Rediscovering the importance of passages we ignore
I’m sitting in a room with with other preachers who get together every year to work through a biblical book. We bring in a commentator to help us exegete the text, and then discuss together how we could preach it. It’s always a good week.
This year the commentator is Daniel Block, who is currently finishing a commentary on Deuteronomy that should be out in another year. We’ve just been discussing Deuteronomy 7:1-11, which is certainly a challenging passage to preach today. It’s the sort of text that preachers like to avoid because it raises troubling questions about the complete destruction of the Canaanite people as part of the conquest. Yet Block has presented it in such a way that most of us can’t wait to get home and preach it.
It’s a good reminder again that some of the most neglected passages of Scripture are highly relevant to us today, and that our job is not to make them relevance, but to discover and demonstrate their relevance. This is the challenge and the joy of preaching.
Tags: Daniel Block, Deuteronomy, Relevance
May 15th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
O c’mon, Darryl. Give us a hint! Can you bullet-point a summary of how that would be handled? Or, maybe you can’t…for reasons of publication rights etc. on Daniel’s part. If you can, I’d love to ponder it!
May 15th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
I don’t know if I can do it justice, but I’ll give a short overview.
Dan mainly spoke on verses 6-11:
1. You are holy people
2. God has chosen you
3. You are God’s treasured possession
On the basis of this, it’s imperative that we maintain our distinctiveness from the world. The reason verses 1-5 bothers us is that we don’t get verses 6-11. He dealt with the tensions of the first section. His application is that we really aren’t living distinctly from the world because we really don’t understand our identity and what’s at stake when we become like the world.
It was really better than that; I hope to preach on it someday.
May 15th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Thanks, Darryl. I can see that easily relating to the commands against intermarriage and for the destruction of the idols, but it’s harder to relate “need to be distinct” with “destroy them all, men, women, children”. I agree that recognizing the underlying theme of a holy identity is essential to exegesis of any of it. So it’s helpful…but still such a tension!
Thanks again.
May 15th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
We had a very long discussion on that topic today. Haddon Robinson was very helpful. Just some highlights from the notes I was taking:
—-
it’s a terrible thing to make God your enemy
you don’t go up against God without realizing this
you won’t understand the Bible unless you realize that God hates sin, no matter who is sinning
he is not a bland, get-along-with-everyone God
if you don’t understand this, then we won’t understand what the gospel is
great question is how God could be holy and justify his people?
our God is a consuming fire
Volf: God himself absorbed this violence at the cross so we don’t have to bear it
if that God begins to judge, he begins with the house of God
application is not to wipe out people
God is holy, and if we compromise with this we’re in trouble
“I don’t like a God like this”
answer: we don’t have a kit at the local church where we can make our own God
—
Much more. A difficult passage to be sure, but you could feel the excitement about preaching it.
May 15th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
I agree with this. I also think you’ll agree with me when I say it needs to be preached with sorrow and fear as well as boldness and awe, and is understood best at the foot of the cross.
Here’s something I think about; our first exchange put the emphasis on the holy people, distinct in the world. Our second emphasized the holy God who has called those people. I think both emphases are in the text, both are legitimate; but I think emphasizing the person of God is what has often been lost, and that preaching it will gain the most traction in the settings we most commonly face.
I like the line about not having a kit at church where we can make our own god. If we had one, it’d make an effective fund-raiser, I’m sure.
May 15th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
I agree with you on your first paragraph for sure.
We had some debate about whether you could cover this passage in one sermon or two. There seem to be two big things to cover in this passage, and both are important.
Good comments.