Preaching and Biblical, Systematic, Historical, and Pastoral Theology (Part 1a)

Don Carson discusses the importance of biblical theology in preaching. He focuses on the definition of biblical theology and its distinction from systematic theology, emphasizing its historical development and impact on understanding Scripture. Carson also addresses the challenge of biblical illiteracy in contemporary culture and the need for preachers to integrate biblical theology in their sermons for a deeper and more accurate conveyance of biblical truths.

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We are going to spend time on, in sequence, Preaching and Biblical Theology, Preaching and Systematic Theology, Preaching and Historical Theology, and Preaching and Pastoral Theology. Those are my four slots that I’m going to distribute randomly over three sessions. In each case my aim is not to say something wonderfully innovative about any of these disciplines. It’s to reflect out loud with you, and then solicit discussion, on how these disciplines ought, self-consciously, to affect our preaching, what they contribute from their particular angle.

In the case of biblical theology, I think it’s probably worthwhile spending a bit of time on definition because, not only in academic circles but amongst pastors worldwide, biblical theology means very different things in different places. So I want to back off just a wee bit and define terms before I give you five suggestions as to how biblical theology ought to shape our preaching.

There’s a sense in which any theology (serious reflection about God that is based on the Bible) ought to be considered biblical theology, and for that reason there are some sectors of the Christian world where good systematic theology is considered biblical theology. If it is systematic thinking about God and it is genuinely grounded in the Bible, why should it not have the rubric biblical theology? On the other hand, there are many others who make quite a smart distinction between systematic and biblical theology.

The expression itself appeared for the first time (so far as I’ve been able to track it in history) in 1604 in Germany in a book title called Teutsche biblische Theologie, German Biblical Theology. That book was simply an over-sized pamphlet giving biblical proof-texts to support German Lutheran dogma. That’s really what it was. The book is now lost. We know about it from indexes and from people who’ve described it, but there is not even a copy that is still extant.

Eventually, however, the usage that shaped a lot of contemporary thought came about through a famous lecture by Johann Gabler given at the University of Altdorf in 1787. It’s one of those titles that is about six yards long when you type it all out, but the bit at the middle was important. It was really comparing biblical theology with dogmatic theology in the hope of returning people to more agreed fundamentals so that then systematic theology (dogmatic theology) could be rebuilt. That’s really what the title was saying.

In other words, Gabler was arguing.… And he wasn’t the only one to do so; it’s just that his particular address fell at a time when there were a lot of others saying the same thing. He was observing that many systematicians were arguing and arguing over many esoteric points in theology with minimal reference to the Bible. They were arguing about things that came out of their ecclesiastical traditions, out of philosophical traditions, out of rising liberal traditions, and so on, but with very little based on the Bible itself.

So he wanted a theology that was grounded in the Bible above all, and then he hoped that if we could get more agreement amongst scholars on that front, then eventually you could start building up systemic thinking again. That was what he was arguing. What he meant, however, by “grounded in the Bible” was a bit loose. What developed in time was this: systematic theology primarily asks and answers atemporal questions. That’s the fundamental distinction.

Now good systematic theology when it quotes the Bible should still be aware of different literary genres. It still, obviously, must make a distinction between the New Testament and the Old Testament, prophecy and fulfillment, and things like that, but at the end of the day when you read almost any systematic theology that means to unpack the canvas of Christian thought, then there are various sectors: anthropology, Christology, prolegomena having to do with epistemology, theology proper, hamartiology, and so on.

So it addressed a number of topical matters drawn from all of Scripture where questions and answers are given in atemporal categories. Who is God? What is sin? What did the cross achieve? That means that the relationships are primarily logical, structured, and comprehensive. To work these things out you had to observe the differences in book, theme, old covenant and new covenant, and so on. Nevertheless, the aim was to give a comprehensive answer to the question, “What does the Bible say about …?” within a broad structure.

Moreover, it was widely recognized that such theology had to interact with contemporary thought, so that if you read systematic theology that was written 100 years ago in the West, it really doesn’t address postmodernism anywhere. Systematic theology that feels like it’s 50 or 100 years old doesn’t get many brownie points precisely because it feels dated in some ways. Systematic theology is thus meant to be atemporal, holistic, and interacting with the contemporary culture, embracing questions of philosophy and epistemology.

By contrast biblical theology, as I understand and use it (and as a lot of people use it today) is not only more immediately concerned with the contributions of each book and corpus, but it is also interested in their individual contributions along the axis of redemptive history. It is a temporally-based discipline, unlike systematic theology which is an atemporally-based discipline.

So instead of asking: What is God like? Or what are the attributes of God? It will ask, “What is the contribution of the prophet Isaiah to the doctrine of God?” Even before that, it will ask, “What is the structure of thought in the prophecy of Isaiah?” That is, “How does Isaiah, as a book, work?”

