Allow me to explain. As I have participated in and facilitated Bible Studies in years past I have often supplemented my own deficient understanding of the Scriptures with the thoughts and scholarship of those far more knowledgeable than myself. I have a few good resources at hand already, but have longed for more in-depth insight. My own mentor, Toni, in Florida, often referred to her commentary on the Old Testament by Keil & Delitzsch. My dear husband knew of my desire to finish filling the bookshelves with such a set, and so he ordered them for my Christmas gift.
A single set on the Old Testament alone seems so unbalanced though, so he also ordered the commentary by Hendriksen and Kistemaker, "the only complete commentary on the New Testament written solely from a Reformed perspective", according to CBD.
"The Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament contain the divine revelations which prepared the way for the redemption of fallen man by Christ. The revelation of God commenced with the creation of the heaven and the earth, when the triune God called into existence a world teeming with organized and living creatures, whose life and movements proclaimed the glory of their Creator; whilst, in the person of man, who was formed in the image of God, they were created to participate in the blessedness of the divine life. But when the human race, having yielded in its progenitors to the temptation of the wicked one, and forsaken the path appointed by its Creator, had fallen a prey to sin and death, and involved the whole terrestrial creation in the effects of its fall; the mercy of God commenced the work of restoration and redemption, which had been planned in the counsel of the triune love before the foundation of the world. Hence, from the very beginning, God not only manifested His eternal power and godhead in the creation, preservation, and government of the world and its inhabitants, but also revealed through His Spirit His purpose and desire for the well-being of man. This manifestation of the personal God upon and in the world assumed, in consequence of the fall, the form of a plan of salvation, rising above the general providence and government of the world, and filling the order of nature with higher powers of spiritual life, in order that the evil, which had entered through sin into the nature of man and passed from man into the whole world, might be overcome and exterminated, the world be transformed into a kingdom of God in which all creatures should follow His holy will, and humanity glorified into the likeness of God by the complete transfiguration of its nature. These manifestations of divine grace, which made the history of the world "a development of humanity into a kingdom of God under the educational and judicial superintendence of the living God," culminated in the incarnation of God in Christ to reconcile the world unto Himself."
- from the General Introduction to the Five Books of Moses, by Keil & Delitzsch.
What beauty of scholarship and expression- I can't wait!
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