Chapter 1 Section 4

4. Our method for understanding the implications of these sayings

Our task is to explain the meaning of those sayings that have been preserved - to explore their implications and set out what they really mean. In this volume we will focus only on what the Lord himself said about his death for our redemption - his redeeming work, active and passive. We cannot completely isolate these sayings from the Old Testament prophecies and types that pointed to Messiah's coming or from the apostolic commentary that followed and that pointed back to what he said. However, our focus is the Gospels and our minds are to be filled with the Redeemer's thoughts. Of course, the Old Testament supplied, even to him, things that entered his consciousness and that were embodied in his life. His words undoubtedly contain traces from the past just as they would add a strong tinge what was to follow. Nevertheless, it is the thoughts of Jesus as they found expression in his words that we will concentrate on. We will insert nothing, we will add nothing that is not warranted by what is outlined in the prophets regarding his coming or by the apostolic commentary on the accomplished fact. We will seek only to deduce the Saviour's meaning, according to the force of his own language. We want to avoid any ideas that can be said to be foreign to the meaning of the Saviour's own words.

Christ's own sayings, if allowed to speak for themselves or explained only as far as is necessary to bring out their implications, will be found to convey such a full and rounded outline of the atonement, that almost no aspect of the teaching is left untouched. In discussing them, then, it will be best to catalogue them, then look at them individually. This is better than following the custom of simply giving them in chronological order and not attempting to classify them. Christ's sayings, however, are, by their very nature, so many and so extensive, that an  artificial classification system will not work. Our Lord's sayings are not only too comprehensive to be easily treated in this way but he gives them in ways that tie them to his mission, person, incarnation and design. Thus they cannot well be crystallised in the way that other sayings are by threading them on to a single string supplied by us in order to hold them together. Further, they vary a great deal and may be said to bring before us a new field of enquiry wherever he touches on the subject. Each gives the keynote, as it were, to a whole series or class of similar sayings in the rest of the New Testament, where they are taken up and continued, in line with the practical needs of the churches or in order to counter the changing beliefs of the time. The apostles take up the various sayings and use them in all sorts of ways, giving them a wide range of application.