The Grace Commentary will focus heavily on providing historical and cultural background studies for each book of the Bible. It is my conviction that these studies not only help bring the Bible to life, but are more important than word studies, grammatical analysis, or other types of research that can be performed on any particular text.
Some may wonder why cultural and background studies are important or necessary for understanding the Bible. They want to know why they can’t just “read the Bible for what it says.” The answer is that you can “read the Bible for what it says,” but only if you understand what it says. And cultural and background studies help us understand what the text says. If you don’t know the culture, then you won’t know the way people thought back then, and if you don’t know the way they thought, you won’t know the meanings of the words they used, and if you don’t know the meaning of the words, you can’t just “read the Bible for what it says.”
Big Mac
I recently found an illustration in Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh’s Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels which helped me explain this in a way that makes more sense (p. 9). They write that when we in the United States read about a “Big Mac” we don’t need someone to tell us that it is “Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun” (remember the old Big Mac commercial?). We know what a Big Mac is and we don’t need someone to unpack it for us.
But suppose I wrote a letter to you, and in it, I mentioned how much I love Big Macs.
Now suppose that my letter gets miraculously preserved for 2000 years until a future archeologist discovers it. Upon translating the letter, the archeologist decides he wants to research what these “Big Macs” were that I loved so much. So he does some investigation, and immediately discovers that some people in 21st Century America are called “Mac.” So he decides that “Big Macs” are guys named Mac who are really large, and in my letter, I express my special affinity for them. He publishes his findings in a leading archaeological journal of his day.
Another scholar comes along, who has a degree in computer science, and he remembers reading something somewhere about “Mac” computers during the 20th and 21st centuries. He goes back and finds his notes and discovers that there were little Macs, called MacBooks which could be carried around, and other, bigger Macs which sat on a desk. He decides the bigger macs must be “Big Macs” and publishes his findings. He is invited to speak at the TED Conference in the year 4014.
There are so many benefits to “publishing” a commentary online rather than in print format. Below are a few (feel free to add more in the comments):
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
Ultimately, this commentary is an attempt to flesh out a new approach to Scripture which I call Redemptive Incarnational Hermeneutics. This is an approach to Scripture I have been thinking through for about two years now. But recently, I have stumbled across several authors and teachers who already use elements of this approach for quite a while. (One author I have not yet read is 
My new approach to people can be summed up in one word: GRACE.
Probably the primary area of theology that has changed in the past few years is my view of God. I used to think of God as the sum total of His attributes, and depending on what point in theology I was trying to make, I would focus on one attribute or another. If you look in most theology books, this is how God is viewed. The sections on “Theology Proper” are often little more than a cataloged list of God’s characteristics and attributes. The one God is then a sum of all His attributes.
Grace means “free” and so one of the reasons I have named this the “Grace Commentary” is because I strive to make them available for free. It is the Grace Commentary because it is the Free Commentary. It is free for all to read online at 
I first envisioned this Grace Commentary Series when I was about ten years old. The memory is as vivid as if it was yesterday. I was in the sanctuary of the church in which my father was a pastor, and had just come from browsing through his commentaries and books about the Bible. I was looking over the free literature on the information counter, and noticed that all of the newsletters and pamphlets were of lesser quality than the books on my father’s shelves. There were some basic Bible study guides and devotional material, but little of it was of any value.
What Bible translation is being used for the Grace Commentary? I will be using the