“Exegesis does not mean mastering the text, it means submitting to it as it is given to us. Exegesis doesn’t take charge of the text and impose superior knowledge on it; it enters the world of the text and lets the text ‘read’ us. Exegesis is an act of sustained humility.”
–Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 57.
“Too many Bible readers assume that exegesis is what you do after you have learned Greek and Hebrew. That’s simply not true. Exegesis is nothing more than a careful and loving reading of the text in our mother tongue. Greek and Hebrew are well worth learning, but if you haven’t had the privilege, settle for English.
Once we learn to love this text and bring a disciplined intelligence to it, we won’t be far behind the very best Greek and Hebrew scholars. Appreciate the learned Scripture scholars, but don’t be intimidated by them.
Exegesis is the furthest thing from pedantry; exegesis is an act of love. It loves the one who speaks the words enough to want to get the words right. It respects the words enough to use every means we have to get the words right. Exegesis is loving God enough to stop and listen carefully to what He says.
It follows that we bring the leisure and attentiveness of lovers to this text, cherishing every comma and semicolon, relishing the oddness of the preposition, delighting in the surprising placement of this noun. Lovers don’t take a quick look, get a ‘message’ or a ‘meaning,’ then run off and talk endlessly with their friends about how they feel.”
–Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 55.
“We are fond of saying that the Bible has all the answers. And that is certainly correct. The text of the Bible sets us in a reality that is congruent with who we are as created beings in God’s image and what we are destined for in the purposes of Christ. But the Bible also has all the questions, many of them that we would just as soon were never asked of us, and some of which we will spend the rest of our lives doing our best to dodge.
The Bible is a most comforting book; it is also a most discomfiting book. Eat this book; it will be sweet as honey in your mouth; but it will also be bitter to your stomach. You can’t reduce this book to what you can handle; you can’t domesticate this book to what you are comfortable with. You can’t make it your toy poodle, trained to respond to your commands.
This books makes us participants in the world of God’s being and action; but we don’t participate on our own terms. We don’t get to make up the plot or decide what character we will be. Eat this book, but also have a well-stocked cupboard of Alka-seltzer and Pepto-Bismal at hand.”
–Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 66.
“That is the mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners: wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christ’s and the righteousness of Christ not Christ’s but ours. He has emptied Himself of His righteousness that He might clothe us with it, and fill us with it.
And He has taken our evils upon Himself that He might deliver us from them… in the same manner as He grieved and suffered in our sins, and was confounded, in the same manner we rejoice and glory in His righteousness.”
–Martin Luther, Werke (Weimar, 1883), 5: 608.
“In Ephesians 5, the apostle Paul requires musical instrumentation in worship. He says there that we are to be ’speaking to [one another] in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in [our] heart to the Lord’ (Eph. 5:19). The translation in the heart would better be rendered as with the heart. We would say ’singing and making melody with all our hearts.’
This is not an arbitrary choice; we can tell this contextually. The short phrase ‘making melody’ is a rendition of a word that means to pluck a string–psallo. Going over a song in our hearts is something we have all done. Singing silently can be done–even though it is frustrating, and is always looking for an outlet.
But very few of us have played the oboe in our hearts, or played a trumpet or piano there. Doing that kind of thing is way too close to playing air guitar. Telling the Ephesians to play the violin in their hearts would be a little bit odd. So Paul tells the Ephesians to sing and play stringed instruments–just the kind of thing that the psalmist would exhort Israel and all the nations to do.
This is music out loud. But the driving force of the exhortation reveals the motive for instruments, and the motive for robust singing. We are told to sing with all our hearts. This kind of heart attitude looks around for ways to make it better, richer, louder. The same kind of thing comes out in Colossians.
As the word dwells in us richly, the music should come out richly. A rich interior life cannot result in a poverty-stricken musical expression. We are here to worship God. We have music before us that is designed to help us with this. We should stand on the balls of our feet, eager to express in song what we believe God has done for us. After all, He is worthy.”
–Douglas Wilson, “Instruments in Worship,” (accessed on 9/17/2009).
“Jesus is the great teacher of lowliness of heart. We need daily to learn of Him. See the Master taking a towel and washing His disciples’ feet! Follower of Christ, wilt thou not humble thyself? See Him as the Servant of servants, and surely thou canst not be proud! Is not this sentence the compendium of His biography, ‘He humbled Himself’? (Philippians 2:8)
Was He not on earth always stripping off first one robe of honour and then another, till, naked, He was fastened to the cross, and there did He not empty out His inmost self, pouring out His life-blood, giving up for all of us, till they laid Him penniless in a borrowed grave? How low was our dear Redeemer brought!
How then can we be proud? Stand at the foot of the cross, and count the purple drops by which you have been cleansed; see the thorn-crown; mark His scourged shoulders, still gushing with encrimsoned rills; see hands and feet given up to the rough iron, and His whole self to mockery and scorn; see the bitterness, and the pangs, and the throes of inward grief, showing themselves in His outward frame.
Hear the thrilling shriek, ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?’ And if you do not lie prostrate on the ground before that cross, you have never seen it: if you are not humbled in the presence of Jesus, you do not know Him. You were so lost that nothing could save you but the sacrifice of God’s only begotten.
