Exegesis for the Pulpit

Paul's picture of the preacher in 2 Timothy 2 is not a performer. In the space of a few verses Timothy is a soldier who does not get entangled in civilian affairs (2:4), a competitor who must keep the rules to win the crown (2:5), a hardworking farmer (2:6), and then, in verse 15, a workman. The Greek word ergates is an ordinary word for a labourer, the same word Jesus uses when he says the worker is worthy of his wages (Luke 10:7). Paul uses it of false teachers too, the deceitful workers of 2 Corinthians 11:13. A workman is judged by his work. Nobody admires a carpenter's personality if the table wobbles.

The word translated 'approved' is dokimos, a word used of something tested and found genuine, like a coin or a metal that has passed the assay. Timothy is to present himself to God as one who has stood the test, and the test is the handling of the word. The goal is to be 'unashamed', which means that when the work is inspected there is nothing in it to hide. That is a sobering picture for a preacher. The congregation may never know whether you did the work. God does.

Then comes the verb that this lesson is built on. The BSB says the workman 'accurately handles the word of truth'. Behind it is orthotomeo, from two Greek words for straight and to cut. It occurs only here in the New Testament, which makes its exact picture hard to fix, and commentators have suggested a stonemason, a tentmaker cutting cloth to a pattern (Paul's own trade, Acts 18:3), a ploughman's furrow and a road. The strongest evidence points to the road, because in the Greek translation of the Old Testament the same verb is used in Proverbs 3:6 and 11:5 for a path made straight. But every proposed picture shares one meaning. The work is measured against a line it did not draw.

That is what exegesis is: the patient, honest attempt to find out what a passage meant to its author and first readers, before you decide what it means for anyone else. The word comes from a Greek verb meaning to lead out. You are drawing the meaning out of the text, not reading your own into it. And the contrast in this chapter is exactly the one a preacher faces. In 2:14 the believers are quarreling over words, plural, the endless fight about terms. In 2:15 the workman handles the word, singular, the message as a whole, and handles it straight. Exegesis is how you get from the first to the second.

One more verse belongs here, because it prevents a false choice. In 2:7 Paul writes: 'Consider what I am saying, for the Lord will give you insight into all things.' Timothy is told to think hard, and the reason given is that the Lord will give understanding. Study does not replace the Spirit, and the Spirit does not excuse a lazy reader. Every step of the routine below can be done in prayer, and should be.

What follows is a routine, not a law. Experienced preachers vary it, and you will too. But a beginner who runs these seven steps on a passage every week, in order, will understand the text better than most of the people who hear him, and will rarely say something the text does not say.

Step one: read it many times. Read your passage at least ten times across several days, aloud if you can, since it was written to be heard. Read it in the BSB, and in at least one other translation; the KJV and the World English Bible are free and in the public domain, and Blue Letter Bible and STEP Bible both let you lay versions side by side. Where translations differ, mark the place. A difference between careful translations almost always points to something in the original that is hard to render, and that is where your study should slow down.

Step two: write it out and mark what you see. Copy the passage by hand into your notebook, leaving space between the lines. Then mark it. Circle repeated words. Underline commands. Box the joining words: and, but, for, therefore, so that, because. Mark who is speaking and to whom. Write questions in the margin: why this word, why here, why now? This is the step most preachers skip, and it is where most of what you will preach is found. The text is usually saying more than you saw on the first reading, and writing it out slows you down enough to notice.

Step three: read it in its context. Read the whole book if it is short, and the chapters on either side if it is long. Ask what the author is doing in the book as a whole and where your passage fits in that purpose. Then ask what the first hearers' world was like, as far as the text itself and the rest of scripture can tell you. Many Bibles have short introductions to each book, and Blue Letter Bible carries several older study tools. This step protects you from one of the commonest preaching errors of all, which is explaining a verse as if it had no neighbours.

Step four: weigh the key words. Choose two or three words that carry the weight of the passage, not every word. Use the interlinear and lexicon tools in Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible to find the Hebrew or Greek word, its range of meaning, and where else the same author uses it. Section 4 below is about how to do this without fooling yourself, and you should read it before you try.

