Chapter and Verse

Some pastors like to talk about verse-by-verse expository preaching. There's nothing wrong with that, if you mean that you carefully consider each word, phrase, sentence, paragraph and so on.

However, we must also understand that the chapter and verse divisions are not divinely inspired. That means that we need not preach every verse the same way, with the same weight. Simply put, not all verses are complete sentences, and therefore cannot stand on their own. Frankly, that's also true of most complete sentences-- they shouldn't be divorced from their paragraphs or larger sections.

So what about those chapters and verses? Here's some background. Click the box at the end for a nifty interactive feature from Bible Study Magazine.

Chapters and verses in the New Testament were never intended to guide preaching or devotional reading. They were introduced so that reference works could be created. Chapters were added by Stephen Langton at the University of Paris around 1200 so passages could be cited in commentaries. Verses were put in around 1550 by Robert Estienne, a French scholar and printer who was working on a concordance to the Greek New Testament.

Chapters are designed to be about the same length. But the stories, oracles, poems and discussions that make up biblical books are of many different lengths. Chapters typically cut longer units into pieces. They add to the confusion by combining shorter units. In 1 Corinthians Paul discusses twelve different topics. His longer discussions have been cut up into chapters 1–4, 8–10 and 12–14. Shorter discussions are combined in chapters 6, 7, 11 and 16. Only two chapters (5 and 15) correspond accurately with a single discussion. This example shows why, in most cases, it’s difficult to make sense of a biblical book when reading or preaching through it chapter-by-chapter.

But if we eliminate chapter and verse numbers, won’t we be cast adrift on a sea of unorganized type? Isn’t something better than nothing?

Actually, the alternative isn’t nothing. Far from it. The biblical authors built natural structures right into the text of their works. We can learn to recognize these structures and follow them as we read, study and preach.

Source