Christocentric Hermeneutics

And Mystery of Providence. So we'll just be going through some texts that demonstrate Christocentric hermeneutics. Who here knows what Christocentric hermeneutics are? Maybe a few people. Okay, can anybody guess what Christocentric means?

Christ-centered, yeah. What does hermeneutics mean? How to interpret the Bible, right, yeah. It's the science of interpretation. By the way, science just means school of knowledge, you know. So yeah, the science of interpretation.

Hermeneutics should be Christocentric. A lot of times people will affirm that in broad ways, but when it comes to specifics, especially if you're talking about actual academics, who a lot of people would assume are Christocentric, when you read their writings they explicitly deny Christocentric hermeneutics, saying that, well, Christ is a pretty big theme in the Bible, but not the only theme, or there are various ways that people will approach this and reject Christocentric hermeneutics.

A lot of times we'll talk about Christotelic hermeneutics, that's the end goal of everything in the Bible, but Jesus is not necessarily on every page. Yes, right, yeah. And I suppose you could change the verses such that they were so short that they were just an article, so I'm not claiming that Jesus is in every article, like the, like the word the, but he is in every pericope, every preachable passage.

So that's the granularity with which I would argue this. I would argue that if you have some portion of Scripture that's so small that you can't find Jesus in it, it is not a preachable passage. So every pericope points to Jesus.

All right, if you've ever heard of the Chicago statement on biblical hermeneutics, well, there's a Chicago statement on biblical inerrancy, there's also one on hermeneutics. It says, we affirm that the person and work of Jesus Christ are central, the central focus of the entire Bible.

We deny that any method of interpretation, excuse me, we deny that any method of interpretation, I must have copied that in right because that doesn't sound right grammatically, we deny that any method of interpretation which rejects or obscures the Christ-centeredness of Scripture is correct.

All right, so yes, Christ is central in all the Scripture, and this really means that all of it, not just eventually as you, as you see that this is a foundation for understanding this, for understanding this, which eventually gets to Christ.

It really, in a much more direct way, all points to Jesus. When I was in seminary, there was one book that I read on biblical theology. By the way, biblical theology does not mean theology that is biblical.

What biblical theology refers to is the literary aspects of the theology we believe. So in systematic theology, you'd be answering questions like, what is the doctrine of the Trinity? What is the doctrine of baptism?

Stuff like that, and you'd be grabbing a whole bunch of different passages and giving an answer to that. In biblical theology, the question is more one of how did God reveal this truth? So how did God reveal the doctrine of the Trinity would be a biblical theology question where you say, well, it's obscured in some ways in the Old Testament, but then in the New Testament, it comes to fruition in the missions of the Spirit and the Son which reveal the processions, et cetera.

So you can have a biblical theology of the temple that says, oh, how does the temple show us about God's presence with His people? And then you walk through the tabernacle, the temple, the church, et cetera.

So that's what biblical theology refers to. It refers to the literary aspect of theology about how God is revealing His truth. So anyway, I read this book on biblical theology where the author, who I had heard other people generally respect this man as someone who had a Christ-centered approach, basically in his whole introduction to this, which most people skip over, he's just denying it the whole time, including even in one of the chief texts for this kind of thing in Genesis 3, the Proto-Evangelium about the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, seed of the woman crushing the serpent under his heel.

This, of course, speaking of Jesus Christ, this man even rejected that or at least rejected it was clear enough to teach with any kind of confidence. Anyway, it's surprising how much people in the highest places will reject a Christ-centered approach to scripture.

Yes? Oh, yeah. I don't know. Yeah. Defeat of animals? I don't know. I'm not even sure. But yeah. If there's enough, you know, imagery, then you want to give people freedom to interpret it differently, I suppose.

I think that's the idea. Yes. So, like I was saying earlier, I wouldn't necessarily say every verse because maybe someone could show me a verse that was so short it was kind of meaningless to assert such a thing, but I would say that in any preachable text, yes, that it speaks of Jesus.

And I'll give a, yeah, I'll argue for that in a moment. Another thing that many people say is that in order to read the Bible correctly, you must read the Old Testament and make commitments to your understanding before you move into the New Testament.

