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 PrintableVersion The Word became freshBrilliant, readable and very Ralph DavisTHE WORD BECAME FRESH If, during the last few years, your pastor has been preaching lively sermons from Joshua, Judges, Samuel or Kings, you are probably indebted to the work of Dale Ralph Davis. These brilliant and readable commentaries (also published by Christian Focus) turn the most unappetising or unapproachable texts into hearty feasts for the soul. How does he do it? In this short book, sub-titled ‘How to preach from Old Testament Narrative Texts’, Dale Ralph Davis modestly reveals his route. He includes chapters on quirky texts, nasty texts, packaging that significantly surrounds texts, theology and application. Every chapter is stuffed with worked examples, so you need to have your Bible to hand as you read, in order to follow. And then you will want to go off and preach it to somebody. Dale Ralph Davis is the P.G. Wodehouse of Christian writing. His priceless prose is awash with wit and extraordinary turn of phrase. He makes you laugh out loud and then he nails you to your chair with the sharpness of his biblical point. This is the man whose text the Sunday before Christmas was 1 Chronicles 9.1-4 Look it up: it’s a genealogy. Davis says he has never found genealogies unpreachable. His sermon title on that occasion was, ‘A whole bunch of dead folks for Christmas’. He writes: ‘We were, I am sure, the only church in the whole USA that carried 1 Chronicles 9.1b-4 on its bulletin cover. Even Uthai deserves his day in the sun!’ Davis maintains that avoidance of difficult texts ‘gets us nowhere and impoverishes the church’. His excellent chapter on appropriation/application includes the damning sentence: ‘I hold that a reader who does not appropriate and/or a teacher who will not apply Scripture is practising abortion on the Bible.’ You may or may not want to imitate Davis’s style but if you read this book you will want to lift his structures and insights straight off the page. And that will be no bad thing for the church. It was not Davis who said that exegeting the Old Testament is like making love to a beautiful woman. But Dale Ralph Davis is that excited about it. And that love affair with Scripture is the most inspiring and striking aspect of this book. The net result is that you gasp with admiration not at the author but at the Bible and the Bible’s Lord. Ann Benton,
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