master Theme of the Bible (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale, 1973), and the articles on “Lamb of God” in the revised International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986) and The Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (InterVarsity, 1992).

[7]. Note that v. 2 is repeated in Psalm 118:14 and Isaiah 12:2, and that Revelation 15:3 records a song of Moses sung at a heavenly sea. There is rich material here for the creative preacher!

[8]. Israel’s being “planted” in the land (2 Sam. 7:10; Ps. 44:2) relates to the image of the nation as God’s choice vine (Ps. 80:8, 15; Isa. 5:2; 60:21; Jer. 2:21; 11:17; 24:6; Amos 9:15). Our Lord used this image in His Parable of the Tenants (Matt. 21:33-46; Luke 20:9-19).

[9]. Whenever the going got tough, the Jews expressed a desire to return to Egypt where they had security and food (see Ex. 16:1-4; 17:1-7; Num. 14:1-4; 20:1-5). Instead of wanting to go forward to their promised inheritance, they wanted to go back to the old life. This fact parallels one of the themes of the Epistle to the Hebrews, “Therefore let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity” (Heb. 6:1). There is no standing still in the Christian life: we either go forward by faith or go backward in unbelief.

[10]. Too often we want to fly away from the storm like frightened doves (Ps. 55:6), when we ought to rise above the storm like soaring eagles!

[11]. Premillennialists will interpret this passage as describing God’s special care for the Jewish remnant during the reign of the Beast. Amillennialists will apply it to God’s providential care for His people during their time of tribulation and persecution. See William Hendriksen, More Than Conquerors (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1940), 141–42. But the image is the same: when His people are in trouble, God can lift them out or give them the “wings” they need to fly out.

[12]. The use of an Old Testament image by a New Testament writer affirms continuity of spiritual truth from one age to another, but it doesn’t necessarily prove identity of persons. Peter didn’t allude to Exodus 19 to prove that the church was a “continuation” of Israel, but to encourage his readers to live up to all that they had in Jesus Christ. We would expect the people of God who today live under the New Covenant to have similarities with the people of God who lived under the Old Covenant. Totally apart from matters hermeneutical and theological, the images convey the messages the writers wanted to convey.

[13]. On the basis of this “treasured inheritance” image, dispensationalists interpret our Lord’s Parable of the Hidden Treasure (Matt. 13:44) as applying to Israel. Christ came to His own people, but was rejected by them; so He “hid” them back in the world (“the field is the world” [Matt. 13:38]), but purchased the whole field that He might possess them.

[14]. The NIV Study Bible has an especially good cross-reference system which is also found in most of the NIV reference Bibles. The NIV Exhaustive Concordance, comp. by Goodrick and Kohlenberger (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990) is also a very helpful tool. For many years, I’ve used The Treasury of Scriptural Knowledge, a book of half a million cross references, covering the entire Bible. It was compiled by George Wigram, who also gave us The Englishman’s Greek Concordance and The Englishman’s Hebrew Concordance, and was originally published in the United States by Fleming H. Revell. The revised and improved edition was edited by Jerome H. Smith and was published by Thomas Nelson in 1992. It follows the Authorized Version but this does not necessarily limit the book’s usefulness if you use another translation.

Ten

[1]. Werner Foerster, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), s.v. “axios.”

[2]. This image reminds me of the words of saintly Robert Murray M’Cheyne, written to a missionary: “How diligently the calvary officer keeps his sabre clean and sharp; every stain he rubs off with the greatest care. Remember you are God’s sword—His instrument—I trust a chosen vessel unto Him to bear His name. In great measure, according to the purity and perfections of the instrument, will be the success. It is not great talents God blesses so much as great likeness to Jesus. A holy minister is an awful [awesome] weapon in the hand of God” from Andrew A. Bonar, Memoirs and Remains of Robert Murray M’Cheyne (London: Banner of Truth, 1966), 282. See also the entry “Sword of the Spirit” in A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, ed. David Lyle Jeffrey (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992).

[3]. In Scripture, death is pictured as God putting out a light and leaving the person in darkness. See Job 3:1-5; 5:14; 18:5-6, 18; 21:17; Prov. 13:9; 20:20; 24:20.

[4]. Of course, God selected Solomon to be the next king, to keep the lamp of David burning in Israel.

[5]. The fact that in Scripture human beings are often compared to grass doesn’t minimize their importance at all. The image reminds us that human beings are weak and transitory, but not useless. There are between six and ten thousand varieties of grasses in the world, including cereal grains, and they play an important part in the balancing of nature, the protecting of land and the feeding of both people and animals.

Eleven

[1]. James Boswell, The Life of Dr. Johnson (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1973), 2:27.

[2]. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 1:117.

[3]. C. Hassell Bullock, An Introduction to the Old Testament Poet Books (Chicago: Moody, 1988) is an excellent volume for the student who wants to dig deeper.

[4]. For some excellent studies on the literary qualities of the Book of Job, see Roy Zuck, ed. Sitting With Job (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992). This excellent anthology contains scholarly material from a variety of sources and helps the serious student get a broad perspective on the fascinating but difficult Book of Job.

[5]. The term “daysman” used in Job 9:33 in the KJV is a fifteenth century word for the man who told the defendants the days they were scheduled to appear in court. The word “day” was once a verb, and “to day” meant “to appoint a day.” Christian theologians see Jesus Christ as the “umpire” who brings sinners and God together because of His incarnation and sacrifice on the cross. For a popular treatment of the theme, see G. Campbell Morgan, “The Cry for a Daysman,” in The Answers of Jesus to Job (Old Tappan, N.J.: Revell, 1964).

[6]. Some commentators see this as a euphemism for Job’s inability to beget more children. Speaking of his earlier days of prosperity, Job had said, “My glory will remain fresh in me, the bow ever new in my hand” (29:20), a description of his masculine vigor.

[7]. King Hezekiah used the same image in his lament: “Like a weaver I have rolled up my life, and he has cut me off from the loom” (Isa. 38:12). Psalm 139:15 states that the unborn child is being “woven together” by the Lord. Those who die too soon have had their days “cut short” by the Lord (Pss. 89:45; 102:23). The image opens up many possibilities for imaginative preaching. In Job 10:8-12, Job describes the same prenatal process as the molding of clay and the making of cheese.

[8]. The English poet Francis Thompson in his poem “The Poppy” compared time to a reaper: “The goodly grain and the sun-flushed sleeper/The reaper reaps, and Time is the reaper.” The American poet Henry Wadsworth Long-fellow saw death as the reaper in his poem “The Reaper and the Flowers”: “There is a Reaper whose name is Death/And with his sickle keen/He reaps the bearded grain at a breath/And the flowers that grow between.” Paul compared the burial of the dead body to the planting of a seed and the resurrection to a glorious harvest, of which Jesus Christ is the firstfruits (1 Cor. 15:35-49).

[9]. Eugene Peterson, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 77. This is an excellent volume not only on the devotional use of the Psalms, but also on the theology of the Psalms. The chapter on metaphor is especially insightful.

[10]. The chaff comes from the threshing floor, which is often an image of chastening or judgment (Jer. 51:33; Dan. 2:35; Matt. 3:12; Luke 3:17). Sometimes God sees His people Israel as His threshing instrument to judge the godless nations (Isa. 41:15-16; Micah 4:13).

[11]. When peripateo and stoicheo are used by Paul in a figurative sense to describe the Christian life, the NIV usually translates them as “to live” rather than “to walk.” In the Epistles of John, the word “walk” is preferred by the NIV translators (1 John 1:6-7; 2:6; 2 John 1:6; 3 John 3).

[12]. It should be noted that in the Old Testament, “shepherd” applies to leaders in general, including kings, priests, and prophets, as Ezekiel 34 makes clear. Our common word for a spiritual leader is “pastor,” used only once in the English New Testament (Eph. 4:11). With reference to spiritual leadership, the verb poimaino (“to act as shepherd”) is found in John 21:15, Acts 20:28, 1 Corinthians 9:7, 1 Peter 5:2, and Revelation 7:17. The Lord Jesus shall “rule” (poimaino) the nations with a rod of iron (Matt. 2:6; Rev. 2:27; 12:5; 19:15; see Ps. 2:9).

[13]. One of the most useful books on biblical imagery is Othmar Keel, The Symbols of the Biblical World (New York: Seabury, 1978). He relates biblical images to the findings of the archaeologists and to the myths of the Eastern nations. It seems that Eastern kings smashed vases with their scepters to guarantee victory over their enemies. See Keel, pp. 266–67.

[14]. Greek mythology refers to “the earth mother” and explains the origin of all things from the marriage of the earth and the sky (Uranus). “Rain falls from the bridegroom Heaven and makes Earth pregnant,” wrote the Greek dramatist Aeschylus. The Greeks called her Gaia (Ge, Gaea) and believed she was born out of Chaos. See the references to “earth-mother” and Gaia in Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Mt. Kisco, N.Y.: Moyer Bell, 1988); John Ferguson, Greek and Roman Religion, A Source Book (Park Ridge, N.J.: Noyes, 1980); and David Adams Leeming, The World of Myth (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990). The name “Gaia,” referring to “Mother Earth,” is today a part of the “pop mythology” used by people promoting the proper care of the earth.

[15]. God wants to give us “wings like eagles” (Isa. 40:31), so that we can face the storm and rise above it.

[16]. One of the best topical summaries of the Book of Proverbs is Ronald M. Sailler and David Wyrtzen, The Practice of Wisdom (Chicago: Moody, 1992). The editors are alert to the Hebrew text and not just the topics as expressed in the English Bible.

[17]. Sailler and Wyrtzen, Practice of Wisdom, 151.

[18]. Consult your concordance and you will see that there are dozens of references to wisdom as a path or way on which we are to walk if we want the blessing of God. Wisdom calls people to the path of life while Folly (the harlot) calls them to the path that leads to death.

[19]. For the “tree of life” image in the Book of Proverbs, see 11:30, 13:12, 15:4; and for other agricultural images, see 10:30, 11:28, and 12:3 and 12.

[20]. The section on “nutrition” in Sailler and Wyrtzen is especially insightful.

[21]. This reminds us of the Apostle John’s statement that worldliness involves “the lust of the eyes” (1 John 2:16, KJV), that is, the sensuous enjoyment of the things that we see, acquire and accomplish. “The lust of the eyes” can contribute to the “lust of the flesh” and also promote “the pride of life.” This is illustrated by King Nebuchadnezzar’s words, “Is not this the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence, by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?” (Dan. 4:30)

[22]. See note 4, chapter 4.

[23]. For an excellent introduction to the Song of Songs, see Bullock, An Introduction to the Old Testament Poetic Books.

Twelve

[1]. The exodus theme in the New Testament is found in Luke 1:68; 2:38; 9:30-31; Romans 3:24; Ephesians 1:14; Colossians 1:13; 1 Peter 1:13, 19.

[2]. It isn’t difficult to apply these images to the church today. We’re God’s children, but do we obey Him? We’re the body of Christ, but are we keeping the body healthy? We’re the temple of God, but we look like a cheap shack. We’re the bride of Christ, but we have become harlots by our compromise with the world. Our treasures are cheapened and our beauty has faded. No wonder judgment begins at the house of the Lord (1 Peter 4:17)

[3]. The felling of trees is often used in Scripture as a picture of the destruction of a nation or an empire that stands in proud defiance against God. See Isaiah 2:12-18; 10:33-34; Ezekiel 17:24; 31:1ff; Daniel 4. Note in Isaiah 10:33-11:1 the contrast between the proud tree cut down and the humble tender shoot coming forth from the stump of Jesse.

[4]. On the basis of Revelation 3:7 and Zechariah 10:4, some see in Eliakim an illustration of the Messiah. See Isaiah 36 for Eliakim’s role in the Assyrian negotiations.

[5]. Isaiah 26:4 is the basis for the familiar hymn, “Rock of Ages,” by Augustus Toplady. The KJV reads “for in the Lord God is everlasting strength,” but the margin reads “the rock of ages.” The NIV reads “the Rock eternal.”

[6]. The image of Christ the Stone is mentioned in Psalm 118:22-23; Daniel 2:34; Zechariah 4:7; Matthew 21:42-44 (and parallels); 1 Corinthians 10:4; Ephesians 2:20; and Romans 9:32-33.

[7]. Job wondered if his hope would go with him “down to the gates of death” 0ob 17:16). The word translated “death” is sheol, the realm of the dead, the same word Hezekiah used in Isaiah 38:10. See also Psalms 9:13 and 107:18, as well as our Lord’s words in Matthew 16:18.

[8]. The image of idolatry as adultery and prostitution surfaces frequently in Scripture: Exodus 34:15; Leviticus 17:7; Jeremiah 3; Ezekiel 23:3; 1 Corinthians 10:20; James 4:4-5; Revelation 18:1-3. God’s people are a covenant people, and when they give their devotion to that which is not God, they prostitute themselves. We will see this image developed further in Hosea.

[9]. The KJV uses the word “backsliding” twelve times in Jeremiah (2:19; 3:6, 8, 11-12, 14, 22; 5:6; 8:5; 14:7; 31:22; 49:4). It’s a translation of a word (shobab, shobeb) from the Hebrew root shub, which means “to return.” The NIV prefers “faithless,” although it uses “backsliding” in 2:19, 3:22, 5:6, 14:7, and 15:6. The word means “to turn away, to apostasize.”

[10]. The Jews, like many pious people today, were prone to put their faith in the externals of religion, particularly circumcision, rather than in the Lord and His Word. From the beginning, circumcision was a sign of God’s covenant (Gen. 17; Rom. 4:11) and not the means of obtaining salvation (Rom. 2:25-29). Moses urged the people to circumcise their hearts and not depend on external rites (Deut. 10:16; 30:6), and the New Testament echoes this admonition (Matt. 3:7-12; Acts 15:1-35; Rom. 4; 2 Cor. 3; Gal. 1–6; Col. 2:11).