And that makes sense in some way that you don't want to say that, oh, well, the New Testament and the Old Testament can be inconsistent with one another. They should both be true. But you should recognize that if you read the Old Testament without the New Testament, you are likely to arrive at some wrong conclusions that the New Testament should correct you on.

And it is important to read the clearer passages to interpret the less clear passages, and the New Testament is the more clear of the two, in general at least. And that is, that should be obvious, but some people refer to that as reading the Bible backwards.

Yeah, reading the Bible backwards is where you prioritize the New Testament over the Old Testament for some people. But it's good to read the Bible backwards. It's good to prioritize the New Testament over the Old Testament as far as interpretation goes, because things are shadowy and mysterious in the Old Testament, and they are revealed in the New Testament.

This is why the word mystery is used so many times in the New Testament to describe things that have been revealed. So, yes, go for it. So, the New Testament frequently quotes Isaiah to mean something more than someone would initially think as they read Isaiah.

But then beyond that, as you read Isaiah and you realize that it necessarily, even in passages where the New Testament doesn't interpret it, must mean something more than what's obvious to it. Like, for example, it talks about Assyria and Egypt and Israel all becoming one nation together, and Assyria doesn't even exist anymore as Assyria, you know, not the same nation anyway.

So, what could that possibly mean unless it's just implying something about the gospel, you know, this is prophesying the gospel? Or I think one that really helps me, too, is in Isaiah 7 and 8 where you have the Emmanuel prophecy.

And everybody knows from the New Testament that this refers to Jesus, that the Virgin would have a son, etc. But when you read that passage and you realize how the original hearers were supposed to understand it, it's something very different than what we would have understood, or than what we typically think of when we think about the Virgin having a son, because it's fulfilled in the very next chapter.

It's fulfilled in chapter 8. Isaiah's wife has a son, virgin also being another word for just young woman. Isaiah's wife has a son. He names him Mehershalah HaShabaz. And before the child is very old, the alliance with Israel and Syria is broken up and Syria is destroyed, which is what the prophecy says.

The prophecy says that a child will be born, and before he's very old, Syria will be defeated. And that's exactly what happens in the next chapter. It explains it all. And so, you know, growing up hearing about Emmanuel every Christmas and everything, and then realizing that that's actually the second part.

It is the more ultimate fulfillment of something that had a very obvious initial fulfillment. And then realizing, well, this is how almost all the prophecies are working in Isaiah. Almost all of them are working like this, where they have some initial fulfillment, and then are speaking of something greater.

This one is just so obvious because it's such a frequently preached on text, and Matthew interprets it directly. But even in passages where you don't have a New Testament author interpreting it to mean something more, it becomes apparent as you see the pattern of the apostles interpreting things that they all, they pretty much all mean something more.

So that's the case in double fulfillment, but even in passages that are not prophecy proper, there's still some fulfillment in Christ. And let me, let me go ahead and read Ephesians 1, 3 through 12. According to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the beloved.

In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses. According to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight, making known to us the mystery of his will.

According to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven, and things on earth. In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things, according to the counsel of his will.

So that we who are first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory. Now I read a long passage there, but the the most important part here is, making, verse 9, making known to us the mystery of his will.

Okay, so there's that word mystery again. According to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven, and things on earth.

Have you ever thought about what it means to unite all things in him? What does that mean, to unite all things in him? There are different things that it could mean, but I believe the primary thing that it does mean here, especially in the context of mystery of his will, is that he intends to glorify himself through the Son, and every single thing that has been created finds its fulfillment in that, in him.

It's not just every verse in Scripture is interpreted through Jesus Christ, every thing that exists in our universe is interpreted through Jesus Christ, but most especially divine revelation, most especially, and in a special way.

I'm not, I'm not arguing that you should have a Christocentric hermeneutic of creation or nature in the same way that you would have Scripture, but as God has given it all to us to reveal the mystery of Jesus Christ, he's telling us right here what his purpose was.

And then you have that word mystery used throughout Ephesians. It's not just there at the beginning, but it's throughout Ephesians, and it's pretty clear that it's talking about the gospel every single time.

