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Session 9 – Bibliography (Abstract of Systematic Theology by James P. Boyce)

Video: Session 9 – Bibliography

Abstract of Systematic Theology by James Petigru Boyce
Session 9 – N/a
Subject: Bibliography
Wednesday Logos – 7-29-26

Sermon Transcript

The following is a lightly edited transcript generated from the audio; it may contain small errors.

Opening

Amen. Thank you, Dan. Okay, now if you remember, my opening teaching was on bibliology, right? Remember that? That’s why we talk about the information of Scripture and that sort of thing. It dawned on me: why are just some of us teaching and some of us are not? Then I thought, are all the people here really qualified to teach themselves the way they could be? The answer is no. It’s not because you’re dumb. You’re all capable. Some of you are probably a lot smarter than I am, especially Jake, because he’s an engineer and I’m not. That’s kind of scary, actually, not to mention it.

Why Tools Matter

But as with any field, like if you’re an engineer—electrical engineering, physical engineering—there’s different kinds, right? Each field, each discipline has a certain nomenclature, vocabulary, and it has certain tools. Roger works electricity. He needs certain tools. I don’t have those tools either. That’s why I call Roger. Theology is the same way. People over the years have walked into my office, which now Mike stole, and they look at the books and say, have you read all these books? And the question reveals that they don’t really understand what a library is. Most people have a library of a dozen romances, Christian fictions, and a couple devotional books. They say, look at my big library. That’s not a library. It’s a collection of books, but it’s not a library. A library is well thought out, and a library is a collection of books that has a foundation and a base and it builds on something.

But I wasted—as I learned and I gathered knowledge, I realized how much money I wasted on books that weren’t really that valuable. I didn’t know any better. I had to learn the hard way. No one taught me how to collect books. No one taught me the important kinds of books to get if I want to learn Bible and theology. So I just bought books that looked good. That job was really a godsend. I didn’t know God was preparing me for ministry, but he was, providing a means for me to build this library at a reasonable price. Because back then we didn’t have apps. We didn’t have the internet. I mean, I had to write letters to people in Europe just asking if they had a book that I was looking for. That’s how you did it in the old days. Maybe a phone call. So what I want to talk about tonight is some of the tools that you need in your library. Now, when I say you need, some of you are like, we don’t need more books. Well, certain kinds of books you probably don’t need. Other books you do need.

The Family Theologian

And I just want to say one word here to the men, and this is not a diss to the women. Do you know that passage that says when a woman has a question she should ask her husband at home? You know that verse? I remember this one lady quoted me the verse and laughing, saying, that is hilarious. Me ask my husband at home. And she was right. Her husband was not qualified to answer her questions. He should have been, though. Because every husband and every father is the family theologian. And you young bucks that aren’t married yet, you’re going to be.

If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home.

(1 Corinthians 14:35)

And it’s amazing how it paid off in my life later as an adult, as a husband, as a father, as a pastor, all the things that I did later. You’ve got to learn—you don’t just learn the word, you’ve got to learn how to learn the word. Okay. So tonight I want to talk about some of the tools. Now I don’t expect you to buy every book I recommend. I want to talk about some categories of books for you to think about as you build. I don’t care if you’re 20 or 80. I’m not quite 80 yet; I’m getting there. You’ve got to build this thing and use it. I’m going to pass mine on to somebody in my family.

The Bible as Foundation

When we talk about a foundation, what is a foundation of all theological study? The Bible. Amen? So I’m not going to put the Bible at the top because it’s not the crown. The Bible’s a foundation. Now, have you ever asked yourself why there’s so many translations? Ever said, why are there like 80 million English translations? Well, I’m not going to get into this because it’s a very complicated and arcane topic, but I want to try to help you understand your English Bible and what you should use or not use. You can learn Greek. Okay, Greek is a good way to go. I can help you with that too.

Manuscript Families and Translations

Okay, you’ve got two primary classes of manuscripts. Now when I’m referring to manuscripts I’m referring to the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Now the Old Testament is in Hebrew primarily, although there is a Greek translation of the Old Testament that was written in about 250 BC, the Septuagint. And let me tell you something I learned in my studies, and I’ve been studying for a long time. I just learned this: that when the New Testament quotes the Old Testament, more often they’re quoting the Greek Old Testament than the Hebrew. Suck on that for a while. Do what you will with it, but I think it’s important to know that. That’s why I’m reading the Septuagint.

