"Exegesis" Tagged Sermons
Careful exegesis of verse 7 closes out the series, alongside the small chiasm found in verses 5-7 that rewards close, patient reading rather than a quick pass. Paul’s own placement of love before faith in verse 5 gets specific attention, an ordering easy to read past. The Bible’s complexities, the sermon insists in closing, are not an obstacle to faith but part of what draws a reader more deeply into it.
The common claim that Paul is straightforwardly against slavery gets called unbiblical here, a real complication this sermon doesn’t try to smooth over. ‘Manstealing,’ condemned explicitly in 1 Timothy 1, is distinguished carefully from the household slavery Ephesians 6 addresses. Believers, in any case, cannot rightly consider themselves apart from Christ as a slave and God as a master, categories the modern reader resists but Paul assumes.
The two dreaming Josephs, and the two exoduses they belong to, are read for both their similarities and their real differences, a case study in proper Biblical exegesis done carefully rather than forced. Matthew 2:23’s obscure prophecy of a shoot from Jesse’s stem gets its own close attention. Scripture, the sermon insists throughout, is finally about what God does to us. What we’re meant to do comes after, not before.
The cross has to be in view from the very first verse of the Sermon on the Mount, this sermon insists, never introduced later as an afterthought. The long-running debate over whether there are seven, eight, or nine Beatitudes gets addressed directly. A full review of 5:3-9 and its commentary in 5:10-16 closes out this first major section of the series.
Matthew 5:17 raises three real exegetical difficulties at once: whether Christ changes the law, what ‘fulfill’ actually means, and how that fulfillment fits with the six contrasts that follow in 5:21-48. Two errors commonly made with 5:17-20 are named and set aside. The verse demands more patience than either error allows.