This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ in the church in Ephesians 5, 32. Now that's talking about sex there. It's not even talking about the Jews and Gentiles being brought together, but then you realize, well, these are all the, these are actually all the same thing.

All these different mysteries about the unification of all things in Jesus Christ are really, they're different aspects of the same thing. So before he had talked about the mystery of his will in 3 .6, he talked about the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things.

He uses this term mystery several times in Ephesians 5, or excuse me, in Ephesians. And what is it every time? It's ultimately referring to Christ, to the gospel as revealed in Jesus Christ. Okay, so a few other passages.

I'm gonna grab the Bible here. John 5, 39. You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness about me. Now many people would just read something like this and say, oh, well, some aspects of the Old Testament Scriptures that Jesus is referring to speak of Jesus.

I don't believe we have any reason to reject that he's talking about all the Old Testament, especially the way he speaks in Luke. In Luke 24, verse 44, he says,. So Jesus is resurrected at this point.

He speaks to his disciples. He opens their minds to understand all Scripture. I believe this is the only place in the Bible that speaks of the Ketuvim, if you're familiar with that term. Wait, did I get to say that right?

The Tanakh, right? The Torah. Why am I... Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I'm blanking on the right terms here. But yeah, the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. A lot of times it just says the Law and the Prophets.

Here it talks about the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms, which are the Writings. This is a larger category than just the book of Psalms when it says Psalms. The Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. Just like when it says the Law, that's a larger category than just the legal code.

Yes, right. Yeah, so that's, well, there the Law is referring to the whole Old Testament. Yeah, but this is, yeah, so this is those three divisions of the Old Testament. So it's a very full merism. A merism is like to emphasize the wholeness of something, say wolf and warp or heavens and earth, right?

So that's a way of just saying like the whole thing. Instead of just saying all things, you say all the parts to emphasize it. Synecdoche? Yeah, synecdoche. Not quite, yeah. Synecdoche, you say one thing in place of the other.

A merism is you say all the parts to, right? Synecdoche, you say the part to refer to the whole, and a merism, you enumerate the parts. Okay, so yeah, and then what does he do? Okay, so he opens their mind to understand all scriptures.

They're supposed to go forward, and what are they doing throughout the rest of the New Testament? They're explaining the Old Testament in light of its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. So he's opened up their minds to understand all the scriptures and they're bringing it all to bear to show what it says about Jesus, because it all speaks about Jesus.

Yeah, so let's go through some more passages. Colossians 1, this is a pretty important one. I'll start in verse 24. Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church, of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you, to make the Word of God fully known.

Okay, so this is Paul's purpose, to make the Word of God fully known. The mystery hidden for ages and generations, but now revealed to his saints. Okay, the Word of God fully known was a mystery, now is revealed.

That was verse 25 of chapter 1. Sorry, 26. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of his mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom that we may present everyone mature in Christ.

Okay, so how does he present everyone mature in Christ? By proclaiming Christ. And how does he do that? Through making the Word fully known. Every passage has new meaning in light of God's revelation of his Son.

Every passage of the Old Testament. And then all the passages of the New Testament are about the Son, so that everyone may be made full in Christ. Him we proclaim. If there is any message, now I'm not saying every message has to be very explicit about this.

I have a lot of room for flexibility in what it means to preach Christ. But every message that is a Christian message is one that should be proclaiming Christ. And I don't just mean tacking him on the end as, well, I got to say something about Jesus.

Yeah, once again, there's flexibility in what I mean by this. Because I would argue that, for example, Jonathan Edwards' sermon—I make this observation often—but I think Jonathan Edwards' sermon centers in the hands of an angry God.

It's a very Christocentric sermon. He never mentions Jesus by name. He only talks about God in like one or two—he only talks about the gospel like the actual hope of mercy. And, you know, one or two sentences in that whole sermon.

But the whole point of the sermon is to drive people to Christ, right? So it's still a—I would still argue that's a very Christocentric sermon. If you're familiar with Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, if you're not, you can go look it up.

