Preaching Like the Prophets: The Hebrew Prophets as Examples for the Practice of Pastoral Preaching

Preaching Like the Prophets

The Hebrew Prophets as Examples for the Practice of Pastoral Preaching

Robert A. Carlson

Preaching Like the Prophets

The Hebrew Prophets as Examples for the Practice of Pastoral Preaching

Copyright © 2017 Robert A. Carlson. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Wipf & Stock

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-1334-0

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-1336-4

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-1335-7

Manufactured in the U.S.A. March 8, 2017

Unless otherwise indicated, all scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations designated (NASB) are taken from the New American Standard Bible® (NASB), copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973,1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. www.Lockman.org.

Scripture quotations designated (NET) are from the NET Bible® copyright ©1996–2016 by Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C. http://netbible.org All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Hear the Prophets Preach

Part One

Chapter 2: The Essential Prophet: Thus Says the Lord . . .

Chapter 3: The Testimony of Jesus is the Spirit of Prophecy

Chapter 4: The Spirit of the Lord is Upon Me . . .

Part Two

Chapter 5: Opening Words and Opening Ears

Chapter 6: A Word Fitly Spoken

Chapter 7: Let Me Be Clear

Chapter 8: Up Close and Personal

Chapter 9: Show and Tell

Chapter 10: Continuing to Preach like the Prophets

Epilogue

Bibliography

To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his own blood and who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant.

(Rev 1:6; 2 Cor 3:6)

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Julie who has been my constant help and encouragement through each phase of ministry, as well as throughout this project, which was initially birthed in our family devotions in the Minor Prophets. I am also thankful to our daughters Rebecca McCall and Ruth Zvinoera for their assistance in review and editing. Any remaining errors or awkwardness in the manuscript are mine, not theirs, but without their help my errors would be greatly multiplied.

This work would not have been possible without the preceding studies of the many outstanding scholars whose work I have referenced. More particularly, Robert Chisholm provided many helpful refinements and recommended several illuminating sources. Roger Raymer helped me to clarify certain points and was an encouragement throughout the project. Donald Sunukjian’s personal instruction and writings have added significant clarity and relevance to my preaching and this work. Arturo Azurdia and Robert Smith each encouraged me in the Spirit’s empowering in preaching and in completing this work in a form which would be of greater benefit to other preachers.

Finally, I am indebted to the elders and the members of Brush Prairie Baptist Church in Vancouver, Washington. I began these studies so that I might more faithfully and effectively preach the word of God to this wonderful church family. They have graciously nurtured my growth as a preaching pastor, and they have heard (and perhaps endured) many messages from the sermons of the Hebrew prophets during this project.

1

Hear the Prophets Preach

But if all prophesy, and an unbeliever or outsider enters, he is convicted by all, he is called to account by all, the secrets of his heart are disclosed, and so, falling on his face, he will worship God and declare that God is really among you.

1 Corinthians 14:24–25

As a preacher, the apostle Paul’s words to the Corinthians haunt me. I want them to be true when I preach. I want them to be true in our church. When those who do not know Christ visit us, I want the word of God to come so near that it’s as if the preacher knows them, that I somehow know what they are thinking. I want what I say as I preach to be so aimed at their heart, that it must be God. I want them to hear God himself imploring them through my message. I want them to tell others they heard from God here, and although it was both assuring and unsettling, they have to come back—regardless of the style of the music!

I want believers to have this experience as well. I want those who come hungry and expectant of a word from God, to hear it. I want them to feel the press of Nathan’s finger on David’s chest. I do not want it to be for that same terrible reason as David’s guilt, although there will be times when it is. But I want God to speak so clearly through his messenger that it seems that I must have read their email or text messages. I want it to feel like the sermon has singled them out, so they cannot escape God’s powerful and transforming message. I want them to know unmistakably that today, through the preacher, God spoke his word to them. I want my congregation to experience the truth of Calvin’s words, that if we come to church we shall not only hear a mortal man speaking but we shall feel (even by his secret power) that God is speaking to our souls.¹

On any given Sunday a portion of the congregation will come to church discouraged. Life has been hard and their burden is heavy; the pressures threaten to overwhelm. They need to hear again from God through the preacher. They need to be reminded that God knows their hardship and his grace is sufficient. They need to see again the glory that is set before them as God himself would describe it to them, so that for the joy set before them they can endure their present cross. They need to hear the Spirit tell of the glory he is working in them through all of the stuff they may presently be enduring.

