PREACHING CHRIST FROM DANIEL
Foundations for expository sermons
By Sidney Greidanus. Eerdmans. 440 pages. £19.54
ISBN 978 0 802 867 872
Preachers know they need to preach Christ from the Old Testament. The challenge is doing this in a way that respects the Old Testament context as well as the fuller revelation that comes with Christ.
Sidney Greidanus has been at the forefront of helping preachers rise to these challenges for a number of years. This book is his attempt to help preachers preach Christ from one of the most challenging Old Testament books — the book of Daniel.
The book begins with some introductory comments about the book of Daniel (date of composition, author, audience, the shape and structure of Daniel, overall message). Each subsequent chapter deals with the text of Daniel — taking a literary unit at a time. These chapters follow a repeated pattern (Text and Context, Literary Features, Theocentric Interpretation, Textual Theme and Goal, Ways to preach Christ, Sermon Theme and Goal, Greidanus’s own ‘worked example’ showing how he would preach the section).
This is obviously a book for preachers. So, as a preacher, what do I make of it? This book has real strengths — I appreciated the emphasis on avoiding easy, moralising applications based on Daniel and his friends’ behaviour. Instead, Greidanus urges us to focus on God in each section. I was encouraged to preach Daniel and excited about helping people see the greatness of God from this book. Did I appreciate everything? No — I occasionally found Greidanus’s advice on ‘Ways to preach Christ’ a little forced and repetitive. I would have valued some discussion on the relative merits of each of his seven ways to preach Christ. This book is not a replacement for personal detailed text study. However, I would gladly recommend this book as a help to preachers as they wrestle with this complex, beautiful, profound and often misunderstood part of God’s Word.
Jim Murkett,
pastor, Lower Kingswood Evangelical Church, Surrey
