Preaching from the Old Testament: An Interview with Sidney Greidanus

Preaching: In your own preaching, is there a particular area in Genesis that you have enjoyed preaching more than others?

Greidanus: Well, I don’t know if there’s any particular passage that I enjoyed more than others. Some are more challenging than others for preaching, particularly Genesis 1, the creation narrative. And I do sense that it’s a narrative, though not nearly as clearly so as other narratives. But in making a sermon on that myself, I thought a narrative form would get me stuck in the 10 times “God said ... God said ... God said.” And so I developed that sermon deductively with three main points. So that is a more challenging passage to preach in the narrative form.

With the others I usually follow the narrative form. In the appendix I have a sermon model—an expository sermon model—that explains where you can start with the introduction, what you do in the body and how you come to the conclusion. I followed that in my own sermons, and I’ve taught that to my students. I’ve found that very helpful.

Preaching: So you’ve done Preaching Christ from Genesis, and you were telling me earlier the next one that you’re working on now will be Preaching Christ in Ecclesiastes. You mentioned that the wisdom literature may be the toughest area for making some of those connections. Are you far enough along in that process now to be seeing some of the particular challenges that you’ll be facing?

Greidanus: I realized the challenges of preaching Christ from wisdom literature already when I wrote Preaching Christ from the Old Testament. At that time I brought in the definition of preaching Christ. The traditional definition is preaching the person and/or works of Christ. We may focus on the person of Christ, the Son of God, the Messiah, or focus on the works of Christ—the fact that He worked atonement, that He worked miracles and so on. That is OK, but with wisdom literature you don’t get too far that way. So I stress that part of the work of Christ is the teaching of Christ. With wisdom literature I realized that we have to usually look at Christ as the wise rabbi who taught in mashal, which is parables or proverbs.

Preaching: You’ve been teaching preachers for many years now. How have you seen preaching change over those years? And where do you see preaching in the years to come?

Greidanus: When I was trained in preaching 40 years ago, we were taught to look for the theme of the passage; but we were not taught to look for the goal of the passage. And I think it’s extremely important to catch the relevance of the passage when you look for the author’s goal in that historical situation. Once you have the goal, you have the relevance of the text. Every biblical text is relevant when you read it historically. We don’t have to make it relevant. We just have to look for its relevance and then pass that on to the congregation today in terms of where they are today. So that would be one change I have seen.

Another change that I was not taught was to write the sermon in an oral style. But I soon realized when I started preaching that at certain points in the sermon I would lose the attention of the congregation. And checking later, I realized that this was usually where I had very long sentences and difficult words. So I’ve been trying to impress that on my students, to write in oral style.

Craddock with his inductive approach—that’s another change that has come about since I started. Now, I don’t think that we can say the inductive approach or the narrative form is a new form—Jesus used it, so it’s not all that new. But you cannot make the narrative form or the inductive development a “one size fits all” either. It depends on the text.

I’ve been trying to teach my students to allow the text and the form of the text to shape the form of the sermon so that expository preaching is not only to expose the message of the text but also to expose how the text brings the message.

And I feel that in the future there will be more experimentation one way or the other, but most of those do not live very long. So I’ve preferred to focus on searching the Word, understanding the text in its context. How was it relevant at that time? And then bring that message through Jesus Christ in the New Testament to the people today and how it is relevant for them. What does God expect from us as a response to that Word?