Okay, so there’s two main families. You have what’s called the Byzantine, and then you have the Alexandrian. The reason I want to mention this is because all the English translations are based on one or the other of these schools, or they’re called families of texts. Now there’s a real science to all this we’re not going to get into. They look at the dates, they look at the way the letters are made, and look at the materials used. It’s complicated.

The Byzantine was the foundation of what’s called the TR. The TR means Textus Receptus, the received text. Now the King James is based on that, the New King James, the Modern English Version, and many of the original English versions, the Coverdale and the Bishops’ Bible, and all those early Bibles that predated the King James, which was really an intention to collect all of those English Bibles into one, which it did accomplish pretty much. Those have a foundation of the Byzantine family. And then over here you have the Alexandrian family, which is the New American Standard, ESV, and NIV, and a bunch more. The trend today is away from the Byzantine toward this Alexandrian group.

This is called the Textus Receptus. This is called the critical text, okay? Because it was critical of the Byzantine family. I mean, that’s really what happened. A group of scholars: you know, the King James is good, but we’ve got to fix some things here. So they did like the founding fathers of America did. They went to Philadelphia, and instead of giving us a revised Articles of Confederation, they gave us a whole new Constitution. So these guys got together; instead of fixing this, they just gave us a whole new document. We’re proposing this as the best text based upon the modern science of textual criticism. And so most of the modern versions are based on that.

Now there’s a third thing developing as we speak, and that’s called the majority text. Majority text doesn’t care about these two families of texts. They just care about numbers. What’s the majority of manuscripts, regardless of the text tradition?

So now we know our Bible at this level, right? Of the KJV, New KJV, NAS—we know it at that level. All this stuff is really underneath, all the scholarly groundwork that’s going on to get the English Bible in our hands. Some people feel very extreme about this. I mean, there’s the King James only people, because the King James is based upon the Byzantine school, and that’s what Paul used, that kind of thinking. So at this level, we’re talking about manuscripts, but at this level here, we’re talking about translations.

So here’s the question. How do you have a group of people that all agree that the Alexandrian manuscripts are correct, and yet you have 25 different translations? How does that happen? Some people just like certain styles. When you get down to it, if you’re looking at a manuscript and I’m looking at the manuscript and they’re identical, and we say, okay, I’m going to translate it and you can translate it, and they become a little bit different, but we’re basically saying the same thing. That’s what all this is. In some cases, you can have some critical verses that’ll be almost identical in all versions regardless of the manuscript family. But otherwise, there’s a lot of leeway. And once the NIV got accepted, boom, the floodgates just opened up. Now we have all kinds of translations. You can’t keep track of them all.

Versions and Study Bibles

But then your Bible, also you have a version of the Bible. The version is different than the translation. This is an ESV. But I can guarantee you, there’s a lot of different ESVs. Some of them are ten times thicker, right? Why? Because that one’s a study Bible. This one is a reading Bible. Ain’t nothing wrong with that. They’re just different. You can have a Tozer Bible, a Ryrie Bible, a MacArthur Bible, the Patriot’s Bible, a Charles Stanley Bible. I mean, there’s a million versions now. Great preacher, but not a scholar. So that’s a version. You have the translation you like, but then you have to pick a version of the translation you like. Right, Lisa? Lisa knows this because she’s been through some Bibles finding the perfect Bible. I admire her for that quest.

All of the versions can be of any translation. You can have a King James translation with many different versions, a MacArthur version, an R.C. Sproul version, a Tozer version, and then you can have the New American Standard in it, same thing. It’s all about the study material that’s put into the Bible to help you learn the Bible. So the point I want to make about this is that every translation has its weaknesses. Every one of them. People say, well, the ESV is the best. King James is the best. I get it. But the truth is, they’re all human translations. The only perfect translation is the original. We don’t even really have the original original. We have copies of the original.

So the King James, I actually still use it. I like it. But that’s me. What I also realize from studying the Bible for years is it has certain weaknesses. So when I read it, I know what the weaknesses are. It’s like you know the country roads where you live, so you can avoid the ditches. So King James has a problem with the Greek aorist tense; it doesn’t like to use it. But that’s the past tense in Greek. So it says things that sound like it’s present tense, like “you are dead.” That’s not what it says. It’s saying you have died, or you did die. It’s different than you are dead now. You learn the weaknesses of the translation you’re using. It’s very important. If you’re not sure, then read about it. You’ll find books that will compare the different translations, and they’ll give advice. The important point is you’re being thoughtful about the thing that you are consuming, that you are calling the Word of God.

