Based on the cover, not so much “for everyone” as for the really beautiful people.
John Goldingay, whose For Everyone commentaries on the Old Testament I couldn’t recommend more highly, writes with candor and self-deprecation, qualities that, I hope, are reflected in my own preaching and blogging. Like Goldingay (I suspect), I tend toward self-doubt and pessimism. I’m not saying that I’m justified in this tendency. But it’s who I am. After 42 years of being this way, I’m probably not going to wake up an entirely different person.
With this in mind, you can imagine how much I appreciate this first paragraph of Goldingay’s reflection on 1 Kings 19, where Elijah runs away in fear from the murderous Jezebel:
I am inclined to think that nothing I do in seeking to fulfill my vocation achieves anything. My vocation is to help people understand the Old Testament and let their thinking and their lives be shaped by it. I am passionately committed to this task and want to carry on seeking to fulfill it rather than retire and spend more time cycling on the boardwalk, but I am inclined to think I totally fail. It is not because I am incompetent but because the odds are stacked so high by the church’s ignorance of the Old Testament, especially in our culture over recent decades. Nothing I can do, like writing all these commentaries or having four five hundred student in my classes every year, can make a significant difference. This raises the question of why I continue seeking to fulfill this vocation, and I guess the answer is contained within the question. It is my vocation.[†]
† John Goldingay, 1 & 2 Kings for Everyone (Louisville: WJK, 2011), 90.
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