February 15 reflections on verse by verse exegesis

Reading through the initial chapters of Deuteronomy this morning i was reminded of often the New Testament utilizes the Old. Deut. 4:24 reads, "For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God." Compare that with Hebrews 12:29, "for our God is a consuming fire." Other examples include the great commandment in Deut. 6:3, used by Jesus while being tempted in Matthew 4, and the ten commandments of Deut. 5, nine of which are repeated in some fashion in various places in the NT. Recently i skimmed a website of a newly popular association of evangelical churches. Many of their convictions appeared strongly Biblical but one concerned me. This regarded people looking to join or participate in a new church, and the characteristics which they should look for. The author insisted that the only type of Bible teaching permitted was verse by verse exegesis. The concern expressed was that those who teach thematically, using verse and passages from various places in the Bible could easily teach wrong doctrine. This seems reasonable unless one looks to the example of Jesus and the apostles in the New Testament. Do we find places where they exegete passages of Isaiah or the Psalms or other OT Scripture? Certainly they reference the OT, and sometimes at length but often this is a mixture of verses and even phrases drawn from many locations. Examples include Peter's sermon in Acts 2, where he uses Joel 2, Psalm 16, and Psalm 110, and Paul's letter to the Romans, chapter 3:10-18, which references portions of at least nine different OT passages. If we believe that the Bible is the Holy Spirit inspired, eternal word of God, and that He worked through human authors (2 Peter 1:20-21, 3:2)and this is how the Spirit chose to write to us, do we have any basis for saying that only verse by verse exegesis is legitimate? Granted that we have certain passages and chapters that dwell on a particular subject such as love in 1 Corinthians 13 or faith in Hebrews 11 or giving in 2 Corinthians 8 & 9. But it is rare that the entire teaching of the Bible on a given subject is contained in one place. In fact, that usually indicates that something is not of overriding importance. Let us be adamant where the bible is clearly adamant; let us use caution where it is not.