Another point is there’s a difference between a reading Bible and a study Bible. A reading Bible maybe will have larger print. It’s just more comfortable to read. Some of these study Bibles are like, you need a cart behind you to carry your Bible to church. They’re big. They’re bulky. There’s a lot of study material in there and it’s wonderful, but it can be kind of awkward. I’m partial towards a study Bible because I like to study the Bible and I just read it. There’s a downside, though. I led this one gal to Jesus in college and I got her a Bible. And she calls me up one day and says, oh, I want to read this passage to you. And she starts reading, and I’m like, that’s not in the Bible. And she was reading the heading, written by Ryrie. She didn’t know any better. She assumed if it’s in the book, within the covers, it must be the Bible. The Bible doesn’t even have chapters, you know, not the original. It wasn’t divided up into paragraphs. A lot of Greek manuscripts don’t even have spaces in between the letters. Pretty crazy. So you can get a study Bible, and all the notes are great, but then you end up reading the notes all day and not the Bible. That’s a trap. So I encourage you to get a good study Bible, but to make sure you read your Bible more than the study notes. Okay, very important.

Concordances

Okay, now let’s talk about—who wants to tell me what a concordance is? The thing in the back? Well, mine has maps in it, depending on your version. Actually, the new Bible I bought the other day doesn’t even have a concordance. It’s a reading Bible, not a study Bible. A concordance is a book. Mike, did you bring one? Yep. Got it? And you’ve got to be strong to pick it up, trust me.

What this does is if you’re reading your Bible and it says you are saved by faith, you say, I wonder what faith means in the Greek. Well, you can go to your Strong’s, or even this one, and you can look it up and it’ll show you the Greek word for faith in that verse. And when you start to do that, you find the same English word is often used for many different Greek words. So then you start saying, why is that? How come the word for faith, which is pistis, is the word used here, but over here it’s something else? Maybe there’s a reason. Through a concordance you can find every place in the Bible the word faith is mentioned, and that would be the place to begin. And then look every one of the verses up and then begin to build your study from there.

Now concordances can be English, they can be Greek, they can be Hebrew, because Greek and Hebrew is what the Bible was written in, English is what we read. So what they did with Strong is they gave every word a number. So now you can learn the original word in Greek and Hebrew through your concordance and then link it to all kinds of scholarly apparatus through just knowing that number. It’s amazing. If the Bible is the foundation, a concordance is that important. Foundational. The original concordance was not written by Strong; it was written by a guy named Cruden. And he went mad, by the way. He did. He lost his mind doing it. That’s what you call dedication, right?

Word Studies, Lexicons, and Dictionaries

Okay, so another area I want to mention is word studies, and that’s related to concordance work. I love words. I love the Word; his name is Jesus. I hope that’s why I love words, because I love the Word. We live in a world where words aren’t important, images are, right? They make commercials in such a way they may not say anything about the product, but they’ll talk about family and dogs in the back seat and children, and they give you a feeling. It’s psychological manipulation. That’s what it is. No words. God gave us his revelation in words. Now he did other things, he did miracles, he did visuals, right? Wonders they’re called. But he encapsulated that in his revelation of the Bible, which is made up of words. So we have to study those words. We don’t just study the topics—we do that—but in order to understand the topics you have to know the words. You cannot build a gigantic Lego set without the individual pieces. The words are the small pieces that you build your concepts and you build your doctrine on.

You’ve heard about the theological split between the East and the Western church, and everybody said it was about one letter, about the iota: was it homoiousios or homoousios, because one means like nature, the other one is the same nature. That makes a big difference. We’re talking about Jesus: is he like God and has a similar nature, or is his nature the nature of God? So it wasn’t a letter. It wasn’t even a word. It was a whole theological construct based upon the words. The words are important. I love doing word studies. Vine’s dictionary is a favorite of mine. There was a famous book done in the late 1800s, and it’s still being read today in seminaries, a great book on synonyms in the New Testament. I’ve got a couple books by Barclay on New Testament words; one’s called More New Testament Words. Those are classic books on word studies. And there’s many, many other books. Go on your computer and Google biblical word studies and all kinds of titles will pop up. You’ve got to dig into the words.