Then as you work through the categories that are necessary for unpacking Isaiah, you will see that it is saying some things about God. That’s when you ask the second question, “What are the contributions, therefore, that the book of Isaiah makes to the understanding of God as you slot it into its place in redemptive history?” Thus there are two elements to biblical theology.

First, it really is constrained by the categories in the first instance of individual books and corpora. So that if you’re working with John, for example, then the categories you use will be a little different than the categories that would prevail if you were working on Matthew. Matthew is talking endlessly about the kingdom of heaven. It’s loaded for bear with parables.

John uses kingdom only three times (twice in John 3, once in John 18; that’s it), but it’s got a lot more emphasis than Matthew on life and eternal life. It has no narrative parables, although it has a lot of extended similes and so forth. So that means that if you’re unpacking John’s gospel, then you’re using the categories in John’s gospel. They are the things that shape your thought.

By contrast, in systematic theology, because you’re asking holistic questions that transcend a lot of biblical categories, you’re looking for terms that organize the material holistically and that may not fit very well in any one individual corpus.

Once you have tried to unpack the thinking of Hosea or Leviticus or a corpus like the Johannine corpus or the Pauline corpus in the categories that those books or corpora use then you ask, “Where does this fit into the unfolding of redemption, into the unfolding of Scripture, across a temporal axis?” That’s how I am going to use the term, so.… What then are the ways in which a good grasp of biblical theology is likely to enrich our preaching?

1. Biblical theology directly addresses the massive biblical illiteracy now prevalent in many of our hearers.

I remember speaking at a conference not long ago in another country where I was asked to say something about different literary genres on the way, and I mentioned, just quickly in passing, Jotham’s fable. Now this was a conference where there were a lot of people who were supposed to know the Bible.

Maybe I mumbled, maybe my elocution is not very good, but I said something about Jotham’s fable just in passing, and I had half a dozen people at the next coffee break saying, “You really think that Jonah is a fable?” Now my suspicion is, however bad my elocution might be, that there was enough biblical illiteracy even in that conference that was supposed to be known for its biblical teaching that they had no category for Jotham and, therefore, heard Jonah, then heard fable, and took umbrage. I think that’s probably what happened.

Certainly, in the broader culture even the kinds of God-words that are considered almost self-evident among us all mean different things. God. Spirit. Faith. In every instance they mean something different. What is faith in the contemporary Western world to people on the street? It’s one of two things.

In some cases, it’s roughly equivalent to religion (there are many faiths, there are many religions) or it means something like personal, subjective, religious choice, ungrounded in any genuine truth claim. Now the first usage is occasionally found in the New Testament. It’s rare, but it is found. The second usage is never found in the New Testament. Not once.

So when we say, “You must have faith,” or “You must believe,” what are people hearing us to be saying? Contrast what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, for instance, where he imagines for a moment that Jesus has not risen from the dead, and then he unpacks what would follow if Christ has not risen from the dead.

He says, “Well, for a start, those who say he has risen from the dead are liars or deceivers in some sense. The apostles, the 500, they didn’t tell the truth.” Then he says, “You’re still in your trespasses and sins.” That’s bound up in another couple of assumptions we need not tease out. Then he says, “Your faith is vain. Your faith is futile.” In other words, for Paul, if you believe something that is not true, then that’s not valid faith.

One of the criteria for valid faith is the truthfulness of faith’s object. So much so that he then goes on to say, “Not only is your faith vain, but you are of all people most to be pitied.” That is, if you believe something that is not true, not only is that not valid faith, but it does not entitle you to a higher claim in the spheres of spirituality because this is what you personally believe. God bless me. It means you’re a joke. “You are of all people most to be pitied” because you believe something that isn’t true.

Now that’s not the only criteria in the New Testament for valid faith, but it is certainly a necessary criteria. What I mean by this observation is simply that even the most common God-words we use are often very dissimilarly used in the broader culture, and that is a mark of the biblical illiteracy that is all around us.

So that when we stand up to preach, especially if we have significant numbers of non-Christians being brought in, we have to be thinking all the time about what they don’t know about the Bible. We make a reference to the Canaanites or we refer to Gideon or we draw a lesson from Hosea, and they don’t have a clue what we’re talking about. It’s another planet. It’s like reading The Lord of the Rings and not knowing what Elvish is. It’s that far removed from our thinking.

The advantage of preaching in the categories of biblical theology is when you’re unpacking texts that are right in front of people, because they have pew Bibles or because you have the text projected on the screen, and you are using the categories of the text itself, they are learning to read at least that part of the Bible with the terms, categories, and storyline that is there right in the text. It’s beginning to plug the holes in the biblical illiteracy that is so prevalent amongst us.

