Dr. Keith Essex · The Master's Seminary · 62 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Keith Essex, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
Here the course takes its bearings. Dr. Essex lays out the three components of every sound Bible study, observation, interpretation, and application, then makes a case most students have never heard: that the Old Testament is the foundation, that Jesus himself named the canon in its Hebrew shape, and that this course will read Genesis to Esther in that order. Listen for the arithmetic of the Bible, what fraction of it we actually preach, and for why an inerrantist's work is harder, not easier.
All Bible study has three basic components. Observation saturates the student in the particulars of the text, and there is no plan B: it means reading and rereading and rereading, the complete Bible, Genesis through Revelation. Interpretation then determines the meaning of what has been observed, and application works out the significance of that meaning for the interpreter and the people he serves.
A first observation about the Bible as a whole: seventy-eight percent of it is Old Testament and twenty-two percent is New, yet we spend roughly ninety percent of our time in the twenty-two percent. Essex sets the imbalance on the table at the outset, because sheer length, placement, and the New Testament's own use of the Old all point one direction: to understand the New Testament is to understand its Old Testament foundation.
In 2 Timothy 3 Paul reminds Timothy that from childhood he has known the sacred writings that are able to give the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. Timothy's childhood fell around the year 30, before any New Testament existed: the sacred writings were the Old Testament. When verse 16 then declares all Scripture God-breathed and profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness, the first referent is the Old Testament.
In 1 Timothy 5 Paul calls two texts Scripture in one breath, quoting Deuteronomy 25 on not muzzling the threshing ox and then the saying recorded in Luke 10 that the laborer is worthy of his wages, and he quotes the Old Testament first. The New Testament partakes of the same God-breathed character the Old already had. As Essex puts it, the New Testament measures up to the Old Testament, not the other way around.
Between the Testaments stands the life of Jesus Christ, anticipated by the Old and looked back on by the New. Strikingly, the Son of God came and wrote nothing canonical; he spoke, constantly referring back to the Old Testament, and by the Spirit his words were brought to his apostles' remembrance to become the New Testament's foundation. Matthew opens with a genealogy that gathers the promises to David and Abraham, the whole Old Testament story compressed into names.
John 1 says no one has ever seen God; the only begotten God at the Father's side has made him known. Essex takes the earthly manifestations of God in the Old Testament, the theophanies in which Yahweh appears and speaks to men, as appearances of the pre-incarnate Christ, since revelation to man on earth has always come through the Son. In Revelation 4 and 5 John does see the Father enthroned, for in the heavenly court the redeemed will see him; on earth, the Son reveals him.
The Bible's books stand in larger blocks. The Hebrew canon has three: the Torah, the Prophets divided into former and latter, and the Writings, the arrangement Jewish readers still call the Tanakh, from the initials of its three parts. The English Old Testament has four divisions, law, history, poetry and wisdom, and the prophets, an order that descends from the Septuagint through the Vulgate. Knowing which Testament a book is in is only the start; the student must know its block.
Which order should govern? What is God-breathed is the content, not a table of contents, but the Hebrew order has a warrant the English order lacks. In Luke 24 the risen Christ says everything written about him in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled, the Psalms standing first in the Writings and so naming the third division. Following that example, this course reads the historical books in the Hebrew sequence: Ruth comes after Kings among the Writings, Esther before Ezra and Nehemiah, and Chronicles last of all.
By word count the Torah is roughly a quarter of the Old Testament, the Prophets about half, and the Writings the final quarter, and the Torah alone is nearly equal in length to the entire New Testament. The Prophets and the Writings continually refer back to it, and in skeletal form everything God would reveal in the canon is already there. When Jesus said all things concerning him must be fulfilled, he began with Moses; John 5 presses the same point, that to believe Moses is to be prepared to believe Christ, for Moses wrote of him.
Biblically there is no such thing as the book of Genesis through the book of Deuteronomy: Scripture always calls those five the Torah, the law, the law of Moses. The Torah is one literary unit of common authorship, later divided. Likewise Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles are each a single book split in two, just as 1 and 2 Corinthians are two real letters to one church. Each book then breaks down into divisions, sections, and segments, arriving at the preacher's basic unit of study, the paragraph.
The presupposition beneath all of this: God directed a single man to write each biblical text, as 2 Peter 1 says, men borne along by the Spirit. No book of the Bible came from a committee, even where the author's name is unknown, as with Chronicles or the long-debated authorship of Hebrews. Much modern scholarship reads the Bible looking for contradiction because it has surrendered this; the believing interpreter looks for cohesion, for the comprehensive plan and textual fabric of an authored text. If we find contradiction, the problem is ours, not the writer's. Essex jokes that he wishes he were a liberal, since inerrancy compounds the exegetical work: you must stay at the text until its unity appears.
Finding a book's purpose and compositional strategy is detective work, clues gathered at the macro level down to the micro level, and Essex holds up Dr. MacArthur as the model: hours upon hours hunting the purpose for which a book was written and the framework and embedded patterns that carry it. The students, he says, are becoming biblical detectives for the rest of their lives, and their skill at that work will shape how God uses their preaching.
Interpretation uses the historical-grammatical method, and its governing principle is that the biblical text cannot mean today what it never meant: meaning is what the author communicated to the original audience. Essex applies it to the days of Genesis 1: could the word day mean other things? In the abstract, yes; standing with Israel on the plains of Moab, no. Along the way the course will flag the crux interpretum, the interpretive discussions that have exercised good and godly men for centuries, because a congregation expects its preacher to know them.
Application is the significance of the meaning, first to the expositor himself and then to the people he serves; public application is expository preaching. On method, Essex is candid about his own practice: the book-level reading and rereading happens in the vernacular translation, and the Greek and Hebrew come down off the shelf at the paragraph, where the exegetical analysis is done, usually confirming what the English reading had already shown. Even the most gifted expositors read a book thirty days running in English before the original-language work begins.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all thirteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What proportion of the Bible is the Old Testament, and how does that compare with where we spend our time?
2. What were the sacred writings Timothy had known from childhood?
3. In 1 Timothy 5, how does Paul treat the Old and New Testaments?
4. What is striking about the incarnate Christ and the writing of Scripture?
5. On the basis of John 1, how does the lecture understand the Old Testament theophanies?
6. What are the three divisions of the Hebrew canon?
7. What warrant does the lecture give for following the Hebrew order?
8. How large is the Torah?
9. Why does the lecture say there is biblically no such thing as the book of Genesis?
10. What does the lecture claim about the authorship of every biblical book?
11. What should the believing interpreter do on meeting an apparent contradiction?
12. What governing principle controls interpretation?
13. Where in his own study does Essex turn to the Greek and Hebrew?
All thirteen correct. Lecture 2 is complete.
Ninety percent of our time in twenty-two percent of the Bible: does that ratio describe your own reading? What would change in your view of the New Testament if you kept hearing the Old Testament echoing through it?
Essex says inerrancy makes exegesis harder, not easier, because you must stay at a difficult text until its unity appears. When has wrestling with an apparent contradiction in Scripture rewarded you?
Meaning is what the original author said to the original audience. Where are you most tempted to ask what a passage means to me before asking what it meant to them, and what guards against that?
Paul's charge in 2 Timothy 3: the whole of Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness, so that the man of God is equipped for every good work, and that begins with the Old Testament.
The lecture's own shelf: Roy Zuck's Basic Bible Interpretation, with the newer Invitation to Biblical Interpretation by Kostenberger and Patterson alongside it; John Walton's Chronological and Background Charts of the Old Testament for the canon arrangements; and Eugene Merrill's Kingdom of Priests for the historical background the method depends on.