People coming to church desperately need to hear from God, not just hear from a preacher. I wish that this were their experience more often than it is. I cannot do what only God can do, but am I the messenger that I need to be? Or, have I let preaching become something less than it is supposed to be? How can I know what faithful pastoral preaching looks like? In 1 Corinthians 14:24–25 the apostle suggests that this dynamic experience of God’s word ought to be the normal experience of the church gathered when the word of God is prophetically proclaimed. Normal that is, except for that awkward bit about prophesying.

It is not my purpose in this book to dive into the debate about the exact definition and nature of New Testament prophecy. That is an important topic, but it has already been written on extensively.² Instead, I will focus on the continuities and discontinuities between Old Testament prophets and New Testament preachers. There are clear parallels, as well as distinctions, between the Old Testament writing prophets and present era preaching pastors.

I will not attempt to prove that preachers are prophets. Rather, I will focus on the fact that the prophets were preachers. This is an important distinction. If we were to assert that preaching pastors are prophets, that would raise many issues for pastoral ministry including the inerrancy of preachers and the role of prediction in preaching. Greg’s Scharf’s recent clarification is helpful:

In the sub-apostolic New Testament era, preachers claim neither the sort of inspiration the Old Testament prophets had nor the authority of an eyewitness on a par with the apostles and therefore, their words from God for the good of the church are to be tested by apostolic doctrine already received (

1

Cor

14

:

36

–

40

;

1

Thess.

5

:

20

–

21

). This does not mean that such words lack authority (Titus

2

:

15

), only that the authority derives not from the fact that those words come immediately from God—for they do not—but from the fact that they come from God through the writings of the prophets and apostles (Acts

2

:

42

; Eph

3

:

20

). What prophets, apostles, and pastor-teachers have in common is that they speak for God, in his name, and on his behalf.³

However, focusing on the fact that the Old Testament prophets were essentially preachers opens the way to benefit from any parallels which exist between the preaching prophets and preaching pastors. This book will explore some of those salient parallels between prophets and preachers because I am convinced that the Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament are an under-utilized, yet profitable paradigm for pastoral preaching,

The prophets are important examples because there are not very many examples of pastoral preaching in the New Testament. Aside from Jesus’s discourses,⁴ there are few examples of a man called by God, preaching to those who are God’s people and applying God’s revelation to their lives. There are several examples of evangelistic preaching in the book of Acts. However, other than perhaps the book of Hebrews, most of the New Testament is composed of written epistles rather than oral preaching.⁵

On the other hand, the Old Testament prophets are rich with preaching prose. They are a treasure of neglected examples of spirit-inspired preaching.⁶ This is not to suggest the study of the prophets’ preaching has been completely neglected. In fact, the following chapters will rely on a considerable body of rhetorical analysis of the prophets. However, the main thrust of current rhetorical analysis has focused on understanding the message and purpose of the prophets, rather than applying the prophets’ rhetoric to pastoral preaching. This is the gap which this book explores: parallels which exist between the preaching of the prophets and the preaching of pastors.

The prophets were men of God; some were called to preach in a place far from their own home and some where called to preach to people they had lived among all their lives. In either case, they preached to those whom God had chosen to be his unique people, from among all the nations of the earth. Under the divine supervision of the Spirit of God these preachers apply the word of God given hundreds of years earlier through Moses to the present circumstances in which God’s people now live. They remind people of what God has done for them. They confront sin that is contrary to God’s revealed word and urge God’s people to walk in God’s ways in light of his mercy toward them and their standing as his chosen people. They give hope as they speak of what God had promised he would do, even though the people had not yet seen that promise fulfilled and needed to live toward it by faith. Most of all, they continually point to Christ and his coming.

Called to preach . . . applying the word of God . . . recalling God’s promised future . . .—am I describing the prophets preaching to Israel or pastors preaching to the church? As you can see, the essence of what the Old Testament prophets were doing in their era has much in common with the essence of pastoral preaching today.

The New Testament provides another example of the parallels between Old Testament prophets and pastoral preachers. That example is the book of Hebrews. Many expositors have suggested that the book of Hebrews was originally written as a sermon to be preached.⁷ It is clearly written to an audience in the church era, under the New Covenant; however, it has a definite Old Testament resonance. The author (or preacher) reminds them from the Law of Moses of what God has done for them. He reminds them of who they are as God’s people and gives several prophetic warnings. In technique similar to the prophets, Hebrews uses the assurance of God’s redemptive work in the past and the hope of a glorious future to exhort God’s people to live faithfully during a present difficult time of opposition and hardships. Most importantly, the message continually focuses on Jesus as the fullness of God’s previous promises. The book of Hebrews has the tone and timbre of an Old Testament prophet, but is clearly a sermon preached to the church, proclaiming the risen Christ.