Moreover, because biblical theology tries to unpack any book or corpus using the categories of that book and corpus, first and foremost, it is less likely to be using a whole lot of theological terms that transcend the Bible: trinity, supersessionism, or (depending on your background) supererogation. All kinds of words that are drawn from the Bible but actually have a specialty usage. For example, call. The doctrine of the call of God.

When people speak of the call of God, they are actually commonly using call the way Paul uses call, but not the way Matthew uses call. In Paul when you’re called, you’re saved. It’s an effective thing, whereas in Matthew the call of God is invitation. “Many are called, but few are chosen.” To force attention on the biblical text at hand and use the categories that are right there is one way of addressing the massive biblical illiteracy that we find on every hand. I would love to tease that one out at greater length, but I’m going to press on to other things.

2. Biblical theology constantly draws attention to the turning points in redemptive history.

When you are asking atemporal questions (“What are the attributes of God?” and so on), you and I are presupposing that people know about the fall, the call of Abraham, the exodus, the entrance into the Promised Land, the establishment of the king, the exile, and the return from exile. You and I know those turning points in the story because of our background.

They are rarely actually brought up and thought about in systematic theology, because systematic theology presupposes those things as givens and then asks and answers atemporal questions over them, as it were, so that as we give the explanations for what God is like, what his attributes are like, we might say, “Just as God displayed his mercy in the exile …” and nobody has a clue what the exile means.

Whereas biblical theology, precisely because it is focusing on the contributions of individual books and corpora in their respective slots in redemptive history, focuses on the turning points in ways that systematic theology often doesn’t. Thus we begin to have a framework. Moreover, those slots in redemptive history link so many books and passages together.

I finally put together something I’ve been threatening to do for years and years. The book has finally come out this summer called The God Who Is There. Those of you who are older will know that I swiped the title from Francis Schaeffer (but he’s dead, you know). Legally speaking titles are not copyright. Everything else is, but titles aren’t. For my particular audience, they won’t have heard of Francis Schaeffer in any case, so I …

The reason I swiped the title, the reason I liked it, is because all the 14 chapters in the book begin with “The God Who …” So the first chapter is “The God Who Made Everything.” (Genesis 1 and 2) The second is “The God Who Does Not Wipe Out Rebels.” (Genesis 3) The third is “The God Who Writes His Own Agreements.” It’s Abrahamic covenant, but if you say Abrahamic covenant to a group of unbelievers, you’ve lost them pretty severely.

The next one is “The God Who Legislates,” and you keep working through. Eventually the seventh is “The God Who Becomes a Human Being.” It’s incarnation. In each case it’s grounded in particular biblical texts that then fill in. So I spend time expounding the text for unbelievers, and yet it fills in enough of the story from the previous bits so the turning point of the story is being unpacked.

Moving on from “The God Who Becomes a Human Being,” there’s “The God Who Declares the Guilty Just.” (Romans 3:21–26) There’s one on new birth, similarly. There’s one on the transformation in the church and so forth. The last two are, finally, “The God Who Is Very Angry” and “The God Who Triumphs.” The last one is grounded in Revelation 21 and 22. It was pretty obvious that The God Who Was There was an appropriate title for a book with chapter titles like that.

Then I prepared a study guide for the leaders, a leaders’ guide, to show how leaders might use this thing. There’s a DVD that goes with it. The aim is either to ground baby Christians this way or to use it in university evangelism and the like for people who are complete biblical illiterates. It presupposed so little that, in the first chapter, it actually begins by explaining the big numbers and the little numbers. If you say Genesis 3:16, what does that mean to anybody? It sounds like code.

So you have to explain the big numbers and the little numbers and something about the languages the Bible was written in and so on. What I’ve really done in this book is chosen a number of turning points, and then, in addition to those turning points, two or three biblical themes that do run through quite a lot. Creation, the fall, the Abrahamic covenant, the exodus, and the giving of the Law. They’re turning points in redemptive history that tie the whole storyline together. Biblical theology is strong at doing that sort of thing.

3. Biblical theology enriches systematic theology and is enriched by it, and together they prepare the way for mature preaching.

I’m going to say what systematics gives us that biblical theology doesn’t a little later. I could’ve put this point under systematics, but this will do here.

There is a men’s store in Chicago called Syms. They specialize in bringing in warehouse quantities of name-brand suits and the like. Their advertising slogan for years and years has been “An educated consumer is our best customer.” Oh, isn’t that clever? In other words, “If you do your research as to who has the best brands at the best prices, you’re going to come to us. An educated consumer is our best customer.”

I want to argue that a biblically-informed Christian is our best hearer. You get the best hearers when you have the greatest number of people who are already most informed by Scripture, the turning points, and so on. You can build things on it. There are some things we can do about that, but we can track that out in discussion.