It's a very hellfire and brimstone sermon, but the whole point is to drive people to the importance of the gospel, even if the gospel portion of it isn't very explicit and just kind of assumed because he knows the people he's talking to are aware of it.

Okay, so to present everyone mature in Christ, it's necessary to proclaim Christ. That happens by making the Word of God fully known. You only have two options, really. Well, I guess you have other options, but either we shouldn't be preaching this whole book or it actually is all about Jesus.

Consider what Paul said to the Corinthians. I knew nothing among you except Christ and Him crucified. And in Acts 20, he says that if he didn't preach the whole counsel of God, blood would be on his hands.

Okay, he's—it's not that for the Ephesians he's preaching the whole counsel of God, and then for the Corinthians he's just keeping it to the bare minimum of Christ and Him crucified. In Corinthians? Okay, yes, right, yeah.

Yeah, this is—and you just see that kind of interpretation constantly throughout Acts. You know, brothers, David's body went into the grave and, you know, he saw corruption. He's not saying this about himself.

He's saying it about the son who was raised, etc. Okay, let's keep—yeah, let's keep going here. Another one I like a lot is Hebrews. Hebrews chapter 5. So if I can walk through Hebrews. Hebrews 1 talks about how Jesus is greater than the angels.

The Son is greater than the angels. In chapter 2, it explains why he's made a little while lower than the angels, because it's kind of surprising that someone greater than the angels would be so—live such a humble life.

And then it goes on in chapter 3 to relate him to Moses, and then in chapter 4 to relate him to Joshua, and then in chapter 5 to relate him essentially to Aaron, to the priesthood. And then in verse 6 of chapter 5, it says as he says in another place, you are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.

In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayer and supplication with loud cries and tears, etc. Verse 10, being designated by God a high priest after the order of Melchizedek. And then we go into a—more than a whole chapter of parenthetical, because what does he say right after Melchizedek, because he's not going to talk about Melchizedek again until chapter 7, where he explains that Melchizedek represents Christ.

In verse 11, he says, about this we have much to say, okay, as much to say about Melchizedek. And it is hard to explain since you have become dull of hearing, for though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God.

You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have the powers of discernment, trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.

Let us therefore leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God and of instruction about washings and the laying on of hands and resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment.

And this we will do if God permits. So he's describing these different elementary things, faith, repentance, resurrection, etc. All those things are elementary and they need to be understood more fully in Jesus Christ, just like Melchizedek understood more fully in Jesus Christ.

And this is what he's getting at in 1 Corinthians 2, also right after he said that I knew nothing among you except for Christ and him crucified. And then he says that you couldn't, that I could not teach you as mature, but only as immature because you can only handle milk and not meat.

He's not saying that he's only giving them milk because here he's saying that the way you cure someone who needs to be weaned is by actually giving them meat. What he's saying is that he's giving them the gospel, but they're only receiving it as milk.

They're not receiving it as meat because they're not able to understand the fullness of it in Christ because of their lack of maturity. So how is Melchizedek rightly understood? Only in light of Jesus.

But that's true about everything. It's not just Melchizedek happens to be some special example. This is the pattern the New Testament apostles are giving us, is that everything has to be understood more fully in Jesus Christ.

This is also why when I preach in Isaiah, I don't spend a ton of time giving the Old Testament background of it all, in part because I've done that in previous sermons, in part because I don't think that's really even the primary point of the passages, especially the more poetic ones, to say, okay, yeah, this is Babylon, etc., etc.

Because a lot of people feel the obligation to do that. They feel that their main obligation is to spell out all the historical details of what this passage is talking about. But I see the primary goal as being to demonstrate its fulfillment in Christ, which involves understanding what's going on, but not wasting too terribly much time on it.

All right, here's another passage, 1 Peter 1, 10 through 12. Concerning the salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories.

It was revealed to them they were serving not themselves, but you and the things that have now been announced to you through those who preach the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look.

Once again, this is not just talking about some of the prophecies. It's talking about all the prophecies. All the prophecies were for the sake of us New Testament Christians in a more full way than they were for the Old Testament Christians, or for the Old Testament saints.

