20070722 Bible Study for the Day Update

For those of you who may have followed my Bible Study for the Day posts, I would first like to apologize for the lack of posting over the past several weeks. I pray that you have continued to remain in the Word and will continue to do so whether or not I write here or anywhere else.

Frankly, I took on a very ambitious project when I started writing daily posts following the WELS 3-year Bible Study on 1 January 2006, an undertaking whose magnitude and evolution I did not anticipate at the time I started. My goal with those posts was to present a conservative, confessional Christian layman’s perspective on the Bible and its message of hope to all of us while challenging myself to search deeper into Scripture than I have ever done before.

Since that initial conception, I have come to realize that my deeper goal is to study and present the Bible in both its spiritual context and with a real, understandable, historical backdrop that illuminates our faith with the light of the fact that the history of the Bible is our history-mankind’s history-stretching from creation to Jesus’ return yet to happen. What I want to do is reveal our faith as real and relevant to us, both historically and in the present tense.

Of course, this evolution of scope added another layer of complexity to the writing of each post, making each post harder and harder to complete by its given deadline given the other demands of life. As a result, I fell terminally behind in these posts, the state which I now find myself in.

I do not intend to abandon this project, however in order to do each post justice I must necessarily adjust my approach. Currently, my goal is to select specific books that are sufficiently in the future to give me enough time to complete each post for that book with the care and attention I want to give to the subject. Unfortunately, this means that I will not be able to cover every book in the order they are presented in the study.

Further, this will mean that my project will likely take far longer than the three years I originally idealistically imagined. Given that some posts can take as long as a week to write as I do studying and research on the text at hand, I estimate this project taking as long as ten–yes, ten–years to complete in its entirety, including several generations of significant revision to earlier material as my own understanding and insight develops.

All of that being said, my plan for now is to resume posting daily posts very soon with verse and informational links and, as time permits, short notes on specific things that catch my attention about the verses for that day. In the mean time, I plan to work on completing more in-depth studies that I will post at their relevant times in the future.

Thank you all for reading and for your patience in this matter. Weblogs like this one cannot survive without readers like you.

God’s blessings,

-=DLH=-