4. Biblical theology encourages various kinds of inner-text tendon development.

It encourages the unpacking of inner-canonical connections. In other words, it not only keeps in mind the great turning points in redemptive history but it keeps one eye peeled for the inner-canonical connections, the inner-canonical tendons, that tie all of the Scripture together.

There are about 20 of them. There are a lot of lesser ones but about 20 biggies. They include covenant, creation, priesthood, kingship, temple, sacrifice, rest, wisdom, and so forth. It doesn’t mean that they show up absolutely everywhere in the Bible, but they show up frequently, and there are trajectories that form out of them.

If you are preaching through something, and you hit something about temple, at some point (not in every sermon), it may well be worthwhile stepping back and giving something of the development of the theme that runs through the whole Bible. You don’t want to do that too often; it gets boring. Nevertheless, to do it often enough so that people learn what these things are is really critically important.

For example, temple. You might be preaching from Ezekiel where the threat of the destruction of the temple is at issue. On the other hand, where does the temple come from? Where’s the threat in that? Buildings have been knocked down in war before. They will be knocked down in war again. What is the significance of this?

There are, of course, articles and books that will help you. A very useful resource is the New Dictionary of Biblical Theology edited by four people (the first person’s name there is T.D. Alexander) where a lot of these themes are worked out. Or in some cases, there are whole books just on the development of these themes. In this particular case, Greg Beale has written a book on the temple in the NSBT series (New Studies in Biblical Theology series), and he argues that there are temple allusions even in Genesis 2, in creation. Put those aside for a moment.

If you take undisputed parts of the Bible, you already have the tabernacle as the place where the Holy God meets his people. He gives the dimensions, the structure of the whole thing, including the distinctive Most Holy Place where only the high priest can go on Yom Kippur, the high Day of Atonement, with blood of bull and goats both for his own sins and for the sins of the people. This is the only way that sinful people can meet and interact with this God and be accepted by him, by the sacrifices that he prescribes.

The glory comes down upon the tabernacle and rests there. When this glory rises and departs, then the priests can come and roll it all up, put it on their backs, and carry it off to the next place. When he designates where it is to be parked again, that is where it is to be unfolded, and all the silver sockets and all the various skins are posted in the right way all over again.

Eventually the people enter into the Promised Land. You can talk about its various places. You could talk, if you wanted, about the attack on the tabernacle at the time of the Philistines. Eventually, it’s displaced by the temple. When the temple is built in the time of Solomon, that magnificent prayer of King Solomon is spectacular in disclosing that, although this is where God discloses himself, he is not limited to it.

“Behold, the heaven of heavens cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built.” Yet it is the rallying point for the tribes, and three times a year at that point (later four times a year), the hosts of Israel are supposed to get there if they possibly can. Now the temple is destroyed. Where do people meet with God? How are they acceptable before God?

If you’re preaching from Ezekiel, then you cannot help but listen carefully to the argument of Ezekiel 8–11, especially verses 10 and 11, where God says, “Don’t you understand how wicked the people are? They’re hiding behind the temple as a talisman, but it’s not a magic thing. They are so revolting that they are going to be destroyed.”

Ezekiel says to that first round of exiles, “You want to go back to Jerusalem and the temple; that’s home for you. That’s meeting up with God, but the folks back home in Jerusalem don’t care about you. They say, ‘The pot with all the meat in it is right here.’ They’re the gristle and the rubbish on the outside. They don’t care if you come home at all. Therefore, let me tell you something, ‘Where my sanctuary is, is where I am.’ ”

In Ezekiel, chapter 11, you have this vision of God’s sanctuary being with the exiles themselves. Not where the building is; where God is. That’s where the temple truly is. Eventually, this vision of a renewed, rebuilt Jerusalem and a renewed, rebuilt temple in apocalyptic vision in chapters 41 to 48 is seen. Then you come to the postexilic period with Nehemiah and Ezra and the rebuilding of the temple, the reconstituting of things.

You read Ezra and Nehemiah, and there’s part of you that wants to say, “Why is there so much concern to get the sacrifices right, to get the building right? There’s hardly anything on adultery, honor, theft, generosity, or loving your neighbor. It’s all about the cult, for goodness’ sake!” Yet this is the great meeting place between God and human beings. The thing that’s fundamentally wrong with us is whether or not we’re in connection with him. That’s why the temple is so important.

Until you come, in due course, to the time when it’s half paganized all over again under Herod. Lots and lots of building on it. Gold sheaf on it and all of that. A voice is heard in Jerusalem saying, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it again.” His opponents didn’t understand him. Jesus’ disciples didn’t understand him. John says so in John 2. They didn’t have a clue, but after he had died and risen again, “Then they remembered his words, and they believed Scripture.”

What is he claiming? Not just, “I am the temple,” but “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it again.” He has constituted the temple by his destruction and rising again. He has constituted the great meeting place between God and human beings by his destruction and rising again.