They are for Christians in a special way because their ultimate fulfillment is found in Christ. A lot of people have a hard time with this in part because they have been taught to be...one of the things they've been taught in being Bereans is basically to reject any kind of interpretation that seems too fanciful or too allegorical, etc.

Right? A Berean is supposed to pay attention to the context, etc. But this is the context. The whole context includes Jesus. The whole context includes the apostles instructing us to interpret the Old Testament this way.

And think about how many times you see the Bible expect us to understand things saying, have you not read? I'm going to give you five examples here. We're supposed to understand that divorce is sinful from the phrase, the two shall become one flesh.

This is what Jesus does when he's being asked about this. We're obligated to understand that there would be a resurrection from the statement, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob in Exodus 3 .6.

We're supposed to understand that the Son of God would be rejected from the phrase, the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. These are all statements where Jesus says, you know, either have you not read or he's saying it like this is something you were supposed to already know based on these Old Testament verses.

We're obligated to understand that commerce was forbidden in the temple from the statement, my house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations. We're obligated to understand the narrative of David in 1 Samuel 21, 1 through 6 as making a positive statement about the nature of the Sabbath.

You know that, yeah, he was able to go in and eat the showbread, et cetera. And Jesus is speaking of those things as just, you're supposed to speak of this sufficiently. But I know the way many Christians who consider themselves like very careful, faithful interpreters of the Bible will often say, oh, well, you know, that passage doesn't necessarily mean that, et cetera.

Which, once again, I'm not arguing for just groundless, baseless interpretation in any direction. But just because something isn't right there in the bare words themselves without some fuller understanding doesn't mean it's not true.

Jesus would have rebuked many, yeah, many folks if they further, you know, modern style interpretations. The other thing is that I think it's right to call pretty much all this typology. If you don't know what the word type or typology means, it actually is a word in Scripture.

It talks about Abraham receiving Isaac back by resurrection as a type, right? So, type, if you think about it like, it means an imprint. So, like a typewriter, that's what it's doing, it's imprinting.

And then the anti-type is the other half of it. I guess the type is the, technically it's the imprint and the anti-type is the thing that imprints. So, what we see throughout the Old Testament are different imprints.

What is the thing that is imprinting them? The anti-type, that anti-type is Christ because all things are ultimately fulfilled in Him. I think it's reasonable to speak of almost all this stuff as typology.

Some people think that basically typology should only be reserved for a few of these things. So, for example, in Matthew 2, 15, Matthew says, out of Egypt I called my son, you know, quoting Hosea to apply that to Jesus.

And interestingly, that's when Jesus is going into Egypt. Jesus is being saved out of Judea where the infants are being killed, right? So, Egypt is being reversed in this case. When Jesus goes into Egypt, it's being called going out of Egypt.

This is something where people say, oh, He's just making an analogy based on an Old Testament passage. I mean, this seems to be the point of the Old Testament passage, just to find its fulfillment in Jesus, once again.

And even, and I would say this is even true of passages where you see Jesus in the Old Testament. So, if Jesus is the angel of the Lord, the angel of the Lord goes and kills 800 ,000 of the Assyrians, et cetera, some people will say, well, that's not a type of Christ, that is Christ.

Or the pre-incarnate Christ. But what is He demonstrating by killing all the Assyrians at the last moment before Jerusalem is destroyed and the people are totally annihilated? It's demonstrating what He is going to do in the gospel.

So, His whole activity, even if this is the Son of God pre-incarnate acting, it's to typologically reveal something about Himself that's going to happen later on. Another thing is a lot of people will talk about the danger of allegorizing.

They will basically say, okay, well, typology is good, but allegorizing is bad. But then, very few people actually give a definition to allegory. And allegory just basically means typology that I am uncomfortable with.

So, yeah, there's ways to get too crazy with this. If you read a lot of older writers, they would say things like, well, the ark represents the cross because it's made of wood. Okay, yeah, that's crazy.

The Bible has to invest something with significance for us to read significance out of it. But that happens a number of times that there's an investment in significance. Another one that people will often reject that used to commonly be held, though, is Rahab's scarlet thread.

They used to say this represents the blood of Christ. And now most interpreters would say, no, that's too fanciful. That's too allegorical. But you do have the blood painted on the doorposts not too long before all that.