Step five: let scripture interpret scripture. Look up the cross-references; Blue Letter Bible lists them for every verse, drawn largely from an old work called the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge. Ask whether the passage quotes or echoes the Old Testament, and if it does, read the passage it echoes in its own setting. The Westminster Confession of 1646 states the principle in words worth memorising: 'The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself'. When a passage is unclear, the Confession goes on, it is to be understood by other places that speak more clearly.

Step six: trace the flow. Write out the passage again, this time as an outline of its argument or the steps of its story. In a letter, put the main statements at the left margin and indent the reasons, purposes and results under the statement they belong to. Walter Kaiser, in Toward an Exegetical Theology (1981), urged preachers to lay out a passage's grammar this way so that the structure of the sermon could follow the structure of the text. In a story, list the scenes and mark the moment where the tension turns. When you can see the shape, you can preach the shape.

Step seven: write what it meant. Finish with a single sentence, in the past tense, stating what the passage said to its first hearers. Not yet what it says to us; that comes in the next lesson. If you cannot write that sentence, you are not finished with exegesis, and no amount of illustration or application will make up for it.

Take the passage bounded in the last lesson, the storm on the lake, and run the routine on it in brief so that you can see the kind of thing each step finds.

Reading and marking. Several things surface on the second and third readings that a quick reader misses. It was Jesus' idea to cross (4:35). Jesus is asleep on a cushion in the stern (4:38). The disciples do not ask for help; they accuse: 'Teacher, don't You care that we are perishing?' Jesus speaks first to the wind and sea and then to the disciples (4:39-40). And the passage ends not with relief but with a different kind of fear, and a question: 'Who is this, that even the wind and the sea obey Him?' (4:41). The disciples are more afraid after the storm stops than during it.

Context. In Mark the episode follows a day of parables about the kingdom growing in secret (4:1-34), and it opens a run of four mighty acts: over the sea, over a legion of demons (5:1-20), over sickness and over death (5:21-43). The whole first half of Mark circles the question the disciples ask in 4:41, and it is answered by Peter at 8:29. So the passage is not mainly about how to survive the storms of life. It is one of Mark's ways of pressing the question of who Jesus is.

Words. Look up the two commands of 4:39 in an interlinear. 'Silence!' and 'Be still!' are two Greek verbs, and the second, phimoo, to muzzle or silence, is the same verb Jesus used to the unclean spirit in Mark 1:25: 'Be silent!' He rebukes the wind as he rebuked a demon. Then look at 4:41, which the BSB renders 'Overwhelmed with fear'. An interlinear will show you that the Greek says, more literally, they feared a great fear.

Scripture interpreting scripture. The cross-references open the Old Testament behind the scene. In Psalm 89:9 it is the LORD who rules the raging sea and stills its waves. In Psalm 107:25-29 sailors in a storm cry out to the LORD, and he calms the storm to a whisper. And in Jonah 1 a prophet sleeps in a ship in a storm, the sailors are afraid and cry out, the sea grows calm, and the men feared the LORD greatly (Jonah 1:16). A first-century hearer who knew those passages would hear the disciples' question and know the only answer scripture gives.

The exegetical sentence. Something like this: Mark showed his readers that Jesus, by commanding the sea as only the LORD does in Israel's scriptures, confronted his frightened disciples with the question of who he is and with their lack of faith in him. You may word it better. But notice what the routine did. It moved the sermon away from the familiar message about storms in your life, which is not false but is not the point, and toward the text's own question, which is more searching and, in the end, more comforting.

Free tools have made it possible for a pastor with a phone to look up every Greek and Hebrew word in a passage. This is a great gift, and it has a trap built into it. The tools make it easy to find a word's dictionary entries and hard to know which meaning the author intended, and one of the commonest pulpit errors of the last century is the sentence 'the Greek word here really means', followed by something the Greek word does not mean in that verse.

The scholar who first named the problem was James Barr, in The Semantics of Biblical Language (1961). One of the errors he described he called illegitimate totality transfer: taking all the senses a word can have anywhere and loading them all into one occurrence. A word in a sentence means one thing, or a small cluster of related things, not everything in the dictionary. D. A. Carson's Exegetical Fallacies (1984) gave preachers a catalogue of related mistakes. The root fallacy assumes a word means what its parts mean; but English butterfly has nothing to do with butter. The anachronism fallacy reads a later meaning back into an earlier word; Carson's well-known example is the sermon that says Paul's word for power in Romans 1:16, dunamis, means dynamite, when dynamite was invented in the nineteenth century and the gospel does not blow things up.