Well, words of course make you think about dictionaries, right? When you talk about Bible dictionaries there’s actually two kinds, generally speaking. One is about words. And those are also called lexicons, because if it’s a Greek dictionary they rarely call it a dictionary. They call it a lexicon. It just means dictionary. It’ll give you a word, it’ll give you a basic definition. That’s what we think of as a dictionary. But there’s now so many other dictionaries, and they’re really dictionaries about topics. And this is where there’s a blurring between dictionaries and encyclopedias. Encyclopedias is where you expect the big articles, right? And a dictionary you just want a word and a very simple definition. A lot of these biblical dictionaries are now kind of morphing into something in between.

I even brought a couple. A dictionary of early Christian biography. A dictionary of early Christian beliefs. All that means is the topics are in alphabetical order. The general topic is what did the early church believe, and you look it up by alphabetical order. That’s why they call it a dictionary. But it’s a great tool to have. So lexicons—Mike, did you bring lexicons? Yeah, this is like the classic, if you’re going to learn New Testament Greek, you’re going to be using this book: A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. It’s basically a Greek dictionary of Greek words, not big articles about what the early church thought about something, just what the words mean and how they were used. But there are many others.

A Short Break

Let’s take a quick break now, grab a drink a little bit, but try not to dilly-dally too long. All right. Seven minutes, how’s that? No, ten at the most. [audio unclear — class break]

Okay, let’s get going.

Encyclopedias

Now I mentioned we’re talking about dictionaries, right? The McClintock and Strong encyclopedia, the Hastings Bible dictionary—it’s called the dictionary, but it’s really an encyclopedia. And the ISBE, which is the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. That’s one of my favorites. Smith’s Bible Dictionary is another good one. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, why do you need four of them? Just buy one. Because I can guarantee you that some of these encyclopedias, you’re going to have that burning question about a certain topic, and it keeps you up at night. I’m going to get my encyclopedia and look it up, and it won’t be there. Whereas the ISBE leans conservative on those same things. Well, that’s good to have too, right? I don’t say you should never read anything that leans liberal, but you should have the corollary of the conservative view of it also. When you’re reading liberal stuff you should know it’s liberal. And if you don’t know it’s liberal then you better get educated. Because then you’re really in a dangerous place, if you’re reading books and you don’t know where they’re coming from.

So the reason you want two or three of something, or four or five, or in Mike’s case, ten of something, is there are different viewpoints. There’s denominational viewpoints that will show up. You get a Bible dictionary that’s funded by one set of authorities, and you get a Bible dictionary that’s funded by the Presbyterian Church. Guess what? They’re not going to have the same view of the gifts of the Spirit. They just won’t. Well, you need to know that; you need to be well rounded. Bible dictionaries or encyclopedias can be on any topic in the Scripture and sometimes even on topics that are only remotely related to the Scripture. You can get encyclopedias on biblical manuscripts. I’m a word nerd, which means I like words, but I like the things that words make, which is paragraphs, and the things that paragraphs make, which are books. I like it all. I love learning. And the funny thing is, before I was saved I don’t think I read one book in my life. It’s true. After I got saved, I became immediately addicted to learning. Immediately. I wanted to learn everything I could learn.

Commentaries

Anybody can write a commentary. I can write a commentary of the book of John. And when it says, in the beginning was the Word and the Word was God, I can say, this means this. There are commentaries on biblical authors. Let’s say you want to study the book of Romans, so you just collect a bunch of commentaries on the book of Romans. That’s fine. I’ve got a whole bunch on Romans, some of the classic ones. But then you’ll see someone will write a commentary not just on the epistle of 1 John but 1, 2, and 3 John and even John’s Gospel, so he does a commentary on the writings of John. You get people who write a commentary on the Pauline Epistles, all the ones that Paul wrote. The main ones are the individual books that people will buy, you know, they want to study Hebrews, or whatever.

What do you leave out? Did you leave out James? No. That was Luther. He wanted to expunge it from the Bible. Calvin never wrote a commentary on the book of Revelation. Because he said nobody understands this. He’s like, no way. This is insane. And he said, I’m not doing it. He never did. Okay. Excuse my language. It’s hilarious, isn’t it? It’s true though.

