God With Us - By Glenn r. Kreider

I was talking with one of my uncles some months ago and he was lamenting the lack of good Christian books out there, pointing out that the only good 'Christian' books are the ones that lead you to read the Bible itself instead of more books about the Bible. God with Us: Exploring God's Personal Interactions with His People Throughout the Bible by Glenn R. Kreider is one such book.  I don't believe that I had heard of this book before, or at least if I had it didn't catch my attention at the time.  A friend gave it to me and I ended up being very pleased with it.

In the book, Kreider focuses upon the humility of God.  He goes through the different periods of Biblical history pointing out many instances of God's graciousness towards mankind.  I'll list some particular snippets that I found fascinating:

First, in his section on Abraham Kreider points out that God could have responded in anger for Abraham's asking how he would know that he will gain possession of the land (instead of just accepting that it would happen), but He didn't, "God's response is compassionate, gracious and kind.  He cuts a covenant with Abram.…..The covenant does not make the promises of God more secure, but it does give Abram something he knows and understands." God didn't have to make a covenant at all, but He graciously did so.  And despite Abraham's flaws, God condescends to be known as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (who also were very flawed).

 Later on, in His call to Moses God condescends to answer Moses' objections to being chosen to lead his people out of Egypt, and has already provided a helper for Moses in the person of Aaron - This made me realize too that God could have made Aaron the leader of His people.  But even though Moses objected so much, God graciously still used Moses. 

And then of course, the amazing condescension of God to send His Son to earth as a human being….and as an infant, not an adult. Kreider says that for a while he had a hard time with the account given by Luke of when Jesus was 12 years old and deliberately stays behind in Jerusalem when His parents leave for home - in particular, Mary's apparently frustrated response towards Him, "My Son, Why have you treated us like this?..."   How could she dare do that seeing that she had been told beforehand that Jesus was "the Son of God"? And then he explains that his conclusion, " "Anyone who was in the presence of God in the flesh would recognize his deity, I thought.  I Now believe that this story reveals to us that Jesus' deity was well concealed.  Apparently, the difference between Jesus and her other children was not as obvious to Mary as I had thought.  Jesus never sinned, never rebelled against her; he never behaved in a depraved way."  He goes on to explain that, in a way, Jesus was, as it were, 'immature'(not meaning to indicate that Christ's action in staying behind was immature).  In other words, He still grew in wisdom, as that chapter points out, though in the process of growing in wisdom/'maturing'  He never sinned. And so Mary apparently had trouble perceiving His divinity because of this, despite having seen His perfect goodness.  I thought that was an interesting point. 

I also loved the concept that God has condescended to have His Son be in human form forever, "he humbles himself by adding to his complete deity complete humanity, not temporarily but permanently."  And not only this, but that Christ will be with His people forever on the new earth,  "The hope of redeemed humanity is not heaven but earth.  Heaven is a temporary home until the day of resurrection, when heaven will come down to earth and the God of heaven will make the earth his home (Rev. 21:3).  When the work of redemption is completed, the triune God will condescend to dwell eternally on this planet."

All in all I thought that it was quite thought provoking.  There were some things (as in any book other than the Bible) that bothered me a bit: such as Kreider's stating that, ""Although sin and rebellion will continue, God promises never to respond as harshly as he did in the flood." - I guess that he doesn't think that the future judgments to come upon the earth are not that bad? That confused me - especially as he says that he is premillennial.  And then he says that "Since the Scriptures testify about Jesus, any reading that fails to hear Jesus, any interpretation that fails to elevate Jesus, and any bible study that fails to focus on Jesus is incorrect and worthy of judgment." But what if certain passages elevate God the Father? What if they focus upon Him and not upon Christ…or what if they focus upon the Trinity as a whole? * Sigh*….. 

But I still liked the book.  Kreider does a good job of pointing out this other attribute of God, humility, that we ought to emulate, and that we will emulate because we have God- The Holy Spirit living inside of us.  It makes you want to take another look at the Bible with, not necessarily a new perspective, but with a heightened desire to notice God's condescension and humility towards humanity  that is revealed therein.  

Some of the websites where this book may be purchased are Christianbook.com and Amazon.com

My Rating:  5 out of 5 Stars *****

Short Answers to Big Questions about God, the Bible and Christianity - by Clinton E. Arnold and Jeff Arnold

Short Answers to Big Questions about God, the Bible and Christianity by Clinton E. Arnold and Jeff Arnold is just what its title declares it to be, it is an endeavor to answer, in only a few pages, many questions new Christians, or unbelievers, have about God, the Bible or Christianity.  The book is not as good as I had hoped it would be.  My main problem with it is its presentation of the relationship/interaction between God and mankind. 

