Lecture

Hello, I’m Haddon Robinson, and we’ll be spending some time together talking about preaching. I’ve been doing that now for almost 50 years, and I’ve taught all kinds of folks never quite like this, but I think we’ll have a great time together. I’m interested in having reaction from you and hopefully I can contribute something to your life, to your ministry.

John Stott, the noted British theologian, has a book on preaching. It’s entitled Between Two Worlds. The major image that Stott has in his book is that of a bridge. As you know, a bridge spans the gulf between two land masses separated usually by some kind of ravine or river. And Stott says the preacher is a bridge. Just as a bridge brings two land masses together, the preacher has to have one foot in the ancient world of the Bible and another foot in the modern world and, like a bridge, he brings the two together.

James Cleland in his book on preaching has a different image. He talks about bifocal preaching and he says it’s as though the preacher has an eye for the text and for the Bible and then an eye for his people. And if he gets them together, they will see clearly and he will see clearly what the Bible is saying to people today.

Images are helpful. I think, however, that it’s even a more difficult challenge to be an effective biblical preacher. For us to preach well we have to be a part of many different worlds. For example, one world that we have to enter is the ancient world—the world of the Bible. It’s the world that we enter through a study of exegesis. Exegesis is how we come to grips with the text, and when you enter that world you discover that you have to know its history. When God gave His revelation, He gave it to certain people living at certain times in certain places, and to understand the revelation you have to know who those people were and what they were going through. The Bible can never mean what it hasn’t meant, and so you have to ask, “Well what did this mean to those people to whom this Word was given?” So you have to know the history.

I don’t know how much time you give to history but we have lived for a number of years in the northern part of the United States and we lived in the state of Massachusetts in a town called Gloucester. It’s the oldest fishing village in the United States. It was started in 1623. You would understand then that Gloucester has a great many antique shops. In fact, one of the people who runs one of those shops has a sign out front. One part of the sign—one side of the sign—says, “We buy junk.” The other side of the sign said, “We sell antiques.” Well if you like old junk or you like antiques, you would love that area of the country. But imagine that you go into an antique shop. Usually they’re kind of musty and dark, but the nice thing about it is you can wander around, see everything there. But imagine you go into one of the shops and you see a trunk. It’s old, it’s dusty, but you’re curious about old trunks so you open its squeaking lid and you look inside. You discover that it’s covered with a kind of velvet so you rub your hand along the velvet sides and to your surprise you hit a lever that has a secret compartment. In that compartment there’s a bunch of letters. They’re tied with an old, dark ribbon.

So you put the trunk lid down, sit on the trunk, open that packet of letters. As you read, you get the idea that these letters were written by a young man to a young woman. You’re not sure who she is and what their relation is. Maybe just good friends or maybe a fiancée or maybe even his wife. There are things about those letters you would understand. You’d understand his sense of loneliness. When he went off to battle, he thought he’d be away a few days and now it’s stretched into months, even years. He’s lonely. You could also understand his sense of grief. Many of the young men who came with him to battle have been killed. You can understand his sense of fear. He’s going into battle the next day and he doesn’t know what will happen to him.

There’s a lot of things you could understand about those letters, but there are other parts of the letters that you might not understand—references to Appomattox and Chambersburg and Gettysburg or references to McClellan and to Grant or to Lee or to Jackson. Unless you understood the war between the states [of the] United States, that would all be foreign to you. You guess that these were important places, important people, but couldn’t be sure. I have experienced that. A while ago, I was over in Taiwan and I went to the Chiang Kai-shek Museum. Magnificent place, and there were all kinds of oriental vases, pictures, and I was dazzled by their exquisiteness, but I didn’t understand a lot of it. I didn’t understand Chinese history. I didn’t understand the dynasties. Had I understood the history I would have gotten a lot more out of it.

So when you study the Bible it’s important to know the history of the Bible. If you’re going to study the minor prophets in the Old Testament—the last 12 prophets—it’s hard to even begin to understand them unless you know what was taking place in the land of Israel or the country surrounding it almost 3,000 years ago. History helps us enter into the ancient world. So one thing that you have to know is the history.

Another thing that’s helpful to know is the language. Now let me be very clear: you don’t have to know Hebrew or Greek to understand the Scriptures. It’s amazing how much of the Bible you can learn if you have a translation in your language and just read it. But there is some benefit to knowing the languages. A translator is really an interpreter. That is, in order to translate from one language to another he has to make decisions, and therefore you will find in every translation a vagueness—some phrases you just don’t understand—even though they’re in your language because the translator has to decide how to translate a phrase and he may not be sure.

