Preaching the Old Testament in light of Christ

Bob Hyatt on a story that's frequently misused in sermons:

For instance, the story of David and Goliath? So not about how you can defeat the giants in your life (how many times have you heard that sermon???) It's about how you can't – but God can. And it's specifically about how He does so through the weakness of the substitute – the unlikely one who stood in Saul's place, who came in the name of the Lord and the power of the Spirit and defeated the enemy of the people of God. If you read that story and see yourself in David, you are reading it wrongly. You're not David – you are the cowering Israelites who face an undefeatable foe…

But God is on the scene, sending One who can defeat whatever we face – and that's who David points us to – Jesus. The point of the story is not 'Be like David.' You can't… it's trust Jesus, the real and true David who wins the victory over death and sin.

The more I read of Scripture, the more I see that this is the way it's meant to be read – it all points to Jesus and in such amazingly literate ways as to boggle the mind. As Art said, the writers of Scripture were better writers than even they knew…

The entire post is worth reading, including this paragraph:

The Old Testament is a record of failure and the New a record of Jesus and His success where others had failed – His success and the success of the Gospel in bringing the life that the Law could not bring through obedience and the Prophets couldn't bring through their preaching.