Quality vs Quantity

Hi friends,

Writing a Bible commentary is like building a car. It’s not something you do in a day.

When I began working on the Grace Commentary two and a bit years ago, I had two options. I could write the whole thing and then publish it, or I could write bits and pieces and share those as I went along.

As you know, I went for the second option. It would’ve taken years to write the whole thing. I figured it was better to have a rough something than a beautiful nothing.

So far I have written commentary for 3000+ verses, which sounds impressive. But a lot of that commentary is fairly basic. It’s a rough draft, a first attempt.

In the beginning, my emphasis was on quantity. Just get something out there. But these days I am increasingly focusing on quality. Which means I am rewriting and expanding existing entries.

Let me give you an example. In Revelation 21:1 we find the phrase “a new heaven and a new earth.” What does this mean? If you looked up this verse in the Grace Commentary a year ago you would have seen a brief entry like this:

New heaven and a new earth. In the new covenant, the church is the temple of the Holy Spirit and the new heaven and earth.

If you look up this verse in the Grace Commentary today, you’ll see a bigger and better entry:

New heaven and a new earth. The eternal age, where God dwells with humanity here on earth.

In the poetic imagery of Revelation, the new heaven and earth correspond to the City of God, a.k.a., the new Jerusalem, a.k.a., the church. Just as the temple of Jerusalem was known to the Jews as “heaven and earth” (see entry for Matt. 5:18), in the new covenant, the church represents the new heaven and earth (see next verse). But the church is merely the trailer, not the movie.

On the Mount of Transfiguration, John got a glimpse of Christ’s kingly glory even though Christ had not yet ascended into heaven (Matt. 17:2, 2 Pet. 1:16). In the same way, the church presents the world with a taste of the kingdom come (Eph. 3:10) – even though the King has not yet come in power and glory. As wonderful as the church is, we still live in a world of tears and death. Wars, pandemics, and sin ravage our world. But one day God will bring an end to all those things that oppose his good will. He will remove everything that causes us to stumble and wipe away every tear (Rev. 21:4). He will make all things new (Rev. 21:5). Best of all, he will make his home among us physically and permanently (Rev. 21:3).

The revised version is not yet publishable quality – in fact, reading it now I can think of some tweaks. But I think you will agree it’s an improvement.

Since my last update in December 2022, we have made hundreds of revisions like this. There has been a huge improvement to the overall commentary.

If last year’s commentary was a Model T Ford – innovative, functional, but basic – then this year’s commentary is a bigger and better Model A. It has more grunt under the hood.

Next year’s commentary will be a Thunderbird followed by a Mustang!

This year we have also beefed up the Grace Glossary and published two Grace Bible installments.

I realize it’s been a while between updates, but I wanted to let you know that work on the Grace Commentary continues at a great pace.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank those of you who joined the Grace Commentary supporters’ team last week. Your partnership encourages me more than you know.

Grace and peace,

Paul

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