I listened to a fascinating sermon recently on Jonah chapter 2. The preacher taught us about God and his awesome sovereignty, and about Jesus and how the patterns and promises of Jonah looked forward to him. But he also preached about Jonah himself. He talked about what it meant to be chastised by the Lord—to be brought low. He talked about Jonah’s experience of God’s judgement and discipline, and what we might learn from that as we experience God’s chastisement ourselves.
It was a very encouraging and challenging message, but what struck me in particular was that while the preacher succeeded in locating Jonah in its biblical theological context, and avoided turning Jonah into a kind of morality tale, he nevertheless drew example and encouragement from Jonah’s response to God. I don’t always hear the Old Testament preached like this.
It highlighted for me a danger for us in preaching ‘biblically theologically’. We certainly need to show how the Old Testament points forward to Jesus, and we must not treat Old Testament stories as context-less tales of moral example. But we also need a biblical theology of response (if I can put it that way). We need to show our hearers from Old Testament passages what it means to respond to God in repentance and faith because that is part of why the Old Testament was written: “Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor 10:11).
To just preach God and his promises fulfilled in Christ without also calling for and explaining repentance and faith is to leave out half the message.
