How To Read The Bible For All Its WorthSample

The Next Step in Your Bible Reading: Find a Great Commentary

A good commentary is every bit as much a gift to the church as are good sermons, good video, audio and web resources, or good counselors.

If you are a serious Bible student, you will eventually want to secure or have access to a good commentary for each book of the Bible. There really is no completely satisfactory one-volume commentary.

How, then, does one evaluate a commentary? First, you do not evaluate on the basis of your agreement with the author. If the commentary is really a good one, and if you have done your own exegesis well, more often than not you and the better commentaries will be in agreement. But agreement is not the basic criterion.

Moreover, you do not evaluate on the basis of its “turning you on.” The point of a commentary is exegesis — what the text means — not homiletics — preaching the text in our day.

There are at least seven criteria you should use in judging a commentary. But the one crucial point is: Does this commentary help you understand what the biblical text actually said?

The best way to get at all this is simply to pick one of the really difficult texts in a given biblical book and see how helpful a commentary is in giving information and answering questions, and especially how well it discusses all possible meanings. One can initially evaluate the worth of a commentary on 1 Corinthians, for example, by seeing how the author discusses 7:36 or 11:10. For the Pastoral Epistles, check 1 Timothy 2:15. For the book of Genesis, 2:17 would constitute a “checkpoint.” For Isaiah, it might be 7:14 – 17. And so on.

Let us repeat: You do not begin your Bible study with a commentary! You go to the commentary after you have done your own work. The reason you eventually consult a commentary is to find answers to the content questions that have arisen in your own study. At the same time, of course, the commentary will alert you to questions you failed to ask but perhaps should have.

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More FREE resources: Get the key to understanding Genesis with this downloadable eBook: http://zondervanacademic.com/free-ebook-three-views-on-genesis. Also, this reading plan only scratched the surface of How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. Pick up the classic book today to get equipped for deeper, better reading of God's Word!