First, the
good news about my sermon preparation on Isaiah 38 this Sunday. Thanks to Paul House, who contributed an excellent chapter on preaching Old Testament narratives in a 2007 festschrift to R. Kent Hughes from Crossway Books, I will avoid the cardinal homiletical sin of attempting to justify the Old Testament as Christian scripture in Sunday's sermon. It already is!
As a novice preacher, I'm sure I would have been forgiven for such an oversight, but the fact remains that the Old Testament is often unfairly treated as lacking usefulness for the Christian life. If they do engage the Old Testament at all, preachers often fall back on simple moralistic comparisons between the listeners and the text. At the other extreme, some preachers tend to stretch the text beyond what it was ever supposed to bear, seeing Christ and the Church in every single Old Testament text.
If scripture is indeed inerrant - and it is - and if it is eminently profitable - and it is - then we need not justify the ways of the Old Testament to our hearers, to paraphrase John Milton. We need only to let it speak for itself.
Please do read over Colin Adam's review of the Hughes festschrift (see above), as well as a new interview with Dr. Josh Moody of College Church in Wheaton, Illinois - Kent Hughes' former pastorate.
Oh, almost forgot the bad news. Whilst carrying out some last minute research at a local seminary library, I came across an entire book written on the passage I'm about to preach on. Oh well.
