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 PrintableVersion Let's study MatthewWelcome Matt!LET’S STUDY MATTHEW This title in the ‘Let’s Study…’ series edited by Sinclair Ferguson precisely fulfils the series’ purpose for its target audience. These are ‘to be helpful to ordinary Christian people by encouraging them to understand the message of the Bible and apply it to their own lives… It can be used simply as an aid to individual Bible study… family devotions… and also for group study’. The book includes the whole text of Matthew’s Gospel broken into 70 passages, each ten to 30 verses long. Three pages of pithy conservative evangelical commentary, clearly written with pastoral concern, are provided for each passage. So the commentary section for the whole of Matthew’s Gospel comes to 300 pages — not so long as to be daunting, but not so brief as to be ineffectual. The crowning jewel of the book is the Group Study Guide at the back. Each study covers three to four passages from the main part of the book, has seven questions for each of the 26 studies, including questions for application and prayer. A Bible study group weekly meeting could study the whole of Matthew’s Gospel in under a year using this guide. The strength of the book — its brevity and the way it breaks up Matthew’s Gospel into manageable-length sections — is also its Achilles’ heel. In some places over-arching themes that integrate multiple sections of the Gospel and help with the interpretation of individual sections are hinted at but not explicitly highlighted, so that an interpretive key to some of the more difficult sections is not available. An example would be the section covering the famous Christian-calendar verse, ‘Come to me all who labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest’ (Matthew 11.28) — a passage that begs for interpretation in the light of the following passage about the impossible burden put on people by the Pharisees in their commitment to self-justification by good works. But other overarching themes are picked up — such as the promise of Immanuel (‘God with us’) given by the angel before Jesus’s birth, repeated by Christ in the Great Commission (‘I will be with you’). In summary, this will be a helpful book for personal and group Bible study, with some useful insights for preachers seeking pastoral application. Tim McMahon,
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