Think of that, and as Jesus stooped for you, bow yourself in lowliness at His feet. A sense of Christ’s amazing love to us has a greater tendency to humble us than even a consciousness of our own guilt. May the Lord bring us in contemplation to Calvary, then our position will no longer be that of the pompous man of pride, but we shall take the humble place of one who loves much because much has been forgiven him.
Pride cannot live beneath the cross. Let us sit there and learn our lesson, and then rise and carry it into practice.
–Charles H. Spurgeon, “Evening – June 3,” in Morning and Evening: Daily Readings, Vol. 1 (Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2008), 362-363.
[HT: Blake Hickman]
“We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.”
–C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (San Diego: Harvest, 1964), 75.
“Maledictions upon every preacher who strives after the sublime in the church with an eye to his own glory, ambitious to gain the favor of someone or another. When I preach at Wittenberg, I descend to the lowest level.
I do not look at the doctors and magistrates, of whom about forty are present, but at the hundred or so young people. To these I preach; to these I address myself. They need instruction. If the others do not want to listen– the door is open.”
–Martin Luther, What Luther Says: An Anthology, comp. Ewald M. Plass (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1959), entry no. 3574, p.1118-1119.
“Throughout the narratives of Exodus 19-Deuteronomy there are numerous examples of Israel’s failure to follow God’s will. Here we can see the hand of the author at work. After each episode of disobedience we can see that God gave Israel a new and more complete set of laws.
As Israel continued to transgress the laws given to them, God continued to give them more. God did not give up on His people. When they sinned, he added laws to keep them from sinning further.
The laws were not added to keep them from sinning; the laws were added to keep them from disappearing into the world of sin around them. It thus was the transgressions of the people that provided the motivation for God’s giving the Mosaic law.
As the transgressions increased, more laws were added.”
–John H. Sailhamer, The Meaning of the Pentateuch (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009), 561.
“Every church service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best– if you like, it ‘works’ best– when, through long familiarity, we don’t have to think about it.
As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling.
The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God. But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing from worshipping…
A still worse thing may happen. Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude it, the question ‘What on earth is he up to now?’ will intrude. It lays one’s devotion to waste.
There is really some excuse for the man who said, ‘I wish they’d remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks.’
Thus my whole liturgiological position really boils down to an entreaty for permanence and uniformity. I can make do with almost any kind of service whatever, if only it will stay put.
But if each form is snatched away just when I am beginning to feel at home in it, then I can never make any progress in the art of worship.”
–C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (San Diego: Harvest, 1964), 4-5.
“I could as often have made similar complaints in return. But let us rather pray for each other and strengthen each other’s hands in the Lord. It is wonderful that God should do anything by such poor, grovelling sinners as we are.
One thing, however, is manifested by it: the work is entirely His own and if we should reach the kingdom of God at last, it must be by great grace. God has honoured us not a little by employing us in this great work. But as the honour does not belong to us, we must return it.
The crowns do not seem to fit our heads. Therefore, they must be cast at the feet of Jesus.”
–Andrew Fuller, as quoted in James Culross, William Carey (New York: A.C. Armstrong, 1882), 78. This is excerpted from a letter Fuller wrote to Carey in 1803.
[HT: Seth Wachtel]
“The Spirit of God is not in it if it does not glorify Christ.”
–Charles H. Spurgeon, “The Work of the Holy Spirit” in Spurgeon on the Holy Spirit (New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 2000), 58.
“My brethren, it is quite certain that no man ever begins the new birth himself. The work of salvation never started with the efforts of any man. God the Holy Spirit must begin it. Now, the reasons no man ever started the work of grace in his own heart are apparent. The best reason of all is because he cannot.
He is dead. The dead may be made alive, but the dead cannot make themselves alive, for the dead can do nothing. Besides, the new thing to be created as yet has no being. The uncreated cannot create. But you say, ‘Man can create.’ Well, if hell can create heaven, then sin can create grace. Let any man create a fly, and afterward let him create a new heart in himself.
Until he has done the lesser thing, he cannot do the greater. Besides, no man will. If any man could convert himself, there is no man who would. The will to love God, the desire to be in unison with Christ, is not to be found in any man who has not already been brought to be reconciled with God through the death of His Son.”
–Charles H. Spurgeon, “The Work of the Holy Spirit” in Spurgeon on the Holy Spirit (New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 2000), 16-17.
“Evangelical approaches to the Messiah in the Old Testament often have focused on reading the New Testament back into the Old Testament. I am suggesting that one should also move in the other direction.
The Old Testament sheds a great deal of light on the New Testament. Our primary objective should be to read the New Testament in light of the Old Testament, not vice versa.”
–John H. Sailhamer, The Meaning of the Pentateuch (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009), 246.
“The New Testament is not so much a guide to understanding the Old Testament as it is the goal of understanding the Old Testament. Unless we understand the Old Testament picture of the Messiah, we will not recognize the New Testament picture of Jesus.”
–John H. Sailhamer, The Meaning of the Pentateuch (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009), 233.