[11]. We aren’t told whether anybody actually saw Jeremiah bury the linen belt and then take it out of the rock again, but the fact that the incident and its interpretation were recorded in his book proves that the message was meant for public consumption. It was one way of showing people what is meant by the word “useless.”

[12]. Isaiah 66:7 uses the image differently. Before the mother’s pains begin, she gives birth to the child! So shall the “birth” of the nation of Israel be in the day when God restores His people. See also Isaiah 54:1 (Gal. 4:27).

[13]. For an excellent introduction and commentary that is sensitive to both the theological and homiletical values of the book, see Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., A Biblical Approach to Personal Suffering (Chicago: Moody, 1982).

[14]. The moth and the rot eat things away silently and nobody knows it. The flood can sometimes be anticipated, but the lion strikes without warning. The nation was decaying long before the Assyrian “lion” attacked. Like the moth and the rot, sin works quietly and brings its own judgment.

[15]. The net seems to symbolize the military power of Babylon, which the Babylonians themselves revered as one would worship a god. Your god is the thing that you trust, and Babylon trusted in its army.

Thirteen

[1]. Alexander Whyte, The Walk, Conversation and Character of Jesus Christ Our Lord (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1975), 134.

[2]. James Stalker, Imago Christi (New York: A.C. Armstrong & Son, 1890), 246.

[3]. William Barclay, The Mind of Jesus (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 89.

[4]. Stalker, Imago Christi, 247.

[5]. Matthew uses the word “fulfilled” fifteen times in his Gospel. One of his purposes is to show his readers that Jesus of Nazareth is indeed the Messiah who fulfilled what was written in the Old Testament Scriptures. This applies not only to what He said and did, but also to the way He ministered.

[6]. Charles B. Williams, The New Testament in the Language of the People (Chicago: Moody, 1966), 40.

[7]. We think of disciples as learners, and this is true; but the important thing is that disciples learn by doing and not just by listening to lectures or reading books. Perhaps the best contemporary equivalent is apprentice. Jesus would teach the Twelve and then send them out to put into practice what they thought they had learned.

[8]. I noticed one day in my devotional reading that Psalm 1 somewhat parallels the three responsibilities we have to the truth of God’s Word. We must learn the truth (Ps. 1:2), live the truth (Ps. 1:1) and share the truth with others (Ps. 1:3). The tree doesn’t eat the fruit it produces but makes it available to hungry people. It’s only as we live the truth of the Word that we can effectively minister to others.

[9]. Dr. H.A. Ironside often quoted the adage, “If it’s new, it’s not true; if it’s true, it’s not new.” He probably had Ecclesiastes 1:9 in mind. The Pulitzer-Prize-winning American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote insightfully about America’s love affair with novelty: “We have learned so well how to absorb novelty that receptivity itself has turned into a kind of tradition—‘the tradition of the new.’ Yesterday’s avant-garde experiment is today’s chic and tomorrow’s cliche.” Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 418.

[10]. E.P. Boys-Smith, in the article “Mental Characteristics,” in Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels, ed. James Hastings (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1973), 2:164.

[11]. Stopford A. Brooke, Life and Letters of the Rev. Frederick W. Robertson (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1866), 2:160–61. Various editions of Robertson’s sermons are available but must be purchased second-hand. If Robertson is a new name to you, I suggest you get acquainted with him by reading The Preaching of F.W. Robertson, ed. Gilbert E. Doan, Jr., and published by Fortress Press in their “Preacher’s Paperback Library” (1964). The editor’s introductory essay provides an excellent introduction to Robertson’s life and interpretation of his philosophy of preaching. The ten sermons included in the book should make you hungry for more. In his day, Robertson was too liberal for the doctrinaire evangelicals of the Anglican church, but too evangelical for the liberals with their nebulous theology.

[12]. More attention needs to be given to the paradoxes in Scripture. In one sense, the Incarnation is itself a paradox; and many of our Lord’s most memorable sayings were couched in paradoxical terms. For examples of how the paradoxes may be made practical in our preaching, see: Charles W.F. Smith, The Paradox of Jesus in the Gospels (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969); Gerald Kennedy, The Lion and the Lamb (New York: Abingdon, 1960); Ralph W. Sockman, The Paradoxes of Jesus (New York: Abingdon, 1936); Albert D. Belden, The Paradoxes of Jesus (London: Independent Press, 1962); and Henry Clay Trumbull, Practical Paradoxes (Philadelphia: John D. Wattles, 1889).

[13]. The statement is found in the book Machines That Think, published in 1983. I found it in The New York Public Library Book of 20th Century American Quotations (New York: Warner, 1992), 374–75.

[14]. Many of the classic studies on the parables, while helpful for sermon ideas, are inadequate for serious study in the light of recent research. I’m referring to those by Campbell Morgan, Marcus Dodds, Ada Habershon, William Taylor and Arthur Pink. Bernard Brandon Scott, Hear Then the Parable (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990) is an excellent study of the parables and has a splendid bibliography. See also: Craig Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1990); Norman Perrin, Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976); Jan Lambrecht, Once More Astonished (New York: Crossroad, 1981); David Wenham, The Parables of Jesus: Pictures of Revolution (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989); Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus (London: SCM, 1963) and Rediscovering the Parables (New York: Scribners, 1967); Archibald Hunter, The Parables Then and Now (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1972); Robert H. Stein, An Introduction to the Parables of Jesus (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1981); Martin H. Scharlemann, Proclaiming the Parables (St. Louis: Concordia, 1963); Dan Otto Via, Jr., The Parables (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967); Madeleine I. Boucher, The Parables (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1981); Herman Hendrickx, The Parables of Jesus (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986); and Robert McAfee Brown, Unexpected News (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984). I especially recommend the books by Kenneth E. Bailey, a recognized expert in Eastern culture and language: Through Peasant Eyes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), Poet and Peasant (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), and The Cross and the Prodigal (St. Louis: Concordia, 1973). Helmut Thielicke’s sermons on the parables are insightful: The Waiting Father (New York: Harper and Row, 1959) and Christ and the Meaning of Life (New York: Harper, 1962). Three books of sermons by Robert F. Capon are also stimulating: The Parables of Grace, The Parables of Judgment, and The Parables of the Kingdom (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988 and 1989). On the Parable of the Prodgal Son, see: J. Wallace Hamilton, Horns and Halos in Human Nature (Westwood, N.J.: Revell, 1954), R.H. Ward, The Prodigal Son (London: Gollancz, 1968), and Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son (New York: Doubleday, 1992).

[15]. C.H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom (Glasgow: William Collins Sons, 1978), 16.

[16]. See W. Graham Scroggie, A Guide To the Gospels (London: Pickering and Inglis, 1952); and Roy B. Zuck, Basic Bible Interpretation (Wheaton, Ill: Victor, 1992), especially chapter 9.

[17]. See Wilhelm H. Wuellner, The Meaning of “Fishers of Men” (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967).

Fourteen

[1]. It’s possible to carry to extremes teaching from the types, but it’s also possible to rob ourselves of nourishing truth if we neglect the types. With reference to the feasts of Jehovah listed in Leviticus 23, see: Roy L. Gustafson, Feasting on the Feasts (Grand Rapids: Dunham, 1958); H.K. Downie, Harvest Festivals (New York: Loizeaux, 1951); G.C. Willis, The Seven Feasts of Jehovah (Hong Kong: Christian Book Room, 1957); Lehman Strauss, God’s Prophetic Calendar (Neptune, N.J.: Loizeaux, 1987); John Ritchie, Feasts of Jehovah (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1982); and Richard Booker, Jesus in the Feasts of Israel (South Plainfield, N.J.: Bridge, 1987). The classic text is Patrick Fairbairn, The Typology of Scripture, 2 vols. (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1900). On the hermeneutics of typological study, see chapter 8 of Roy B. Zuck, Basic Bible Interpretation (Wheaton, Ill.: Victor, 1992), and chapter 11 of A. Berkeley Mickelsen, Interpreting the Bible (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1963). For a critique of Fairbairn’s hermeneutic, see chapter 14 of Earl D. Radmacher and Robert D. Preus eds., Hermeneutics, Inerrancy and the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan/Academie Books, 1984).

[2]. Gentiles were present at Pentecost but as Jewish proselytes (Acts 2:11). From Acts 1–9, the message is ministered “to the Jew first” (see Acts 13:46; Rom. 1:16).

[3]. For a rich devotional and practical study of Acts 2, see G. Campbell Morgan The Birth of the Church (Old Tappan, N.J.: Revell, 1968). His approach to the symbolism is insightful.

[4]. “Peter was not a popular preacher drawing a crowd. The crowd was drawn by the Church. . . . The Spirit-filled Church always presents to the world supernatural phenomena, producing amazement, perplexity, criticism. No church is doing its work unless it is doing something supernatural that cannot be done anywhere else.” Morgan, Birth of the Church, 65–66.

[5]. In his commentary on Ephesians 5:18–6:9, Life in the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1975), D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones devotes five messages to Ephesians 5:18-21; and I recommend them to you. As a physician and gifted expositor, Dr. Lloyd-Jones was eminently qualified to deal with this text.

[6]. Luke didn’t use logizomai as Paul did in Philippians 3:1-10, but the meaning is the same.

Fifteen

[1]. Paul S. Minear’s Images of the Church in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977) is a basic text that concisely covers a great deal of territory. In the volume on ecclesiology in his Systematic Theology (Dallas: Dallas Seminary Press, 1948) Lewis Sperry Chafer discusses seven key images of the church from the dispensationalist’s point of view. Earl D. Radmacher, What the Church Is All About (Chicago: Moody, 1972) discusses six pictures of the church. John S. Howson, The Metaphors of St. Paul (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1883) contains valuable material on four images used frequently by Paul and shows their relationship to the Christian life: the Roman army, architecture, agriculture and the Greek games. Herbert M. Gale explains and applies many of Paul’s metaphors in The Use of Analogy in the Letters of Paul (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964); however, he deals with only seven epistles. Harriet Crabtree, The Christian Life (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991) focuses on seven images of the Christian life and gives a satisfying introduction to the place of metaphor in theology. Francis Lyall, Slaves, Citizens, Sons (Grand Rapids: Zondervan/Academie Books, 1984) is subtitled Legal Metaphors in the Epistles and gives an excellent summary of the Roman legal system of Paul’s day and his use of it in his letters. Douglas John Hall, The Steward: A Biblical Symbol Come of Age (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), explains this important biblical metaphor and applies it to economic and ecological problems confronting today’s world. Dwight E. Stevenson, Faith Takes a Name is a book of sermons on twelve images of the believer, (New York: Harper, 1954). On the devotional side, Guy H. King, Brought In (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1953) contains nineteen excellent devotional studies on the believer’s position “in Christ,” such as, “In the Family,” “In the Army,” “In the Building,” etc. The author brings together a great deal of Scripture and applies it in a practical way. See also pages 687–94 of Walter Elwell’s Topical Analysis of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991). The student will also want to read the relevant articles in the Bible encyclopedias and dictionaries as well as in the volumes on Greek and Roman life. I have found the following to be helpful: The National Geographic Society’s Greece and Rome: Builders of Our World (1968); T.G. Tucker, Life in Ancient Athens (London: Macmillan, 1918); Jerome Carcopino, Daily Life in Ancient Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940); T.G. Tucker, Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul (London: Macmillan, 1910); G.R. Watson, The Roman Soldier (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1969); H.A. Harris, Sport in Greece and Rome (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972); C.E. Robinson, Everyday Life in Ancient Greece (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933); Paul Veyne, ed., A History of Private Life, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, vol. 1 of (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987). The five volumes in this series cover almost every aspect of “private life” from the time of the Roman Empire to our present day and are valuable additions to your library.

[2]. Charles H. Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1954), 354.

[3]. Let Solomon settle the matter. “Like a lame man’s legs that hang limp is a proverb in the mouth of a fool” (Prov. 26:7). “Like a thornbush in a drunkard’s hand is a proverb in the mouth of a fool” (Prov. 26:9). The word translated “proverb” (masal) refers to any wise saying, parable, or oracle that conveys truth, sometimes stated in paradox or symbolism. The fool understands and explains this kind of statement as effectively as the lame man can walk. Like the drunk wielding the thornbush, he does more harm than good, both to himself and to others.

[4]. See Robert Payne, The Roman Triumph (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1962).

[5]. For an imaginative approach to the church as an army gone AWOL, see Halford Luccock’s Like a Mighty Army (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1954), 3–5. Luccock’s “Simeon Stylites” column in The Christian Century entertained and irritated readers for many years, and this little volume contains a selection of the best.

[6]. For other references including agon and agonizomai, see: Philippians 1:30; Colossians 1:29, 2:1, and 4:12; 1 Thessalonians 2:2; 1 Timothy 6:12.

[7]. The three images of the church given in 1 Corinthians 3—the family (vv. 1-4), the field (vv. 5-9a) and the building (vv. 9b-23)—emphasize different goals in ministry. The goal for the family is maturity; for the field it is quantity; and for the building it is quality. There is an interesting parallel here to Jer. 1:10.

[8]. See also Ephesians 1:23 and 2:16; Colossians 1:18, 24; 2:19; 3:15.

[9]. The image of marriage is sometimes used when God warns local churches about their sins. The church at Ephesus had forsaken her first love (Rev. 2:4), a statement that reminds us of Jeremiah 2:2; and “that woman Jezebel” had seduced the believers in Thyatira (Rev. 2:18-25). James 4:4 equates “friendship with the world” with adultery.

