Have you ever wondered, perhaps when reading through John Calvin’s Institutes or the Westminster Confession of Faith, why God gave us His Word in such a confusing and disjointed way? I mean, shouldn’t the book of Genesis be about the doctrine of revelation rather than being about the creation of the world, the fall of man, and the lives of the patriarchs? How can we read God’s Word until we have carefully articulated a doctrine of revelation? And wouldn’t it be more sensible if Moses and the Holy Spirit had explained to us theology proper, the doctrine of God, before saying, “In the beginning God …” so that we would know of whom the words spoke? At least the last book in our Bibles deals with last things, but I don’t think anyone would ever describe the book of Revelation as straightforward prose, something eminently easy to understand.
When I was in seminary, I had an outstanding professor of systematic theology. He was no atomist, a person who comes to the Word of God and looks at each passage as if it were in a vacuum, as if there were no relation between this text and that, as if we can say the Bible here teaches x and there teaches non-x, and we’ll believe both if we’re pious enough. He rightly defended the labor of systematics as an attempt to rightly understand the Word of God in its context. He showed that the God we worship is a God of order. His Word coheres; it is one Word. But it is one Word that is given to us in historical narratives, wisdom literature, and prophetic discourses, both more apocalyptic and less. There are also didactic portions, but the Bible isn’t a systematics text. And if we preach as if it were, we do a disservice to the Word, and to preaching.
One of the dangers of treating the Bible as a mere sourcebook of quotes to corroborate our systematic theology is that such makes it easier for us to ride our hobby horses. We Reformed folk, of course, are rather adept at talking about election. And the Bible talks about election in many places. But the Bible isn’t only about election. One of the advantages of preaching exegetically, of refusing to pick out a theme and then go to the Bible, is that it allows the Bible to balance our themes. If we follow God’s story, we are less likely to simply repreach our favorite abstractions from God’s Word.
The same principle also works in reverse. Not only do we preachers like to talk about what we like to talk about, we don’t like to talk about what we don’t like to talk about. Some of us aren’t so well-known for our gifts in mercy ministry. We aren’t known the world around for preaching faithfully and powerfully on the “one-another” passages of the Bible. And so it would be rather easy for us to exacerbate our weaknesses by not preaching on them—if we are free to flit here and there, from one passage on election to another, in our preaching.
When we take the simple precaution of preaching through books of the Bible (understanding also that we probably have missed the point if we spend decade after decade preaching exclusively through Paul’s epistles), we can alleviate the temptation to stay inside our own comfort zone, and that of the sheep entrusted to our care. When we treat the Word as God’s story we are less likely to seek our own glory.
