Preface
PREFACE
The book you hold in your hands contains the written form of the plenary addresses given in April 2011 at the national conference of The Gospel Coalition, in Chicago. The audio and video forms of those addresses are still available on our website (thegospelcoalition.org).
The theme of that conference was “They Testify about Me: Preaching Jesus and the Gospel from the Old Testament.” Not a few of the accompanying workshops were tied, directly or indirectly, to the same theme. The conference title has been slightly modified to become the title of this book.
So as not to arouse false expectations, I should specify what these eight plenary addresses do not provide. They do not provide a “how to” resource for preachers: a manual on “how to read the Old Testament in the light of the New,” or something of that sort. The best “how to manual” along those lines is the book by G. K. Beale, Handbook on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament: Exegesis and Interpretation. Still less does the book you are reading attempt to comment on every place where the New Testament quotes or alludes to the Old: that would require a very large tome, and one is already available: G. K. Beale and D. A. Carson, eds., Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, which is meant to be a reference tool for preachers and other Bible teachers.
What the addresses in this book offer is something more modest but with more immediate effect, namely, some examples of Christian preachers handling a variety of highly diverse Old Testament texts. The exception is the first chapter, which ably introduces the subject. The remaining seven focus squarely on Old Testament passages and bring the reader to Jesus and the gospel.
These seven expositions of Old Testament texts vary enormously as to how the Old Testament text is handled. In some cases the preacher focuses on the details of the text, and, because the text is demonstrably predictive, finds his way to Jesus in a straightforward fashion. In other cases the preacher relies on typology—on discerning the persons, places, and institutions that constitute massive patterns in the Old Testament that spin out into trajectories pointing forward to Jesus. In one or two cases, the preacher expounds the “big idea” of the assigned text and, in a kind of analogical argument, arrives at the same “big idea” in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Again, a preacher may show how the sequence of developing revelation in the Old Testament forces the reader toward the culmination of that sequence, Jesus himself.
In every case, our hope and prayer is that these expositions will prove not only clarifying but humbling, enriching, and edifying, as well as incentives to keep preaching and teaching Old Testament texts.
D. A. Carson