Being a preacher is not as simple as studying a Bible passage, turning it into an outline, tagging on an intro and conclusion, and stepping into the pulpit on Sunday morning.

The disheartened need comfort, the rebellious need conviction, the weak need strength, the strong need training, the unsaved need the gospel, and the preacher is supposed to deliver a message that somehow meet all these needs. How does he do this all in one sermon? How does he urge them to obey without turning his congregation into a flock of legalists, yet not preach grace so flippantly that people give cheers to Jesus while they gulp down their 16th beer can? What about the challenge of proclaiming timeless truth to a culture that changes faster than politicians change their positions, or the complexity of speaking from a book removed from us by two to three and a half millenniums of culture change into a postmodern “whatever” age?

Graeme Goldsworthy tackles another question, a question bigger than the book he writes: How does the preacher proclaim Christ from the whole Bible? Goldsworthy is a lecturer in Old Testament, biblical theology, and hermeneutics at Moore Theological College in Sydney, and stands as the scholar knight of redemptive historical preaching as much as Walter C. Kaiser holds up the flag of grammatico-historical preaching.

Goldsworthy writes to prove that, “The overall structure of biblical revelation finds its coherence only in the person and work of Christ,” (21), thus, he concludes that every sermon should ultimately point to Christ, showing how the passage fits into the Christ-theme of the Bible. Like an oak among hickories, his book stands out from most books on preaching that only deal with the techniques of drafting a manuscript, but fail to tap into the precious role of biblical revelation (32).

Similar to Tremper Longman III’s Making Sense of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker 1999), Goldsworthy believes that every sermon needs to show the passages’ ultimate connection to God’s final revelation, Jesus Christ. Unlike Longman’s work, however, Goldsworthy frowns on almost any use of Old Testament stories as moral principles.

Goldsworthy’s divides his book into two sections: first, “Basic Questions We Ask About Preaching and the Bible” (chapters 1-9) and second, “The Practical Application of Biblical Theology to Preaching” (chapters 10-18). In the first section, he argues for the centrality of Christ to all of Scripture and elevates the importance of preaching the Old Testament in such a way that does not reduce it to nothing more than moral lessons and pious heroes to follow, but instead shows how each passage of the Bible fits into the unity of all the Scriptures which ultimately point to Jesus. Goldsworthy contends that without Christ at the center of every sermon, the preacher fails to do what Paul strove for in 1 Corinthians 1:23-24.

Goldsworthy notes that the gospel is central experientially, since we first met God through Christ, and theologically, since the Old Testament predicts Jesus and the New Testament reveals Him (5-6). Goldsworthy’s mission to “clarify the role of biblical theology, not as an optional extra, but as the heart of the process of bringing the word of God to the contemporary hearer” (7) lies at the heart of every paragraph. He works hard to convince the preacher to ask himself, “How does this passage of Scripture, and consequently my sermon, testify to Christ?” (21). Because Jesus claims to be the subject of Scripture, because the structure of biblical revelation finds its coherence only in the person and work of Christ, and because both the Bible and Jesus are called “the Word of God,” every sermon, he contends, should be a faithful exposition of the way the text testifies to Christ (21).

Goldsworthy clarifies that he does not mean we need to tag the gospel onto the end of every sermon, nor that we should look for mysterious types and shadows in Old Testament passages that were more a product of our own imagination than faithful exposition, but rather that every sermon should show how the text points to Christ and fits within the framework of Christ’s centrality to all of Scripture. Goldsworthy’s favorite argument for his thesis lies in biblical theology, since progressive revelation reveals Christ as the center of all Scripture and the ultimate revelation of God and the gospel.  In the end, his book is as much about biblical theology as it is about preaching Christ from all the Scriptures.

In the second part of his work, Goldsworthy emphasizes the importance of understanding that every book of the Bible and even passages within books take on a literature genre that should inevitably effect how we interpret each passage (135-139). Goldsworthy writes that whether the preacher preaches from Old Testament narratives, law, Old Testament prophets, wisdom literature, the psalms, or apocalyptic texts, the preacher must show how every texts ultimately links to Christ. Looking at each genre of the Bible, Goldsworthy shows its relationship to Jesus and then exhorts the reader to preach this way in the pulpit. Goldsworthy’s final chapter calls the reader to consider preaching sermons on biblical theology and provides examples for how this can be done.
In this unique work, Goldsworthy writes persuasively to prove that an understanding of biblical theology is vital to preaching. He argues powerfully by showing how biblical theology lets Scripture speak for itself as God progressively revealed more truth through the history of revelation. As a fan of Cornelius Van Til, his strong conviction that the unity of Scripture is governed by the “presupposition of divine revelation” (23) bleeds from the pages of his book. 

