Commentary Shopping!

My wife has a Kindle. She loves it. She is constantly reading from it. Since she got it for her birthday I think I have seen her with an actual book in her hand once.

Don't look for me to get one any time soon.

I love books. I love their feel, their smell. I love the turning of the pages. I like to look at them, feel them in my hands, see them on a shelf. There are few things in life more beautiful than a book shelf full of interesting books. I want a book in my hand, not a thin electronic device.

And since I love books so much, there are few things in life more exciting to me than going book shopping. Of course, going to a book store is the absolute best, but one cannot always do that. Besides, a book store will not usually be carrying a given particular book I may be looking for. That is because I am picky when it comes to books. I know what I want and that usually means something rare, something specific, and definitely in hardcover.

Some day I want a huge house with an entire floor dedicated to my library. Why not?

So anyway, tonight I went on-line shopping for resources on the book of Isaiah. I already have access to the usual suspects--Matthew Henry, John Gill, John Calvin. Don't get me wrong, these are all valuable. But they are on-line. They're not on my shelf. And if I'm going to learn this book I'm going to learn it well, so I'll want more than three teachers.

When I studied and taught Galatians I had access to eight commentaries, all of which I read in their entirety. By far my favorite was Martin Luther's. It was priceless for its historical value alone. I could feel his passion jumping off the page as he expounded the doctrine of sola fide, likely from hand-copied pages of Paul's epistle.  Luther's commentary was especially interesting in light of the fact that it was written at the height of the Reformation and that the Reformation centered around teaching found in that book.

Another great one was one I discovered by "accident." It was written by George G. Findlay, a late 19th century Methodist preacher who was simply astounding in his insight.

These are my teachers, my seminary professors. These are the men God gifted to the Church for my benefit.

Ephesians 4:[11] And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, [12] to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, [13] until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ,

With that in mind, and with cash short, I went looking for one additional commentary I had in mind (actually two, one now and one later), and one rare, odd, or more interesting choice. I think I have found them.

The first is part of a series which I have always found reliable and valuable. It is the New American Commentary Series. It has Isaiah in two volumes. I found both volumes at one low price, and not a bad price considering they are hardcover and new.

As for my exotic choice . . . I am certainly coveting a particular book right now and will likely get it next. It is The Commentary of Ibn Ezra on Isaiah.

Never heard of him? According to Wikipedia:

Rabbi Abraham ben Meir Ibn Ezra (Hebrew: אברהם אבן עזרא or ראב"ע, Arabic ابن عزرا; also known as Abenezra) (1089 — 1164) was born at Tudela, Spain in 1089, and died c. 1164, apparently in Calahorra. He was one of the most distinguished Jewish men of letters and writers of the Middle Ages. Ibn Ezra excelled in philosophy, astronomy/astrology, poetry, linguistics, and exegesis; he was called The Wise, The Great and The Admirable Doctor.

Yeah. That guy. I feel like now would be a good time to start my collection of his commentaries.

Some Hermeneutical Principles

Hermeneutics is the science and art of biblical interpretation. It is a science because it is based on set rules and specific methods. It is an art because it is imperfect and sometimes uncertain. Rather than go into the history of biblical interpretation and without going into the details of the competing theories of how best to go about it, let me just lay out briefly what method I will use--what method I always try to use--when approaching any biblical text. The way I try to interpret Scripture is really the way one should attempt to understand any writing or literature. Let me explain.

Certain questions must be asked when approaching any body of writing.

a) Who wrote it?
b) To whom was he writing?
c) Why was he writing?
d) What is the genre?
e) In what language was it written?
f) If in a foreign language are there barriers and limitations in the translation into the receptor language?
g) What is the time-period and culture involved?
h) What is the historical setting?
i) Are there similar writings with which to compare it?

I could probably go on, but you get the idea. The bottom line is that I want to understand it in the same way that the original readers were intended to understand it by the original writer. If I can do that, then I am off to a great start.

As large a task as this seems, it is still only the beginning for the Bible student. The next questions to ask are--what does it say about God? What have I learned about God? What was God saying to the original readers? What was God saying to the Ages? What is God saying to me?

Without boring the reader with too many details, let me just say the method I use is the method used by confessing evangelicals for the last, well, since Martin Luther. That is, I use the historical/grammatical method of interpretation. This is the method I outlined above.

