Lecture 1: The Making of an Expositor: Why This Course Exists

The lecture, section by section

1. A cycle through the whole Bible

   This course begins a cycle of three classes, Old Testament Studies I and II and New Testament Studies, that carries a student from Genesis to the book of Revelation. This first course covers Genesis through Esther, and its opening session doubles as an orientation: where these courses sit in the curriculum, and what they exist to produce.

2. Why the seminary exists

   The school's purpose statement is to equip godly men to be pastors or the trainers of pastors, and Essex presses the nearness of it: of the forty-four men in the room, past experience says thirty to thirty-five will be in full-time pastoral ministry within four years, and roughly one graduate in five ends up ministering outside the United States. Over its history the seminary has sent out more than twelve hundred men, all centered in some way on pastoral ministry.

3. The pastor's first task

   The first great task given to the pastor is the proclamation and teaching of God's word, reaching back to Paul's charge in 1 Timothy 4 to pay close attention to himself and to his teaching, and to give attention to the public reading, teaching, and exhortation of Scripture. A man's effectiveness in ministry, under the Spirit's direction, rests on his effectiveness in understanding and applying the word to his own life and then explaining its meaning and significance to those he shepherds.

4. Preach so everyone can hear

   One of Essex's own professors told his class that if you cannot teach four-year-olds, you cannot teach. The preacher must take what he has learned from the text back to the Lord until he can explain it so that the youngest and the oldest, the newest believer and the most mature, can hear and, through the Holy Spirit, comprehend and apply it. He tells the students to look around their congregations on Sunday and get used to the array of people God will one day set in front of them.

5. You never know who will be listening

   Essex tells of agreeing to a funeral for a college friend's father-in-law, expecting a dozen people. The man had spent years in Long Beach city government, and five hundred came, the mayor and council among them. He preached the fifteen-minute message he had prepared on John 3:16, and the man's ninety-two-year-old mother came to Christ through it; eighteen months later Essex did her funeral, a dozen people and all of them rejoicing. The lesson: you do not know where God will take you, so do every assignment unto the Lord.

6. The gift of the Bible in your own language

   Essex recounts a BBC documentary he watched that summer, The Most Dangerous Man in Tudor England, on William Tyndale, whose aim was that through his English translation the simplest plowboy would know the Bible better than the pope. God answered that aim, and biblical literacy in Britain crested in the nineteenth century, when ordinary church members knew their Bibles better than anyone in the classroom that morning; those were the hearers Spurgeon preached to. Whatever a student's first language, the point stands for every vernacular translation.

7. Black and white, and color

   A fellow professor's analogy: a program watched in black and white conveys about ninety-five percent of what the color broadcast conveys. The congregation reads the translation, the black and white, and sees nearly everything; the preacher who knows Greek and Hebrew sees the color, and his job is to add those touches so the people get the full impact. Essex warns against preaching in a way that suggests the Bible cannot be understood without the original languages, and urges the men to honor the translation the people hold and preach from it.

8. Comprehension before explanation

   The Bible Exposition department sits on the border between private study and public proclamation, and every course is designed for a foundational comprehension that leads to an accurate explanation of Scripture. Another of Essex's professors put it in a sentence he never forgot: a mist in the pulpit will be a fog in the pew. And a student never studies only for himself; hundreds or thousands of future hearers are, so to speak, looking over his shoulder saying get it right.

9. The goal: every book's purpose and structure

   By the end of the cycle a student should be able to state the structure and the purpose of every one of the sixty-six books, the very thing the ordination council will ask him to do in ten minutes flat. Essex names this the foundation of expository preaching, and diagnoses the scarcity of expositors today exactly here: few preachers take the time to unpack each biblical book's basic purpose and structure. For this course, that means Genesis through Esther, each book set in its canonical and historical context.

10. Chapter titles and the synopsis papers

    Two working habits carry the course. First, chapter titles: about six words per chapter, written in the student's own wording, never memorized but composed, which is why they stick; Essex made them for the whole Old Testament in his own seminary days and still thinks through the Bible by them. Second, synopsis papers: a short, well-crafted statement of each book's purpose, divisions, and themes, so that by the end of the cycle every man has written a mini commentary on the whole Bible. Men twenty years out of class still open their synopsis papers when they begin a book.

11. The reading shelf

    Every assigned book is read in its entirety, twice, across the course. Alongside the Bible sit the MacArthur Study Bible introductions, five or ten minutes each, and three supplemental texts to be read an hour a week according to need: The World and the Word by Merrill, Rooker, and Grisanti for each book's contents and themes; Cracking Old Testament Codes on the Old Testament's literary genres; and Eugene Merrill's Kingdom of Priests for the history. Essex also notes the flood of new biblical theologies in print, Thomas Schreiner's The King in His Beauty the latest, and reads the demand as a symptom: pulpit and pew alike no longer know how the Bible fits together from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22.

12. A workman's writing habits

    The session closes with the seminary's writing requirements, and behind the humor sits a conviction about care: proper form, no padding, no long block quotations of Scripture when a reference in parentheses will do, never exceeding the assigned length, and always running the spelling and grammar checks. The papers are response papers, not research papers: Essex wants to see what the student himself has seen in the text, in his own words, because a man remembers what he writes far better than what someone else wrote.

1. Essex says a preacher must be able to explain a passage so that a four-year-old and the most mature believer can both take hold of it. Think of the last sermon or lesson you gave or heard: what would it take to make it that clear without making it shallow?

2. The lecture insists the congregation's translation conveys nearly everything, and warns against preaching that implies the Bible cannot be understood without Greek and Hebrew. Why does that warning matter for how a congregation reads at home?

3. Chapter titles and synopsis papers are habits of writing things in your own words. What is one book of the Bible you know well enough to state its purpose in a single sentence, and one you could not? What would it take to close that gap?