Goldsworthy’s strongest argument for making sure every sermon shows how the text connects to Jesus Christ is his observation that the gospel “shows us the real nature of our human problem as well as God’s answer to it” (61). Indeed, it is very human of us to reduce Christianity to another moral religion of do’s and don’ts, even though not a soul can know God or draw close to Him apart from His fullest revelation who is Christ. Goldsworthy puts his finger on the danger of reducing the Old Testament to nothing more than “the imitation of godly example and the avoidance of the ungodly example…[which] raises the question of the nature of the Bible’s unity” (5). He writes, “To preach about us, our problems, and our way to a better life, and to do so without recourse to the significance of the gospel, is to radically distort the understanding of humanity and the meaning of Scripture” (60). He acutely notes that this often paints a legalistic picture of what it means to be a Christian.

On the other hand, Goldsworthy reactively swings too far the other way and writes, “It is grossly irresponsible for a preacher to moralize on isolated texts and to convey the notion that the real issue is finding self-esteem, happiness, health, self-fulfillment, or any other desirable quality in life, as if these were valuable in themselves” (79-80). Goldsworthy unfairly links teaching moral lessons from the Old Testament as self-centered. In defending a biblical position, he goes to a defenseless extreme, for Paul twice writes that stories of the Old Testament were “written for our instruction” (Rom 15:4; 1 Cor 10:11)!  To teach a moral lesson from an Old Testament text is neither irresponsible of the preacher nor selfish of the hearer, otherwise, we have bigger questions to ask Paul when we meet him in glory. In spite of this extreme, Goldsworthy admits that he does not want to fall into either extreme of random allegorizing or narrow-vision moralizing (69).

Theologically, Goldsworthy’s work is a classic. Practically it does little. His book is solid yet uninspiring, well-defended but mostly impractical. If the word “practical” was removed from the title for the second half of the book, it’d be more accurate. With all due respect, Goldsworthy writes like a theorist who spends hours contemplating and studying, but not like a man in the pulpit every morning, working day in and out with the sheep, hearing their cries and preaching truth to their souls. In the second half of the book, each chapter tackles preaching a different genre and leaves only a page and a half for “application.” And even then, Goldsworthy spends the majority of this application section talking about the application of preaching with very little application itself.

For example, in chapter ten Goldsworthy discusses how to preach from Old Testament narrative texts. Concluding his discussion about David bringing the ark into Jerusalem from 2 Samuel 6, he writes, “To understand the relations of this text to the gospel, we must be ready to pursue the great themes of kingship, the dwelling of God among his people, and the temple” (147). This statement is painfully nebulous. Locked within the walls of the theoretical, his comment gives the reader nothing tangible to latch onto and use. Examples likes this ooze from the pages of every “practical” section.  He may make preachers better theologians, but not better preachers.

This weakness may grow from Goldsworthy’s definition of preaching, “…expository preaching is essentially the practice of explaining the meaning of a passage of Scripture” (120). If this is the definition of preaching, then what is the definition of a Bible commentary? A preacher won’t survive in the pulpit if his audience’s spiritual condition, their culture, their struggles, their stage of life does not come into play. Truth is timeless but this does not mean sermons should not be timely. If a preacher is to benefit maximally from Goldsworthy’s volume, he must consider specifically how he will explain a text’s relationship to Christ and how to apply it so that the Christian mechanic, doctor, single mom, and college student know exactly how to find all their strength in Jesus alone.

Personally, this book has introduced me to the inseparable link between biblical revelation and Christ as the ultimate theme of all of Scripture. Goldsworthy has convicted me of hundreds of sermons I’ve preached with moral lessons but lacking the ultimate theme of proclaiming Jesus. It has also exposed me to the danger of addressing a sin struggle without holding forth Jesus Christ as the ultimate solution. For example, if an unbeliever walks in just one Sunday and hears me deliver three steps for conquering selfishness but hears nothing about Jesus Christ, the ultimate Word of God, without which it is impossible to truly know God, he may walk away believing that Christianity is about obeying rules, when it is first and foremost about trusting and following Jesus Christ.

Having read this book I have been persuaded to include two elements in every sermon I preach. First, I want to show how every passage ultimately links to Jesus Christ. For example, if I am preaching from 1 Kings 19 where Elijah encounters God at Mt. Horeb, I would do injustice to let the final theme of the text be on how to deal with depression. I must show the flock that Elijah’s role as a prophet to Israel and a warrior against sin foreshadows the ultimate prophet Jesus Christ. Second, I want to show how the application of every passage is only possible through Jesus Christ. Elijah’s depression sprang from a lack of trust in God when God went silent. The believer today can learn to trust God only through the work of Jesus Christ who paid for his sins at Calvary.

Graeme Goldsworthy. Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture. Grand Rapids/Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 2000. 272 pp. $25.00