For example, in the second letter that Paul wrote to the Corinthians, Paul says, “The love of Christ constrains me,” and in the grammar you don’t know if that’s an object of genitive or a subject of genitive, and by that I mean you don’t know if Paul is talking about “My love for Christ” or “Christ’s love for me.” A translator will make a decision about that and then he makes the decision and the decision turns around and makes the translation. So when you come to passages like that, it’s helpful to know a bit of the language. Even to read a commentary, you are benefitted if you know the language.

There’s another reason that it’s helpful to learn the language and that is languages are the vehicle in which we think. We can’t think apart from language, and your language determines how you think. Benjamin Lee Whorf was a noted linguist who worked with the Hopi Indians in the American Southwest. Whorf discovered that when somebody explained the theory of relativity to them, they understood it and the reason was that the Hopi language has no time in it. We have in English, we have all kinds of time. We have past, present, future. We have passed beyond the past; future beyond the future. When we think of time, we can think of it exactly. Hopis can to that. Either something happened here where they are or away from them, and since that’s their way of thinking because that’s their language, they understood the theory of relativity.

[Albert] Einstein himself, I hear, insisted that he could not have thought of the theory of relativity in English. He had to have German and mathematics. Don’t let me fool you in that. I don’t quite understand why that’s true, but it is. So isn’t it that how we speak determines how we think. And the Inuits, the people who live up in the northern part of Canada—sometimes called Eskimo—don’t have a single word for “snow” in their language. Not a single word. They have 17 words for [describing] snow. They have a word for snow falling and snow hitting the ground, snow beginning to freeze and then or beginning to melt. I mean when an Inuit thinks about snow, he can really think about snow.

English, however, we have something similar to that. We don’t have a single word for a bread product made from wheat. If you visit our country, you’ll find that there’s a place where we have bagels and we have donuts. We have Twinkies, but we don’t have a single word for bread product made from wheat. What I’m trying to point out is what your language does is not only help you to communicate, it guides the way you think. So to get into the ancient world, it’s a help to have some familiarity with the languages in which the Bible was written.

But there’s a third thing that you need to know. To get into the ancient world you not only need to know its history and be aware of its language, but it helps to know the culture. Just as the biblical writers could not think or write outside their own language, they could not think or write outside their culture. All of us are sort of entrapped in the cultures in which we live.

Let me give you an example. We do a program called Discover The Word—a radio program—and awhile ago we decided that we’re going to do a series on the proverbs in the Old Testament. Now at first glance, doing the proverbs would be an easy task because proverbs are universal. In the ancient world they were universal. People came from one country and another [and] they swapped proverbs. The mark of your being an educated, intelligent person is you knew the proverbs of the wise. So it seemed like it would be an easy thing to do the proverbs. We thought that until we got into it. We discovered that some proverbs in the later part of our book of Proverbs were written apparently to young men who were studying to be in the bureaucracy of Solomon. And so they get all kinds of advice. That is, if you’re studying and you’re trying to get a position, when you go out to dinner, somebody takes you to a meal, don’t make a slob of yourself, you know—don’t just take all the food and eat it. Remember that there are very few things given to you as a young executive that don’t have some strings attached.

Or there’s a command that: don’t drink hard liquor. Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging, and if you’re an executive in Solomon’s bureaucracy you ought not cloud your thinking. There’s another passage, a chapter later, in which it says if a poor man is having a difficult time, give him a shot of liquor. It’ll help him. So the command there is not to all Christians everywhere not to drink liquor. It says don’t drink it if it clouds your mind.

Or at the beginning of the book of Proverbs there are two or three proverbs that tell you not to cosign a note. That is, if somebody takes out a loan and they want you to be surety for it, you cosign. And the writers say, “Don’t do it.” Don’t do it. If you have cosigned a note, beg, plead, do anything you can to get out of it. They’re almost ballistic about it. But the reason for that is that in the ancient world if you cosigned a note and the person who took out the loan didn’t pay it, you had to pay it. And if you didn’t pay it, they could take you, they could take your wife, they could take your children and put you into slavery. Now most countries today would not be that strict. It would not be that dangerous. So to understand why the writers of the proverbs are telling people, “Don’t cosign a note,” it does help doesn’t it to know something out of the culture in which they wrote. At any rate, that’s the task.

The first thing we have to do if we’re going to be true to the Bible is we have to know the world of the Bible. We have to know its history, have to know its language or at least be aware of the language. We have to know its culture.