Audio Transcript

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas celebration with friends and family and with your family in the faith. We’re back to work today talking about Bible reading and commentaries in a question from an old friend of ours. “Hello, Pastor John. My name is Calvin from Singapore.” This, by the way, is the same Calvin from Singapore who previously asked, “Why did demons ask Jesus for pigs?” which became APJ 1534, one of our most popular episodes of all time. Great episode. If you somehow didn’t hear it, check it out. Most of you have because it got lodged in the YouTube algorithm and generated huge amounts of traffic — over two million views in YouTube alone. Crazy.

So, Calvin, keep sending us your questions! And he has. Because Calvin is back to ask this question: “Pastor John, every time I read the Bible, I use a Bible commentary to help me understand it. But I very often end up not reading the Bible and finding myself just reading straight from the commentary, which can be very illuminating and edifying. But I don’t want to neglect the Bible itself. What’s the right balance of reading the Bible and reading commentaries? How do you move back and forth from text to commentary to benefit from great teachers but not at the neglect of the text of Scripture itself? How do I know if I’m overusing commentaries?”

It is possible to fall off the horse of independent thinking in two directions. In one direction, we fall off on the side of, “I don’t need anybody else. Just me and the Holy Spirit and my Bible, and I can see what I need to see.” Or we can fall off on the other side of the horse by failing to think for ourselves at all and becoming almost entirely dependent on what others have thought.

If we make the first mistake, we’re probably arrogant, and we are denying the biblical reality that God has given to his church teachers (Ephesians 4:11). It’s an amazing thing. God has given to his church teachers. He didn’t just give us a Bible; he gave us Bible teachers. That has huge implications. Because no one person apart from the help of other teachers is going to see all that God has to teach us in the Bible.

And if we make the second mistake, then we’re probably going to become inauthentic second-handers. I don’t like to be a second-hander. I don’t want to be, and I don’t want you to be, a second-hander — that is, people who can never say anything with confidence from the Bible because they have actually seen it for themselves directly. Rather, they’re always echoing what other people have said about the Bible. Second-handers are like ambassadors of a king who are never sure what he says. They’re never able to say, “Thus saith the sovereign king . . .” Instead, they’re always saying, “Well, my commentary says that the king says . . .” That’s a second-hander.

So, we want to avoid falling off the horse of independent thinking on either side.

More Common Danger

Now, in the world I live in — where I function at Bethlehem College and Seminary and Bethlehem Baptist Church and Desiring God — and the circles I go in, there aren’t many people who are falling off the horse on the first side, who say, “I never read commentaries. I never read books about the Bible. I just read my Bible, I pray, and that’s all I need.” I don’t know anybody like that in my sphere. That’s not the world I live in. I’m sure they exist; I just don’t have anything to do with them.

“No one person apart from the help of other teachers is going to see all that God has to teach us in the Bible.”

In my sphere, the error is almost always on the other side, the other direction. And therefore, I have devoted most of my life to encouraging people not to be dependent on commentaries and books about the Bible but to give assiduous attention to the biblical text directly — for themselves. When it comes to church leadership, I see more danger in becoming an inauthentic second-hander than in spending too much time assiduously thinking for yourself about what the Bible text is teaching.

In real life, most of us have a limited amount of time that we can devote to study. And I’ve generally said, “Look, if you have eight hours to get a lesson or a sermon ready, and you’re going to spend four hours studying and four hours writing, then use most of those four study hours — almost all of it — thinking about, praying over, looking at the text, not reading commentaries.” That’s going to be my advice. Now I say that trembling because I know some people are going to think, “Oh, Piper doesn’t value commentaries. He’s got his head in the sand. He thinks people can do it on their own.” That’s not true. I love commentaries. I’m thankful for commentaries. I use them every week, alright? Let’s get rid of that misunderstanding.

Think, Weigh, Judge

But here’s what’s behind my emphasis. The Bible teaches us that doing our own thinking with our own mind is essential for Christian living.

