So that was one thing that I learned about Genesis: how foundational it is and yet how little preachers preach it today because it confronts them with difficult issues.
For example, take Genesis 1—how do we interpret that today? Is it the young earth? Old earth? Six literal days or long periods of time? How do we interpret that? How do we bring that message today? Moreover there are some really gory details in Genesis. So many preachers think it’s the better part of wisdom to just avoid that book entirely. And so I started with Genesis. In fact I retired from full-time teaching three years ago in order to finish this book because I thought it was so important.
And I put myself in the place of a pastor who wants to preach a series of sermons on Genesis. Usually I recommend not to extend a series like Calvin did—he would sometimes go two years on a book—but I think variety is the spice of life. So if you preach five or six sermons from Genesis and then move to another book—maybe in the New Testament—then you can come back to Genesis. So I set it up as a series of four sections in Genesis: the prehistorical section, the Abraham cycle, the Jacob cycle and the Joseph cycle. So I had four sections, and I decided to do five or six narratives from each. So I came up with a total of 23 narratives; and I just tried to do the work that preachers do in their studies, but I had more time than the pressure cooker of the ministry.
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In this book I tried to develop, first of all, what is the textural unit because many commentators are not in agreement on that. What is the narrative unit? And then I look at particularly the literary features in that unit; then I draw for each narrative the plot line, which is very important to get the point of the passage and also to retell it later in the sermon. From there I move to what is the point of the author, the theme, the big idea? And then I raise the question, “Why did he write it to Israel at that time? What’s the goal: To encourage them? To teach them something? To comfort them?”
Then we move on to a section where I go through those seven ways to Christ that we mentioned earlier. And I try to figure out how we can use those ways and which are the best ones to use. Then I state the sermon theme—because it may be somewhat different from the textual theme from time to time—and the sermon goal. Then I have a section on sermon exposition that’s basically homiletical commentary; I called it
sermon exposition, showing what are some of the important ideas in that narrative, how it develops and at which points I would move to Christ in the New Testament.
But those are only suggestions—in their study pastors can often be inspired to move at different points. But I would like to emphasize that they should not move off to Christ on incidental details in the text but rather the main message. I find if you do that then the application comes very easily, too. It’s usually through the Christocentric move that you get to the application of the passage.