[10]. When Paul expounded a doctrine, he wedded it to a duty; when he admonished God’s people, he tied the admonition to a doctrine; and he associated both doctrine and duty with Jesus Christ. This is what it means to “build on Christ” in a local church. Why should God’s people give? Because of “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 8:1-9). Why should they forgive one another? Because Christ has forgiven them (Eph. 4:32). Why should husbands love their wives? Because Christ loved the church (Eph. 5:25ff). Why should believers submit to one another? Because Jesus Christ emptied Himself and became a servant for us (Phil. 2:1-18). Duty without doctrine lacks authority; doctrine without duty lacks practicality; and both without Jesus Christ lack motivation. A local church that is built on a preacher, a program, a tradition, or even the defense of some special teaching, will not survive the fire of God’s judgment, no matter how successful it appears to be in this world.

[11]. One of the best concise discussions of this passage is by Leon Morris in the Tyndale Bible Commentaries series, volume 7 on 1 Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970).

[12]. Versions of the Bible striving to avoid sexist language translate adelphoi as “brothers and sisters,” recognizing that Paul included the whole church when he used the word. In his hypothetical illustration regarding faith and works, James wrote, “Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes . . . ” (James 2:15). Our Lord used both “brother” and “sister” when referring to believers (Matt. 5:22; 12:46-50; 23:8; see Rom. 8:29; Heb. 2:11). Peter called the whole church “the brotherhood of believers” (1 Peter 2:17; and see 5:9).

[13]. Lesslie Newbigin, The Good Shepherd (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), 43. An evangelist friend of mine suggested that preachers drop the shepherd image from their thinking and preaching inasmuch as we are living in an urban society that knows little or nothing about sheep. Newbigin’s book explains why that suggestion is unwise.

[14]. Books abound on the shepherd metaphor, most of them of a devotional nature dealing with Psalm 23. A classic is William Allen Knight, The Song of Our Syrian Guest (Boston: Pilgrim, 1956). John Stevenson, The Lord Our Shepherd (London: J.H. Jackson, 1853) is an old work that contains a wealth of insight. Two newer works that are helpful are John J. Davis, The Perfect Shepherd (Winona Lake, Ind.: BMH Books, 1979), and J. Douglas MacMillan, The Lord Our Shepherd (Evangelical Press of Wales, 1988). You will also want to consult Charles Jefferson, The Minister as Shepherd (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1912), and Lesslie Newbigin, The Good Shepherd which I quoted above.

[15]. See Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (Chicago: InterVarsity, 1961).

[16]. On the relationship in God’s program between Israel and the church, see: John S. Feinberg, ed., Continuity and Discontinuity: Perspectives on the Relationship Between the Old and New Testaments (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1988); Samuel J. Schultz, The Gospel of Moses (Chicago: Moody, 1979); Thomas E. McComiskey, The Covenants of Promise: A Theology of the Old Testament Covenants (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985); Stephen Westerholm, Israel’s Law and the Church’s Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988); Daniel P. Fuller, Gospel and Law: Contrast or Continuum? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980); Renald E. Showers, There Really Is a Difference! (Bellmawr, N.J.: Friends of Israel, 1990); Charles C. Ryrie, Dispensationalism Today (Chicago: Moody, 1965); Robert L. Cate, Old Testament Roots for New Testament Faith (Nashville: Broadman, 1982); Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., Toward an Old Testament Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1978); Toward Rediscovering the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1987); The Old Testament in Contemporary Preaching (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1973); F.F. Bruce, New Testament Development of Old Testament Themes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968); Willis J. Beecher, The Prophets and the Promise (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1963).

[17]. Continuity doesn’t necessarily demand identity. In the unfolding of His program, God brings the new out of the old and doesn’t always abandon the old. Good and godly people disagree over whether there is a future for national Israel, and the choice they make depends on their hermeneutic. But our hermeneutic is an act of faith based on our interpretation of the data we perceive in Scripture. The amillennialist can be just as sincere in his or her approach as the premillennialist, and the approach must never be made a test of orthodoxy or spirituality.

[18]. The classic study is H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1951). The emergence of the “religious right” in America has forced “separatists” and “fundamentalists” (I do not use these terms pejoratively) to examine their theology of culture. Traditionally, the separatist/fundamentalist doesn’t identify with “the world” or seek to change it. According to their theology, the church is “in the world but not of the world,” and the church’s main task is to save people “out of ” the world. See George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980); Religion and American Politics, ed. Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990); Randall Balmer, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989); Jon Johnson, Will Evangelicalism Survive Its Own Popularity? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1980). It’s worth noting that Abraham was a pilgrim and stranger, yet he had allies among the people of the land (Gen. 14:13, 24) and he risked his life to save the wicked people of Sodom (Gen. 14:14-16). Through it all, however, he maintained his strong testimony as a worshiper of God and didn’t force his standards on those who were confederated with him (Gen. 14:17-24). See also the Prophet Jeremiah’s counsel to the Jewish exiles in Babylon (Jer. 29:1-23). The New Testament commentary on Jeremiah’s letter is the First Epistle of Peter. For a perceptive study of Peter’s counsel to the “scattered strangers,” see Bruce Winter, “ ‘Seek the Welfare of the City’: Social Ethics According to 1 Peter,” Themelios 13 (April/May 1988).

[19]. The “unequal yoke” is an agricultural image and suggests Deuteronomy 22:10. The phrase “have in common” translates metoche, a word with “business” connotations involving partnership in common purposes and activities. (See Luke 5:7.) Light and darkness are mutually exclusive (see 1 John 1) and have no koinonia. “Harmony” comes from a Greek word that gives us our English word “symphony” (sumphonesis, “to agree in sound, to be in harmony”) and suggests that believers and unbelievers belong to different orchestras, read different scores and follow different conductors. “Have in common” in 2 Corinthians 6:15 is a translation of meris, a word that means “part” or “portion” (see also meros). The word has geographical overtones and can refer to real estate such as a division or district of a nation. God’s people and the people of the world have different citizenships and live on different ground. “Agreement” in 6:16 is synkatathesis, derived from synkatatithemi, which means “to agree, to cast one’s vote together”; so the word has political connotations (Luke 23:51). The temple of God doesn’t support the candidates on the devil’s ballot.

Sixteen

[1]. One of the best surveys of the Book of Revelation that focuses on the imaginative is Eugene H. Peterson, Reversed Thunder (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988). In A Rebirth of Images (Albany: State Univ. Press, 1986), Austin Farrer interprets the imagery of the Apocalypse in the light of the annual Jewish feasts, the signs of the zodiac, the number seven, and the prophecies of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Zechariah. One need not agree with his approach to benefit from all he “sees” in what he calls “John’s theological poem.” In his “Didsbury Lectures,” published as The Relevance of the Apocalypse, Donald Guthrie says of Farrer’s approach: “But to maintain the theory there is much manipulation of evidence, and it needs to be asked whether the readers would have grasped the symbolism. As an explanation of the structure of the book Farrer’s theory is not convincing for it introduces too much subjectivity” (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 23–24. Merrill C. Tenney, Interpreting Revelation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957) is a helpful handbook to the Apocalypse; and William Hendriksen, More Than Conquerors (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1982) presents the amillennial view in a scholarly and irenic manner, giving full consideration to the symbolism of the book. Paul Minear’s I Saw a New Earth focuses on the symbolism and takes a non-prophetic point of view. No matter what your eschatological position, you are wise to read widely and learn from those you may disagree with. The exegete must steer cautiously between the crass literalism of some expositors who miss the significance of the symbolism, and the sheer fantasy of others who make it mean whatever they want it to mean.

[2]. The NIV simply says “He made it known,” and the NASB “He sent and communicated it,” with the marginal note for “communicated” reading “signified.”

[3]. Robert H. Mounce, The Book of Revelation in New International Commentary of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), 65. Writing in The Tyndale Bible Commentary, Leon Morris says, “Signified is cognate with ‘sign,’ and, though the point cannot be pressed, it is natural to associate this with the multiplicity of ‘signs’ narrated in the book” (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969), 46.

[4]. Trumpets or trumpeters are referred to fifteen times in the Apocalypse. According to Numbers 10, the trumpets were used to assemble God’s people, declare war, announce the holy days and prepare the people to move, all of which have their application in the Book of Revelation. See also Matthew 24:31, 1 Corinthians 15:52, 1 Thessalonians 4:16, and Hebrews 12:19.

[5]. See my book Real Worship (Nashville: Oliver Nelson, 1986), for a study of these themes and their application to the church’s ministry today.

[6]. The Book of Revelation is the book of the throne. The word is used forty-six times.

Seventeen

[1]. The metaphor of spoils after the battle ought to arouse your imagination so that you ask yourself, “Who in the Bible had to deal with this kind of situation?” You would probably think of Abraham (Gen. 14:17-24), Achan (Josh. 7) and King Saul (1 Sam. 15); and these examples offer you wide opportunity for exegesis and meditation. The metaphor also suggests that there’s no reward in Bible study unless we fight some battles with ourselves and with the enemy.

[2]. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, The War Within (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 171. She was quoting the French sculptor Charles Despiau from whom she learned many lessons while he was sculpting her head in his Paris studio. She marveled at his patience and total disregard of the passing of time. Despiau claimed that if an artist had three minutes of “clear vision” in a day, it was enough for him (p. 91). “But you have to step back—to step back—in order to move forward,” he claimed (p. 150). As in the creation of a beautiful work of art, the preparation of a message demands time and patience; and it does the minister good to step back occasionally and examine what is “growing” under his hands. This isn’t to suggest that a sermon is a piece of “artistic literature,” a religious essay born to be admired. The “baby” is born to confront our listeners personally and accomplish a specific purpose in their lives and the life of the church. As we shall see in a later chapter, the preacher or teacher can learn much about creativity from gifted artists in many fields.

[3]. Thomas Merton, The Monastic Journey (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Image, 1977), 50.

[4]. Jill Morgan, A Man of the Word (London: Pickering and Inglis, 1951), 188.

[5]. George W. Truett, The Prophet’s Mantle (Nashville: Broadman, 1948), 143–54. The sermon is included in volume 8 of 20 Centuries of Great Preaching, ed. Clyde E. Fant, Jr., and William M. Pinson, Jr. (Waco, Texas: Word, 1971), 174–81. Interestingly enough, George H. Morrison used the same text and preached on “The Perils of the Middle-Aged.” See Morrison’s The Wings of the Morning (London: Hodder and Stoughton, n.d.), 131–44.

[6]. James S. Stewart, The Gates of New Life (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1939), 102–11.

[7]. Willard L. Sperry, Sermons Preached at Harvard (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953), 37–44.

[8]. Frank Boreham, A Bunch of Everlastings (Philadelphia: Judson, 1949), 210–21. William Knibb (1803–1845) was an English missionary to Jamaica and crusader against slavery.

[9]. See The New Park Street Pulpit (Pasadena, Texas: Pilgrim, 1981) 4:473. That other dean of American homiletics professors, Andrew W. Blackwood, wrote, “If Spurgeon had thought about the contents and tone color of Judges, he would not have preached a sermon about Samson as an object lesson of consecration.” See Blackwood’s The Preparation of Sermons (Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1958), 52. Spurgeon also used Samson as a type of Christ in the sermon “Our Champion,” found in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, 52:493.

[10]. John A. Broadus, A Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons (New York: A.C. Armstrong and Son, 1897), 51.

[11]. Broadus, Treatise, 62.

[12]. Some seminary professors insist that we must make our own translations of our texts, a task that’s especially difficult and time consuming for busy preachers who are not proficient in Bible languages. Certainly we ought to study the text in the original language as best we can, using all the helps we can; but, to paraphrase Emerson, why swim the river when somebody has built a bridge?

[13]. I was fortunate as a seminary student to study under two gifted homileticians, Dr. Charles W. Koller and Dr. Lloyd M. Perry, both of whom insisted on careful “spade work” as we prepared our messages. They required us to hand in our “factual data” sheets along with our sermon outhnes, just so they could be sure we weren’t depending more on “inspiration” than information and perspiration. Dr. Koller’s book Expository Preaching Without Notes (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1962) and Dr. Perry’s Biblical Sermon Guide (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1970) both discuss the gathering of factual data and the organizing of the material into expository sermons. The Koller volume also contains fifteen of his best sermons. When Dr. Koller or Dr. Perry preached in seminary chapel, we were all there to listen!

[14]. I realize that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an objective study of anything, because the observer is always a part of the process and can’t be completely neutral. Students of the Word need to recognize and identify their prejudices and seek to be as objective as possible as they study the Bible.

[15]. Leland Ryken has written some valuable books to help the student better understand the significance of the literature of the Bible. See How to Read the Bible as Literature (Grand Rapids: Zondervan/Academie, 1984); The Literature of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974); and The Christian Imagination (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991). Another valuable manual is The Bible in Its Literary Milieu, ed. John Maier and Vincent Tollers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979). I also highly recommend Roy B. Zuck’s Basic Bible Interpretation (Wheaton, Ill.: Victor, 1991); chapter 6, “Bridging the Literary Gap,” is especially pertinent to this discussion. Also, Sidney Greidanus, The Modern Preacher and the Ancient Text (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988) is an excellent survey of modern literary theory as it relates to biblical hermeneutics and homiletics. The author summarizes a wealth of material and explains how it can be used in the study of the Bible and the preparation of sermons. An older, but still useful, work is E.W. Bullinger, Figures of Speech Used in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1968).

[16]. For that matter, the word “literal” is itself a metaphor and means “according to the letter.” The image is that of a student with a copy-book, learning to write by imitating the letters on the page. As Emerson said, every word was once a picture.

[17]. For an excellent survey of various types of “criticism” and their application to biblical hermeneutics, see David Alan Black and David S. Dockery, eds., New Testament Criticism and Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1991).

[18]. One of the best tools for identifying New Testament “semantic domains” is the Greek—English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, ed. Johannes P. Louw and Eugene A. Nida, 2 vols. (New York: United Bible Society, 1989).