So you’ve got the question of do I want a single-volume commentary or a set. I recommend you get one or two good sets that cover pretty much the whole Bible. And then if you have special books you want to study, maybe you can collect some books on those books. Like I said, Romans, Hebrews, whatever you want. I made it my goal when I was younger to try to find what was the best commentary on every book of the Bible. Like what scholars say is the best. And that’s the one that I want to own. I spent years building a wonderful, beautiful library. I have some of the best theological books you can buy. Are you envious yet? And soon you guys can all fight over it when I’m gone.

But who has time to read the junk, right? That’s one of the things I learned when I was young in the Lord. I work in a bookstore, there’s millions of books here, I ain’t planning to have time for all this; I kind of need to figure out what’s the best stuff to read. I have limited time. So only read the best, but sometimes you have to read to find out what the best is. Read a book on commentaries. Read a good article: what are the best Bible encyclopedias? And do your own research, and then make some smart purchases.

There’s also the general breakdown between critical or academic commentaries and general or popular commentaries. An academic commentary will generally not just expound the passage, but this Hebrew scholar’s wrong, and this Hebrew scholar’s wrong, but mine is. And that’s stuff that a lot of people don’t care about. They just want to know, what’s the verse mean? So you, meaning the average reader—and that average is not an insult, by the way—probably don’t want critical or academic unless you’re on the road to learning Greek or Hebrew. Be aware of that, because you can end up buying critical books you’re never going to read. You’re going to get it home: oh my goodness, I can’t read this.

There’s only one critical commentary that I read that I really can’t understand, and that’s the Keil and Delitzsch Old Testament. It’s ten volumes, and he goes way into the Hebrew. Well, I don’t know Hebrew hard at all. I mean, I know important words or phrases, but I don’t mean know it know it. But his English comments are so good. Really. I have these gorgeous paragraphs; it’s like it opens up the word. But it’s based on a whole page of Hebrew scholarship that I didn’t understand. So you just put up with it. I’m not going to learn Hebrew. I’m too old. But generally you don’t want to buy a bunch of books you can’t understand. There’s great general commentary written for lay people, and there’s many of Sproul’s commentaries written for lay people, with good scholarship backing it up. They’ll refer to this Greek word here means this, that’s fine. But they don’t go into dissertations on the dative case versus the other case, page after page. You don’t want that.

Also, some commentaries are verse by verse. Some are paragraph by paragraph. And some are even more like a book: you get a one-volume book that’s 500 pages, you think, well, it’s a big book. Not really, not when if you buy the set it’s 5,000 pages. And they’ll give you basically five chapters on the book of Romans about the general topics of Romans. Now I’m not saying there’s nothing good in it. It’s just not like, when you think of a commentary, you want somebody to walk you through the text, right? You want the verse. What you really want is the verse-by-verse commentary. So be aware of that.

If I could give you some recommendations on commentaries, I would mention Matthew Henry, John Calvin, Albert Barnes. Albert Barnes was a Presbyterian, and he was tried for heresy twice by his denomination because he did not believe in limited atonement. So if you’re a Presbyterian or a Calvinist and you have a problem with the TULIP, you should probably like Albert Barnes. He is a scholar of scholars. Some would say he was a heretic, I get it, but I found out later after studying him, I go, oh, I love this guy, he agrees with me. Yeah, I agree with him.

Adam Clarke. He was a Wesleyan. So I don’t think I agree with his soteriology, but a lot of other stuff I do. But I also have an interesting view of his that, I don’t know, maybe you guys never heard this, but he believed the serpent of the garden, when Satan possessed the serpent and it says after that, you’ll crawl on your belly, he believed the serpent was a monkey, and it lost all of its limbs, and that was his view of what the curse was, because he believed that you cannot have anything already that crawls on the belly have another curse of crawling on the belly, and so that was his thinking. To each his own, right? All right. But it’s a good commentary.

John Gill. He’s probably one of my favorite systematic theologians and also commentators. He does both. He also has a great sermon book I think everybody should have, The Cause of God and Truth, I think, is the title. Alexander Maclaren, and he wrote the Expositions of Holy Scripture. It is outstanding. Incredible preacher, incredible scholar. Charles Spurgeon, especially The Treasury of David, Psalm commentaries. I even have my original Treasury of David. I think I got it from a library. It’s about 150 years old, but that’s one of the first books I ever had, I should say, after the Lord saved me, I bought. J.C. Ryle, I love this man. He has Expository Thoughts on the Gospels, four volumes, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and he comments on the passage, and then he has a sermon on that passage, and they’re just golden, they’re just amazing. Charles Hodge, he’s great. Now that’s just some. I know you can say, oh, I have my favorites, I get it, but that’s just some of them. I didn’t mention Greek or Hebrew commentaries, just the ones that I found to be more easily readable. All of them are readable, actually, of the ones I mentioned.

