John MacArthur, Jr., is president of The Master's Seminary and pastor-teacher at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, CA. A renowned champion of biblical inspiration and authority, MacArthur has written many books and recently served as editor of the MacArthur Study Bible, published by Word Books. He is widely known through his national radio ministry, "Grace to You." He was interviewed during the recent International Congress on the Bible hosted by his church.

Preaching: Since you are now the editor of a major study Bible, let's start by talking about that Bible project. I'd be curious about what led you to get involved in a project like that.

MacArthur: In all honesty there was a time when I thought about the possibility of doing that because my passion is exposition of scripture. My passion is to make the Word of God clear to people. And I thought the commentary series would sort of suffice, which is like a 30 year project or turning out to be nearly that! But the guys on my staff came to me one day -- and the guys that are around me know me best -- and they said, "John, you need to think about someday getting all of your stuff condensed down into a single volume and maybe think about a study Bible." I basically said, "I will never do that."

Then some people at Word Books came to me with this proposal at about the same time the guys were saying this is something that you ought to think about. And if I had really known what was involved, I would probably would have said no, because I had no idea what was going to happen when we said yes. Once they presented it to me I thought, "Well, everybody feels I should do this. I have a seminary faculty here I can run all of this through," and I said yes.

I had a guy who was going to edit a lot of my New Testament material. He did none of it and handed it back to me six months later. I just got swept up in the thing. In the end I am really thrilled for the privilege of having done it.

Preaching: As a preacher, an expositor, what kind of unique perspective does that give you as you are going into a project like this?

MacArthur: I'm not primarily concerned with getting entangled in systems and I wasn't concerned with getting entangled with critical things. I didn't want it to be superficial. I just really wanted to clarify the meaning of the text and the flow of the book. I was thinking more of not just a practical application, but of understanding its applicability. I stopped short in writing a study Bible of application. But I hope I got at least to the point of comprehension and understanding so the person says, "I understand what's that saying. I understand what that means." Not only in the individual sense of this text, but by cross referencing and cross referencing footnotes. I can see it in the bigger context and the bigger picture.

My goal was to make the Word of God understandable. And that's what I really do every week of my life, basically. The challenge here was I can do it in a paragraph a lot easier than I can do it in two short sentences. You are battling this need to summarize and condense and choose your words very carefully, and when you are doing 25,000 like that the process gets very burdensome. That was really a challenge. But I didn't want any theological system imposed on it. I just wanted to let the Word of God speak. The word dispensations is in there only once and it's in the Bible text. I tried to avoid anything that would look like a shadow from outside the scripture sort of cast over it. So I just let it speak in the flow of the argument of the book. It is very important to establish introductory material at the front of every book which was honest and legitimate and once you've done that then you have established a certain theme, a certain flow. As a pastor I was thinking of how my people will be able to understand the meaning of the scripture in a way that could be applicable.