[19]. I use “hearers” instead of “readers” because much of the Word was spoken before it was written, or if it was written first, it was written to be read aloud. Furthermore, the written Word as we have it today should be “heard” even when it is read privately. In fact, as a regular part of the study process, the minister would do well to read the text aloud and listen to it. The careless reading of the Scriptures in public is often an evidence that the passage wasn’t carefully read in private. It was said that people learned more from Campbell Morgan’s public reading of the Bible than from anybody else’s preaching of the Bible!

[20] There is a brief but insightful discussion on preaching and biblical theology in Greidanus, Modern Preacher, 67–72. See also Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology, Old and New Testaments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948); Edmund P. Clowney, Preaching and Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1961); Gordon R. Lewis and Bruce A. Demarest, Integrative Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan/Academie, 1987); and Alan F. Johnson and Robert E. Webber, What Christians Believe (Grand Rapids: Zondervan /Academie, 1989). These last two volumes summarize both biblical and historical theology as they explain the major doctrines of the Christian faith.

[21]. See Louis Berkhof, The History of Christian Doctrines, (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1975); Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Historical Theology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978); Gordon R. Lewis and Bruce A. Demarest, Integrative Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan/Academie, 1987); and Alan F. Johnson and Robert E. Webber, What Christians Believe: A Biblical and Historical Summary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan/Academie, 1989).

[22]. The Santayana quote is found in his The Life of Reason, volume 1, chapter 12. The Whitehead quote is in his Adventures in Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1967), 238. In quoting Whitehead, I’m not at all agreeing with either “process philosophy” or “process theology”; but there’s a sense in which the way things change helps to determine what will happen in the future. One is reminded of George Orwell’s “party slogan” in 1984, “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past” (part 1, ch. 3). See Earle E. Cairns, “Christian Faith and History” in Christianity and the World of Thought, ed. Hudson T. Armerding (Chicago: Moody, 1968); George A. Buttrick, Christ and History (Nashville: Abingdon, 1963); Colin Brown, History and Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan/Academie, 1987); and Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History (New York: Scribners, 1950). No historian can be purely objective; even the selection of materials has a subjective bias. But the alternative is to have no historians at all, and that would be tragic.

[23]. See Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Living of These Days (New York: Harper, 1956), 230.

[24]. In his preface to Karl Barth’s Homiletics (Louisville: Westminster /John Knox, 1991), Geoffrey Bromiley writes: “Theology for him could not be an end in itself. It is not to be done in isolation from the church’s supreme ministry. It is itself a secondary ministry It has the servant role of critically and constructively testing the church’s proclamation with a view of keeping it in tune with its function as testimony to the revealed Word of God according to the norm of the scriptural Word.”

[25]. Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1977), 1: 6.

[26]. “Few things are more essential to biblical preaching than being aware that the Word addresses pastor and people alike, that the struggle to appropriate the text is common to us all.” Leander E. Keck, The Bible in the Pulpit (Nashville: Abingdon, 1978), 63.

[27] Phillips Brooks, Lectures on Preaching (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1969), 8. The edition published by Kregel Publications, The Joy of Preaching, contains paragraph headings that help to make it easier to read these long lectures. In my opinion, Brooks’s Lectures on Preaching is the seminal book on preaching published in the United States, and almost everything we’ve since published about preaching is a footnote to what Brooks said at Yale in 1877.

[28]. This is from Emerson’s famous “Divinity School Address” which he delivered at Harvard on Sunday evening, July 15, 1838. The fact that Emerson himself was a “ministerial drop-out” didn’t endear him to the Divinity School faculty; and he had been invited to speak, not by the school officers, but by the members of the senior class. It would take nearly thirty years for the faculty to get over this address and invite Emerson back to speak. He defined preaching as “the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life.” While his address contains a good deal of “Emersonian transcendental fog,” he does say some things about the church and preaching that we could well take to heart today.

[29]. The experience of Isaiah, recorded in chapter 6 of his prophecy, is often used to illustrate how God prepares us for ministry: Isaiah saw the Lord, he saw himself, and he saw the needs of others. He met the Lord in worship, the Lord met him in cleansing, and then the Lord commissioned him for service. Both Jeremiah and Ezekiel had to experience personal suffering before they could receive and deliver the messages God gave them. When we divorce the messenger from the message, we cease to have “divine truth communicated through human personality.”

[30]. Bonar, Menoir and Remains, 36, 40.

[31]. The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, March 18, 1842.

[32]. Dwight E. Stevenson writes: “Nothing is more central to a genuine ministry than the faculty of feeling one’s way into the lives of others. . . . It is more than sympathy; it is empathy, the imaginative projection of one’s consciousness into another’s being.” In the Biblical Preacher’s Workshop (Nashville: Abingdon, 1967), 113.

[33]. I use the word “myth” to mean a set of beliefs, often nebulous, that hover around persons, events, and institutions. Myths help people to understand life, find their place in society, and cope with what comes their way. An excellent introduction to the subject is K.K. Ruthven’s, Myth in the “Critical Idiom” series published by Methuen and Co. The section on “The Context of Preaching” in James W. Cox, Preaching (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985) contains many helpful insights.

[34]. “I always consider the settlement of America as the opening of a grand scheme and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.” John Adams wrote that, and George Washington said in his first inaugural address, “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment intrusted to the hands of the American people.” Senator Albert Gore justified the annexation of the Philippines in these words: “God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No. He made us master organizers of the world to establish a system where chaos reigned. . . . He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the redemption of the world.” These quotations are cited from Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant (New York: Seabury, 1975), 33–34, 38. A nation that’s been through costly unsettled wars in Korea and Vietnam, as well as the upheavals of the ’60s and ’70s, probably questions some of these noble sentiments. But the “American messianic myth” of progress and conquest is still the guiding light of millions of people. Add to this the “Horatio Alger myth” (or the “log cabin to White House” myth) of success available to anyone who will work hard, and you have the statement of faith for American civil religion, celebrated every Fourth of July and Labor Day. The minister of a WASP church doesn’t have the advantages of the minister of a black congregation, who knows that the people look to the exodus from Egypt as their unifying and guiding myth.

[35]. Following are some helpful books in this area: Samuel Volbeda, The Pastoral Genius of Preaching (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1960); Charles F. Kemp, The Preaching Pastor (St. Louis: Bethany, 1966); David H.C. Read, Preaching About the Needs of Real People (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1988); Wayne E. Oates, The Bible In Pastoral Care (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953); Edmund Holt Linn, Preaching as Counseling: The Unique Method of Harry Emerson Fosdick (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson, 1966); and J. Peter Vosteen, “Pastoral Preaching” in The Preacher and Preaching, ed. Samuel T. Logan, Jr. (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1986).

[36]. See Thomas H. Troeger, Imagining a Sermon (Nashville: Abingdon, 1990), and Paul Scott Wilson, Imagination of the Heart (Nashville: Abingdon, 1988). Both books contain excellent suggestions for transforming a “standard sermon outhne” into a message that is creative.

Eighteen

[1]. See my Bible Exposition Commentary (1989) as well as Wiersbe’s Expository Outhnes on the New Testament (1992), Wiersbe’s Expository Outhnes on the Old Testament (1993), and the individual commentaries in the BE series, all published by Victor Books; also see With the Word, published by Oliver-Nelson.

[2]. I courageously attempted to outhne Ecclesiastes in my book Be Satisfied (1990), and First John in Be Real (1979), both published by Victor Books. The astute reader, however, discovers that in both books I arrived at my outhnes by first imposing an overriding theme. I saw Ecclesiastes as a study of satisfaction in this life, and First John as a description of real Christian living. If you selected a different theme, you’d end up with a different outhne. In Be Joyful, I expounded Philippians as an epistle of Christian joy, but I could just as well have used the themes of unity and servanthood and developed different outhnes. There is no escaping the fact that the student’s outlook will largely determine the outcome.

[3]. The one exception may be the Book of Revelation; that is, if you take Revelation 1:19 as the “inspired outhne,” as dispensational premillennial expositors do. A case can be made, however, for seeing two divisions in the text and not three: “the things you see, namely, what is and what is to come.” For a concise discussion, see Mounce, Revelation, 81–82. Psalm 119 and other acrostic psalms follow the order of the Hebrew alphabet, but this can hardly be called an outhne. The careful expositor should follow the example of Campbell Morgan, who did not say “This is the outhne of the book” but “This is an outhne of the book.” In my own ministry, I have used the phrase “a suggested outhne.”

[4]. I recommend that you index the sermons in your personal library by texts and take time regularly in your studies to compare and contrast the approaches that various preachers take to the same passage. Of course, you never read sermons on your text until your own preparation is completed, lest you be tempted either to plagiarize or to follow a “track” that just isn’t suited to you. One of Alexander Whyte’s assistants once modeled a sermon after Whyte’s approach, and Whyte’s only comment was, “Preach your own message!” Good advice!

[5]. T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 27.

[6]. A lady with pen and notebook in hand stopped me after I had preached a message at a summer Bible conference. She asked, “What was the third subpoint under Roman numeral five?” I really must have done a poor job that morning, because there was no Roman numeral five! I trust she didn’t go away from the meeting with her notebook full and her heart empty.

[7]. Philip Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. Press, 1975), 39. For a fascinating discussion of the importance of imagination to scientific research, see Roger Shepard, “The Imagination of the Scientist,” in Imagination and Education, ed. Kieran Egan and Dan Nadaner (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988), 153–85.

[8]. Emerson agreed with his friend, for he wrote, “Whoever discredits analogy and requires heaps of facts before any theories can be attempted, has no poetic power, and nothing original or beautiful will be produced by him.” See The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903–1904), 5:239. “The poet/prophet is a voice that shatters settled reality and evokes new possibility in the listening assembly,” writes Walter Brueggemann in Finally Comes the Poet, 4.

[9]. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 217.

[10]. Since the Enlightenment, the Western world has focused on “reality” and encouraged the “scientific approach.” During the Romantic Era, the pendulum began to swing back with the new emphasis on feelings and imagination—the “world” within us; and now, science and imagination are good friends, if not wedded. But the Eastern world has cultivated a different approach that Western thinkers shouldn’t ignore: the “real” world is the world within. See Robert Avens, Imagination Is Reality (Dallas, Texas: Spring, 1980) for a brief survey of “Eastern” views of imagination and reality. Thomas Moore’s best-selling Care of the Soul (New York: Harper-Collins, 1992) blends Jungian psychology with the Eastern philosophy of reality and applies both to pastoral work and spiritual development. Moore says a great deal about the imagination and the role it plays in the making of a life.

[11]. Hugh Black, Listening to God (New York: Revell, 1906), 17. Hugh Black (1868–1953) was Alexander Whyte’s associate at Free St. George’s Church in Edinburgh and later served as professor of practical theology at Union Seminary, New York City. Because Black was more liberal in his theology than was his senior minister, the congregation facetiously said that in the morning service they were blackened by Whyte and in the evening they were whitewashed by Black! However different they may have been in personality and doctrine, the two men agreed on the importance of imagination in preaching God’s Word.

[12]. Marvin Bell, “Three Propositions: Hooey, Dewey, and Looney,” in Writers on Writing, ed. Robert Pack and Jay Parini (Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New England, 1991), 7.

[13]. Nancy Hale, in “The Two-Way Imagination,” Adventures of the Mind: Second Series, ed. Richard Thruelson and John Kobler (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 357. She quotes the nineteenth-century German chemist Friedrich A. Kekule von Stradonitz who said, “If we learn to dream, gentlemen, then we shall perhaps find the truth. We must take care, however, not to publish our dreams before submitting them to proof by the waking mind” (p. 362). Blessed are the balanced! See Northrop Frye’s discussion of imagination and science in chapter 1 of his The Educated Imagination (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. Press, 1964).

[14]. Kittay, Metaphor, 7. See also p. 67: “A model is, in essence, a sustained and systematic metaphor.” Physicists smile and tell us that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, they envision light as waves, while on Tuesdays and Thursdays, they envision light as particles; and apparently nobody is worse off because of the bargain.

[15]. Quoted in Derek Jarrett, The Sleep of Reason (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), 129.

[16]. Watchman Nee, A Table in the Wilderness (Fort Washington, Pa.: Christian Literature Crusade, 1965), selection for August 13.

[17]. Terence Hawkes, Metaphor, The Critical Idiom Series (London: Methuen, 1972). I haven’t referred to it before, but this book is perhaps the best brief introduction to the study of metaphor.

[18]. Frye, Educated Imagination, 32.

[19]. Peterson, Answering God, 73.

[20]. Edward F. Murphy, The Crown Treasury of Relevant Quotations (New York: Crown, 1978), 593. Somewhere, Emerson wrote, “A system-grinder hates the truth.” Life is characterized by “spontaneity and variety,” and so is Scripture. Why then should our sermons be characterized by lameness and tameness?

[21]. Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination (San Francisco: North Point, 1981), 43. “No word in a context can have more meaning than the writer thinks into it,” he says. “When a writer does not care about the meaning of a word, we know it” (p. 31). In his Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, Henry Ward Beecher called words “pegs to hang ideas on,” which is about as tame a definition as you can get. Joseph Conrad came closer to the truth when he wrote in Lord Jim: “A word carries far—very far—deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.” In Scripture, when God speaks, something happens. The miracle of preaching God’s Word is that the Spirit can take our feeble efforts and accomplish things in His church. “He sent forth his word and healed them; he rescued them from the grave” (Ps. 107:20). “The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life” (John 6:63).

[22]. “O for the touch of the Holy Spirit to make this outhne into a living sermon,” cried Spurgeon as he launched into a sermon. “Here are the altar and the wood: O Holy Ghost, be thou the fire!” See The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, vol. 27, p. 158.