Systematic Theology

Okay, now, systematic theology books. How many of you have a systematic theology in your library besides the Bible? What’s the difference between a systematic theology book, generally, and a commentary? Well, a commentary is going to go through the text, and then it might mention some application maybe on a verse, say, well, this is talking about election. A systematic theology will say, I’m going to look at the whole doctrine of election, and I’m going to go through the whole Bible and collect all the information about it, and then I’ll try to systematize it so I can teach this to you and make some sense. And that’s just the next level of study. I would recommend Louis Berkhof, and I especially recommend the smaller book, the Manual of Christian Doctrine. It’s just a smaller version of his larger systematic. A lot of people cannot read the larger systematic. It’s hard to get through. I got a lot from the Manual; I got through it. And John Calvin, of course, one of my favorites, and Charles Hodge, A.A. Hodge. A.A. Hodge is Charles Hodge’s son. You know, I just naturally don’t like the son, because I like the original, I like the dad. But then I started reading the son, and it’s like, oh my, this is really good. I mean, he actually might have exceeded the father.

Reading Old Books

And this is one of my favorite books. I don’t know if you guys have ever heard of this, God in the Dock. C.S. Lewis wrote this book, and I shouldn’t have been surprised because it’s so good, and of all of his writing it’s so clear and it’s so cogent, you just can’t believe. God in the Dock, meaning God is on trial, right, like we were talking Sunday, about the trial. And then he has an incredible article in here, and there’s two things I would recommend. He has an article on prayer, and I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s really, really well thought out, and I think that it could be profitable to some. And then he also has, in the beginning of the book, you’ll never guess, he does the introduction of this book, and I highly recommend this, I tell you this, to everybody I know, and he wrote the introduction to Athanasius, The Incarnation of the Word, from the 4th century. And in that book, at the beginning, Lewis has a little article, On the Reading of Old Books. Fantastic. I will tell you this, this is C.S. Lewis, he says, I tend to, when I want to read something, I go to the old books rather than the new books. He’s like, most of the people I know only read new books, they never read old books. There’s a reason, he says, I prefer old books to new books. He makes an incredible argument in this article why you should read old books. I would suggest you get this, and this has this article also, On the Reading of Old Books. It is just, it is just excellent. Highly recommended.

Renewing the Mind

And then, of course, I think I want to mention this—excuse me, but I think it’s just very, very important. I think this is a shame. I think this is a shame. I think that we are typified by this statement: we are typified as being people that don’t want to learn. People that don’t want to think. We don’t want to think about God. We don’t want to be a thinking people. I know that there’s a spirit of this in our culture, like, you know, Caesar raise your kids, don’t do it in a Christian environment, because they’ll be Romans, not Christians. We’ll raise them to be good Romans, how to serve Caesar. But, you know, even in the church, there’s the same spirit, I think, of just, I don’t want to learn. I don’t want to think. I just want to believe. Faith and belief is incredibly important, but I also think that God created us in a way to think, and he gave us a revelation so we can think clearly. Because after the fall, all of our thinking is a little skewed. We don’t think the way we should think, and so we need something to renew our mind, right?

But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

(2 Peter 3:18)

Paul, I think it was Peter, actually, that said we should grow in knowledge and grace, right? Those two things, they have to go together. Because if you just have knowledge, you can be a prideful, arrogant person, and if you just have grace and you don’t have knowledge, you can be taken for a ride, easily deceived. So this is just an exhortation. I think we should be thinkers. We should be people that not only love God, but we should love his Word, and we should love the wisdom and the knowledge that comes from studying it.

Apps, Websites, and Cost

Now, there are some other things I wanted to mention that’s not in the books. The books are now being surpassed by the apps, are they not? I mean, I used to have, in my library, I had twenty-five Bible dictionaries, I had thirty-two commentaries, and so on, and now I can have, like, a thousand of them on my iPad. I don’t even have a library anymore; I have a little device. The funny thing is, I don’t even look at it. I still like the books. I still like to feel them. That’s just me. I know some of you guys, you’re not even—you don’t even have a printed Bible. Oh, yeah, I have it on my computer, on my phone. Okay, I get it. If it works for you, it works for you. If you can read it, if you can study it, I don’t have a problem with it. I just like my books. I like this leather. There’s nothing like an old book. And books have a smell to them, especially older books; they smell wonderful, like a good cup of coffee. Books don’t smell like coffee, but I love the smell of a good book.

