"In 1971, Fred Craddock
rocked the preaching world. His book As One Without Authority proclaimed
that preaching would continue “for another generation as ‘a marginal annoyance
on the record of a scientific age’” if it did not change its methods. His
underlying message was that the authority determining the value of any sermon
was the hearer. The result was a radically altered presence in America’s
pulpits.
According to Craddock,
preachers cannot preach with authority. He insists, “The preacher exists as one
without authority.” Instead of preaching with authority, they had to appease
the listeners with sermons that tickled their ears and made them feel good. In
essence, Craddock was calling for a new homiletic. Preachers should no longer
preach deductively from the Scriptures, but should preach inductively,
targeting the hearer as the true authority on the quality, quantity, and content
of the sermon. Craddock’s book was a kind of canary in the coalmine for
biblical preaching. With the rise of the church-growth movement and emerging
spirituality, authoritative preaching has fallen out of fashion.
Nevertheless, true
preaching—biblical preaching—must be authoritative preaching. The nature of the
message we preach necessitates authority. If we are faithfully exegeting and
preaching the Scriptures, then our message necessarily comes with authority,
because it comes from God.
Now to say it comes with authority is not to say
that our preaching is abusive, abrasive, or harsh. We must speak the truth in
love, with patience, and with grace. Still, we need
to realize that when we speak we are not speaking for ourselves—we are speaking
for God. Peter gives us this mandate, “As each has received a gift, use it to
serve one another, as good stewards of God's varied grace: whoever speaks, as
one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the
strength that God supplies” (1 Peter 4:10–11). Peter, addressing the issue of
spiritual gifts, breaks them down into these two broad categories: speaking and
serving. In addition, he says if you are speaking—if you are ministering to
someone by way of speech—you need to do it “as one who speaks oracles of God.”
Moreover, his scope is comprehensive. He says this applies to “whoever speaks.”
Anyone who is ministering by word is to speak “as one who speaks oracles of
God.”
The word “oracle” (logion)
is sometimes translated “utterances.” It is used four times in the New
Testament and in each instance it refers to the Old Testament Scriptures. It is
a unique word in that it focuses on the “oracular” nature of Scripture. In
Stephen’s great sermon (Acts 7:38) he refers back to Moses and says, “He
received living oracles to give to us.” They were not dead words from a dead
man they were living, effective, operative and still speaking. That is the
point. They were oracles – the very voice of God in the highest and strictest
sense that the word “oracle” or “utterance” can bear.
B. B. Warfield says that
by referring to the Bible as oracles of God, the apostles saw the Scripture as
“nothing other than the crystallized speech of God.” This is as much the very
words of God as if God were speaking audibly out of heaven.
When you read the New
Testament, you see this attitude toward the Old Testament among the apostles.
They showed a profound reverence toward the text of Scripture as the very Word
of God. They made a regular practice of appealing to the Old Testament text as
to God Himself speaking. You see it in passages where the New Testament writers
refer to the Scriptures as if they were God. In other cases, they refer to God
as if He were the Scriptures. For example, Paul, quoting from Genesis 12:1–3,
writes “The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith,
preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the
nations be blessed.’” (Gal 3:8). In another place, he writes, “For the
Scripture says to Pharaoh, ‘For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I
might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the
earth’” (Rom 9:17). As Warfield points out, the Scripture obviously did not
exist either at the time of Abraham or at the time of Moses’ confrontation with
Pharaoh. The first pages of Scripture would not be written until after these
events when Moses was out in the desert with the people. Paul could still
equate the Scripture with God. Warfield says: “These acts could be attributed
to ‘Scripture’ only as the result of such a habitual identification, in the
mind of the writer, of the text of Scripture with God as speaking, that it
became natural to use the term ‘Scripture says,’ when what was really intended
was ‘God, as recorded in Scripture, said.’”
In Hebrews 1:6, quoting
from Deuteronomy 32, the writer says “And again, when he brings the firstborn
into the world, he says, ‘Let all God's angels worship him.’” Hebrews 1:7,
quoting from Psalm 104, he writes – “Of the angels he says, ‘He makes his
angels winds, and his ministers a flame of fire.’” (cf. also Heb 1:8, quoting
Ps 45). However, in the original context for each of these verses it is not God
who is presenting as speaking. These are the words of others recorded in the
text of Scripture. But they are attributed to God because, as Warfield says,
there was “such habitual identification, in the minds of the writers, of the
text of Scripture with the utterances of God that it had become natural to use
the term ‘God says’ when what was really intended was ‘Scripture, the Word of
God, says.’” In addition, they are never presented as the Words that God once
spoke. The present tense verb presents them as living words still speaking.
Warfield quotes B. F.
Westcott: “Generally it must be observed that no difference is made between the
word spoken and the word written. For us and for all ages the record is the
voice of God. The record is the voice of God, and as a necessary consequence
the record is itself living.… The constant use of the present tense in
quotations emphasizes this truth.”
So when we speak, we are
to speak “as one who speaks oracles (or utterances) of God.” The Scripture that
we share is as much the very words of God as if God were speaking audibly out
of heaven right now.
This is what Peter meant
when he said: “Whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God.” Of course, we
can only do that to the extent that our message and our words are filled with
the Scripture. J. I. Packer writes: The Bible text is the
real preacher, and the role of the man in the pulpit or the counseling
conversation is to simply let the passages say their piece through him…. By
being made God's spokesmen and mouthpieces for His message, the messengers
become emblems, models, and embodiments of God's personal address to each of
their hearer.
It is not as if all we
can do is sit there and read Scripture to people. There is a place for our
words alongside of the words of Scripture. However, we must grasp the point
that the Lord gives us a weighty responsibility because of this inherent
authority that comes along with preaching. When we speak as one who speaks
oracles of God, we need to understand the confidence with which we can speak
into the issues of people’s lives. Again, when we say confidence or talk about
authority, we are not suggesting authoritarianism. Too many preachers become
authoritarian. They make demands of their congregation that are nothing less
than legalism. When you minister the Word of God, you must speak God’s truth not
your own ideas.
Regarding authority in
counseling, Jay Adams says: Authentic biblical counseling is
subject to the directives of the Bible and is not a law to itself. It is
counseling that uses (and does not exceed) the authority of God. Therefore, it
is neither arbitrary nor oppressive. Nouthetic counselors must learn to
distinguish clearly between good advice that they think grows out of biblical
principles and those principles themselves. The latter (“You have no grounds
for divorce; it would be sin!”) they may enforce with the utmost authority; the
former (“Why not set up a conference table in order to begin to learn how to
speak the truth in love?”) they must present with more caution. It is possible
that one’s deductions from scriptural principles may be false. The counselor
must always allow such deductions to remain open for question by the counselee
in a way that he cannot allow a plain commandment of God to be questioned.”
'So we should clarify that
our calling is about the Word of God, faithfully handled, rightly divided, and
then presented and spoken to people “as one who speaks utterances of
God.'"
Today's article was written by Pastor Shane Koehler. Shane also teaches at the Expositors Seminary.
