How to Preach on Difficult Old Testament Texts

Every preacher eventually has to stand in front of their congregation and preach a text that makes them uncomfortable. The binding of Isaac. The extermination of the Canaanites. Lot's daughters. The women taken as war captives in Numbers 31. Psalm 137's invitation to dash Babylonian infants against the rocks.

These texts do not disappear if you avoid them. They sit in your congregation's Bibles, occasionally stumbled across by new believers or handed to skeptics as evidence that the Bible is morally problematic. Engaging them with honesty and theological integrity is one of the most important things a preacher can do.

The Approaches That Don't Work

Allegorizing away the difficulty — treating every morally troubling text as a symbol pointing to something more palatable — avoids the problem rather than addressing it. It also produces a hermeneutical method that can make the text say almost anything.

Whataboutism — responding to the difficult text by pointing to other texts that say something better — is similarly evasive. Yes, the New Testament's ethic of love and enemy-blessing stands in genuine tension with some Old Testament texts. That tension is itself theologically significant and worth exploring, not a resolution to the problem.

Overt harmonization — finding a reading of the text that makes it unproblematically consistent with contemporary moral intuitions — often requires tortured exegesis that more careful members of your congregation will recognize as implausible.

A Better Framework

The most honest and most productive approach to difficult Old Testament texts begins with placing them in canonical context. The Old Testament is not a flat document in which every verse carries equal weight. It has a narrative arc, a developing moral vision, and a teleology that moves toward Christ. Jesus himself describes his teaching as fulfilling the law — bringing to completion what the Torah was moving toward.

This means that the genocide texts of Joshua, for example, can be understood as moments within a particular historical dispensation — the violent establishment of the people through whom God would bring salvation to the world — rather than as timeless moral prescriptions. This does not make them untroubling. But it locates their troubling character within the logic of a story whose ending we know.

The imprecatory psalms — the prayers for the destruction of enemies — need to be understood as honest cries of people in genuine suffering and genuine threat, not as models for Christian prayer. The psalms give voice to the full range of human experience before God, including the rage and desire for vengeance that suffering produces. Naming those desires before God is healthier than suppressing them — but the New Testament direction is toward the transformation of those desires, not their satisfaction.

The Progressive Revelation Framework

One of the most useful theological frameworks for preaching difficult Old Testament texts is progressive revelation: the conviction that God's self-disclosure has been cumulative and developmental, moving from partial to fuller, from accommodation to human limitation toward the full expression of God's character in Jesus Christ.

This framework allows you to acknowledge that some Old Testament passages reflect a less-than-fully-developed moral vision without concluding that the Bible is simply wrong or that God is morally inconsistent. God met the ancient Israelites where they were and moved them progressively toward a higher ethic — one that Jesus ultimately articulates in the Sermon on the Mount.

What Your Congregation Needs to Hear

When you preach a difficult Old Testament text, your congregation needs to know several things. First, that you have read the text honestly and are not pretending the difficulty away. Second, that the difficulty has a context — historical, canonical, theological — that helps account for it without eliminating it. Third, that the Christian's primary orientation to the Old Testament is through Christ — that we read backward from the New Testament's fulfillment, which does not discard the Old Testament but reframes it.

And they need to hear you model the honest engagement with Scripture that you are inviting them to practice: willing to sit with difficulty, unwilling to produce easy answers, committed to the long work of reading the whole Bible faithfully and letting it form you even in its most challenging passages.

The Foundation Beneath the Practice

Every sustainable practice is built on a theological foundation — a set of convictions about what is real and what matters that makes sense of the effort the practice requires. Without that foundation, the practice becomes an arbitrary discipline, held together by willpower alone and abandoned when willpower runs thin.

For the practices described in this article, the theological foundation is the conviction that God is at work in the ordinary — in regular disciplines of attention, in honest conversation, in the slow formation of character, in the faithful repetition of small acts of love and leadership. The God of Scripture is not absent from the mundane. He is present in it. The ordinary is the primary site of spiritual formation.

This means that the most important things a pastor, a spouse, a leader, or a disciple does are usually not the most dramatic things. They are the daily practices that no one observes — the prayer before the staff meeting, the honest conversation after the service, the hour of solitary study, the protected evening with your family when the ministry is calling. These are the investments that compound.

What the Research Shows

The science of human flourishing converges with the biblical wisdom tradition in a striking way: the factors that predict long-term wellbeing, effective leadership, and enduring relationships are almost uniformly relational, behavioral, and habitual rather than circumstantial, technical, or strategic.

People who have stable, close relationships with at least two or three people who know their actual lives — not their performance of their lives — live longer, lead better, and recover faster from adversity. People who have regular practices of physical rest, contemplative attention, and honest self-reflection make better decisions, sustain their work longer, and experience less burnout. People in marriages who maintain regular, uninterrupted time for genuine connection with each other report higher satisfaction even during seasons of high external stress.

None of this is surprising in light of what Scripture says about human beings. We are creatures who need community, rest, and the grounding presence of God. When we structure our lives to give us those things, we function as designed. When we deprive ourselves of them in pursuit of productivity or accomplishment, we pay the predictable price.

Implementation: Starting Smaller Than You Think You Should

The single most common failure mode in attempts at meaningful change is beginning with too ambitious a commitment. The person who resolves to pray for an hour each morning after years of neglected prayer almost never maintains that hour. But the person who commits to ten uninterrupted minutes and actually does it tends to find those ten minutes growing over months into something more substantial.

Start with the minimum effective dose. What is the smallest version of this practice that would still be genuinely valuable? Begin there. Sustain it. Let it grow organically from consistency rather than trying to manufacture consistency through sheer force of will.

Then build accountability into the structure. Tell one person what you are doing and ask them to check in. Put it in your calendar as a recurring appointment that can only be moved, not deleted. Build in a weekly five-minute review of whether you actually did it. Accountability is not self-punishment — it is structural support for the things you've decided matter.

The Long Horizon

The most important reason to take this seriously is not productivity or professional development. It is the person you are becoming over the long arc of a life and a ministry.

Every pastor, every leader, every spouse is becoming someone over time. The question is not whether you are being formed — you are always being formed, by everything you give your attention to. The question is whether you are being formed intentionally, in the direction you have decided matters, or whether you are being formed by default, by the pressures and habits and cultural currents that will shape you whether or not you choose them.

Intentional formation requires intention. It requires the regular, honest, sometimes difficult question: who am I becoming, and is that who I want to be? The answer to that question, returned to consistently over years, is the most important navigational tool available to any human being trying to live and lead well.

The practices are the instruments of that formation. They are not the destination. But they are, reliably, how the destination is reached.