One of our concluding claims last time was: Covenantal preaching is most fully biblical preaching.
If this be true, what then is covenantal preaching?

Is your Bible divided?⤒🔗

Many of us know full well that the Bible is "made up" of 39 books in the OT and 27 books in the NT. This arrangement into two testaments came about at the beginning of the third century AD.

In one important sense, however, it is truly unfortunate that our Bibles are arranged into Old and New Testaments. Unfortunate because this has led some to view such an arrangement as a division between two testaments, giving rise to some disastrous conclusions among very many Christians, conclusions like...

• the OT is about the old covenant, the New Testament is about the new covenant
• the OT is about law, the NT is about grace
• the OT is about works, the NT is about faith
• the OT tells us about the work of the Father, the NT tells us about the work of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit
• the OT presents a formal, external religion, the NT shows us a personal, warm religion of the heart

In popular thinking, all of these unfortunate distinctions that easily arise from the very way our Bibles are arranged usually become — if we don't think carefully — spiritually fatal separations. Grace is separated from law, faith from works, the work of the Father from that of the Spirit, external form from internal intention.

Among the earliest thinkers in church history who fell into this error was Marcion (2nd century). He taught that the OT came from the God of the Jews, who was also Creator and Lawgiver. The NT (well, most of it) revealed a God of love, who is manifest now in Jesus Christ. By contrast, another prominent church father, Augustine, defended the abiding value of the OT against the Manichaeans.

How theology becomes practice (1)←⤒🔗

Maybe you're wondering if this really touches life in the pew — or the work of the pulpit, for that matter.

Let me show you.

Consider, for just a few paragraphs, the work of a dedicated Christian organization known as The Gideons International.

Before going any further, I declare forthrightly my high esteem for the goal of bringing the Word of God to people. I agree wholeheartedly with the practice of using the Word of God as a tool of evangelism. I acknowledge with thanksgiving that many people have come to know the Lord through the work of the Gideons. I deeply respect my dear, godly friends who belong to the Gideons and who give sacrificially to that cause.

I say all of these things to you before God so that you will not dismiss what I am about to write as something careless, uncharitable, or picky. It's not.

How theology becomes practice (2)←⤒🔗

Look up sometime the webpage of The Gideons International (www.gideons.org), or pick up their materials. Read their mission statement. Browse through their material. Examine their activities.

I met this organization for the first time as a student at East Paris Christian School, when the Gideons came into our classroom to present my class with personal copies of the New Testament (with Psalms and Proverbs). I treasured my little pocket-sized New Testament (with Psalms and Proverbs), small enough to take on Cadet campouts and to fit in my Sunday shirt.

My only mistake — understandable back then, I realize — was to think this was the Bible.

Let me explain.

One of their webpages is entitled "Practical Teachings," subtitled "Where to find help when..." This page features a list of topics accompanied by relevant Bible passages, topics like "afraid," "discouraged," "bereaved," "need rules for living," and the like. You get the picture. Now, run your eye down the column of accompanying Bible passages and look for a passage that is not found in the New Testament, Psalms, or Proverbs. How many do you find? Answer: none, not one.

Another webpage teaches "The Way of Salvation" with the help of three Bible verses — all of them from the New Testament.

In all fairness, we should mention that other Gideons webpages do include readings from the rest of the Old Testament. Also, nowadays the Gideons are placing more full Bibles in motels and other places of public traffic than they have in the past. Let's give thanks to God for His evident blessing upon the labors of the Gideons, blessing upon His Word and its reading, for the salvation of many!

The unity of Scripture←⤒🔗

I still treasure my pocket-sized Gideon NT (with Psalms and Proverbs). It's handy for pastoral calls, for carrying in the glove compartment or travel pouch. But I also realize that we and the world really need the Bible, the full Bible, all 66 books, in order to know God's redeeming work.

What does this all have to do with covenantal preaching?

Covenantal preaching is most fully biblical preaching. That means that covenantal preaching is marked by its respect for the whole Bible. Covenantal preaching differs from other kinds of preaching because it uses the whole Bible to explain who God is, who we are, the way of salvation, and what's in store for the world.

Whole-Bible preaching does not mean that over the course of his ministry, the preacher will pro­duce sermons on texts from every book of the Bible. Often the phrase "preaching the whole counsel of God" can come to mean just that — over the course of one's ministry, the preacher should cover every doctrine of the Christian faith, should dip into every part of the Bible.