But there’s also, you know, I’m going to mention, Erasmus, I think, is the one who said, when I have money I buy books, and if I have money left, I buy food. That’s the idea, right? You guys, some of you are going to go, well, I can’t afford to have a huge theological library. I don’t have $20,000 sitting around to buy books, and I get it. I couldn’t do it either. I never made very much money, but I had access to used books. And now you have the internet, you have ways of going on these websites, you can get books. Some of the classic books are now so cheap. I would encourage you, if you don’t have the money, then maybe just work your way up, get one or two, and start to enjoy it, and also, if you have a little more, maybe spend a little more, you don’t need the nicest car, you don’t need the nicest this or that. Maybe spend a little less in other areas and a little more in the areas of your mind, of your soul. You know, I think that’s really important.

Logos and Other Software

So now, the other things I wanted to mention besides books, apps, websites, and computer programs. I mentioned I have a couple of them I really like. I do like e-Sword, I like the free version, but I also have the paid version, and I also have this one, GreekKit, I think, is the name of it, and I like that. And then, of course, Logos. Now, I don’t like the cost of Logos, I’ll be honest, I don’t like it. I had to really struggle with this. I have a friend who was like, you have to get this, you have to get this. And I was like, I can’t afford $9 a month. I just, I really, I can’t. And this is 17 years ago, I remember, and I was like, I can’t afford it. And I went round and round, and finally I just said, no, I just, I can’t. And then I, I just regret it now, because I could have had 17 years of a Logos library, and I just, I just, I should have spent the $9 a month. I really, I was like, I can’t, I just, I can’t. I have kids, I have this, I have that. I’m on a budget. I should have just, I should have just paid it, I should have just gone for it. But I didn’t, and I missed out. I don’t want you to miss out, if you can help it.

So, I want to mention some other websites. Olive Tree, Bible Hub, Blue Letter Bible, Bible Study Tools, and there’s probably 50 more that I didn’t mention. These are just some of the ones that people use. They’re all good. I mean, they have, they have certain strengths, certain weaknesses, but they’re all good. You can, you can find things that you like, and, you know, I would encourage you, if you have a phone, or a tablet, or a computer, you can, you can start to build a library of resources that you can have in your pocket, and that’s pretty amazing.

Now, I asked Mike if he would be able to talk about Logos a little bit, because he’s been using it for a long time, and I think he can show you some of the things that it can do, maybe more than I can, because I never really got into it the way he did. So, Mike, if you want to share a little bit about Logos, that would be great. [audio unclear — Logos demonstration]

Thank you, Mike. I appreciate that. That’s, that’s really, that’s really helpful. I think you can see the power of what some of these programs can do, and, you know, if you have the means, I would encourage you to look into it.

A Love for the Word

I just want to close with this. I want you to have a love for the Word of God. I want you to have a love for studying it, a love for learning it, a love for teaching it to your family. I want you to be the kind of people that, when you have a question, you go to the Word, and you have the tools to find the answers. You don’t have to be a scholar, but you can be a student. You can be a lifelong learner of the Word of God.

I bow down toward your holy temple and give thanks to your name for your steadfast love and your faithfulness, for you have exalted above all things your name and your word.

(Psalm 138:2)

You know, the psalmist says that God has exalted his Word above all his name, or, depending on the translation, he has exalted his name and his Word. That’s how important the Word is. Jesus said, I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me, and I in you. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. That’s John 15. The Word has to abide in us. We have to be people of the Word.

I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.… If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

(John 15:5, 7)

So, I just want to encourage you. Get the tools. Use the tools. Build your library, whether it’s paper or digital. And more than that, love the Word, because the Word is Jesus. And if you love him, you’ll love his Word.

Closing Prayer

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your Word. We thank you that you have given us this revelation, that we can know you, that we can know your truth, that we can be equipped. Lord, help us to be people who love your Word, who study it, who teach it to our children, who use the tools that you’ve provided through the labors of so many faithful men and women over the centuries. Give us a hunger to learn, a humility in our learning, and a love for you that grows as we grow in knowledge and grace. In Jesus’ name, amen.