Strong's numbers are a particular temptation. They are a nineteenth-century system keyed to the King James Version, and they are a useful way to find a word. But the short entries that come with them end with a list of every way the KJV translated that word, and a list of renderings is not the same as what the word means in your verse. Use the number to find the word, then look at how the same author uses it elsewhere. Context decides meaning. A word's use in the same book is better evidence than its use anywhere else, and its use in the same paragraph is best of all.

Three tests will keep you honest. First, do the major translations agree? If every careful translation renders a word one way and your sermon says it means something startlingly different, you are almost certainly wrong, because those committees knew the language better than the website you used. Second, can you show it from the passage, not just from the dictionary? Third, would the point still stand if you never mentioned the Greek? If it would, you may not need to mention the Greek at all. If it would not, you had better be sure.

How much do you need the original languages? Here faithful people genuinely differ. Martin Luther, writing to the councillors of the German cities in 1524, urged them to fund schools that taught the languages, arguing that the languages were the sheath in which the sword of the Spirit is kept, and that the gospel would not long be held without them. Many Reformed and evangelical seminaries still require Greek and Hebrew for that reason. Others point out that the great majority of faithful preachers in the history of the church never read a word of either, that good translations are the fruit of scholars' language work given to everyone, and that a little Greek misused can do more harm than none. Both points are true. A student who can learn the languages should. A student who cannot should use good translations, compare them, and treat the tools as a way to see the text more clearly rather than as a source of secret meanings.

Commentaries are the church's long conversation about a text, and a good one is a gift. But many of the students this course is written for have no library and no money for books, and the most important thing to say is this: the routine above does not need them. Every step can be done with a Bible, a notebook and a phone. Commentaries come after your own work, as a check on it, not before it as a substitute for it. A preacher who reads the commentary first tends to preach the commentary.

There are also good free resources, if you know where to look. The NET Bible, free online, carries tens of thousands of translators' notes explaining difficult words and choices. Blue Letter Bible and other sites carry older commentaries that are now in the public domain: John Calvin on most of the Bible, Matthew Henry, Albert Barnes, Adam Clarke, and Keil and Delitzsch on the Old Testament. The Christian Classics Ethereal Library hosts many of the same and more. STEP Bible, built by Tyndale House in Cambridge, offers original-language tools free, and has a version you can download to a Windows or Mac computer and use offline.

Use old commentaries with your eyes open. They were written by deeply learned and godly men, and they often see things modern writers miss. They also predate a century and a half of discoveries about the ancient world, from manuscripts to archaeology, and on historical questions they can be out of date. Read them for their wisdom about the text and their pastoral sense, and check their historical claims against more recent resources where you can.

Two more resources cost nothing. The first is other believers. Read your passage with two or three others in your church and ask them what they see; Nehemiah 8 shows a whole team of Levites helping the people understand, and you need not work alone. The second is honesty. When you cannot settle a question, say so in the sermon: there are two ways to read this verse, careful readers hold both, and here is why the main point of the passage stands either way. A congregation trusts a preacher more, not less, when he shows them where the certainties end.

Finally, give the work time. Exegesis done on Saturday night is not exegesis. A workable rhythm for a weekly preacher is to begin reading the passage early in the week, do the marking and context work while there is still time to think, do the word and cross-reference work midweek, and write the sermon only when you can state what the passage meant. The sentence at the end of step seven is the gate. Do not start writing the sermon until you have walked through it.

Your step this week. Take the passage you chose and bounded in the last lesson and run all seven steps on it. Give a page of your notebook to each step and keep the pages, because the next three lessons build on them. On the marking page, aim for at least twenty observations before you look anything up. On the word page, study no more than three words, and for each one write the verse where the same author uses it elsewhere. On the last page, write your one sentence, in the past tense, beginning with the author's name: Mark showed, Paul told, the psalmist sang. If you can, read that sentence to one other believer and ask whether it is what the passage says. Then bring it to the next lesson.