Gospelspeak

This second Gospelspeak volume studying the whole of the Bible's New Testament extends the work of the first volume addressed only to the New Testament's twenty-one epistles. The premise of both volumes is that the Bible has a tremendous amount to say to us on all topics of profound spiritual significance. Yet the Bible's spectacularly unprecedented format, as a collection of sixty-six books of various types spanning a millennium and a half, makes difficult the critical task of integrating its teaching on any one of those topics. Some readers, like me, feel a strong need to gather in one place, from each of several New Testament books and letters, what the Bible says on a certain topic, to read and reread the verses until they make greater sense together. That gathering, organizing, and reorganizing is, after all, what good preachers do, thumbing back and forth through the scriptures to weave the coherent, integrated, and wondrous story. And so, this second volume adds a parsing, sorting, and reorganizing of the verses of the four Gospels, Acts, and Revelation, to the first volume's parsing of the twenty-one epistles. You have here a gathering, section by organized section, of all the New Testament's verses on each of dozens of different topics that the New Testament indicates should be important to us.

One way of using the book is to read it cover to cover, as one would any other book. The effect immerses the reader in New Testament study, not through the words of a preacher, theologian, commentator, scholar, or other author, but in the Bible's own words. As with the first volume on the epistles, I have rewritten verses only to separate and accentuate their themes, simplify the sentence construction, and clarify the implied actors. Strict translations tend to use passive language disguising the actors, compound sentences mixing topics and themes, and prepositional phrases, making harder to discern the actors, actions, and objects of their actions. The verses here as I have rewritten them are shorter, more focused to single topics, and more active, to make your study easier integrating and emphasizing common meanings across verses. If you read the whole book, cover to cover in order, then you will have completed a New Testament study unlike any other, digesting the whole New Testament through the lens of its topics. You will, in effect, have had only a silent commentator, the one who reorganized the verses into their topics, nudging you to see how the many verses on each topic together inform the whole of any topic.