Then out of this, the antitype of the Old Testament temple in the New Testament runs in two directions, with a possible third. The central one is Jesus. Jesus is the great meeting place between God and human beings. The second is the church. The church is the meeting place between God and human beings.

There is a sense in which we, the church of the Living God, constitute the temple of God. We hear the voice of God, and we proclaim it to others. We take the concerns of others and bring it back to God. We constitute the great meeting place between God and human beings. In one or two passages, our individual bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. That’s a minor one. It’s the one that we use the most often with our young people; nevertheless, it’s a relatively minor one in the New Testament. It’s either Christ or the church.

Perhaps the most spectacular fulfillment of this stream of thought, this stream of development, comes in Revelation 21 and 22, where in the New Jerusalem the seer says, “I saw no temple in that city for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.” That’s coherent because the New Jerusalem is built like a cube. There is only one cube in the Old Testament. Just one. The Most Holy Place. It is a way of saying that all of God’s people in this social vision of Jerusalem, the New Jerusalem, are now forever in the Most Holy Place, the place of God without the mediation of priests.

Now I’ve skipped lots of passages. I didn’t talk, for example, about Matthew 27 and the tearing of the veil when Jesus is crucified, when he finally gives up the ghost, the tearing of the temple veil signaling access to him. One of the interesting things is when you take any one of these storylines (in this case the temple), you quickly get it tied to one of the other inner-canonical tendon series. In this case, it’s tied to the New Jerusalem theme.

That’s another theme that runs right through the Bible, not from creation, but already you are probably having it in the Melchizedek account where you are dealing with king of Salem. Probably Salem is ancient Jeru-salem. He’s king of righteousness and king of peace, king of shalom. So as early as Genesis 14, you have a kind of Jerusalem theme that runs right through to the very end, and it begins to intersect with the temple theme that runs right through. Jerusalem is also the city of the Great King, so now you’re running parallel to the kingship theme.

So many of these things that hold the whole Bible together, which those of us who’ve been reared in Christian homes have absorbed with our mother’s milk, are understood by almost none of our people. Almost none of them. Yet they hold the whole Bible together. If you take biblical theology seriously, you start following these tracks. When you start hitting any one of these strands all the way through the Bible …

From time to time it’s worth taking time just to unpack it quickly to show how it drops down in various biblical books so that wherever people hit this theme in their reading, they’ll be able to remember where they are in the account, in the storyline, and see in what way it directs you along a particular strand, a particular tendon, to bring you to Jesus, who is in some sense the fulfillment of the temple, who is himself the ultimate sacrifice, the ultimate priest, the ultimate Davidic king, and the one who brings us rest. You can unpack all of these themes and show how every time you bump up against one of these they run out in both directions.

5. Biblical theology, precisely by focusing not only on these big themes but on the way that books are put together, encourages various kinds of integration in our preaching that tend to be missed when you simply focus on a particular passage without being interested in the structure and thought of the particular book or corpus.

Let me give you a couple of illustrations since that’s probably the best way of handling this one.

Turn to Genesis 39. This is the account of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife. I’m sure you remember the story. Just scan it again in case you want to remind yourself how it’s put together. So now you’re going to preach Genesis 39 on Sunday night. How are you going to handle it? Well, I suspect that a lot of us would handle it as a call to purity, primarily in the sexual domain. You could start thinking through pretty carefully what goes into Joseph’s decisions not to succumb to the temptation. What kind of man he was.

He could have taken the stance: “My life has been so unfair and unjust. I have suffered so much and been abandoned so badly by my family, and now I have the opportunity of at least having some fulfillment in one domain of my life, a bit of comfort. If I play this right, and she really likes me, maybe she’ll put in word with her husband in due course so that I could be set free. I might even be able to return home someday.” You could imagine all kinds of ways of thinking, but his way of thinking is in terms of integrity, in terms of righteousness.

He says, “With me in charge, my master does not concern himself with anything in the house; everything he owns he has entrusted to my care. No one is greater in this house than I am. My master has withheld nothing from me except you, because you are his wife.” You see, there’s a basic integrity in his reasoning. Can you imagine that sort of argument being played in any of our films today? It is so alien to the way people think about sex and love today.

Then it’s invested with the theological dimension. “How then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God?” An awful lot of our assessment of these things will really depend on whether we view them as wicked or not and on whether or not the wickedness is defined in terms of its relationship to God or not. It’s not a peccadillo. It’s not a moment of weakness. It’s a wicked thing, and it’s sinning against God.

Then you can point out that he endures a perpetual temptation along this line. She’s after him again and again, and then he takes care to avoid her. He doesn’t want to be in the house with her. He’s not going to see how close he can get without being burned. Then, in the final onslaught, he leaves his coat behind. He can’t be a stupid man. He can’t help but see that having left his coat behind, he has left himself victim to hostage, but he has chosen purity above reputation.

