Tuesday-Structure: Conclusion
Once you have completed the four tasks described in the previous articles, you will have an excellent sense of the structure with which the biblical author has organized his thoughts in order to communicate his message. You will also have a much better sense where the emphases of the passage lie, and on what to focus further when you turn more specifically to the details of the passage.
You have accomplished your main objective and reached Tuesday’s goal.
- Objective: To discover how the author organizes his thoughts.
- Goal (Mile-Marker 2): With a firm handle on the implications of our passages genre(s), produce a structural diagram of the passage along with summaries of its major unit of thoughts.
However, as is our custom in these articles, here we will also add some additional ideas in case you have some extra time or if you want to further strengthen your understanding of the biblical text to be preached.
Additional Ideas
- Perfect your diagramming skills. If you are not very confident in the task of diagramming the structure of a passage, it might be a good investment of time to study more about it and practice it thoroughly until it becomes a natural skill.
- Reinforce skills and procedures. This may all seem like too many tasks or too much structure. Besides, on occasion I have come up with a good sermon almost spontaneously, writing with only the text in front of me. But perhaps the important phrase in this reflection is «on occasion.» For most of us this would likely represent the exception. What we want to achieve, under God’s goodness, is to preach good sermons predictably, on the vast majority of occasions. Hence, it is imperative to develop a system that can be followed on a regular basis and for the use of which we hone the required skills. Take a moment to think about the activities you normally perform when you study or when preparing a lesson or sermon. Now think about the tasks described so far and the sequence in which they have been structured. Are there any that you already plan to incorporate on a regular basis? Which ones? How? Will you join some of them together? Will you do them in a different sequence? What will you do to make sure they fit into your normal study routine?
Ideas for Original Languages
If you have knowledge of the original languages, some of the following ideas may be of particular interest to you.
- Take some steps to «automate» your parsing, especially with the use of software. For example, you can set up «visual filters», which automatically highlight the morphology of any passage. If you spend a few hours learning how they work and set up one or two to start with, you will never have to set them up again, and you can use them every time you work with the original language in question.
- Get commentaries that facilitate grammatical and structural analysis. There are a number of top commentaries in English that do this well. However, the Zondervan Exegetical Commentary (both Old and New Testaments) specifically offers sections for each of these issues in a highly accessible and consistent format.
- Strengthen your defenses against grammatical fallacies. Donald Carson’s book, Exegetical Fallacies, contains a very interesting chapter on grammatical fallacies. It is not as long as the chapter on word study fallacies, and it is a somewhat more difficult read. However, for those who delve deeper into the intricacies of Koine syntax, it has very valuable observations.