The same general elements of content can also be found in the apostles’ New Testament epistles. They build on previous special revelation, often quoting the Old Testament. The epistles remind God’s people who they are in Christ and therefore how they should live in light of their redemption. The gospel of Jesus is, to the authors of the epistles, what the redemptive exodus event was to the writing prophets. The epistles not only look back; they, like the prophets, look forward. They bring light to the present by remembering and anticipating. They call us to remember what God has done and confidently hope in what God has promised. The word of God through both Old Testament prophets and New Testament apostles calls God’s people to live as God’s people ought to live between the two horizons of what God has done redemptively and what he will do eschatologically.

However, there are two significant differences between the epistles and the prophets. The first difference is one of form: the epistles are written as letters, not sermons. This does not ignore the fact that they are letters written to be read in the churches. In fact some of the epistles sound sermonic, such as the letters of Peter and James.⁸ However, in the epistles the sermon has been adapted into a literary form. The prophets, on the other hand, are comprised largely of oral sermons framed with biographical narrative.

The second difference between the epistles and the prophets is more significant: they each speak to different contexts in different historical eras. The apostles and the church fathers who followed them preached in a very different context from that of many preaching pastors today. In the first century, the message of the gospel was strange and different; this radical preaching of a resurrected savior had not been heard before. Today, many pastors preach among a society which has heard of the gospel, or at least a caricature of it, and moved on to something else. Our message is not radically new; it is perceived by many who hear us to be out of date and past its prime. Os Guinness puts it well:

For the early Christian apologists in the time of the Roman Empire, the challenge was to introduce a message so novel that it was strange to its first hearers, and then to set out what the message meant for the classical age and its sophisticated and assured ways of thinking. For much of the advanced modern world today, in contrast, the challenge is to restate something so familiar that people know it so well that they do not know it, yet at the same time are convinced that they are tired of it.⁹

Like preachers today, the prophets also preached to a generation that was familiar with Israel’s covenant with Yahweh as a religious heritage from which they had since progressed or outgrown. Their audience might have opined: This talk of Yahweh is so 1400s, does anyone still believe that stuff? Gary Smith describes the societal context during the ministries of Zephaniah and Jeremiah:

Some pagan prophets and priests carried out their roles in ways that profaned God’s sacred laws. The process of secularization caused others to ignore God rather than trust Him. Some concluded that God was unimportant, for the plausibility structures that supported the ancient Mosaic worldview were undermined by the pluralistic tendencies of Manasseh.¹⁰

During the era of the prophets Israel retained many of the trappings of a shared civil religion which was similar to Paul’s description of the later days, having an appearance of godliness but denying its power (2 Tim 3:5). Walter Brueggemann finds similarities between the societal crisis in contemporary western culture and that of ancient Jerusalem. He describes the prophet’s ministry as confronting an ideology of exceptionalism which distorted the current spiritual reality and fostered unrealistic notions of entitlement, privilege and superiority.¹¹ In this sense, the context in which we preach is more similar to the days of the prophets then it is to the first century. Thus, the earlier examples of the preaching of the prophets is possibly even more important to preachers today than the New Testament examples of preaching which are historically and theologically closer to us. While the epistles and the gospels contain our message, now more than ever, the prophets should inform our method.

This returns us to the central question: can the Old Testament prophets serve as a biblical model for pastoral preaching? Should pastors preach prophetically? Perhaps it depends on what we mean by preaching prophetically. Does this mean that people should fill in the blank pages in the back of their Bibles with the words of their prophetic pastor? Should we add to our Bibles The Gospel of John Piper? There are many faulty notions about prophetic preaching, so it is important to first define what we mean by prophetic preaching, or preaching like the prophets.

It might be helpful to borrow terminology used in other discussions concerning the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament by speaking of the continuities and discontinuities between prophets and preachers. I am probably not alone in anticipating that there are continuities, and yet preachers who have blushed at Isaiah’s and Micah’s extreme object lessons (Isa 20:3; Mic 1:8) also hope that I will establish some amount of discontinuity between the prophet’s practice and our own.

I do not suggest that the prophetic books are intended as handbooks on preaching. Rather, I agree with Bryan Chapell that, Though the Bible is not intended to be a homiletics textbook, it indicates valuable tools for communication that we should consider valuable for preaching.¹² There is nothing in the prophets to suggest that their purpose in writing was to provide a manual for effective oral rhetoric. I will focus on the preaching of the prophets as descriptive, rather than prescriptive. For example, when pastors have the opportunity to hear the sermon from a highly gifted and seasoned preacher, we benefit from both their exhortation and their example. We learn not only from what they say, but how they say it. We are blessed by the word of God through them and also blessed to learn something about the art of effective preaching