Yesterday I highlighted eight reasons why there is so little Old Testament preaching today. And I spotlighted the eighth reason above all - the lack of a Christ-centered understanding of the Old Testament.
I also said that the long road back to a more balanced spiritual diet had to begin with the New Testament. Failure to do so is one of the main reasons, perhaps the main reason, for so many Christ-less Old Testament sermons today. Knowing the New Testament better, and especially the Christ of the New Testament, will help us find Christ in the Old Testament. Dr Michael Barrett explains:Part of the problem with many Christians is that their inability to find Christ in the Old Testament stems from their limited knowledge of who He is and what He is like. If I am told to pick someone out of a crowd and I have no idea what that someone looks like, it becomes purely a guessing game. Indeed I could be looking right at him and not know it. If we do not know what we are looking for, we will most likely find nothing. Looking for nothing in particular, we find nothing in particular (Beginning at Moses, 19).
We must know Christ personally and intimately on a daily basis if we are to recognize Him when He is revealed in the Old Testament.
But, you may say, “Why spend time in the Old Testament shadows when the New Testament sun has arisen.” Thomas Guthrie heard the same question in his day, and answered:Why look at the shadow when you possess the substance? What artist studies a landscape in the gray dawn, when he may see it in the blaze of day? True. Yet such study has its advantages. It not seldom happens that a portrait brings to view certain shades of expression which we had not previously observed in the face of the veritable man; and when some magnificent form of architecture, or the serried ridges and rocky peaks of a mountain, have stood up between us and the lingering lights of day, though the minor beauties of fluted columns or frowning crags were lost in the shades of evening, yet, drawn in sharp clear outline against a twilight sky, the effect of the whole was more impressive than when eyed in the glare of noon. Thus it may be well, at least occasionally, to examine the Gospel in the broad shadows and strongly defined outlines of an old economy (The Gospel in Ezekiel).
Tomorrow we will begin to turn the New Testament key to the Old Testament, by asking it’s divine author, “What’s the Old Testament all about?”
