Valiant for Truth

How can we, should we, read and preach the Bible like Peter and Paul? After all, we are not apostles. We have no special inspiration of the Holy Spirit that secures our inerrancy as interpreters! From that obvious difference between them and us, some conclude that we must not employ the apostles’ interpretive methods to Old Testament texts on which they have not commented. I believe that we should draw just the opposite conclusion.

Because the Spirit conforms believers to the image of Christ in purity and love by deepening our faith in Christ and grasp of the implications of the gospel, our preaching must fix our hearers’ minds and hearts on the transforming glory of Jesus the Christ.

Because Christ is the overarching theme of Israel’s Scriptures, as well as the New Testament, we want our preaching to do for Jesus what God intends the Bible to do for Jesus: namely, to direct faith to him as the only mediator between God and man.

Because Christ is the overarching theme of apostolic preaching, he must be the overarching theme of our preaching.

Apostolic homiletics does not assume that the Christocentric fulfillment of all the Scriptures is focused exclusively in the atonement.

Rather, apostolic homiletics presents Jesus the anointed as achieving a comprehensive redemption not only from sin’s guilt and penalty but also from sin’s tyrannical control, from sin’s conscience-defiling influence, from sin’s mind-darkening deception, and eventually from all of sin’s toxic byproducts—including death itself.