[23]. There was a post-resurrection “boat experience” recorded in John 21:1-14; and it too emphasizes the importance of faith. Peter and the other six men didn’t wait for Jesus to instruct them, so their efforts were in vain. Jesus said, “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

[24]. Preachers are generally too hard on Peter because he got his eyes off the Lord and began to sink. But keep four facts in mind: none of the other disciples left the ship; Peter did successfully walk out to Jesus; Peter had faith enough to cry out to Jesus for help; and both Peter and Jesus walked back to the ship. Anybody who’s still cowering in the ship has no right to criticize Peter!

[25]. If an outhne comes to you as a seeming inspiration from heaven, write it down and set it aside while you “imagineer” the message. On more than one occasion, I’ve discovered that the “inspired” outhne detoured me from the message I was supposed to prepare; but there have been other times when it became the key to the passage. You never know what will happen, so don’t abandon even material that doesn’t seem to fit into the message at all.

[26]. It has been said that the art of expository preaching is the wise use of the wastebasket, and there’s some truth to the statement. In a seminar on preaching, one minister confessed that his sermons sounded like Bible commentaries because he tried to include everything he’d learned about the passage. Remember Harry Emerson’s Fosdick’s admonition that the purpose of preaching is not to explain a subject but to achieve an object. The overriding metaphor you select is governed by the purpose you want to achieve in preaching the message.

[27]. In my outhne, I chose “statement of faith,” i.e., a personal creed, and my key word was “affirmations”; but I could just as well have used “anchors” and maintained the nautical theme. “When you find yourself in the storms of life, lay hold of several anchors of faith . . . ” would have been the transitional sentence.

[28]. Johnson was quoting one of his old college tutors. See Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, entry for April 30, 1773. What’s true of writing is true of preaching: we preach to express and not to impress. The familiar statement of James Denny still stands: “No man can bear witness to Christ and to himself at the same time. No man can give the impression that he himself is clever and that Christ is mighty to save.”

[29]. Donald Coggan, Stewards of Grace (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1958), 71. Coggan was Bishop of Bradford when he wrote this book; from 1974 to 1980, he served as Archbishop of Canterbury. I also recommend his Ministry of the Word (London: Canterbury, 1945), and Preaching: The Sacrament of the Word (New York: Crossroad, 1988).

[30]. Alliteration can be very effective if the way it’s used is original and the pictures are more vivid than the frames. Anyone who ever heard Dr. R.G. Lee go down his famous “Alphabet of Sin” heard alliteration at its best (“Man calls sin an accident; God calls it an abomination!”). In his younger years, Spurgeon sometimes alliterated his main points, as in his sermon on the curing of the demonized boy (Luke 9:42). “There are four points for our consideration this morning,” he told his New Park Street congregation. “That you may easily remember them I have made them alliterative: the devil’s doings, designs, discovery, and defeat.” (See The New Park Street Pulpit (Pasadena, Texas: Pilgrim, 1981), 2:269. In his sermon on “Rahab’s faith,” Spurgeon pointed out that her faith was saving faith, singular faith, stable faith, self-denying faith, sympathizing faith, and sanctifying faith (New Park Street, 3:97–104). He preached the first message in 1856 and the second in 1857; but as late as 1890, he was still occasionally using alliteration in one way or another. “Faith is the fountain, the foundation, and the fosterer of obedience,” he said in his introduction to a sermon on Abraham’s faith (Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, 37:157). He entitled a message based on Psalm 106:7, “Sin: Its Spring-head, Stream and Sea” (Metropolitan Tabernacle, 37:264). In a sermon on Luke 7:50, he said, “Salvation, then, is a present thing, in price, in promise, in principles, and in pledge” (New Park Street, 48:124). James S. Stewart developed the “drama” of John Mark’s life in four alliterated “acts”: Recantation, Remorse, Restoration, and Reparation. See his The Gates of New Life (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1939), 220–31). In the same volume, his excellent sermon entitled “Why Be a Christian?” presents four alliterated reasons: “The Christian life is happier than any other, harder than any other, holier than any other and more hopeful than any other.”

 If an alliterated outhne comes naturally out of the text, and if it doesn’t distract from the message, it can be a useful tool to help people remember what you said. But if this is the only way you set the table, your menu may become too predictable; and predictable preaching isn’t usually powerful preaching. If our people assemble for worship each week asking themselves, “What will it be today, all G’s or all W’s?” then we’re carrying alliteration too far and form is destroying function. Of course, if the preacher wants the reputation of being a clever fellow with words, then that’s another matter altogether.

[31]. Mark Twain is supposed to have said that “the difference between any word and the right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” Rather than wasting his time thumbing through the thesaurus, the preacher would accomplish more if he spent that time consulting a good dictionary of synonyms to make certain the key words in his outhne are accurate. We who preach the Gospel do so by using words; and since words are the tools that we use, we ought to study them and learn how they work. Preachers who neglect to use the dictionary and increase their vocabulary are robbing themselves and their people.

Nineteen

[1]. Harry Farra, The Sermon Doctor (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989), 55. This very original approach to homiletics deserves more attention than it has received. Perhaps the title frightened off preachers who don’t think their sermons need “doctoring.” (Some of mine need burying!)

[2]. A fine example is R.G. Lee’s famous sermon “Pay Day Some Day.” It is biblical biographical preaching at its best; and if you haven’t read it, you should do so soon. You will find it in 25 of the Greatest Sermons Ever Preached, comp. and ed. Jerry Falwell (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983), and also in Great Sermons of the 20th Century, comp. Peter F. Gunther (Westchester, Ill.: Crossway, 1986).

[3]. The popular TV series “Life-Styles of the Rich and Famous” gave a pastor friend of mine the idea for a sermon series on the Beatitudes, which he called “The Life-Styles of the Spiritually Rich and Famous.” That’s using your imagination!

[4]. Let me recommend that you read Daniel J. Boorstin’s book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1964). “Two centuries ago when a great man appeared,” wrote Boorstin, “people looked for God’s purpose in him; today we look for his press agent” (p. 45). Instead of producing heroes today, we are manufacturing celebrities; and thanks to media advertising techniques, we can make a nobody into somebody almost overnight. Boorstin’s book is an entertaining and enlightening study of the “illusions” that have captured America and what they are doing to us.

[5]. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. “The Decline of Heroes” in Adventures of the Mind, ed. John Kobler and Richard Thruelsen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), 95–106. The quotations are from pages 97 and 104 respectively.

[6]. Ambrose Bierce said that “the world is divided into two classes of people, the righteous and the unrighteous, with the righteous doing the classifying.”

[7]. If you have a problem doing this, I suggest you read Frederick Buechner’s (pronounced “BEEK-ner”) Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who’s Who (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979). “What struck me more than anything else as I reacquainted myself with this remarkable rag-bag of people,” says Buechner in his preface, “was both their extraordinary aliveness and their power to make me feel somehow more alive myself for having known them.”

[8]. “There is one study, my Christian brethren, which never can lose its interest for us so long as we are men: and that is the investigation of human character. The deep interest of Biography consists in this—that it is in some measure the description to us of our own inner history. You cannot unveil the secrets of another heart without at the same time finding something to correspond with, and perchance explain, the mysteries of your own. Heart answers to heart.” Frederick W. Robertson, Sermons: Fourth Series (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1900), 160. Robertson was especially gifted at penetrating the human heart as he preached about Bible personalities.

[9]. Russell Baker, “Life with Mother,” in Inventing the Truth, ed. William Zinsser (New York: Book-of-the-Month Club, 1987), 49.

[10]. Catherine Drinker Bowen, Biography: The Craft and the Calling (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969). Chapter 6 is the one I’m referring to. While this book is primarily for biographers writing papers, articles, or books, it contains some wise counsel that preachers can apply as they prepare their biographical messages. Bowen points out the subtle pitfalls we should avoid as we gather data and try to understand history. I especially like her quotation from Henry James: “To live over people’s lives is nothing, unless we live over their perceptions, live over the growth, the change, the varying intensity of the same—since it was by these things they themselves lived” (p. 35).

[11]. Some helpful books to supplement your own research are Harold L. Wilmington’s Old Testament People, New Testament People and The Life of Christ, in the series, Wilmington’s Complete Guide to Bible Knowledge, (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale). The biblical facts are presented in a concise and orderly manner, and the author even tells you how many times the people are named!

[12]. In recent years, the “dramatic monologue” has become a popular approach to biographical preaching; but before you move in that direction, be sure you have the talent needed to make it succeed. Not every preacher is an actor. Furthermore, the dramatic monologue necessarily involves assuming that the character would speak and act in a certain manner, and your assumptions might be wrong. We’re sure of ourselves when we quote what the Bible says; but we can’t always be sure that what we say, or the way we say it, is true to sacred history. An actor has no more right to declaim a lie than a preacher has to preach a lie. The dramatic monologue must have just as much factual basis as the biographical sermon. Imagination is no substitute for information.

[13]. I’ve often wanted to preach a series of sermons on the hands of David. They held among other things, a sling, a sword, a harp, a pen (for writing the psalms) and a cup of cold water. David made as significant a use of the simple things as he did of the great things.

[14]. For a fascinating study of names in the contemporary literary world, see Leon Edel’s “The Figure Under the Carpet” in Telling Lives: The Biographer’s Art, ed. Marc Pachter (Washington, D.C.: New Republic, 1979). Leon Edel is a leading advocate of “psycho-biography” (or “literary psychology”) and is the author of the monumental biography of Henry James, which won a Pulitzer Prize. His theories are explained and illustrated in his book Stuff of Sleep and Dreams: Experiments in Literary Psychology (New York: Harper and Row, 1982). He outhnes his approach in the first three chapters, and I recommend them to you. I also recommend his book Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984). Here and there in this book, the preacher will find hints and principles that apply to the study and preaching of Bible biography. However, let me caution you not to try to become an amateur psychiatrist as you seek to understand the lives of the great men and women of the Bible. A basic knowledge of yourself in particular, and human nature in general, should suffice. For a simple presentation and sane evaluation of this new field, see Milton Lomask, “Psychbiography” in The Biographer’s Craft (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), chap. 13. For an advanced study, see Peter Gay, Freud for Historians (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985). Dorothy F. Zeligs, Psychoanalysis and the Bible (New York: Bloch, 1974) contains interesting studies by a Jewish psychoanalyst of seven Old Testament leaders: Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Samuel, Saul, David and Solomon.

[15]. Quoted in John A. Garraty, The Nature of Biography (New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 1984), 11. A novelist can invent a character and always know what that character is thinking, but a biographer doesn’t have that advantage. Why did Judas sell Jesus? Was it for money? Was it to force Him to do something to redeem Israel? Was it because he hated Him for setting up a spiritual kingdom instead of a glorious kingdom for the Jews? Or was it because his own character had so eroded that there was nothing left for him to do but kill himself and Jesus? Perhaps it was a combination of all of these. “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9)

[16]. We wonder how Judas responded inwardly to all of our Lord’s warnings about wealth and covetousness. How did Judas the treasurer feel when Jesus rejected the rich young ruler’s shallow offer to become a disciple? When Mary of Bethany anointed Jesus, did our Lord’s rebuke of the disciples sting Judas and make him even more determined to listen to the devil?

[17]. Along with the standard books on Bible characters and the books about the twelve Apostles, you might want to consult these special studies on Judas: S. Pearce Carey, Judas and Jesus (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1931); Bertil Gartner, Iscariot (Philadelphia: Fortress “Facet Books,” 1971); Jasper A. Huffman, Judas: The Biography of a Soul (Marion, Ind.: The Wesley Press, 1958); and Albert Nicole, Judas The Betrayer (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1957). Clarence E. Macartney, He Chose Twelve (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1993) contains an excellent study of Judas by a preacher who majored in preaching Bible biographies.

[18]. John Bunyan closes the first part of his Pilgrim’s Progress with the sobering words, “Then I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction.”

[19]. In recent years, much has been done in the area of studying biblical narrative. See: Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987); The Bible in its Literary Milieu, ed. John Maier and Vincent Tollers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), especially the part entitled “Tragedy and the Gospel Narratives” by Roger L. Cox; Leland Ryken, The Literature of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974), especially chapter 3 on “Heroic Narrative”; and Michael Goldberg, Theology and Narrative: A Critical Introduction (Nashville: Abingdon, 1982).

[20]. See Walter Wangerin, Jr., Ragman and Other Cries of Faith (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984). Fulghum’s books include these: All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten, It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It, and Uh-Oh, all published by Villard Books. When it comes to Buechner, you have your choice of fiction, theology, autobiography, sermons, and miscellaneous essays. Just check your local bookstore. Wishful Thinking and Whisthng in the Dark, and Peculiar Treasures are among my favorites, although I certainly enjoyed The Clown in the Belfry. All are published by either Harper and Row or HarperCollins. I find Garrison Keillor easier to listen to than to read or to watch on TV, and you can probably locate his program on your local public radio station on Saturday evenings. Cassette tapes of his monologues (“the news from Lake Wobegon”) are available in many tape and record shops. His book Lake Wobegon Days is delightful (New York: Viking, 1985), and Leaving Home has its moments (New York: Viking, 1987). Michael Fedo has written an unauthorized biography of Keillor that is thought-provoking, The Man from Lake Wobegon (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). In a brief conversation with Keillor after one of his shows, I suggested to him that he wasn’t just telling stories; he was really preaching sermons. He smiled and denied it, but his denial wasn’t too enthusiastic. Maybe I read more into what he says than is really there.

[21]. Just a reminder that while “comedy” may include laughter, the essential ingredient in this type of drama is a happy ending with all turning out well. The stories of Joseph and Ruth are comedic, while those of Samson and Saul are tragic.

[22]. See E.M. Forster, Aspects of The Novel (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956).

Twenty

[1]. Andrew W. Blackwood, The Funeral: A Source Book for Ministers (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1942), 138. My son David and I encourage this approach in our book Comforting the Bereaved (Chicago: Moody, 1985).

[2]. I’ve glanced through my notebook of funeral messages that I’ve preached, and I’m embarrassed to discover how many of them lack that “sanctified imagination” that I contend is so necessary; but I’m encouraged to see a steady improvement over the years. There is hope.

