Biblical Theology – Part 1

I recently heard a message based on Exodus 3-4. The preachers main points looked a little something like this:

• Moses was sent to rescue Israel = us going to rescue the lost people in this world
• Moses didn’t see/trust that God was with him in his mission = we can sometimes lose sight of the fact that God is with us
• Moses suffered from self doubt and felt inadequate = we suffer from self doubt and feelings of inadequacy
• The message given to Moses is a message given to us.

I sat there listening, quite stunned at what I was hearing. I have been keeping a check, more recently, on not being overly critical of sermons that I hear in the pulpit. I’ve been getting into a somewhat bad habit of critiquing sermons that I’ve been hearing AND not allowing any part of the sermon to challenge/rebuke/encourage me. So my thinking has changed from, “What did you think of today’s sermon?” to “What did you get out of today’s sermon?”.

However, although I’ve blogged about this issue before, I think we should be reminded that whatever is said during the sermon/message is fallible and open to incorrectness (for lack of a better word). Therefore anything which is said in the pulpit should not be simply be regarded as fine/good/solid/correct. It needs to be compared with what the bible actually says and we need to do the hard work to properly understand the bible for ourselves.

And so I was left with a number of thoughts from today’s message which go as follows:

• The final application drawn from the above passage was essentially regarding evangelism and missions. However, I thought this application (whilst a possibly minor application point) is not the main emphasis of the text.
• Big things such as God raising a deliverer for his people and God’s revelation of His name, which I believe are central to this passage, were glossed over.
• Mentions of Christianity and Jesus in the sermon were drawn from personal allegory, which begs the question of what the text was originally written for and how was it understood by it’s earlier pre-Christian readers.
• Reading and teaching the bible in this way is wrong as it teaches people to see the hero in the story and to put yourself in their shoes. In this instance we can see how this model of reading the bible fails miserably:
• Moses is a specific person in a specific time in a specific space. So unless we have been called by God through a burning bush, the commands given to Moses should remain as commands to Moses (and not to us).
• Moses is later called a ‘great prophet’ – we, Christians living in 2006AD, have never been (and never will be) called ‘great prophet’s.
• Moses was an Israelite, most people reading this blog, and also reading the passage today, will be Gentiles.
• Later in the chapter God nearly kills Moses for not being circumcised. What are we to make of this? Are we to be circumcised as well?
• The last point shows the inconsistency of a character study (studying a biblical character and taking all their good points on board and ‘learning’ from their bad points).
• Good intentions of the preacher, in the end, are not good enough. It is not enough to draw what you think/want from a passage, people need to hear what the original author intended when they wrote the thing in the first place. Imagine how frustrated you would feel if you wrote a letter to someone and 50 years later people are quoting bits of that letter out of context or twisting the meaning to suit their own purposes. To put it another way – if the original writer of the text was sitting in the congregation as you gave that message would they agree with you in the end?

So it’s easy enough to identify things which were wrong/inappropriate in this sermon. I’m now going to do some thinking about this passage and come back with some ideas of what we, as Christians living in 2006AD, are meant to draw from this incredible passage.

…