Welcome to another week on Things Unseen.

Something has happened, I think, in the last few decades in some evangelical preaching

and in the training of younger men and women to read and some to preach the Bible.

We hear a lot more about finding Christ in the Old Testament, or preaching Christ from the Old

Testament.

And the key verse is almost always Luke 24, verse 27.

That verse is in the passage about Cleopus and his companion, meeting Jesus on the road to Emmaus on Easter Sunday, and not recognizing him at first.

And we're told that beginning with Moses and all the prophets, Jesus interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.

And what you may have noticed, as I have, at pastor's conferences and in training programs

on Bible reading, and yes, in the preaching of many younger ministers, is that there's

developed a huge emphasis on what I would call getting to Christ, or it might be called

preaching Christ from the Old Testament. Now, that's not a new idea, or it might be called preaching Christ from the Old Testament.

Now, that's not a new idea, is it? People have been doing that for a long, long time.

And I'm all for preaching Christ from the Old Testament because it points to him.

But I have to confess that sometimes today I'm left with the feeling that it's being done

in a very mechanical way.

There are actually books that will tell you the five or the seven or the ten ways to do it,

so that after listening to a number of sermons, you can begin to guess which way the preacher

is going to connect the text to Christ. And it can end up sounding

more formulaic than organic, more like applying a system than talking about a real living flesh

and blood person. So it doesn't sound as though Jesus is someone who is loved so much as Jesus is someone

who solves a problem in the incomplete story of the Hebrew Bible.

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