Getting to Christ Through a Canonical Approach

I finished Sailhamer’s Intro last week and have been digesting it for several days. I’ll do a full review later but for right now want to focus in on what I was hoping to find in reading this book: a way to preach Christ legitimately from the OT. I’m pretty happy with where Sailhamer took me, even though I feel like he pulled a Moses on me and took me all the way to the brink of the Promised Land and then stopped short of it. More on that below. The Canonical Approach, in a nut-shell, attempts to demonstrate that the final form of the OT Text in and of itself self-consciously lacks fulfillment and finds that fulfillment in Christ. I will attempt to unpack this definition below.

The first step is to state unequivocally and unapologetically that the Text of the OT as we have it today and reflects the original is fully inspired and inerrant. While this may seem superfluous to state, this will be our lifeline as we proceed into discussions about the Canon. If you feel queasy below and think you are smelling the stench of liberalism on me…look up to this paragraph. The Text of the OT is the very Word of God. It carries the full weight of His authority and purpose. What God wanted to communicate to His people He sovereignly accomplished in various ways to produce a Text that bears His stamp of approval.

Step two may make some of you uncomfortable. The fact that the final form of the OT Canon is inspired does not necessitate that it did not have several editors over decades or even centuries. Consider the Psalter. Psalm 90 was written by Moses so it would date around 1400 BC. Psalm 23 was penned by David about 400 years later. Psalm 137 is a lament of the exiles in Babylon which would take its compositional date into the 500s BC. What that means is that individual psalms were written over a period of 800 years. If we argue (and I do) that the Psalter in its present canonical state has a theological message that is more profound than its individual psalms, we have to argue that this theological message was not complete until the post-exilic period. This final, edited form of the Psalter bears the Pauline stamp “God-breathed” (2 Tim 3:16). What that means for our reading of the Psalms is significant. I certainly want to ask what David was trying to communicate with Psalm 23. However, I want to do much more than that. The theological message that got the “God-breathed” stamp of approval was the one that was created when an editor gathered a bunch of the psalms together and created the Psalter consisting of these 150 psalms. So rather than just asking what David is doing in Psalm 23, what I really want to know is what the post-exilic editor is doing in putting Psalm 23 in the Psalter at that place (number 23).

That shouldn’t have made very many people queasy—but if I move the discussion from the Psalter to the Pentateuch I may be getting into trouble. While most everybody would be comfortable saying that Moses did not personally compose the part in the Pentateuch where he dies, what if he did not personally compose the last two chapters of Deuteronomy? That is actually exactly what Sailhamer argues. While the events described in chapters 33 and 34 really did happen and Moses did say the things attributed to him in them, they were not part of the “original” Pentateuch. A post-exilic scribe added them to further his post-exilic theological goals. Let me re-emphasize what I mean with this. The historical events described actually did take place. Moses did pronounce the blessing attributed to him in these chapters. However, it was not recorded in the way we have it today until the post-exilic period. If you are interested in why Sailhamer thinks this way, feel free to read up on it in his Introduction to OT Theology or his Pentateuch as Narrative.  This scribal addition was done under the supervision and prompting of the Spirit of God and the product was a God-breathed Text.

 

Step three is where it starts getting really interesting. Step one argued that the final canonical form of the Text of the OT as we have it today is inspired Word of God. Step two argued that much of Scripture, including the Pentateuch, was not completed in its final canonical form until the post-exilic period. Now in step three we can finally examine the Pentateuch to see why all of this matters.

In Deuteronomy 18:15 Moses promises that in the future God will raise up a “prophet like me,” and when He does, Israel is to listen to him. In Deuteronomy 34:10 the post-exilic editor of the Pentateuch makes this comment: “No prophet has arisen again in Israel like Moses whom the LORD knew face to face.” Think about all the prophets since Moses—Samuel, Nathan, Elijah, Elisha, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel—and the post-exilic editor knew every single one of them. Yet he still affirms that the future hope for Israel—the promise of Deuteronomy 18:15—is yet unfulfilled. What is even more significant is that at the time that this editor wrote, the office of prophet had died out. The prudent Israelite was no longer one who went to the prophet to receive instructions from the LORD first hand, but the exegete—one who meditates on the written Word day and night” (Ps 1). The wise man has replaced the prophet as the virtuous Israelite. Thus, there is no fulfillment of Deut 18:15 in sight at the point in time when the editor is writing. The OT Canon ends with a self-conscious awareness that there must be more to come.

 

Unfortunately Sailhamer stops at step three and does not take his readers into the Promised Land of step four. If you read the OT as a canonical composition that self-consciously realizes that it lacks fulfillment in and of itself, you can preach Christ as the fulfillment of the eschatological expectation of the OT Canon. Both Peter and Stephen identify Jesus as the fulfillment of Deuteronomy 18. He is the prophet like Moses. While the final editors of the OT Canon knew that something was missing, they were confident that there would be “grace in the end” (as Dr. Kai, my former OT Prof would say). Thus, they shaped the OT canon—from Genesis to Chronicles in their Hebrew Bible—with the eschatological theme of “grace in the end” in mind. Enter Jesus—the fulfillment of the eschatological expectations of the OT canon.