Monday, November 13, 2006

Does Jesus have to be in every talk?

Ok I'm out for advice... Two different viewpoints - one says,
"The Old Testament is meaningless without Christ, so every talk, even those from Old Testament narratives have to contain Jesus"
OR
(as with Dale Ralph Davies) "The whole Old Testament bears witness to Christ; and, the Old Testament does not bear witness only to Christ."

Recently in the Sunday School I help lead we've been doing something known as "the ABC's of God" where we each week learn about different characteristics of God, for example, a "mini-series" - of God is the Creator, so has the right to do what He wants with His creation, God is Wise, so has the wisdom to do this, God does all things for His glory, culminated in God is Sovereign... But (shock horror to some) we didn't use Jesus to explain that God is the Creator... and we used the true story of Joseph to explain Wise... and the culmination of the three in Sovereign was again without mention of Jesus...

have we got it all wrong? Should we have put Jesus into every single lesson or should we stick as we are, explaining what we can learn about God from the Old Testament? Would we lose the richness and the beauty that God inspired the authors to put into the text if we forced it into a formulation that necessarily put Jesus into our talk?

I'd love your comments (any!)...