Summer Reading, The Word Became Fresh, by Daniel Montgomery

Thursday has come again (awfully fast it seems) so that means it’s time for more summer reading. This week, I’m sticking with Dale Ralph Davis. Don’t worry, it’s not another commentary. The book I’d like to point you toward is called The Word Became Fresh: how to preach from Old Testament narrative texts.

First, the obvious. This book suffers from boring-subtitle-itis. Anything that mentions Old Testament narrative texts immediately sets off alarm bells for most people. Only the true Bible-geeks (cut from the mentally masochistic cloth that would read a commentary for fun) will be undeterred. I am that kind of Bible-geek.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that a lot of commentators, even good ones, apparently don’t give much thought to the word ‘accessible’ – which is a shame because they have some amazingly deep insights to offer from their years of studying the historical context of the Scriptures and their original languages. Still, if you’re turned off by the more academic realm of the Christian-focused publishing world, you’re not without your reasons. But we would all agree that the Bible is a priority in Christian spiritual health, right?

Now I’ve got you. Because we all have lofty aspirations to read the Bible, but then we get into the Old Testament and we find that it’s really hard – it’s dense, the narrative structure is just plain weird sometimes, and half the time there’s no moral commentary at all, so how are we supposed to know what God wants us to get out of those passages?

I thank God for men like Dale Davis who have a heart for God’s people hearing God’s message. This book isn’t just for preachers, it’s for any Bible student. It tries to equip you and me to be astute readers of our Bibles. And it’s short, just 153 pages, so it’s no impossible task to finish. It will pay great dividends in your Old Testament reading this year.

Before I close with a few good quotes, two caveats: 1) it’ll be handy to have your Bibles with you when you read this. Davis often draws examples from the text and his examples will be much more comprehensible if you read the Scriptures he’s talking about. And 2) his primary audience is preachers, so he will use some words that preachers/seminary students would be familiar with but you might not know. But to his credit, Davis is more concerned with getting his point across than sounding smart and he is very good with practical illustrations to lend a hand.

So, a few good lines:

‘…there is no one so disturbing, so surprising, so steadying, so fascinating as the God of the Bible. So if I had one piece of hermeneutical (one of the seminary words – hermeneutics basically means how you interpret and understand the Bible. DM) advice to give it is: keep your focus on God if you want your biblical interpretation to be accurate, interesting, nourishing, and relevant.’

‘We are guilty of arrogance, not merely neglect, when we fail to beg for the Spirit’s help in the study of Scripture. We may even have such arrogance even when we seem to be seeking the Spirit’s aid – I think of those times when in a light-headed tokenism we utter our slap-happy prayer that the Lord would “guide and direct us as we study this passage.” One shudders to think how flippant we are. But how many more times we neglect any overt seeking of the Spirit’s help!’

‘[A]voidance [of difficult, violent, sexual texts] gets us nowhere and impoverishes the church.’