[3]. Wiersbe, Comforting the Bereaved, 53.

[4]. This is hinted at in John 11:44, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.” The funeral is not the place for the preacher to try to answer everybody’s questions about eschatology. The post-funeral pastoral ministry will provide many opportunities to teach what the Bible says about death, heaven and hell, the new body and the return of the Lord. In the regular course of our preaching ministry, we ought to deal with these subjects so that our people are informed.

[5]. This is a good place to remind all of us that only God knows the truth about the life of the deceased, and we’d better be careful not to go too far in our eulogies. I once conducted the funeral service for a man everybody thought was a devout Christian and a faithful church worker, only to discover a few weeks later that he was leading a double life. From our limited point of view, the weaving might be beautiful; but to God, it might be ugly and soiled.

[6]. Does Psalm 23 deal only with the shepherd image, or are verses 5-6 describing God as the Host who honors us at a banquet in His house? Expositors are not agreed in their interpretations. Scroggie sees three images in Psalm 23: the shepherd and the sheep (v. 1), the guide and the traveler (vv. 2-4) and the host and the guest (vv. 5-6). (W. Graham Scroggie, Know Your Bible: The Psalms [London: Pickering and Inglis, 1948] 1:145–49.) G. Campbell Morgan also took that view. See his Great Chapters of the Bible (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1935), 55. Alexander Maclaren saw two images: the sheep and the shepherd (vv. 1-4) and the host and the guest (vv. 5-6). (See The Expositor’s Bible [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1940], 3:65–66.) The two-image interpretation is defended by John J. Davis in The Perfect Shepherd (Winona Lake, Ind.: BMH, 1979). The classic devotional treatment of Psalm 23, William Allen Knight’s The Song of Our Syrian Guest (Boston: Pilgrim, 1956), ably presents the single-image approach; and to this agree Phillip Keller, A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1970) and J. Douglas MacMillan The Lord Our Shepherd (Wales: Evangelical Press, 1983). Both of Keller and MacMillan worked as shepherds. Our Lord’s words in Luke 12:32 (“Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom”) would suggest that the single-image interpretation doesn’t violate the shepherd metaphor; for in the East, the sheik is a father, a king and a shepherd. I prefer the single-image view.

[7]. The “valley of the shadow of death” in verse 4 is an image for any place of danger and fear, which could include the experience of death. The NIV margin note reads “through the darkest valley.” John J. Davis translates it, “Even though I should walk in the valley of extreme dangers, I will not be afraid” (Davis, Perfect Shepherd, 93). “The valley of death” is a popular image, based primarily on the KJV (Job 3:5; 10:21-22; 24:17; 34:22; 38:17; Pss. 23:4; 107:10; Isa. 9:2; Jer. 2:6; 13:16; Amos 5:8). In some of these verses, the NIV has moved “shadow of death” to the margin, and in others abandoned it completely. The preacher who pictures death as “a valley that cannot detain us and a shadow that cannot harm us” had better keep in mind that, while the deceased may be safe in the Father’s house, the mourners present are still in the gloomy valley. Death is an enemy who often tears homes apart and leaves suffering people behind, and we must not ignore this fact as we use biblical images. The enemy in the valley may be only a shadow, but the fear and grief in the hearts of the sheep are very real.

[8]. Jesus Christ will still be the Shepherd of His sheep even after they get to glory (Rev. 7:17). The image of a banquet for sheep in the Father’s house is not at all grotesque (Ps. 23:5-6). The sheep go to the Father’s house; the dogs are outside the city (Rev. 22:15).

[9]. Some commentators and expositors have concluded that David was a young man when he wrote this psalm, but I seriously question that interpretation. It’s possible that Absalom’s rebellion is the background for Psalms 22–24: David seemingly abandoned by God (Ps. 22), David trusting God in the wilderness (Ps. 23), and David returning to his throne in victory (Ps. 24). In his delightful A Psalm of an Old Shepherd, Morgan defends the view that David wrote it “when he was advanced in years.” Morgan says, “The one consideration which led to the adoption of this view was that of the wealth of experience quite evidently possessed by the writer. Surely it would be as impossible to associate such wealth with youth, as it would be unnatural for youth to possess it” (F. Crosley Morgan, A Psalm of an Old Shepherd [London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, n.d.], 20–21). Whether Psalm 23 has anything to do with Absalom’s rebellion is not important. That it has everything to do with the believer’s life and death is important, and that’s where the emphasis should be.

[10]. See J. Sidlow Baxter, His Part and Ours (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1938), 113-22; and E.W. Bullinger, Figures of Speech Used in the Bible (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1898), 737.

[11]. M’Cheyne used Song of Songs 6:2 to picture the death of a child: “My beloved is gone down into His garden . . . to gather lilies” (KJV) (Robert Murray M’Cheyne, Memoirs and Remains [London: Banner of Truth, 1966], 551). This may be spiritualizing the text a bit.

[12]. For an excellent sermon on this theme, see Ian Macpherson, “What Christ the Carpenter Has Made of His Cross,” in God’s Middleman (London: The Epworth Press, 1965), 149–61.

Twenty-One

[1]. One of the first things the new pastor should do when he arrives on the field is make a calendar of the important dates in the history of the church. Nothing endears a pastor to the older folks more than seeing his appreciation for the past, and the younger people need to know about the church’s roots. Make a list of the significant dates and start planning your preaching. I have often had frantic phone calls and letters from pastors asking me to speak at a fiftieth or hundredth anniversary of their church—two months before the event! My brethren, such things ought not so to be.

[2]. For a balanced collection of contemporary sermons for the church year, by twenty-six different preachers, see Richard Allen Bodey, ed. Good News for All Seasons (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987). George Sweeting gives us eighteen of his sermons in his Special Sermons for Special Days (Chicago: Moody, 1977), and Clovis G. Chappell’s Chappell’s Special Day Sermons (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1976) contains sixteen sermons for special days. Most “garden variety” sermons can be transformed into special day sermons if you use your imagination and discover how the truth of the sermon relates to the occasion.

[3]. No lover of ecclesiastical calendars, even Charles Spurgeon knew it was smart to preach about the birth of Christ during the Christmas season. “We venture to assert, that if there be any day in the year, of which we may be pretty sure that it was not the day on which the Saviour was born, it is the twenty-fifth of December. Nevertheless, since the current of men’s thoughts is led this way just now, and I see no evil in the current itself, I shall launch the bark of our discourse upon that stream, and make use of the fact, which I shall neither justify nor condemn, by endeavoring to lead your thoughts in the same direction.” The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit (Pasadena, Texas: Pilgrim, 1984), 17:697. See also the introduction to the sermon “The Great Birthday” in vol. 22, p. 709.

[4]. See H.P. Liddon, Sermons, The Contemporary Pulpit Library (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1892), 129-88, for an excellent series of messages on “The Magnificat.”

[5]. Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, “I Saw a Stable,” in The Treasury of Religious Verse, comp. Donald T. Kauffman (Westwood, N.J.: Revell, 1966), 120–21.

[6]. James Stalker’s The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ is a classic work that you ought to read, not only for sermon preparation, but, even more, for your own soul’s good (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1894). An equally rich volume is W.M. Clow, The Day of the Cross (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909). More contemporary volumes are William Sangster, They Met at Calvary, (Nashville: Abingdon, 1956), and Clovis G. Chappell, Faces about the Cross (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1974). The famous “Schilder Trilogy” by K. Schilder, Christ in His Suffering, Christ on Trial, and Christ Crucified (Eerdmans), contain a wealth of material, but you must mine it.

[7]. Clovis G. Chappell, The Cross Before Calvary (Nashville: Abingdon, 1960). These six messages deal primarily with “Old Testament figures who reveal the spirit of the cross.”

[8]. While the phrase “lifted up” refers primarily to our Lord’s death on the cross (John 12:33), it also carries with it the suggestion of His exaltation (12:23, 28; 13:31-32). The Greek verb literally means “to lift up” and figuratively means “to enhance.” Isaiah 52:13 and 53:12 come to mind.

[9]. Charles W. Koller, Sermons Preached Without Notes (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1964). He also called the message “The Plus Sign on the Sky Line.”

[10]. A church elder said to me one day, “I’ve noticed that my pastor is prone to bash the fathers on Father’s Day and bless the mothers on Mother’s Day. It isn’t fair!” And it isn’t. There are godly fathers and worldly mothers as well as worldly fathers and saintly mothers, and sometimes they’re married to each other.

[11]. Even if you aren’t trying to work a special day emphasis into your regular course of preaching, this is a good way to handle special day messages. It takes some research to get the facts about famous mothers, fathers, or what have you, but the results are worth it. Give yourself plenty of time!

[12]. See James Strahan, Hebrew Ideals in Genesis (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1982). This is the best study I have found of the essentials of godly living as illustrated in Genesis, beginning with the call of Abraham. Alexander Whyte advised, “Let that fine piece of evangelical scholarship be in every home.”

[13]. When I was teaching homiletics, I used to warn the students not to fall into the time-honored trap of comparing the decay of our country to the fall of the Roman Empire. In the first place, do you know anybody who wanted the Roman Empire to continue? I don’t. It was built on brutality and slavery and deserved to collapse. Furthermore, Daniel had prophesied that the Roman Empire would fall; and God always fulfills His Word.

[14]. If you want to pursue the study of the place of religion in America, see: Bruce L. Shelley, The Gospel and the American Dream (Portland, Ore.: Multnomah, 1989); Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, and George M. Marsden, The Search for Christian America (Westchester, Ill.: Crossway, 1983); Edwin Scott Gaustad, A Religious History of America, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990); Mark A. Noll, ed., Religion and American Politics (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990); DeWitte Holland, ed., Preaching in American History (Nashville: Abingdon, 1969) and Sermons in American History (Nashville: Abingdon, 1971).

[15]. I note that in some modern hymnals the word “Ebenezer” has been deleted from the second verse of the familiar hymn “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” another concession to the biblical illiteracy that is engulfing the church. Pioneer missionary J. Hudson Taylor had the words “Jehovah-Jireh” and “Ebenezer” displayed in his home: “The Lord will provide—Hitherto has the Lord helped us!”

[16]. For an imaginative anniversary sermon, see Frederick Buechner’s, “The Clown in the Belfry,” in The Clown in the Belfry (San Francisco: Harper-Collins, 1992), 107–17. Buechner used Psalm 23 and an incident from the church’s history to create a message that is unique among church anniversary sermons.

[17]. This prayer has been quoted so often that both the original wording and the authorship have faded into oblivion. Niebuhr wrote the prayer in 1934 and a friend introduced it to Alcoholics Anonymous who made it their official motto. See June Bingham, Courage To Change (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972). In the popular comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” Calvin gives his own version: “I pray for the strength to change what I can, the inability to accept what I can’t, and the incapacity to tell the difference.”

Twenty-Two

[1]. “Poetry . . . takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Wordsworth wrote this in a letter to Lady Beaumont, 21 May 1807.

[2]. New York Post, 29 February 1960.

[3]. Kittay, Metaphor, 4.

[4]. Mel Brooks said, “Tragedy is if I cut my finger. Comedy is if I walk into an open sewer and die.” The New Yorker, 30 October 1978.

[5]. For interesting studies of American humor and comedians, see Steve Allen’s Funny People (Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.: Stein and Day, 1981), More Funny People (Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.: Stein and Day, 1982), and How to Be Funny (N.Y.: McGraw Hill, 1987). The last book he wrote with Jane Wollman. Steve Allen is not only a very funny man himself but also a well-educated man who reads widely and can discuss philosophy and history as intelligently as humor and entertainment. His award-winning television program “Meeting of Minds” proved that.

[6]. This is also true in biblical humor where exaggerated contrast is the basis for humor. When Jesus suggested that a camel go through the eye of a needle, His listeners certainly smiled or even laughed out loud. See Elton Trueblood, The Humor of Christ (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), and Cal Samra, The Joyful Christ: The Healing Power of Humor (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986).

[7]. Keane, Christian Ethics, 67. Reinhold Niebuhr makes a similar observation in his sermonic essay entitled “Humour and Faith.” He says, “The intimate relation between humour and faith is derived from the fact that both deal with the incongruities of our existence. Humour is concerned with the immediate incongruities of life and faith with the ultimate ones.” The essay is found in Reinhold Niebuhr, The Signs of the Times (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946), 111-31.

[8]. E.B. White, A Subtreasury of American Humor (New York: Coward McCann, 1941), xvii.

[9]. For a study of the relationship between humor and creativity, with an emphasis on Freud’s views of humor, see chapter 7 of Silvano Arieti, Creativity: The Magic Synthesis (New York: Basic Books, 1976).

[10]. “The total absence of humour from the Bible,” remarked Whitehead, “is one of the most singular things in all literature.” See Lucien Price, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954), 199. As with so many other things relating to the Bible and the Christian faith, the learned philosopher/mathematician was wrong.

[11]. See E.W. Bullinger, Figures of Speech Used in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1968), 806–15.

[12]. Brooks, Lectures, 56. But Brooks warns the preacher against becoming a “clerical jester . . . [who] lays his hands on the most sacred things, and leaves defilement upon all he touches. He is full of Bible jokes. He talks about the Church’s sacred symbols in the language of stale jests that have come down from generations of feeble clerical jesters before him. . . . There are passages in the Bible which are soiled forever by the touches which the hands of ministers who delight in cheap and easy jokes have left upon them” (p. 56).

[13]. Helmut Thielicke, Encounter with Spurgeon, trans. John W. Doberstein (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1963), 25–26.

[14]. William Jewett Tucker, The Making and the Unmaking of the Preacher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898), 122.

