This morning I preached my last sermon in the series on Ephesians. Last week I put away the 75 file folders of sermons covering this series. Next week I will attempt to put my commentaries back on my shelves in their rightful place. (When I am preaching through a book, I pull all the commentaries on that book and put them directly behind my desk where they are in easy reach.)
I’ve not only acquired many new commentaries on Ephesians in the past two years as we’ve worked our way through the book, but I have also developed a really affinity for these books and the authors. Each week I would spend time reading in at least some of them (at least 6-8 each week), and often most of them (up to 16-18). Here are the commentaries that I found most helpful week by week. If time was short and I could only read a few, these were typically the ones I read:
Exegetical commentaries:
These are the technical commentaries. They are detailed and comprehensive (Hoehner completed his volume in a little less than 1000 pages). These were the best because Hoehner considered all of the issues with scholarly precision and because O’Brien, though not quite as comprehensive had an ability to synthesize the problems more concisely as well as keeping the overall flow of Paul’s argument in the book in better perspective.
Expositional commentaries:
MacArthur is so good at explaining. He was always helpful. Stott and Kent I picked up after I’d started preaching the series. I didn’t always agree with Stott’s interpretations, but he very often had good insights on implications of passages that others didn’t see or address. And Kent is short, but I always appreciated his ability to synthesize a passage in just a couple of sentences or a short paragraph. He was one of the writers that helped keep me from getting lost in the details of a passage.
Devotional commentaries:
Hughes is always a good read for illustrations. He won’t always deal with every verse, but he helps me to see how other pastors “package” the passage with outlines and illustrations. He is very readable. Lloyd-Jones is not as accessible in that he’s so long (his series on Ephesians is eight volumes!). He often diverts from the passage at hand, but he thinks through the passages for the theological implications, which is my tendency, so for that I found him particularly helpful. As with Stott, I don’t always agree with Lloyd-Jones’ theology, and because of time constraints, I couldn’t always read him, but when I did, I was helped.
Words of Grace 