He is more concerned to be right and clean in this domain (which is right remarkable) than to be thought clean and right while not being clean and right. So there are lots of things that you could preach along these lines about sexual integrity and tie it to other passages. Right? Well, yes, all of things are there in the text, but if you’re working through the text as a literary thing, as a literary entity, then immediately you are going to be asking other questions.

How is the chapter put together? How does the chapter relate to preceding and succeeding chapters? What does it contribute to the book as a whole? Now if you look at the first question (How does the chapter itself get put together?), you cannot help but see that there’s a kind of inclusio.

On the one hand, at the front end, Joseph’s been taken down to Egypt. Verse 2, “The Lord was with Joseph and he prospered, and he lived in the house of his Egyptian master. When his master saw that the Lord was with him and that the Lord gave him success in everything he did, Joseph found favor in his eyes and became his attendant. Potiphar put him in charge of his household, and he entrusted to his care everything he owned.”

At the end of the chapter, he’s now in prison. We read in verse 21, “The Lord was with him; he showed him kindness and granted him favor in the eyes of the prison warden. So the warden put Joseph in charge of all those held in the prison, and he was made responsible for all that was done there.” You cannot help but see there’s a kind of literary inclusio (front end and back end of the chapter), which is a way of saying then, inevitably, God’s blessing upon your life may well be utterly abstracted from the conditions in your life.

On the one hand, he’s sold into slavery; he becomes a slave. On the second hand, he’s descended still lower and now is in prison. God is still with him in these wretched circumstances, with the result that Joseph is still showing faithfulness and integrity in these circumstances, such that those around him (even in prison or, a little higher up, in slavery) recognize the integrity of the man and entrust things to his care. He has a reputation for integrity because the Lord is with him.

You cannot help but see that this is a major theme. Then you start asking the question, “The narrative of Joseph, that’s saying something pretty important, but what is Genesis 39 doing in the book?” Well, that forces you to look at Genesis 38 and Genesis 40. If you compare chapter 39 with Genesis 38, you can’t help but see that chapter 39 is in some ways a foil to chapter 38.

In chapter 38, you have Judah in comfort back home having a rather sleazy affair, by contrast with Joseph who’s in slavery being a man of integrity. That is, this issue of integrity transcends your location. You can’t help but see the foil, but also chapter 39 is, of course, part of the setup for chapters 40–42. That is, for Joseph being an interrupter of the dreams of the baker and the butler in the prison such that eventually he gets to be prime minister of Egypt.

Then if you ask, “All right, what does this contribute to the whole storyline of the book?” it becomes obvious that because of Joseph’s integrity, even in these circumstances by the mercy of God, he becomes the one who saves not only lots of lives from famine in Egypt but even his own family and, thus, the promised seed. Not to put too fine a point on it. Humanly speaking, because Joseph kept his zipper up, the Messiah was born.

Now you have to be careful when you say that, because obviously God is not hostage to zippers. You have to remember, after all, it remains true as Mordechai instructs Esther, “Who knows but that God has raised you up for such a time as this, but be assured that God will bring salvation from some other place if not through you.” So it’s not as if God was sort of on tenterhooks to figure out whether Joseph was going to be faithful or not.

Yet, humanly speaking, if you follow the argument of Joseph’s role in the book itself, it’s part of God’s design to maintain the holy family. This brings us also to the setup for the people of God down in Egypt, and thus for the exodus account in the second book of the Pentateuch. The exodus becomes one of the dominant paradigms for salvation (our own salvation), the ultimate exodos, to use the language of Luke.

There is no way that Joseph was acting with integrity because he was saying to himself, “Well, maybe if I keep my zipper up I’ll actually save the Messiah,” but in the peculiar providence of God, because this man was a man of integrity, humanly speaking, the messianic line was preserved from famine, and in due course, Jesus of Nazareth was born, and my sins were forgiven.

Now that’s dramatic, and I haven’t pulled that out of thin air. It’s right there in the narrative once you read the chapter in the flow of the book. This chapter is not just moral lesson. Now it is a moral lesson; there are moral lessons here to be learned. You can usefully expound them, but if you expound them and that’s all, then you’ve become a moralizing preacher and you have not seen how the account itself drives us finally to Christ.

There are many more examples that I could give of that sort, but I think instead of teasing out more from biblical theology, I am going to pause there for questions and comments because I do want to get into systematic theology and at least get it started before we lose our time.

Male: Following up on that last point, the big picture, how do you do that week in and week out faithfully without boring your congregation? It’s beautiful and magnificent, but how do we keep that there.… You know, keeping the moral lessons there but not just continuing on into that thread, because the thread is always going to be quite similar. Do you have an advice on how we can do that?

