“Gospel-Centered” Pitfalls Part 5-Morals of the Story

This is part 5 of an ongoing series.

Introduction

Part 1- Defining “Gospel Centrality”

Part 2- Everything is Justification

Part 3- Jesus?

Part 4- Eggheadism

Morals of the Story

If you’ve endured a certain amount of preaching, you probably have found some bizarre sermons preached out of bizzare texts. One of my personal favorites is Pharoah and the frogs as an evangelistic text warning us to not wait until tomorrow for God’s salvation like Pharoah did (an old youth camp memory). The degree of difficulty on that manuever is pretty high. Such attempts to squeeze an obscure or pithy moral conclusion out of a Biblical narrative is common, especially in children’s Bible stories or teen ministry.

One of the beautiful things about true Gospel-centered discipleship, teaching, preaching, etc. is that it views each portion of Scripture with one lens in wide-focus. How does this particular story, psalm, proverb, law, etc. fit into the larger context of the grand narrative of Scripture-the Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration? Especially in light of passages like Luke 24 and the sermons in Acts, how does this passage point speak of Jesus?

But like all beautiful things, there is a cheap knock-off available. This is the “squirrel” hermeneutic. There’s an old preacher joke about a kid in Sunday School who hears about something that has a big fluffy tail, stores nuts in winter, climbs trees, and has rodent teeth. The little kid, well-trained with years of Sunday School, replies to the teacher, “Well, I know it sure sounds like a squirrel, but I know the answer has to be Jesus.” Some, in a zeal for Gospel-centeredness, have taken to making every passage about Jesus. Great. But they make it only about Jesus. Gone are the nuances of each individual we read about in Scripture, gone are the specific settings the Psalmist is singing about, and they probably don’t even mess with Proverbs as a teaching text. And of course, to find any other application besides, “You are a sinner in need of Jesus to save you”, would be moralizing.

But unfortunately, the New Testament doesn’t view the Old Testament in this way. As Paul writes in Romans 15:4, “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope.” Or 2 Timothy 3:16-17, speaking about the Old Testament Scriptures specifically, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of Godmay be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” Yes, these Scriptures point us to Jesus, but they also are provided for our instruction, to correct us, to train us in righteousness. This means that we will find morals in the Old Testament stories. It means we can learn from Jacob the consequences of deceit, or from Joseph the temporary hardships of resisting temptation. We can even “dare to be a Daniel” and maintain our faith in the one true God in the face of a pagan culture. In fact, many of the readers of Daniel in the centuries before Christ would have found encouragement and a model of endurance as they faced Greek and Roman temptations to acquiesce their monotheism to the demands of the polytheistic, pluralistic (sword-weilding) majority.

Hebrews 11 finds the topic of enduring faith in a vast array of OT narratives. James gives us Rahab, Job, and Elijah as moral examples of active faith, patience, and prayer. Let’s not be more Gospel-centered than the Bible! As in much of these series, the pitfall is found not in the affirmations of those attempting to be Gospel-centered, but in the denials. In a zeal to acknowledge one aspect (Christ in all of Scripture) that has been missed in much of popular evangelicalism, they jettison a good instinct of previous generations. I believe we can find morals in the OT narratives without reducing them to Aesop’s fables. I believe we can see Jesus as our greater Daniel who unjustly died in the Lion’s Den but came back to life without ignoring the wisdom of imitating Daniel’s godly example. I believe we can see Psalm 22 as foreshadowing Jesus’ experience on the cross while also allowing it to speak into our moments of suffering and need to call on God’s covenant faithfulness.