 First, its discussions of the love of God toward people are presented too much like the modern concept of "falling in love", an uncontrolled, "couldn't help it" type of thing.  Here are a few quotes to demonstrate what I mean:  "God isn't just loving, he is love……And he isn't just a loving person 'in theory'; he literally, at this very moment, is aware of his deep love for you. "and, "he loves you because he created  you…If  you have a child,  you have felt this love before; you don't love your child because of what they've accomplished; you love them because they are your child.  This is how God sees you. …"  I don't remember anywhere in the Bible where God's love is declared to have been bestowed on us simply because we are His creations.  God created Satan too but He doesn't love him even though he is His creation. "The problem of sin created a serious dilemma for God…It is his nature to hate sin….yet he earnestly wants a relationship with his people…..", "In his perfect purity, holiness, and righteousness, God is deeply offended by our sin.  Yet he longs to have a close relationship with us.  Since he cannot simply overlook our offenses, he devised a merciful and loving plan to deal with this problem…"  To me, this makes God's love come across as a human loving a pitiable sickly little child, but God's love isn't generally presented that way (unless you count the picture of God's love towards Israel, but even then, it was His choice), it's more like God choosing to love a corpse, or a zombie…those dead in their sins and yet using their decaying faculties to rage against God and His attributes and desires. God CHOSE to have pity on us, God CHOSE to love us detestable creatures, creatures who naturally choose to despise Him and His laws in favor of their own selves and desires.  He chose to make us New Creations, breathing spiritual life into us. 

Second, in answering the question "Why Bad things happen to good people", part of the explanation is given like this, "God gave us the free will to make our own decisions.  Without this freedom, we would be unable to truly love God - or each other, for that matter; we would simply be robots following commands.  So when we ask how an all-powerful God could allow someone else to wrong us, the problem with what we're asking is that God's power has nothing to do with it;….God could, if he wished, end all pain on this earth right now.  He could step in and directly control everyone's actions, thoughts, and feelings in order to keep anyone from doing anything that causes harm.  But imagine the cost:  an entire world full of people who move around like puppets, never saying or doing anything that wasn't controlled for them.  No one wants that." So will we be robots in Heaven, not able to choose evil?  When God makes us into New Creations, Christians, does that make us puppets?  Is it really more loving for God to let a person choose to make choices that will lead to condemnation for eternity than it is for Him to change their dispositions to desire the right and accept Him so that they will live in the New Heaven and the New earth for eternity?  That logic doesn't come from the Bible.  That logic doesn't even make sense when it comes to parents with their children, it would not be loving for a parent to let their child slap their brothers and sisters around and then also give them the option to choose to stick their finger into a light-socket.  The loving thing to do would be to stop them from doing both of those things, not giving them a choice in the matter, even if they aren't happy in the process of being stopped.  "…without this freedom, we would be unable to truly love God.." really? Where does the Bible say that?  True love comes from God (see 1 John), it doesn't originate with human beings.  God defines love, and we learn in the Bible that true love is selfless.  So to rephrase the above statement, "Without the freedom to be selfish, we wouldn't be able to truly be selfless?"  As you can see, I don't believe that question about why bad things happen to good people was answered biblically in this book. 

Things like the above really bothered me.  This is not to say that there weren't good things in the book, there were.  I just don't think that this book would necessarily be the best to give an unbeliever or an immature Christian because some of the answers given do not match up with what the Bible says.  I really liked their section on why we don't always sense the presence of God. That chapter contains many statements that I really like, actually, I think they're excellent! So I'll end on a positive note with my favorite excerpt from the book:

 
Soon after I stopped feeling this intense love and presence of God, I started grasping for things that normally brought that passion back.  I would drive almost an hour away to find churches with great worship bands and speakers……I knew on some level that there was something off about the way I was approaching this, but I felt like I needed to do whatever it took to get that feeling back.  And then one day it struck me:  my faith had stopped being about God and had become about how I felt.  That was really selfish of me.  It shouldn't have mattered how I felt if I trusted that God was real.  At that point the best thing for someone like me was to remove those feelings so that my faith would once again become about God, not myself. ….the end result was that I began learning how  to center my life around God with or without the feelings that I once had…….To make Christianity purely about feelings is to make it about ourselves rather than God.  God doesn't promise to constantly flood us with intense emotion…From the earliest days of the church, Christians have based their closeness to God on theology - on what they knew about God from Scripture - rather than feelings.  Many of the first Christians shed blood for believing in God.  If anyone had the right to feel distant from God, wouldn’t it be the people suffering for his sake? Instead, the early disciples rejoiced at the chance to suffer for Christ (Acts 5:41)."