Rather, covenantal (whole-Bible) preaching seeks to explain care­fully the meaning of the preaching text in terms of the text's several contexts, in this order:

1. the literary context immediately surrounding the preaching text
2. the context of the Bible book in which the preaching text is found
3. the historical context of events surrounding the preaching text
4. the context of the whole Bible

This kind of preaching arises from the lesson learned by children in Sunday School, taught first by St. Augustine:

the New is in the Old enclosed, the Old is in the New disclosed.

The whole Bible provides us with only one story, one message, one "line" from Genesis to Revelation. This single thread consists of God moving from promise-making to promise-ful­filling. The heart of these promis­es is Jesus Christ Himself. The Emmaus travelers learned this from Jesus' post-resurrection explanation of the connection between His pre-resurrection teaching and the OT: "These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled" (Luke 24:44). As one contemporary doctrinal textbook puts it, "The Old Testament salva­tion-promises open up powerful perspectives that are related to the end of the world and to the eternal kingdom of God" (Dr. J. van Genderen & Dr. W.H. Velema, Beknopte gereformeerde dogmatiek, p. 75). God inspired and preserved the OT for us, today. Think back to our discussion about the Gideons as you consider this astonishing claim, by these same Reformed authors: "O.T. and N.T. are so indissolubly con­nected that we cannot accept the one as the Word of God without the other. They are so intimately related that we cannot understand the N.T. apart from the O.T. and vice versa." More than in any other branch of the Christian church, the OT functions promi­nently in Reformed Confessions, liturgy, preaching, church life, and theology.

Illustration: The blessing of Christ's resurrection←⤒🔗

When you read this, the church will again be celebrating Christ's resurrection from the dead. This triumph belongs to Christ's work of exaltation. And precisely by means of this New Testament work of salvation, God presents Himself as the God of Old Testament Abraham. Listen to the "preaching" of Christ's resurrection by the apostles, immediately after Christ's ascension and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. In the temple porch Peter explains the beggar's healing with this stunning announcement: "The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified His servant Jesus, the one whom you delivered and disowned in the presence of Pilate, when he had decided to release Him." Later, speaking in the synagogue of Pisidian Antioch, Paul declared, "And we preach to you the good news of the promise made to the fathers, that God has fulfilled this promise to our children in that He raised up Jesus, as it is also written in the second Psalm, 'You are my son; today I have begotten You'" (Acts 13:32-33).

The point is that we cannot properly understand — or preach — the resurrection of Jesus Christ apart from the OT covenant promises made to Abraham.

The same must be said regarding the future resurrection of believers. When God's program of salvation nears completion with the resurrection of the dead at the end of history, the God of Abraham will be exalted and magnified. Jesus declared, "But regarding the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was spoken to you by God: 'I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? He is not the God of the dead but of the living" (Matt. 22:31-32).

When we see the work of Christ in the light of God's promises to Abraham, we soon learn that Christ Himself did not consider those promises to be mere "add-ons" or peripherals to His mission. Nor should we view them as a primitive stage in the history of salvation that we passed long ago. Christ ascended to the Father's right hand to execute the universal and imperishable dominion of David (Ps. 110). He has received the inheritance promised long ago to Abraham and to David, and He is preserving it for the church. The "many nations" to whom Abraham would become a bless­ing are even now coming into Christ's church, ever since Pentecost. This blessing awaited Christ's coronation; He had to ascend before the Spirit could be sent to execute these ancient promises. Apart from God's covenant with Abraham, Christ's works, ascension, cannot be understood. Jesus Christ is the one bringing to Abraham his great posterity, from every tribe and tongue and nation. And for the sake of Jesus Christ God made these promises to Abraham (Gal. 3:6-9).

We may generalize our observation to include every great event in the history of salvation. The NT work of Jesus Christ — His birth, death, burial, resurrection, ascension, outpouring of the Spirit, session at the Father's right hand, and return — are all described and expected in the OT (that's point one) — and in the NT they are all described and accomplished in terms drawn from the OT (that's point two).

Covenantal preaching, then, is most fully biblical preaching. It seeks to honor the unity and interrelatedness of all Scripture, Old and New Testaments, by letting the various contexts of a preaching text shed their light on the message of that text. This kind of preaching arises from, and leads to, a firm grip on the full Bible. As pulpit and pew join hands through covenantal (whole-Bible) preaching. God's people will be nurtured and equipped by the full gospel for full obedience in the fullness of God's creation.