• 2 Timothy 2:7: “Think over what I say, [Timothy,] for the Lord will give you understanding in everything.” Think over. You think — think. Use your mind, Timothy.
• Or 1 Corinthians 14:20: “Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature.” In other words, don’t make stupid mistakes in your thinking. Be rigorous in your thinking. Be coherent in your thinking.
• Or Luke 12:57: Jesus says, “Why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?”
• Or 1 Corinthians 10:15: “I speak as to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say.”
• Or 1 Corinthians 11:13: “Judge for yourselves [what is] proper.” So, Paul (and Jesus) are saying, “Use your mind. Think over what I’m saying. Look at the situation. Make proper judgments with your mind. That’s why I gave you a brain.”
• Or Romans 12:2: “Be transformed by the renewal of your mind.”

We could go on and on with texts that point in this direction. The fact that God has given us a Bible, a book, doesn’t remove the need for thinking; it creates the need for thinking. Six times, Jesus said to the most well-read Bible readers of his day (Pharisees and scribes), “Have you not read?” This must have absolutely galled these guys. “What do you mean, ‘Have we not read?’ That’s all we do is read.” In other words, they had read, but they hadn’t read. They hadn’t thought rightly about what they read. The requirement to read a Bible is the requirement to think rightly about what you read. They got it wrong. They used their minds in a way that distorted the texts.

The fact that we have a book, an inspired Bible, creates the need for carefully, insightfully reading — good thinking, not bad thinking.

Tracing the Arguments

And here’s the catch with regard to thinking. John Dewey was mainly right when he said, “Nobody thinks until he has a problem.” Thinking is hard mental work. And constitutionally, we’re all disposed to be lazy, to avoid hard work, which means we naturally default to letting somebody else think for us, and then we get the answer when they’re done thinking. And that sounds efficient. He did the thinking; I’ll just take his answer and save myself a lot of time. What that does is turn the mind into passive mush and turn us into second-handers, inauthentic people.

The best teacher I ever had told us, “Don’t read commentaries for their conclusions. Read them for their arguments.” Now that transformed the way I read everything. In other words, if you’re going to seek help in getting an answer from a commentary, make sure you are letting the commentary help you think about how to find the answer, not replace your thinking with their thinking and their answer. That’s what I mean when I say we should look at their arguments and not just their conclusions. Who cares about conclusions, unless you’re a second-hander?

“Thinking our way through biblical texts means asking question after question after question.”

Second-handers love conclusions. They did the arguing. I’ll just take the conclusions and tell my people, “So-and-so has a conclusion. Here’s their conclusion,” and that’ll be my sermon or my lesson. Nobody wants to be a second-hander like that. It’s inauthentic. People can see it’s inauthentic, and they will not trust you in the long run. What you want to see in a commentary is arguments — and arguments from the text of Scripture that you can see for yourself in the text so that the commentary helps you become a first-hander rather than making you a second-hander.

Questions: the Key to Understanding

Now, back to John Dewey for a minute. “Nobody thinks until he has a problem.” The way this applies to reading the Bible is that we need to form the habit of asking good questions, because questions are simply a way of stating problems. Questions are the interrogative form of problems, which get us to think. Thinking our way through biblical texts means asking question after question after question. And the better the questions, the deeper the insight. And of course, this implies we need to use our God-given minds in reliance on the Holy Spirit at every moment to think our way into good Bible answers. We don’t just ask questions; we try to answer the questions by looking at the text.

Asking questions is the key to understanding. The most illuminating questions are not what and where and when questions. They are who and how and why questions. Then we apply our minds. We apply our minds to think and think, and look at the book and look at the book, and doodle with our piece of paper with possible ideas scratched in every corner, watching God bring glorious things to light. And if we run out of time and get stuck, then we reach for our good friend, the commentary, and we look at his arguments.