Don Carson: That’s a good question. First of all, let me dare submit a warning. Don’t be afraid of the moral exhortation. I think sometimes when students are first exposed to biblical theology that follows the threads right through and are warned against a mere moralizing kind of preaching, they do a flip and go too far the other side.

When you read, for example, 1 Corinthians, chapter 10, as Paul expounds the failures of the Israelites in the wilderness, what he draws from it first of all is a moralizing lesson. You need to persevere all the way to the end. Hebrews does something similar. Hebrews does two things at once. In fact, it’s worth taking a look at that one just to answer your question a little bit more. Hebrews, chapter 3 and 4.

From chapter 3, verse 7 on, what the writer is doing all the way down to 4:13 is essentially expounding certain verses from Psalm 95. “So, as the Holy Spirit says …” And then you get the quotation from Psalm 95. “… ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion, during the time of testing in the desert, where your fathers tested and tried me and for forty years saw what I did. That is why I was angry with that generation, and I said, “Their hearts are always going astray, and they have not known my ways.” So I declared on oath in my anger, “They shall never enter my rest.” ’ ”

This is part of the trajectory of the rest theme, and what you have from there to the end of chapter 3 is an essentially moralizing application. It’s a moralizing application worked on the basis of mere parallelism. That is, just as they did not persevere.… They were taken out of Egypt, but then before they got into the Promised Land they succumbed to moaning, complaining, and whining, whether at the return of the spies or in other places in the desert. As a result, they did not finally get in.

So the lesson drawn from verse 12 to verse 19 is: Don’t you be like that. You make sure you persevere. It’s an exhortation toward perseverance so that you don’t do what they did. “So, brothers and sisters, see to it that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is still called Today.” Picking up the first word of the quotation. After all (verse 14), “We have come to share in Christ if indeed we hold firmly till the end our original conviction.”

That’s almost a definition of a true Christian. A true Christian is not only saved from something, but by definition perseveres. “We have come to share in Christ if we hold the beginning of our conviction steadfast all the way to the end, unlike these people who dropped off in the desert.” So that’s teased out.

“Who were they then who heard and rebelled? Well, weren’t they the ones that Moses had taken out of Egypt? Yes, but they fell away because they didn’t continue. So we see that they were not able to enter, because of their unbelief.” That’s the first lesson that’s made, and it’s a moralizing lesson.

Then in chapter 4 and following, although this moralizing lesson is alluded to, there you have a lesson that depends absolutely on the sequencing of the Old Testament narrative. The argument, really, is this: When the people were entering into Canaan, they were entering into the promised rest. They didn’t get there under Moses. They didn’t get there, but under Joshua eventually they did get there.

Nevertheless, some centuries later (at the time of David or later), God is still saying, “Today, if you do not harden your heart you may enter into this rest. Today press on. Persevere. Otherwise you will not enter into my rest.” That means, the author infers, that entering into the Promised Land was not the final rest; it was only one step along the line. Indeed, the author says, when God says, “They will never enter into my rest,” you’re forced to think about when God enters into rest at all.

What does this mean, “my rest”? That takes you all the way back to the creation account. At the end of the creation God rested from all his works. Before he’s finished, you’ve got God’s rest in creation, the Sabbath rest, entering into the Promised Land rest, and now this further rest at the time of David, so that any one of these steps is not sufficient in itself. There is an anticipation of rest that transcends merely entering into the Promised Land.

You cannot see securing the Promised Land as the ultimate promised inheritance if you take the Old Testament Scriptures themselves seriously, because Psalm 95 already promises a further rest beyond entering into the Promised Land. So what you’ve really got is now not a moralizing argument but a sequential biblical, theological, redemptive, and historical argument.

It depends absolutely on sequence and history, and out of that, the author infers, likewise you see, that there is ultimately a rest that has come along in our time. Any Christian is going to remember, “Come to me all you who labor, and I will give you rest,” as well as the way the rest theme plays out in the Apocalypse and so on.

So here is an argument that depends on a storyline, but it doesn’t mean that the author cannot do the moralizing thing first. I guess one of the arguments I’d want to make is just after you’ve seen that Genesis 39 works into a biblical argument that is pretty massive doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to be learned from Joseph’s moralizing example in how he handles this particular woman. That’s the aside part.

The other part, how to do this so you’re not boring. There are a lot of things.… You’ve only got 50 main sermons a year, give or take. It’s not really an awful lot considering the diversity in Scripture. When we had the first national conference of The Gospel Coalition, three and a half years ago, Tim Keller gave an address that you can download from the web in which he …

Male: Can you explain what The Gospel Coalition is?

Don: The Gospel Coalition is an organization of which I am president and Tim is the vice president. It’s really a coalition of about 50 pastors from many different denominations, broadly Reformed, designed to promote the centrality of the gospel deeply, richly, and theologically conceived.