[15]. Oswald Chambers: His Life and Work, comp. and ed. Gertrude Chambers (London: Simkin Marshall, 1933), 276. See also Warren W. Wiersbe, Victorious Christians You Should Know (Grand Rapids: Baker), 53–59.

Twenty-Three

[1]. Two of the best studies of biblical evangelism are David Watson, I Believe in Evangelism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976) and Michael Green, Evangelism in the Early Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970). See also David Watson’s Called and Committed: World-Changing Discipleship (Wheaton, Ill.: Harold Shaw, 1982). The entire book is relevant to our theme, but chapter 9 deals primarily with evangelism.

[2]. According to Deuteronomy 21:18-21, the rebellious son, having brought disgrace to family and village, could have been stoned to death; but the father got there first!

[3]. When he was five years old, John Wesley was rescued from the burning parsonage at Epworth; and all his life, he called himself “a brand plucked from the burning.”

[4]. The word “Gehenna” is a modified transliteration of the Aramaic phrase ge-ben-hinnom “valley of the son of Hinnom.” It was a valley southwest of Jerusalem where Ahaz and Manasseh sacrificed their sons to the god Molech (2 Chron. 28:3; 33:6; see Jer. 7:31-32; 32:35). Godly King Josiah defiled the site by turning it into a place for waste and garbage (2 Kings 23:10). It’s interesting that Paul never uses the word “gehenna” in his epistles, although he does teach eternal punishment (2 Thes. 1).

[5]. “In all discussions of hell we should keep steadily before our eyes the possible damnation, not of our enemies or our friends (since both these disturb the reason) but of ourselves” (C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain [London: Geoffrey Bles, 1950], 116). Lewis’ discussion of hell in chapter 8 of this book is significant to the work of the evangelist. I recommend you read it.

[6]. According to Patterson and Kim, 82 percent of the American public believes in life after death, including both heaven and hell; but only 4 percent of the people think they’re going to hell. Nearly half (46 percent) believe they’re going to heaven. Only 55 percent believe in the existence of Satan. James Patterson and Peter Kim, The Day America Told the Truth (New York: Prentice Hall, 1991), 204.

[7]. Of course, we all know that people want justice to fall on others but not on themselves. The person who cheats on his income tax complains when he’s caught and fined, but he insists that the salesman who cheated him be punished to the nth degree.

[8]. Listen to Spurgeon at age twenty-one: “Thine heart beating high with fever; thy pulse ratthng at an enormous rate in agony; thy limbs cracking like the martyrs in the fire, and yet unburnt; thyself, put in a vessel of hot oil, pained, yet coming out undestroyed; all thy veins becoming a road for the hot feet of pain to travel on; every nerve a string on which the devil shall ever play his diabolical tune of Hell’s Unutterable Lament; thy soul forever and ever aching, and thy body palpitating in unison with thy soul” (The New Park Street Pulpit, vol. 2, 105). At age fifty-six, Spurgeon said this: “You are hanging over the mouth of hell by a single thread, and that thread is breaking. Only a gasp for breath, only a stopping of the heart for a single moment, and you will be in an eternal world, without God, without hope, without forgiveness. Oh, how can you face it?” (Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, vol. 37, 527.) In his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Jonathan Edwards said: “You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder.” He also said in this sermon: “Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf.” See John Gerstner, Jonathan Edwards on Heaven and Hell (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980). I have a feeling that both Spurgeon and Edwards, if ministering today, would still preach passionately on eternal punishment, but, without minimizing the awfulness of hell, would probably take a different approach.

[9]. Lewis, Problem of Pain, 115.

[10]. The verse can also be translated “able to keep what he has entrusted to me,” as in the RSV, NEB, and PH. But I prefer the translation in the NIV, NRSV, NKJV, and NASB. The image is that of a person going on a journey who entrusts his valuables to a friend. Paul is about to “depart,” and he is sure that his salvation and the fruit of his ministry are safe in the hands of the Lord who called him. The theme of “a committed deposit” is important in Paul’s letters to Timothy (1 Tim. 6:20; 2 Tim. 1:12, 14; 2:2; 4:7).

[11]. Users of the Authorized Version should note that the word is strait, not straight, and means “narrow, hemmed in.” It comes from the Latin strictus, “to bind.” The words of Lloyd-Jones explain the image well: “When worldly wisdom and carnal motives enter into evangelism, you will find that there is no ‘strait gate.’ Too often the impression is given that to be a Christian is after all very little different from being a non-Christian, that you must not think of Christianity as a narrow life, but as something most attractive and wonderful and exciting, and that you come in in crowds. . . . The Christian way of life is not popular. It never has been popular, and it is not popular today” (Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960], 2:220–21).

Twenty-Four

[1]. Books on creativity are many and of varied quality, covering the spectrum from erudite psychology texts to pop culture how-to-do-it books. I suggest you investigate the following: James I. Adams, Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1986); Silvano Areti, Creativity: The Magic Synthesis (New York: Basic Books, 1976); Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946); Robert Fritz, Creating (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1991); Brewster Ghiselin, ed., The Creative Process (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985); Robert Gruden, The Grace of Great Things: Creativity and Innovation (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1990); Robert B. Heywood, ed., The Works of the Mind (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966); Vera John-Steiner, Notebooks of the Mind (New York: Harper and Row, 1985); Rollo May, The Courage to Create (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975); Alex F. Osborn, Applied Imagination (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953); Denise Shekerjian, Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas Are Born (New York: Viking, 1990); Jerome L. Singer and Ellen Switzer, Mind-Play: The Creative Uses of Fantasy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980); Anthony Storr, The Dynamics of Creation (New York: Atheneum, 1985); John Wonder and Priscilla Donovan, Whole-Brain Thinking (New York: Morrow, 1984).

[2]. According to the experts, some of the more obvious “marks” of the creative person are these: courage to go it alone; a willingness to take risks and even fail; a good sense of humor; curiosity; confidence in hunches and intuition; persistence; and a positive attitude toward change. Education and IQ aren’t that important, although creative people want to master their field and continue learning. So-called “inspiration” doesn’t play a big part in being creative. It appears that “creativity” isn’t a single isolated skill but a combination of abilities and “ways of thinking” about things.

[3]. For a perceptive discussion of this important topic see chapter 3, “Intellect and Imagination,” in William Temple, Mens Creatrix (London: Macmillan, 1917). The book is a stimulating discussion of “the mind creative”; and even if you don’t totally agree with Archbishop Temple’s Platonism, you will benefit from being exposed to his creative thinking. Temple confessed that the three most formative influences on his mind were Plato, St. John, and Robert Browning. Interestingly enough, Temple sat up very late the night before his wedding to finish writing Mens Creatrix! See F.A. Iremonger, William Temple: Archbishop of Canterbury (London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1948). Chapter 28, “The Philosopher,” was written by Dorothy Emmet. For a general summary of Temple’s theology and philosophy, see A.E. Baker, ed., William Temple’s Teaching (London: James Clarke, n.d.).

[4]. Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings (New York: Warner, 1985), 83. I highly recommend this book as a record of how one creative person cultivated a creative gift in spite of what some people would consider difficult obstacles.

[5]. Ciardi’s statement is, “The poet’s trade is not to talk about experience, but to make it happen.” See his essay “The Art of Language” in Thruelson and Kobler, Adventures of the Mind, 587. What Thoreau wrote in his journal about writing is true of preaching: “The forcible writer stands bodily behind his words with his experience. He does not make books out of books, but he has been there in person” (3 February 1852). “How vain it is to sit down and write when you have not stood up to live!” (19 August 1851) Thoreau’s friend Emerson agreed with him: “If you would learn to write, ’tis in the street you must learn it. . . . The people, and not the college, is the writer’s home.” See Society and Solitude (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1883), 16. The minister who comfortably studies behind the lines of battle will not have much to say to the troops.

[6]. “What is experience but a wealth of parallels upon which our imagination can draw?” That question was asked by Alex Osborn, co-founder of Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn, in his fascinating book Your Creative Power (New York: Dell, 1961), 87. I recommend the book to you.

[7]. See Gary Jackson Oliver, Real Men Have Feelings Too (Chicago: Moody, 1993).

[8]. William Wordsworth’s poem “Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” wrestles with the problem of how to re-create beautiful experiences when you remember delightful events. I suggest you read the poem and note especially the sensory language: I hear, I behold, I see, etc. Writing about his experiences enjoying nature, the poet says:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind,

With tranquil restoration:—feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure. . .

[9]. “There’s a strange paradox about writing novels. It is simply this: there’s no occupation in the universe that is lonelier and that at the same time depends more radically on a community, a commonwealth of other writers.” Walker Percy, Sign-Posts in a Strange Land (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1991), 199.

[10]. A report in the New Yorker magazine (7 March 1959), stated that a survey of sixty-seven people with “the world’s greatest minds” revealed that most of them had their “greatest ideas” either just before they went to sleep or immediately upon awakening. When I was in high school, I discovered that my mind worked all night on geometry problems I had wrestled with before going to bed, and often I awakened with the solutions just waiting to be written down. I’ve had similar experiences with sermon texts I’ve meditated on before dozing off. Ideas are like seeds: after they’re planted, they need time to grow. “The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man,” wrote the English poet John Keats. “It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself—that which is creative must create itself’ (8 October 1818, Letters, 1:374). A survey of 200 college students revealed that 86 percent of the most creative students fell asleep at night within twenty minutes or less of retiring, while the least creative students took thirty minutes or more to go to sleep (USA Today, 26 September 1985). If this is true, creative people don’t have much time at night to give birth to those great ideas!

[11]. Albert Einstein asked a friend at Princeton, “Why is it I get my best ideas in the morning while I’m shaving?” Rollo May’s reply is that “the insight comes at a moment of transition between work and relaxation.” See Rollo May, The Courage to Create, 66–67.

[12]. See Robert L. Short’s The Gospel According to Peanuts (Richmond, Va.: John Knox, 1965) and The Parables of Peanuts (New York: Harper and Row, 1968). I may be wrong, but I get the impression that “good of’ Charlie Brown” has been replaced recently by uncontrollable and unpredictable Calvin of “Calvin and Hobbes,” one of the most imaginative comic strips to appear in decades. Whether the contrast in personalities between Charlie and Calvin represents a significant change in the outlook of the American child, I’ll leave to the sociologists and psychologists to figure out.

[13]. James Elphinston asked Samuel Johnson if he had read a certain new book that was popular, and Johnson replied, “I have looked into it.” “What,” said Elphinston, “have you not read it through?” Johnson replied, “No, Sir; do you read books through?” (See Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1:463.) If I feel that a book I’m reading isn’t really helping me, no matter how highly it was recommended, I mark the place where I stopped reading, scan the rest of the book, and set it aside until later. When I read a book, I underline what’s important to me and make my own index at the back of the book. If the book is biographical, I construct a chronology of the person’s life (unless there’s already one in the book) and make a list of the important people in the subject’s life, the influential books the person read, and other significant data that will help me use the book later on. If you want to improve your reading skills, consult: Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book (New York: Simon and Schuster 1972); James Sire, The Joy of Reading (Portland, Ore.: Multnomah, 1978); and Ben E. Johnson, Rapid Reading with a Purpose (Glendale, Ca.: Regal, 1973). The classic book on rapid reading is Norman Lewis, How to Read Better and Faster, 3rd ed. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1959).

[14]. Mark Twain defined a classic as “a book which people praise and don’t read,” and Daniel J. Boorstin defined a best-seller as “a book which somehow sold well simply because it was selling well. . . . It is known primarily (sometimes exclusively) for its well-knownness.” See Writers on Writing, comp. Jon Winokur (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1990), 40–41.

[15]. When pastors ask me what classics they ought to read, I usually refer them to the revised edition of Clifton Fadiman, The Lifetime Reading Plan (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1978). Fadiman lists over 100 books that have stood the test of time, and he tells you what they’re about and why they’re important. Charles Van Doren performs a similar service on a wider scale in The Joy of Reading (New York: Harmony Books, 1985). In Classics Revisited, Kenneth Rexroth introduces you to sixty classic writers and their writings (New York: New Directions, 1986); and in The Harvard Guide to Influential Books, ed. by Devine, Dissel and Parrish (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 113 Harvard professors list the books that have “shaped their thinking.” Beatrice Batson, A Reader’s Guide to Religious Literature (Chicago: Moody, 1968), is a guide to the best in religious literature from the middle ages to the mid-twentieth century. When it comes to selecting books to read, especially in the realm of “great literature,” don’t let anybody intimidate you. It’s your time you’re investing and you must make the most of it. Some “great books” we have to grow into; others we read simply because we need to know what they say; and others we can ignore. Before you rush out and buy The Great Books of the Western World or The Harvard Classics, or you start collecting the classics in paperback, buy a good anthology of great literature and give yourself a chance to get acquainted with the classic authors and their works. The literature anthologies published by W.W. Norton and Company, New York, are used as textbooks in many colleges and universities and can often be purchased used at campus bookstores. For a contemporary collection, see Frye, Baker, Perkins and Perkins, eds., The Practical Imagination (Harper and Row). An anthology enables you to get acquainted quickly and inexpensively with a wide variety of writers, and you can soon learn which ones really speak to you. Since a classic is a book that doesn’t have to be rewritten, it can always speak to us and the age in which we live. That’s what makes classics important: they deal with matters that are timeless and essential. Much of what is being written about ecology today was anticipated by Thoreau in Walden; and Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, published in 1849, is the primer for the modern civil rights movement.

[16]. For years, I’ve been telling pastors that when it comes to reading the classics, they have the advantage because of their knowledge of the Bible. Classical art, music, and literature are saturated with biblical allusions and images that the average person might not recognize. Many university students read the first sentence of the first chapter of Melville’s Moby Dick—“Call me Ishmael”—but have no idea how significant that name is to the plot. Some years ago, while rereading Moby Dick, I marked all the biblical allusions and quotations. I found over 100 of them, and I know I overlooked some. See A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, ed. David Lyle Jeffrey (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), and Walter B. Fulghum, Jr., A Dictionary of Biblical Allusions in English Literature, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965).