And then the sparing of them as death passes through, et cetera. You have an investment into that picture of red on the window, on the door. This is not, this is something where the Bible has invested significance.

So that's really what you want to do. You want to look to see, has the Bible invested this image with any kind of significance? And then that gives me warrant to see that significance elsewhere. That doesn't mean it's always the same.

You know, leaven sometimes represents sin. Other times it represents good things about the kingdom of God. You know, it's, I'm not trying to suggest anything too simplistic here. I'm just saying that there are rules to doing this well that aren't entirely unhinged into allegory.

And keep in mind that in Galatians, it talks about the allegory of Sarah and Hagar, right? Allegory is not a dirty word. Sarah and Hagar represent two covenants. One is the Jerusalem below. One is the Jerusalem above.

One is bearing children for slavery. One has free children, et cetera.

All right.

That is, I think that's pretty much the end of my notes here. Any questions on any of this? I might've been assuming too much familiarity with some of these topics. So if so, please stop me. Well, can't stop me at this point, but please ask questions.

Yes. Yeah.

So Edmund Clowney, who was the president of Westminster Theological Seminary, he had this triangle that ended up later on in his ministry becoming a rectangle that represents some things here. So the idea is, okay, you have this Old Testament event or institution, and by the way, this isn't restricted to the Old Testament, but a lot of people speak about it in that way because that's often where the contention is.

How do you interpret the Old Testament? So it's invested with symbolism, and that's like the Old Testament truth.

Okay.

So you have the lamb that's slain, that's invested with some kind of symbolism around forgiveness, et cetera.

Right.

And then you have the history of redemption and revelation, which finds its fulfillment in Christ. And so that is topology. This diagonal up here is topology. So some of these other things are where you jump from Old Testament event to preaching about it, right?

So like, oh, the wood of the ark is the cross or something like that, where there's been no investment of significance in wood. That would just be allegorizing. Or if you go to the symbolism and then go directly to preaching, that's just moralizing, right?

So therefore, you need to lay down your life, et cetera. But yeah, this whole thing is topology. Anyway, yeah, I don't know how... I feel like, yeah, I feel like we just have to go through a lot of examples because I don't have a great categorized list of rules.

Yes.

Framework, yeah. Right, yes. Yeah, you still need to... And then the topology is where you're pointing at, is the diagonal here, where you're showing the fulfillment in Christ directly by the symbol, as opposed to just that, oh, we have forgiveness also.

Or something.

Right.

So yeah, even if you're looking at a law passage, you know, we have the three uses of the law. One shows us our need for Christ, right? And the third shows us, it shows us how we're supposed to live, being empowered with the Spirit to live for Christ, et cetera.

Right.

Yes. They're too short. They're, yeah, they're way too short.

And they...

I imagine that every verse is preachable, but you could change the numbering so that it wouldn't be, right? Like if I stopped and said, one might even say, yeah, that's not... Yeah, that's probably not a preachable passage right there.

I'd probably need a little more than that.

I see.

So yeah. And okay, so one of the ways that this gets abused pretty often, though, is if this is the point of preaching, a lot of times people will just try to show nifty things about Christ, and then that's like the end of the preaching, and therefore they've shown you Christ and they're done.

But preaching is primarily exhortation. There's a whole arc where you're not just supposed to show Christ, but then the further fulfillment of that in his blessing on the church, right? So for example, yes, he's the only son of God, but we are sons in him, and that implies a lot about us too.

Yes, he is the temple. God's presence dwells in him, but then he dwells in us and we are the temple. And so that has implications for us. So if you stop short of what I would call ecclesiotelic hermeneutics, basically going all the way to show the implication for the church, you are stopping short.

But that ends up being what a lot of people do, is they kind of are just trying to impress each other with showing nifty things about Christ and then don't really make the applications that are necessary for the church.

We can talk about that more some other time. I went on too long here. We should get to prayer. All right, let's go ahead and close here. Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for your word. We pray that as we look to Christ in all scripture, that you would strengthen us for the tasks we have, including for prayer.

In Jesus' name, amen.