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 recognising 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 pastures 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, isn't? 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 salmons,

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. And one of the inadequacies in all this that I've noticed is that when some

preachers have shown you how to get to Jesus from the Old Testament passage, they just stop.

They don't actually present the incarnate Lord Jesus as the wonderful person he is,

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