Commentaries as a Ministry

Here's an excerpt from Commentaries as a Ministry, Douglas Moo's contribution to the June issue of Tabletalk:

I love writing commentaries. I feel as if it is what God made me to do. I have written around twelve of them, ranging from thirty-page overviews to one-thousand-page detailed expositions. I just finished one and will start another in a year or so. I am incredibly thankful that I can spend so much of my time doing what I love.

As much as I like writing commentaries, however, I could hardly justify the work I put into them on that basis alone. I write them because I am convinced that, as flawed as they are, they help God's people understand God's Word and teach and preach it faithfully. The Christian faith, while centered on the Living Word, Jesus Christ, is defined by the written Word, the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. God addresses His people through these writings. When we read or hear Scripture, we read or hear God speaking to us. His words, however, come to us in the form of human words. Scripture is the product of what theologians call"concurrence": God and human beings together producing the words of life. Good commentaries help people grapple with God's Word as this fully divine yet fully human product.

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