John Owen on the Glory of Christ: A Paradigm for Preaching
If I were to ask you, “What is the best book on preaching you have read?”, what would you say?
Here is the beginnings of a possible list:
Evangelical Eloquence by R L Dabney
I Believe in Preaching by John Stott
Preaching and Preachers by Lloyd-Jones
The Preacher and Preaching Ed. Samuel Logan (not to be confused with the above!)
The list could go on. But I doubt many people would say, “The Glory of Christ by John Owen”!
And yet, I think Owen sets before us what is the biblical paradigm for preaching in this wonderful discourse. Before I get to that, I want to say a few things about the book.
Owen’s basic premise is this: the Christian’s great need is to see the glory of Christ. Indeed, he says: “This alone…will give them such satisfaction and nothing else.”
There are a number of key texts for Owen (for example John 17:24), but if there is a controlling text it is 2 Corinthians 3:18: “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.”
Seeing Christ and his glory by faith now and by sight in the world to come is how we are transformed. This is the key to sanctification – people need to see the glory of Christ. That being the case, this is what Owen proceeds to do throughout the rest of his book. He delights and rejoices in the glory of Christ in his humbling himself, in his work, in his love, in his exaltation, in his revelation in the Old Testament, in his union with the church, in his giving himself to believers and in his restoration of all things. It is simultaneously a theological feast and doxological exercise.
One striking thing to note is where Owen starts as he unveils something of Christ’s glory. He begins with Christ as the representative of God. Christ is the perfect revelation of the Father. In other words, the glory of Christ is rooted in and explicative of the glory of the Triune God. For Owen, the two foundational truths of the Christian faith are the doctrine of the Trinity and the incarnation. We would do well to concentrate much of our meditation on these truths.
How does this help us in preaching?
Quite simply by showing us what our main duty in preaching is: displaying the multifaceted, multidimensional glory of Christ.
Every time we preach to our people, we are to put Christ forth. This doesn’t mean at the end of every sermon we give a formulaic 3 point gospel presentation. Such preaching becomes monochrome, predictable and shallow. Rather, we are to see Christ in the text because he is there. He is there at creation. He is there as the Angel of the LORD. He is there speaking to Moses, leading the people out of Egypt, the rock from which they receive water, the hand from which they receive bread from heaven. Christ is the one who fights for Israel and fights against Israel. He is the one foreshadowed in all the types and figures. And when we come to the incarnation and what follows, what was in SD in the OT becomes HD in the NT. Each text of Scripture gives us a unique facet of the glory of Christ.
This point is made by an illustration from Owen that I love (and, yes, he is good at illustrations when he uses them!):
“Nor doth the Scripture itself in any one place, make an entire proposal of the glory of Christ…nor is it capable of so doing, nor can there be any such representation of it unto our capacity on this side of heaven. If all the light of the heavenly luminaries had been contracted into one, it would have been destructive, not useful to our sight; but being by divine wisdom distributed into sun, moon, and stars, each giving out his own proportion, it is suited to declare the glory of God and to enlighten the world.” (Vol 1, page 409).
This is what our people need: they need to see Christ in his glory. This is why the task of preaching is itself glorious, because by our feeble efforts the Holy Spirit paints a picture of the glorious Christ on the minds of our people and moulds the very core of their personalities into his very image. This is your business, preacher: lift up Christ!
David Pfeiffer is the minister of Whaddon Road Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Cheltenham, England.
