David Pawson - Unlocking the Bible

Second, I have never kept careful records of my sources. This is partly because the Lord blessed me with a reasonably good memory for such things as quotations and illustrations and perhaps also because I have never used secretarial assistance.

Books have played a major role in my work – three tons of them, according to the last furniture remover we employed, filling two rooms and a garden shed. They are in three categories: those I have read, those I intend to read and those I will never read! They have been such a blessing to me and such a bane to my wife.

The largest section by far is filled with Bible commentaries. When preparing a Bible study, I have looked up all relevant writers, but only after I have prepared as much as I can on my own. Then I have both added to and corrected my efforts in the light of scholarly and devotional writings.

It would be impossible to name all those to whom I have been indebted. Like many others, I devoured William Barclay’s Daily Bible Readings as soon as they were issued back in the 1950s. His knowledge of New Testament background and vocabulary was invaluable and his simple and clear style a model to follow, though I later came to question his ‘liberal’ interpretations. John Stott, Merill Tenney, Gordon Fee and William Hendrickson were among those who opened up the New Testament for me, while Alec Motyer, G. T. Wenham and Derek Kidner did the same for the Old. And time would fail to tell of Denney, Lightfoot, Nygren, Robinson, Adam Smith, Howard, Ellison, Mullen, Ladd, Atkinson, Green, Beasley-Murray, Snaith, Marshall, Morris, Pink and many many others. Nor must I forget two remarkable little books from the pens of women: What the Bible is all about by Henrietta Mears and Christ in all the Scriptures by A. M. Hodgkin. To have sat at their feet has been an inestimable privilege. I have always regarded a willingness to learn as one of the fundamental qualifications to be a teacher.

I soaked up all these sources like a sponge. I remembered so much of what I read, but could not easily recall where I had read it. This did not seem to matter too much when gathering material for preaching, since most of these writers were precisely aiming to help preachers and did not expect to be constantly quoted. Indeed, a sermon full of attributed quotations can be distracting, if not misinterpreted as name-dropping or indirectly claiming to be well read. As could my previous paragraph!

But printing, unlike preaching, is subject to copyright, since royalties are involved. And the fear of breaching this held me back from allowing any of my spoken ministry to be reproduced in print. It would be out of the question to trace back 40 years’ scrounging and even if that were possible, the necessary footnotes and acknowledgements could double the size and price of these volumes.

The alternative was to deny access to this material for those who could most benefit from it, which my publisher persuaded me would be wrong. At least I was responsible for collecting and collating it all, but I dare to believe that there is sufficient original contribution to justify its release.

I can only offer an apology and my gratitude to all those whose studies I have plundered over the years, whether in small or large amounts, hoping they might see this as an example of that imitation which is the sincerest form of flattery. To use another quotation I read somewhere: ‘Certain authors, speaking of their works, say “my book” … They would do better to say “our book” … because there is in them usually more of other people’s than their own’ (the original came from Pascal).

So here is ‘our’ book! I suppose I am what the French bluntly call a ‘vulgarizer’. That is someone who takes what the academics teach and make it simple enough for the ‘common’ people to understand. I am content with that. As one old lady said to me, after I had expounded a quite profound passage of Scripture, ‘You broke it up small enough for us to take it in.’ I have, in fact, always aimed to so teach that a 12-year-old boy could understand and remember my message.

Some readers will be disappointed, even frustrated, with the paucity of text references, especially if they want to check me out! But their absence is intentional. God gave us his Word in books, but not in chapters and verses. That was the work of two bishops, French and Irish, centuries later. It became easier to find a ‘text’ and to ignore context. How many Christians who quote John 3:16 can recite verses 15 and 17? Many no longer ‘search the scriptures’; they simply look them up (given the numbers). So I have followed the apostles’ habit of naming the authors only – ‘as Isaiah or David or Samuel said’. For example, the Bible says that God whistles. Where on earth does it say that? In the book of Isaiah. Whereabouts? Go and find out for yourself. Then you’ll also find out when he did and why he did. And you’ll have the satisfaction of having discovered all that by yourself.

One final word. Behind my hope that these introductions to the Bible books will help you to get to know and love them more than you did lies a much greater and deeper longing – that you will also come to know better and love more the subject of all the books, the Lord himself. I was deeply touched by the remark of someone who had watched all the videos within a matter of days: ‘I know so much more about the Bible now, but the biggest thing was that I felt the heart of God as never before.’

What more could a Bible teacher ask? May you experience the same as you read these pages and join me in saying: Praise Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

J. David Pawson

Sherborne St John, 1999

Yes I thought I knew my Bible

Reading piecemeal, hit or miss

Now a part of John or Matthew

Then a bit of Genesis

Certain chapters of Isaiah

Certain psalms, the twenty-third.

First of Proverbs, twelfth of Romans

Yes, I thought I knew the Word

But I found that thorough reading

Was a different thing to do

And the way was unfamiliar

When I read my Bible through.

You who like to play at Bible

Dip and dabble here and there

Just before you kneel all weary

Yawning through a hurried prayer.

You who treat this crown of writings

As you treat no other book

Just a paragraph disjointed

Just a crude impatient look.

Try a worthier procedure

Try a broad and steady view;

You will kneel in awesome wonder

When you read the Bible through.

Author unknown

1. Overview of the Old Testament

2. Genesis

3. Exodus

4. Leviticus

5. Numbers

6. Deuteronomy

God has given us a library of 66 books. The Latin word biblia, translated as ‘bible’, literally means ‘books’. The 39 Old Testament books, which cover over 2,000 years, were written by a variety of authors and include many types of literature. It is no surprise, therefore, that many people come to the Bible wondering how it all fits together.

God did not arrange the Bible topically so that we could study themes individually: he arranged it so that we could read a book at a time. The Bible is God’s truth about himself and how we should relate to him, set in the context of history. It tells how people, principally the nation of Israel, came to experience God for themselves and respond to his Word. Far from being a dry theological textbook, it is the vibrant story of God’s redeeming work in the lives of his people.