In the last few weeks before my father died we had time to celebrate his life, tell stories about past family events, and dream a little about the future. His mind and memory were sharp and he was as upbeat and confident as ever. He was ninety-two years of age, had lived a full life, and had served well the Lord he loved.
The doctors had given him six weeks to live, and in that time we relived many a family story. He was visited by a parade of his close friends, many influential leaders he had taught and mentored. From his hospital room were days filled with warm memories and laughter, and an occasional hymn echoed down the hall.
My father had a list of things he entrusted to me as his oldest son. But in the last week of his life, the conversation turned to the seventy years he had dedicated to the study of the Bible. And in all that time, he explained, four key books of the Bible had been the subject of his most intense study; Revelation, Daniel, Matthew, and 1st and 2nd Thessalonians. He shared stories about how they were first written, taught, and eventually published.
I remember many of those times. Every summer our family piled into our car and drove across the U.S. and sometimes into Canada. We went from one Bible conference to another, but a lot of that time was spent on the road. And always somewhere in the car was a cardboard box filled with books.
Many nights Dad put us to bed and quietly went into a motel bathroom to read and take notes. Then when he was ready he would dictate an entire chapter, footnotes and all. So whether on the road or at home, this scholarly work was of ten done late at night and early in the morning. And it continued all his life.
His dream in those final conversations was that his work and biblical insights would live on after him. He remembered how the commentaries and works of some of the great teachers of the Bible lived on for generation after generation. Would his commentaries survive to teach others after his death?
My father explained he had chosen Moody Publishers (then known as Moody Press) to publish his first commentary on Revelation for one very important reason. He knew he could trust them to keep the commentary in print as long as it was needed.
So in those last weeks of my father’s life, our discussions produced one more assignment. Could I find a way to fulfill his dream to keep these works alive for the generations of students he would not be able to teach in the classroom?
From the seed of that dream has grown the new Walvoord Commentary series. The team that took up that dream is made up of men my father knew and trusted. And as he would have guessed, it was championed by Greg Thornton, senior vice president of Moody Publishers.
Philip Rawley agreed to take the lead as the editor of the series. And he took on the assignment with much more than the word “editor” implies. Phil was both a student of my father’s and a friend. As far back as twenty-five years ago he collaborated with me to help my father with a project that became Every Prophecy of the Bible. Since then we have worked together on many writing projects.
But I believe this may have been one of Phil Rawley’s most important tasks. He was much more than an editor. In many instances he took up the mantle of the writer who could best capture the way my father would have explained his biblical insights to a new generation of students.
Dr. Mark Hitchcock also agreed to join the team. Because of Mark’s interest in prophecy, he and my father of ten had lunch to discuss key issues in biblical prophecy. Mark is a great admirer of my father’s work and a prolific author in his own right who had written more than fifteen books on prophecy and end-time events before we met. Mark was a natural choice to work with me to research and write Armageddon, Oil, and Terror shortly after my father’s death. In that process we became close friends in the quest to turn my father’s ideas and notes into an entirely new work. It was an amazing journey.
Dr. Hitchcock has collaborated on Revelation and has taken on the lion’s share of expanding my father’s work and class notes, previously published as The Thessalonian Epistles, into a full commentary for this series. He is a thorough scholar who fully understands my father’s teaching from the Epistles.
Dr. Charles Dyer also became an important part of the team. He is an author and teacher who has been greatly influenced by my father as one of his students and later a colleague in the administration of Dallas Theological Seminary. As an Old Testament scholar, Dr. Dyer has taken up the task of revising my father’s commentary on Daniel, and has also agreed to work on Matthew’s Gospel for two reasons. First, most of Jesus’ teaching on prophecy is best understood in its Old Testament context. Second, Dr. Dyer is as familiar with the Holy Land and the setting of Matthew as anyone I know. He will, I am sure, make both Daniel and the events of Matthew’s Gospel come alive for every reader of the Walvoord Commentary series.
So now, almost a decade after my father’s death, his legacy will live on in this new series of biblical commentaries. I am sure he would have been proud of the men who have taken up his torch and are passing it to a new generation of Bible students. As a great man of “The Book,” my father is greater still because those who follow in his footsteps remain true to his vision and faithful to the exposition of God’s Word.
John Edward Walvoord
January 2011