[17]. When reading printed sermons, keep in mind that the material has been edited and the statements that might best reveal the heart of the preacher have sometimes been removed. “But it is impossible to print a sermon,” wrote Charles E. Jefferson. “The most fully reported sermon is nothing but a skeleton. The life of the sermon lies in the tones and accents, in the subtle fire that burns in the syllables, and the spiritual heat which radiates from the man himself. A sermon is a man, and you cannot print a man.” Charles E. Jefferson, The Minister as Prophet (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1905), 62.

[18]. If you’re rusty in this area of literature, start with chapter 3 of Leland Ryken’s The Liberated Imagination (Wheaton, Ill.: Harold Shaw, 1989) and enjoy his exposition of ee cummings’ poem about the balloonman. John Ciardi and Miller Williams, How Does a Poem Mean (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1975), Laurence Perrine, Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), and Elizabeth Drew, Discovering Poetry (New York: W.W. Norton, 1933) are good introductions to the understanding and enjoyment of poetry. If you have children in your home—or even if you don’t—secure Lee Bennett Hopkins, Pass the Poetry, Please! (New York: Harper and Row, 1987) and look at poetry from the child’s point of view. Kathleen E. Morgan, Christian Themes in Contemporary Poetry (London: SCM, 1965) discusses six twentieth century poets, and Stopford A. Brooke, Theology in the English Poets (London: J.M. Dent, in the “Everyman Series”) is the classic study of Cowper, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Burns, with the emphasis on Wordsworth. Four Ways of Modern Poetry, edited by Nathan A. Scott, Jr. (Richmond, Va.: John Knox, 1965) is a brief introduction from a Christian perspective to the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, and W.H. Auden. I found Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979) both enlightening and entertaining. Hugo is a contemporary poet and teacher of “creative writing” who can both write and teach with skill and imagination. C.F. Main and Peter J. Seng, eds., Poems: Wadsworth Handbook and Anthology (Belmont, Ca.: Wadsworth, 1961), is the ideal introductory text for somebody just getting started in reading poetry. The selections are balanced and the introductions and expositions are scholarly without being academic. The classic anthologies of religious poetry are Donald T. Kauffman, ed., The Treasury of Religious Verse (Westwood, N.J.: Revell, 1962) and James Dalton Morrison, ed., Masterpieces of Religious Verse (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948). Merle Meeter, comp., The Country of the Risen King (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1978) is one of the best anthologies of Christian poetry that includes a fine selection of contemporary poets along with the historic “greats.” A.W. Tozer, comp., The Christian Book of Mystical Verse (Harrisburg, Pa.: Christian Pub., 1963) reflects Dr. Tozer’s love for the mystics and is a good supplement to the standard D.H.S. Nicholson and A.H.E. Lee, comps., Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse (Oxford: Clarendon, 1917). Lord David Cecil, ed., Oxford Book of Christian Verse (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940). A fascinating anthology of religious poetry is Robert Atwan and Laurance Wieder, eds., Chapter into Verse: Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993). Volume 1 contains poetry based on Old Testament passages, and volume 2, poetry based on the New Testament. Both volumes follow the biblical order of books.

[19]. Listen to Luci Shaw: “The Christian poet offers the Church what the Bible has always offered, but has too often been ignored or perceived incorrectly. God thinks metaphorically. The Bible is full of striking metaphors, but we’ve become too familiar with them to realize how vivid they are. . . When we have a real image, a picture, we can understand better what God is talking about. This is what poetry should do. It shows us a picture. It focuses in on a small area of life and sees it from a fresh angle. This is how poets and other artists can call Christians to a new understanding of God.” Etta Worthington, “Creative Christianity: An Interview with Luci Shaw” Sunday Digest, 10 June 1984. Luci Shaw’s poetry is published by Harold Shaw Publishers, Wheaton, Ill., and includes the following titles: Listen to the Green (1971), The Secret Trees (1976), The Sighting (1981), A Widening Light: Poems of the Incarnation (1984), Postcard from the Shore (1985), and Polishing the Petoskey Stone (1990), which includes all the previous titles except the anthology, A Widening Light.

[20]. “Poetry Considered,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1923.

[21]. Did you know that the English words “erudite” and “rude” are first cousins? They both come from the Latin root rudis, which means “unformed, rough, uncultivated, unskilled.” The verb erudio means “to free from roughness, to instruct, to educate”; hence, an erudite person is one whose rough edges have been polished by education. Late Latin had the verb eruderare, “to clear of rubbish.” Sometimes we have to clear away the rubbish of wrong ideas before we can plant the seeds of new ideas. Words are fascinating!

[22]. I can’t urge you enough to become a student of words. If you’ve studied Hebrew and Greek, you have a head start; and if you were exposed to a modern language sometime during your educational career, this training will help you even if you think you’ve forgotten what you studied. If you haven’t studied any foreign languages, it’s still never too late to start studying English. To get started becoming an effective “word detective,” lay hands on the books by William Safire, such as Take My Word for It (New York: Henry Holt, 1984), What’s The Good Word? (New York: Times Books, 1982), On Language (New York: Times Books, 1981), and I Stand Corrected (New York: Times Books, 1984). Edward Newman’s Strictly Speaking (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974) and A Civil Tongue (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975) are both entertaining and enlightening. Poet John Ciardi gave us A Browser’s Dictionary (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), A Second Browser’s Dictionary (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), and Good Words to You (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), all of which are delightful treasuries of etymological lore. Charles Earle Funk, Thereby Hangs a Tale (New York: Harper and Row, 1950) is a charming collection of facts about the origins of words and phrases, and so is Word Mysteries & Histories, by the Editors of The American Heritage Dictionary (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1986). Owen Barfield, History in English Words (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967) is a more academic treatment of selected words, but a book worth studying. Chapter 11 on “Imagination” is worth the price of the book. Of course, every serious reader needs a copy of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable to help identify the many persons, objects, events, and ideas that have wormed their way into the English language from mythology and other literature. My copy was revised by Ivor H. Evans and published in 1970 by Harper and Row. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983) is a fascinating discussion of 155 words that are important to modern thinking and speaking; and William Lutz, Double-Speak (New York: Harper and Row, 1989) records and analyzes the frightening “language pollution” taking place in America today.

[23]. Gerald Kennedy, For Preachers and Other Sinners (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 91.

Twenty-Five

[1]. Bliss Perry, The Heart of Emerson’s Journals (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1926), 150. On April 1, 1838, after a visit with some Harvard Divinity School students, Emerson wrote in his journal: “A minister nowadays is plainest prose, the prose of prose. He is a warming-pan, a night-chair at sickbeds and rheumatic souls; and the fire of the minstrel’s eye and the vivacity of his word is exchanged for intense, grumbling enunciations of the Cambridge sort, and for Scripture phraseology” (p. 126). He described one sermon he heard as a speech that had “much the style of a problem in geometry, wholly uncoloured and unimpassioned” (p. 91). In spite of the fact that Emerson rejected biblical theology and had no great love for the organized church, his assessment of dull preaching is worth considering.

[2]. Charles H. Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, 308, 310.

[3]. Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers, 97.

[4]. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 2:27.

[5]. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 1.117.

[6]. Samuel Butler (d. 1902) said that “definitions are a kind of scratching and generally leave a sore place more sore than it was before.” That may be so; but until somebody finds a better way to do it, we’ll have to keep scratching.

[7]. Martyn Lloyd-Jones warns us, “We are not going to fight this modern battle successfully by repeating the sermons of the Puritans verbatim, or adopting their classifications and sub-divisions, and their manner of preaching. That would be futile. We must learn to hold on to the old principles but we must apply them, and use them, in a manner that is up-to-date. . . . The moment we become slaves to any system—I do not care how good it was in its age and generation—we are already defeated, because we have missed this whole principle of adaptability.” The Christian Soldier (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1978), 290–91.

[8]. Donald Coggan argues that the rural biblical images are so radically different from modern industrial and scientific images that the preacher must translate the ancient images into contemporary thought-forms if he hopes to be understood. I’m not so sure. While there may be modern equivalents to some of the biblical images, most of them really transcend time and can be understood by people today: birth, death, bread, light, disease, burdens, bondage, guilt and punishment, warfare, drowning, etc. The specifically Jewish images can easily be explained (e.g., leprosy, shepherds, vines, marriage customs). The danger is that we dilute the original revelation, and Coggan recognizes this. See Donald Coggan, Preaching: The Sacrament of the Word (New York: Crossroads, 1988), 113–14, 152–55. Henri J.M. Nouwen has some helpful insights on this problem in chapter 1 of The Wounded Healer (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday “Image Books,” 1979). On page 39, Nouwen reminds us that “preaching means much more than handing over a tradition; it is rather the careful and sensitive articulation of what is happening in the community so that those who listen can say: ‘You say what I suspected, you express what I vaguely felt, you bring to the fore what I fearfully kept in the back of my mind. Yes, yes—you say who we are, you recognize our condition.’ ” Remember that images are pictures (we see life) that become mirrors (we see ourselves) and then windows (we see God). If people reach out by faith, then the sermon becomes a door through which they can move to meet God personally.

[9]. I’ve forgotten which famous preacher it was, but a listener accosted him after a service with, “Your sermon went over my head!” The preacher replied, “Raise your head!” Preaching is difficult work because in our communicating we have to reach down in order to lift people up; and if we aren’t careful, we’ll replace proclamation with accommodation and accomplish neither.

[10]. Brooks, Lectures on Preaching, 46–47.

[11]. Atkinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 77.

[12]. F.W. Dillistone in Donald Coggan, Stewards of Grace (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1958), 120.

Appendix B

[1]. The best treatment of this topic is Richard Kearney’s The Wake of Imagination (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota, 1988), and I gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to this book in the preparation of this brief summary.

[2]. See Plato Republic, bk. 10.

[3]. See Francis A. Schaeffer, Art and the Bible (Downers Grove, Ill.: Inter-Varsity, 1973).

[4]. The NIV translates several Hebrew words as “imagine,” depending on the context, including lev (heart), mahasabah (thoughts), hasab (to think), dabar (to speak).

[5]. In his The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), Jacob Bronowski says: “In my view, which not everybody shares, the central problem of human consciousness depends on this ability to imagine” (p. 18). “The act of imagination is the opening of the system so that it shows new connections” (p. 109). This is a fascinating series of lectures revealing how “unscientific” science can occasionally be used to arrive at truth.

[6]. See Roberts Avens, Imagination Is Reality (Dallas, Texas: Spring, 1980). The schools of psychology of Carl Jung and James Hillman draw upon the ideas of the Eastern philosophers, especially their concepts of myths and archetypes. The growing fascination in the West for Eastern philosophies and religions suggests that we may have a new “romantic” movement on our hands. People are weary of sterile cerebral doctrinaire philosophies and theologies and want something that will excite the imagination and warm the heart. Moore, Care of the Soul draws upon this Eastern tradition as filtered through Jung and Hillman.

Appendix C

[1]. Joseph Campbell’s books include: The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton Univ. Press, 1968); The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, 4 vols. (Penguin, 1983); Myths to Live By (Bantam, 1973); Historical Atlas of World Mythology: The Way of the Seeded Earth, 3 vols. and The Way of the Animal Powers, 2 vols., all published by Harper and Row. The Campbell-Moyers conversations on mythology, “The Power of Myth,” are available on video cassette or in book form, published by Doubleday in 1988. Joseph Campbell also edited Myths, Dreams and Religion (Dallas, Texas: Spring, 1970). David Adams Leeming, The World of Myth (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), is an excellent one-volume anthology of texts from many peoples. Rex Warner, The Stories of the Greeks (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967) is a satisfying retelling of the Greek myths. For a more academic approach, see Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Mt. Kisco, N.Y.: Moyer Bell, 1988). The classic Bulfinch’s Mythology is available in a “Modern Library” edition as well as an edition from Thomas Y. Crowell. Stewart Perowne, Roman Mythology was published in New York by Peter Bedrick Books in 1984. If you want to go back to the originals, read Ovid’s Metamorphoses; Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Euripides; Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony; Plutarch’s Lives; and The Histories by Herodotus. For guidance through the mythological maze, see Michael Stapleton, The Illustrated Dictionary of Greek and Roman Mythology (New York: Peter Bedrick, 1986). Myth and Mythmaking, ed. Henry A. Murray (Boston: Beacon, 1968) is a comprehensive anthology; and John Ferguson, Greek and Roman Religion: A Source Book (Park Ridge, N.J.: Noyes, 1980) is “an anthology amplified by essays.” For an interesting study not only of mythology but also of imagination and faith, see Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Own Myths? (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988).

[2]. Tom McArthur, “Myth” in The Oxford Companion to the English Language, ed. Tom McArthur (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), 675–76.

[3]. See the article on muthos by G. Stahlin in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel and trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), 4:762–95. Also see F.F. Bruce’s article on myth in The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, ed. Colin Brown (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1977), 3:643–47.

[4]. Kittel, Theological Dictionary, 4:793.

[5]. J.A. Cuddon, Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 562.

[6]. See E.A. Bennet, What Jung Really Said (New York: Schocken, 1966).

[7]. For examples of this kind of therapy, see Moore, Care of the Soul. See also Rollo May, The Cry for Myth (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991). On p. 9, May says, “Many of the problems of our society, including cults and drug addiction, can be traced to the lack of myths which will give us as individuals the inner security we need in order to live adequately in our day.”

[8]. The Associated Press obituary of Frye called him “the influential literary critic who tracked myths and symbols to their biblical sources.”

[9]. Northrup Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).

[10]. Malcolm Muggeridge, Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 107.

[11]. May, The Cry for Myth, 15.

[12]. C.S. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact” in God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 63–67. The quotation is found on page 66.

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