There’s an awful lot of evangelicalism that conceives of the gospel as that which tips us into the kingdom. Then all of our life-transforming bits come after that in our discipleship classes, our how-to-be-happy-though-married classes, our how-to-bring-up-your-ridiculous-children classes, and this sort of thing.

That’s not the way the gospel works in the New Testament. In the New Testament the gospel is the big thing. Worse yet, you have rising numbers of people who assume the gospel, but what they focus on is cultural analysis. They assume the gospel, but they focus on postmoderns. They assume the gospel, but they focus on how to serve the poor. All of which things are necessary, but as soon as you merely assume something, you lose it.

If I’ve learned anything from 35 years of teaching, it’s that my students don’t learn what I teach them. They learn what I’m excited about in my teaching. They learn what I emphasize, but they don’t learn everything that I teach them. So if I get to the place where I assume the gospel, my students don’t learn the gospel, or if they learn it, they learn it as some of the data they have to pass exams on. They will follow me in what I’m excited about.

So we want to make the gospel as central to our excitement, our thinking, and our primacy as we possibly can in every domain of church life and so on. It’s brought together people like John Piper, Mark Dever, Tim Keller, myself, and Ligon Duncan, as well as some younger guys like Matt Chandler, Mark Driscoll, Phil Ryken, and so on, to have a coalition that’s trying to promote this sort of thing.

The first domain in which we do it is on our website, thegospelcoalition.org, which has now something like 20,000 expository sermons that are indexed biblically and theologically. Some of them are just audio, some of them video, and some of them text. We took over the old British theological student journal Themelios when it went belly up and made it digital. It still comes out three times a year, with the most current issue posted this morning, and it’ll get hit by 100,000 people.

Out of this is coming a variety of other organizations. Justin Taylor’s blog is on our site now. CCI (Christ on Campus Initiative) is on our site. The aim is to produce a center for material that multiplies. Then out of this we run conferences that are increasingly regionalized to promote gospel thinking and gospel preaching as the organizing thing in our churches and what we’re doing all the time.

In our first small national conference.… Our second one was a big one, and our third one is coming up this next spring where we expect 8,000 people at the McCormick Place in Chicago. At our first one, Tim Keller gave an address that is worth downloading. Everything on our site is free; you don’t have to pay for anything. You could dig it out if you went to The Gospel Coalition and found Tim Keller and the 2007 conference.

Listen to his sermon carefully. At one point he talks about … he just lists them in about three minutes; it’s almost an aside for him … the themes that should dominate your thinking to draw you toward Christ from about half the Old Testament. He doesn’t go through the whole Old Testament. He’s just saying, “Of course, from Genesis we should learn this about Christ, from Exodus we should …” He runs all the way through to about Job before he quits, but you can just see, “Oh, that’s how it’s done. That’s how you think about it. Yes, that makes sense.”

Partly it’s learning how to do it from those who are doing it well, using resources like the New Bible Dictionary of Biblical Theology, keeping track of when you’ve done one of these things and making sure you don’t do them in detail or do a particular one on temple three times in a year, for example. Deciding sometimes a quick skip and a jump is one way of tackling it, and another time in might be worth a 15-minute excursus to really run through something more thoroughly.

In all preaching, whether it depends on systematic theology, biblical theology, or any other discipline, to take time, meditation, reflection, and thinking to figure out how to make it sing and sting; that’s important too. I’ll be coming to another element of the kingship in the fourth of my Psalm expositions to show how alien it is in our culture. Even thinking about that enables you to think of fresh ways to get it across. That’s a very good question.

Male: I wanted to come back to Genesis 38 and 39 and my puzzle with those two chapters. As you say, Joseph’s integrity is preserving God’s people, yet Judah’s obvious lack of integrity is creating the line.

Don: It’s wonderful, isn’t it? It’s a wonderful point. If it were some other way, we might be inclined to think of a merely moralizing descent. Good guys contribute stuff; bad guys don’t. One of the things to be observed in Matthew’s articulation of the genealogy, after all, is that he has a harlot in there and a Moabitess.

Ruth is wonderful as a person, but the law says not for 10 generations do you have a Moabite allowed in. But she’s the great-grandmother of King David in the messianic line. So you have God’s grace overcoming all of these kinds of things just the same. Let’s face it, the patriarchs are a pretty sleazy bunch, but out of the patriarchs (out of Judah, in particular) comes the Messiah. There is a triumph of grace even in those sorts of …

That’s already hinted at in Genesis 49. You don’t have to wait until the New Testament; it’s in the book itself. Out of Judah comes the scepter. Judah, who is leading a bit of a sleazy life. Yes, there is a foil, but it doesn’t mean that.… It’s a bit like reflecting on the life of King David. He’s a man after God’s own heart, but God help us, let’s not follow David in every respect.