Does God Want You to Spend 3 Years Preaching From the Book of Numbers?

I just ran into another Southeastern Seminary alum touting the propriety of verse-by-verse, expository preaching.  Entire books of the Bible must be taught sequentially, he believes.   

They have to beat them away.

Many Baptist and Bible churches boast on their websites that they offer this type of preaching as if it were the only proper way to teach the Word.

Where do they get this?

Verse-by-verse teaching is not directly commanded in the Bible.  However, it does have some scriptural support.  

King Josiah read “the Law” to the people (2 Kings 23) and later, Ezra would do the same (Nehemiah 8).  Ezra explained the text as he read it (Nehemiah 8:8).  

But Ezra didn’t exposit the whole Bible (since it wasn’t finished then) or even all 5 books of the Pentateuch.  He wouldn’t have had time to even read it all from “sunrise until noon” (Nehemiah 8:3) on a single day, let alone explain it.  

Ezra either read Leviticus or Deuteronomy, or, more likely, he read particular passages to the people.  

So while there may be an example of  verse-by-verse teaching in the Old Testament, there might not be.  We’re not really sure.  

Most importantly, a biblical example only becomes a biblical command when the Bible tells us so.  David slept with Bathsheba, but we don't preach the virtues of wife-stealing. 

So if verse-by-verse preaching isn’t really commanded in the Bible, where does it come from?  Tradition.  (Sola Scriptura means this should count for very little with Protestants.)   

A couple of the church fathers (2^nd & 3^rd Century) preached verse-by-verse, Martin Luther did so sometimes, and John Calvin did it always.

John Calvin: To blame for the 6 years you spent in Nahum.

I think we can blame Calvin for all of it (though there is no indication he wanted the church to universally adopt lexio continua, as verse-by-verse was then called).

Steven Lawson wrote of John Calvin, “As a faithful shepherd, he fed his congregation a steady diet of sequential expository messages.”[1]  Sounds responsible.

The Bible, of course, does not define a “faithful shepherd” this way.  Lawson might as well say, “As a faithful shepherd, Calvin fed his congregation a steady diet of Smarties.”  

Without scriptural support, there is nothing particularly “faithful” about verse-by-verse preaching, nor anything “unfaithful” about topical preaching (provided it comes from the Bible).

Lawson ascribes one benefit to expositional, verse-by-verse preaching, one which sounds biblical:  Verse-by-verse exposition means the pastor ends up preaching “the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27).  

The inconvenience of verse-by-verse exposition

That sounds biblical, but it’s not.  Jesus preached “the whole counsel of God,” but He did not go verse-by-verse through entire books of the Bible.  Neither did Paul, Peter, John or any other biblical preacher of the Old Testament or the New, to our knowledge.

In fact, if Acts 20:27 - “proclaim the whole counsel (βουλὴν) of God” - is the support for verse-by-verse preaching, the Greek word βουλὴν is being twisted badly.  It means “predetermined plan,” not "the whole Bible."

We can’t change the words of Scripture.  We might as well make Acts 20:27 read, "Proclaim the whole enchilada of God."  (This idiom actually fits the meaning of the passage better.)

 

Ironically, Lawson lists the specific books that John Calvin preached through during his ministry.

Get it?  

Calvin didn’t get to them all!  If never skipping a verse is what the Holy Spirit meant by preaching “the whole counsel of God,” it didn’t work for Calvin!  He missed a ton of verses that he never got a chance to preach.  Oh no!

Did Calvin use Nehemiah 8:8 as his biblical support for verse-by-verse preaching?  We don’t know.  He never got a chance to preach it!  That makes me laugh.

It's cool that Calvin liked to preach verse-by-verse.  But it was just his thing.  It worked for him.  That doesn't mean God wants you to do it.

How does verse-by-verse usually work today, as a practical matter?

 

Typically, it stinks.  It’s either boring, or it’s a fraud.  

He missed a verse.  We'll have to go back.

As one preacher crawled painfully through the Gospel of Mark, I realized that I would be dead before he reached Luke.  I heard another preacher read a long passage from Chronicles, then tell an endless story about his days as a rock & roll guitarist which had nothing to do with the point of the text.  Verse-by-verse, indeed.

So, if you won’t dare to darken the doors of a church that exposits the Scriptures non-sequentially (gasp!), just know that you’re being stuffy, religious and tradition-bound. There’s nothing sinful about preaching verse-by-verse, but there is nothing particularly holy about it, either.

At our church in Raleigh, we are faithful to preach the whole "plan" of God, from a specific text each week.  But we're not spending 3 years in the book of Numbers, no matter how proud Calvin would be.

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[1] Expository Genius of John Calvin, Steven Lawson.  It’s a great, well-written book.  I’m only picking apart the verse-by-verse stuff.  Otherwise it’s a first-class read.