And I take a high view of Scripture. In other words, like Jesus and the Apostles I treat it as divinely inspired. This means that while real human authors wrote real human texts to real human people in real human language, there is another, deeper aspect to these. The evangelical view of inspiration is not mechanical dictation as it is sometimes caricatured. It is genuine inspiration--but on a higher level than, say, poetical inspiration. The words are Isaiah's in every real sense. But they are also God's.

2 Timothy 3:[16] All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, [17] that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.

2 Peter 1:[19] And we have something more sure, the prophetic word, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, [20] knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. [21] For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

So as Isaiah was carried along by the Holy Spirit let us pray as Paul did for the Ephesians . . .

Ephesians 1:[17] . . . that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, [18] having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, [19] and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might [20] that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, [21] far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. [22] And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, [23] which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

In the Year That King Uzziah Died . . .

Introductory Notes to the Study of Isaiah.

Around the year 1050 BC a Semitic tribal community in and around the area of the world now known as Palestine developed into a monarchy. The new kingdom--Israel. Her first king--Saul. Saul reigned in this tiny kingdom for forty years, but his sons did not reign after him. Instead, the scepter fell to a shepherd/warrior/musician named David. David started a dynasty.

King David reigned over Israel from 1010-970 BC. When he died, the throne went to one of his youngest sons, Solomon. Solomon's famous reign ended in 930 or 931 BC. At this time the northern tribes of Israel rebelled and formed their own kingdom, but the southern kingdom went on with Solomon's son, Rehoboam, sitting on his father's diminished throne.

The eighth king to sit on the throne of Judah after the split was Amaziah. This would be some one hundred twenty years after the death of Solomon. Amaziah had a brother named Amoz and Amoz had a son named Isaiah. This is the Isaiah of Scripture--the prophet whom God used to pen the biblical book by the same name.

When Amaziah died, his son Ahaziah took the throne. Ahaziah was distinguished in several ways as a king in Judah. For one, he was known by two different names. The books of the Kings refer to him as Ahaziah, but in the priestly Chronicles he is Uzziah. Henceforth I will refer to him as Uzziah as well.

When Uzziah became king the kingdom was in shambles. War with Israel and Syria to the north had left it weak and nearly defenseless. The Jerusalem wall had been breached. Things were looking down. But Uzziah was an effective ruler and during his reign the kingdom strengthened tremendously. This brings us to what would ultimately become Uzziah's downfall--his pride.

At the height of Uzziah's success he attempted to unite the Jewish priesthood with its monarchy. In other words, as king he attempted to usurp high priestly duties. In spite of the warnings of dire consequences by the priesthood, Uzziah would not be deterred. He went into the holy place to offer incense and was stricken with the dreaded leprosy for his affront.

Uzziah's reign lasted fifty-two years. During his reign Rome was founded. In Greece, the first Olympiad was held. The world's first empires were forming and Palestine was becoming a thoroughfare for traveling conquerors. The world was growing up, so to speak. Times were good for the people of both Israel and Judah as well. Prosperity was wide-spread, but with it came decadence and spiritual lapse.

Into this mix God sent a young prophet named Isaiah, cousin to the king, younger than the king, destined to have much more impact than any earthly monarch. He is the first of the major prophets. His message affected his culture and society, and went on to transcend it as he pointed the people's eyes and hearts first inward, and then upward. Isaiah is the prophet of the Messiah.

"In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw also the LORD high and lifted up . . ."

Isaiah and Paul - A Direction and Focus

When I was a pastor the method I used in deciding the course of my teaching and preaching material was simple. I prayed for wisdom and understanding. I chose portions of Scripture which intrigued me most at the time. And I studied them thoroughly so as to be able to teach them as accurately as possible in an expository fashion. Not all of my teaching/preaching was expository, but 80% of it was. This is because I trusted that God's word itself would consistently bring to our attention the most important topics, the topics God thinks are most relevant to our lives.

I find that one does best what he enjoys most. When work is a passion it becomes joy and results in excellence. When it is not enjoyed it is toil and becomes a drudgery. For the Christian, the Scriptures should be his passion. For me as a pastor, they most certainly were. I want to know truth. Jesus said to the Father, "Your word is truth." He also said to his disciples that they would know the truth, and that the truth would set them free.

I have been mulling over ideas for several days now on what direction the theological/devotional writing of this blog should take. It occupied my thoughts last night and this morning. It distracted me in church. What direction I decide to go on this blog will also determine the direction of my own Bible study and reading material, so it is not just the blog at stake, but also my personal devotional life.

