Preface
In September of 1999, Pastor Mark Wilms began work on a pastoral commentary of the entire Bible. A month later, he started a weekly Bible study in the church he was serving at the time, Bethlehem Lutheran (ELCA) on the south side of Chicago, using the material that he was producing. By October of 2008 he came to the end of my journey with a complete set of Bible studies on the sixty-six commonly-accepted books of scripture.
These studies can be used individually to cover just a small piece of scripture, a whole book at a time, or a survey of the entire Bible.
The format is consistent throughout.
Each biblical book is divided up into a series of studies covering one or more chapters (usually a group of several).
Each study (and sometimes a book or other kind of section) offers an introduction that attempts to be informative but also pastoral in tone, followed by a series of notes that add more information, and then one or more discussion questions.
The historical material has been gleaned from a number of study Bibles and commentaries that are listed after this preface.
This commentary takes a high view of scripture, but also strives to be in harmony with responsible scholarship.
The intent has been to produce a Bible study that is highly informative, true to scholarly research, but also helpful and interesting for anyone, from the person who has had little contact with the Bible but would like to know more, to someone who knows their Bible well but would like to deepen his or her knowledge. More than that, it is my desire that these studies will help people grow in their faith in the God who brought so many people of the Bible out of bondage and gave them hope in spite of their many failures as God’s children, a hope that, in the end, could only be satisfied by God’s own action through Christ.
Bible Studies are available here
No comments:
Post a Comment