“Preaching comes through Christ’s sent messengers. This implies that preachers are necessary for preaching and that God must equip and send them to preach on Christ’s behalf. This point builds upon the previous post, which defined preaching as a public authoritative proclamation of the gospel through Christ’s ordained ambassadors.”

Salvation is an expansive term. It essentially means “safety.” Salvation includes the application of Christ’s work from the new birth, through faith and repentance, to Justification, adoption, sanctification, and glorification. Christians share in Christ’s benefits because they are united to him through faith and they enjoy communion in all his benefits. We have been saved (Eph. 2:8), we are being saved (2 Cor. 2:15), and we shall be saved (Rom. 5:9). God uses means such as the Word, the sacraments, and prayer to save sinners (WSC 88). We receive Christ by faith as we use his appointed means to foster and to exercise our faith.

Is reading the Bible in private enough to save us? Not ultimately. Like the Bereans, we must receive the preached Word “with all readiness” and we must search the Scriptures daily “to find out whether these things [are] so” (Acts 17:11). Preaching is necessary for salvation because it is the ordinary means through which we hear Christ and are saved by him. This passage explains why preaching is necessary, who should do it, what it proclaims, its opposition, and its purpose. These truths show us why we need preaching as a means of promoting our salvation through union and communion with Christ.

The necessity of preaching of so clearly highlighted by the Apostle Paul in Romans 10, where he wrote:

“How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they are sent? As it is written: ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the gospel of peace, who bring glad tidings of good things!’ But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, ‘Lord, who has believed our report?’ So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Rom. 10:14-17).

Preaching is necessary because people need to hear Christ in order to believe in him for salvation. Romans 9-11 answers the question why so many Jews did not receive Christ as their Messiah. In chapter 9, Paul answered that not all Jews came to faith because God did not elect all of them to salvation. Chapter 11 concludes that God preserved an elect remnant of ethnic Jews now, such as Paul, and that God would save many more of them in the future. Chapter 10 explains that unbelieving Jews were accountable for their unbelief. Paul explained that God would save both Jews and Gentiles through preaching. He pressed the necessity of preaching in light of the fact that people need to call upon Christ through faith. Circumcised Jews needed to be circumcised in heart (Jer. 9:25-26; Rom. 2:28-29). Uncircumcised Gentiles “were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12). Only Christ’s blood could bring both Jews and Gentiles near to God (v. 13-18). Paul added that it was not enough to hear about Christ. People need to hear Christ’s voice. The Greek text of Romans 10:14 says literally, “How shall they believe him whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear [him] without a preacher?” As Christ spoke in Paul (2 Cor. 13:3), and as Christ pleads with sinners through his ambassadors (2 Cor. 5:20), so people hear Christ through preachers in order to believe Christ himself. This does not mean that Christ does not call people through Bible reading and that he does not use the sacraments and prayer as means of salvation. Yet preaching is the ordinary means by which we must learn Christ and hear his voice (Eph. 4:20). How God can save sinners and how he ordinarily chooses to do so are different questions. When we listen to sermons, we should expect to hear Christ in the sermon as he calls us to himself by his Word and Spirit.

Preaching comes through Christ’s sent messengers. This implies that preachers are necessary for preaching and that God must equip and send them to preach on Christ’s behalf. This point builds upon the previous post, which defined preaching as a public authoritative proclamation of the gospel through Christ’s ordained ambassadors. To identify preaching we must identify the preacher properly. We saw that Christ gifts preachers through the Spirit. Christ sends preachers to do their work by calling them to office through the church. He calls men to office through the election of the congregation and the laying on of hands by a group of elders (presbytery, in Greek. Acts 1:23, 6:3-6, 14:23; 1 Tim. 4:14). This former act is election and latter is ordination. The church recognizes the gifts of those whom Christ is sending to preach; it does not convey gifts to them. This reinforces the idea that we must define preaching largely in terms of office. We should seek to hear and receive Christ through the preaching of those preachers whom he has sent.

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