Since I have no doubt God makes us who we are, works providentially in our lives, and gives us all our godly wants and desires, then I do believe that whatever direction I go, though my own choice, will ultimately be seen to have been his choice as well. It is He, after all, who does according to his will both in the armies of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth and none can stay his hand nor even question him.

So where shall we go? If our goal is bringing to God the most glory, exalting him in our thoughts, and if the Scripture is the vehicle we will use to take us there, and if all my own godly thoughts and desires come first from Him, then I will choose the "where" from my wants and trust him that this is a good thing.

I am intrigued right now, most of all, by two men in the Bible. They are Isaiah and Paul.

I have always loved the book of Isaiah. To me, it is the most sublime, contains the noblest themes, of all the Old Testament. I have access to tools which will help me to study it more thoroughly than many men who lived in the past. Most of these tools are at my fingertips, but perhaps I will order a book or two as well. Yes, this is where we will go.

And since I am a man of many and varied interests I am also going to tackle the life of Paul. I taught Galatians once before on Wednesday nights over an eight month period and I also spent about the same length of time once on the Acts of the Apostles. These two books contain the majority of Paul's biographical history, but not all. I want to tackle his life in biographical fashion. I have a couple of books this will give me an excuse to read and this will also enable me to get certain events in his life placed in order in my mind.

There, that helps me with some direction and focus.

It's All About the Name

Pay attention sometime to all the times in the Bible when God says he will do something or not do something for "his name's sake" or "because of his great name."

Do you ever stop to wonder why God does what he does? What is his motivation? What is the primary motive behind everything?

It is his Name.

God's Name is his fame. It is his reputation. It is that by which he is known in the universe. You and I use language like this all the time. We may say of someone, "So-n-so is an honest man. He has a good name in this community." Of course we are talking about someone's reputation.

Well, God's primary focus is his own reputation--his own name. And if you think about it, God's name is the most important thing that there is.

Just as it is our primary duty (and love's great longing) to give all glory, praise, and honor to God . . . and it is, you know . . . so it is God's primary righteousness to give all glory, honor, and praise to himself. It would be sinful for him to do anything less. And by very definition God cannot sin.

This is a lot to chew on. A whole lot. And it's pretty chewy stuff. It's not milk, it's meat. But I want us to meditate on it because it is truth and it is the kind of truth that can mean a paradigm shift in our lives and in our thinking once we grasp it. Yeah, it's a game-changer. Why? Because, if we're honest, we're all naturally self-absorbed people and we tend to think everything is about us. It is so ingrained we tend not to even notice it.

But it's not about us, it's about his Name.

Consider again: for us, it is wrong to be self-absorbed. Why? Because we are not God and there are more important things than us in the world. Can that be said about God? No. So for God, it is the opposite. If anything were to be more important to God than his own glory it would be sinful on his part.

God will not act contrary to his name, nor will he act in a way to defame his name. Conversely, everything God does brings honor and glory to his name and was designed for that purpose.

I will give one example and let it go for now. But look for me to give many, many examples in the near future. I won't even take the time to break this passage down right now, but I promise to in the next day or so. Here it is:

Isaiah 48: (ESV)
[9] “For my name's sake I defer my anger,
for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you,
that I may not cut you off.
[10] Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver;
I have tried you in the furnace of affliction.
[11] For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it,
for how should my name be profaned?
My glory I will not give to another.

A Godward Focus

While contemplating what should be the focus and emphasis of this blog it occurred to me that the blog is supposed to reflect my life as it is. This is how I originally viewed it, as sort of a launching ground for whatever happens to be on my mind. What usually occupy my thoughts are ideology, theology, basketball, and my family (in no particular order). Now, what occupies my mind and what should be occupying my mind at any given moment are not necessarily the same thing. How this blog helps me is that it confronts me with what I need to be thinking on and writing about. It helps me to focus on what is important. While not all of life is church, per se, all of life should be Christ. And while not all of life is worship, all of life is worship. In other words, and I should blog on this at some point, our separation of the spiritual from the secular is an artificial distinction. For the Christian, all of life is spiritual, even the most mundane elements.

Which brings me to my point, I think. If all of life is about God, then God should be the focus of my life, and thus God should be the focus of this blog. That doesn't mean I won't be posting about politics or basketball or whatever else. What it means is that in any posts of that nature there will be an attempt made to think and write about them with a Godward focus. It also means that the main thrust of my theological writing will be how to help us think about God and view the world through a God-first mindset.

The purpose of the universe, after all, is to bring glory to God. It is all about Him.

Acts of the Apostles, the Early Church, Jews of the 1st Century, etc.

I correspond with my Sunday School teacher from time to time and the following post is gleaned from one of the emails I sent to him awhile back pertaining to our studies in the book of Acts. I hope it makes sense.

I wrote:
Anyway, I wanted to throw some things at you about Acts, the early Church, the Jews of the first century, the whole circumcision controversy, and why those Jews rejected their Messiah. That's way more of a bite than either one of us could chew in one sitting, but there are a couple of things that the average modern reader doesn't quite see or get that make the whole thing more understandable. Most of this you probably already know and some of it you may have already covered in class before I got there, but let's start anyway because it is interesting and important.

The religious Jews of Jesus's day were strong, strong, strong in their ethnic pride, probably stronger than anything we could compare them to in modern times. A lot of this had to do with their history between the Testaments.

Ever heard of a man named Antiochus Epiphanes? He was a Greek general, ruler, and descendant of Alexander the Great. He had conquered Palestine, sacked Jerusalem, appointed the high priest that he wanted, and then, in 167 BC, when he became angry and suspicious, he went on a murdering spree killing some 80,000 Jews--men, women and children--in a four-day span. This is recorded in the Maccabees. He then proceeded to desecrate the Holy of Holies by sacrificing a pig on the altar, following this up with the outlawing of such quintessentially Jewish things as sabbath-keeping and circumcision. Several Jewish mothers who had defied this law against circumcision were paraded through town with their infants at their breasts and then pushed off the city wall to their deaths. Many such atrocities were committed including the burning of sabbath-keepers--I could go on.

All of this served to solidify his victims in their zeal for those rites which made them uniquely the children of God. Thus, when we get to the New Testament, these Jews are brazenly proud of their nation, their law, their religion, their circumcision, their Jewishness. No one was going to take that away from them and they despised these foreign intruders and everything about them.

According to Alfred Edersheim, Jews of the first century were so proud of their ethnicity and their homeland that immediately upon return from a Gentile-occupied territory they would ceremoniously shake the dust off their feet, not wanting to pollute their own holy land with dirt from the Gentiles. (Sort of gives you an enlightened perspective of Jesus's command to his disciples to shake the dust off their feet when leaving the house of anyone who would not receive them in his name, does it not?)

What did they think of Gentiles? Gentiles were dogs. And "dog" was the worst pejorative you could call anyone. With that in mind take a fresh look at a passage like . . .

Mark 7:

[24] And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And he entered a house and did not want anyone to know, yet he could not be hidden. [25] But immediately a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of him and came and fell down at his feet.

[26] Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth. And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. [27] And he said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.” [28] But she answered him, “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.” [29] And he said to her, “For this statement you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter.” [30] And she went home and found the child lying in bed and the demon gone. (ESV)

Tyre and Sidon were heavily populated with Gentiles and this woman was a Gentile. She begs for Jesus's help and he responds to her the way any Jewish rabbi of his day would have--he gives her the Jewish attitude toward Gentiles . . .

And he said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.”

The "children", of course, are the Jews and the "dogs" are the Gentiles.  This is a test.  She, as a Gentile, has approached a Jewish rabbi seeking a miracle.  Will she get it?  Will she pass the test?  How will she respond?

But she answered him, “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs."

She responds in humility and faith.  She is undeserving and admits as much, yet she asks anyway. Her request is based, not on her own merit, but on the mercy and goodness of the Giver.

(There's a lesson in that, though none of it, of course, has anything to do with your Sunday School lesson--ok, maybe a little--but I get easily sidetracked.)

My point is that pride was the sin of the Jews of Jesus's day.  It blinded them to what God was doing at the time.  True, they expected their Messiah to come very soon. They may have understood Daniel's prophecy of 70 weeks, even. They knew the times and seasons, but they expected the Messiah to come, partly, because they believed they deserved him. He was going to come and throw off this Gentile rule and re-establish the throne of David in perpetuity. Now was the time.

O come, o come Emmanuel

And ransom captive Israel.

They had no idea of their spiritual destitution. Neither did they understand the nature and scope of the Messiah they were getting. Their hatred of Gentiles blinded them, even, to the numerous passages indicating the world-wide messianic kingdom that was coming. What they got was the opposite of what they wanted in almost every respect.

But there was one more thing about Jesus that sealed the deal for why no self-respecting Jew would ever follow him, something that should be obvious but doesn't even stand out to you and me. Something that was a complete deal-breaker for them. You might already know what it is, but I'll save it for the next email.