I received a free review copy of this book from the Baker Books Blogger Program and my review did not have to be favorable.

 

Worship

This book is a good critique  of our modern ideas of worship by setting forth the truth in Scriptures about the right way to serve God.  Many people are idolaters, or at least worshipping in an idolatrous way, perhaps more so than we would have thought.  "Fundamentally, idolatry is thinking thoughts about God that are untrue of Him, or entertaining thoughts about Him that are unworthy of Him."  Macarthur spends some chapters going through the Trinity, and showing from the Scriptures that correct worship involves  a correct knowledge of God.  Muslims, Buddhists and other faiths not solely focused upon the Bible as God's Word(the Old and New Testaments) are not worshipping the true God, as they have an incorrect knowledge of who He is.  People who do not acknowledge Jesus as one with the Father are rejecting who God is and His salvation.  "Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, and the truth, and the life: no one cometh unto the Father, but by me."(John 14:6 ASV)  "Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.."(Joh 14:9 ASV)  Peter speaking of Christ said:  "And in none other is there salvation: for neither is there any other name under heaven, that is given among men, wherein we must be saved. (Act 4:12 ASV)  Salvation is not found by worshipping any other god other than the God of the Bible. 

 

"It is significant that Jesus spoke of truth, not music, as the distinctive mark of true worship.(John 4:23-24)" And yet nowadays, music and ecstatic feelings are regarded as the height of worship, if not the only true worship.  And then there are others who equate Christianized Old Testament practices as worship(sacrifices = sacraments, alters, priests, atmosphere, Church building = the temple).  MacArthur takes these ideas to task with the Scripture's definition of worship stating that, "Some would insist that any kind of sincere worship is acceptable to God, but that is simply not true.  The Bible clearly teaches that those who offer self-styled worship are unacceptable to God, regardless of their good intentions." He shows that the Israelites, in making their golden calf, seemed quite sincere in their actions, and even equated the calf with God not with false gods,"And he received it at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, and made it a molten calf: and they said, These are thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. And when Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, To-morrow shall be a feast to Jehovah. (Exo 32:4-5 ASV Emphasis Added)  God threatened to completely annihilate them for it(Ex 32:9-10) but had ordained that Moses would plead for Israel.  Many of them  were still killed.  Sincerity is not worship in and of itself.  God defines what worship is, not us.   

"Music and liturgy…cannot make a non-worshipping heart into a worshipping one.  The danger is that they can give a non-worshipping heart the sense of having worshipped."  "Worship is a response to truth." States MacArthur.  As Christians, we worship God by believing what He says, in His Word, and by obeying what He says.  We can, and ought, to worship Him everywhere and all the time.  And we ought to worship Him as He says we are to worship, not what seems more worshipful to us. We do not need to add liturgical aspects to our service, or define practices by the Old Testament.  Macarthur uses the example of the Hebrew Christians written to in the book of Hebrews: "To worship God the Hebrews had to say no to the old covenant and its ceremonies, sacrifices, symbols, pictures and types.  The old was gone - it was set aside.  A new and better covenant had come, and they had to be willing to come to God in full confidence of the revealed faith of the New Testament.  The New Covenant, in contrast to the Old, is not a system based on ceremonies, sacrifices, and external obedience to the law.  Its truth is not veiled in types and figures."

As with any book, there are things that I do not agree with that are stated, but I do not see the need to address them here, as they do not affect my recommendation of this book. 

Thanks to MoodyPublishers for sending me a free review copy of this book! (My review did not have to be favorable)

Reasons For Belief - By Norman Geisler and Patty Tunnicliffe

"Every truth claim is narrow.  Why?  Because truth itself is narrow.  If you jump off a tall building with no ability to remain aloft, you will fall to the ground, yet no one would say belief in the law of gravity is being narrow-minded."    The authors of this book are very good at demonstrating the exclusiveness of truth, and our need to know the 'true-truth'.  Answering 10 questions about Christianity, the authors build their argument, 'closing in' on the truth as the book moves on.  Starting very basic, they demonstrate the logic of there being truth and that truth must be exclusive.  Then, after pointing out the obviousness of the existence of  a god, they narrow down to what god that is and if there is only one.   The rest of the book demonstrates that the God who exists is the God of the Old and New Testaments and upholds those Scriptures as the truth by answering questions about their composition and content.

This book includes several charts comparing the beliefs of world religions to Christianity, and critiques several of the major religions.   Here are some of the authors' statements on Pantheism:  "The Designer is not the design anymore than painter is the painting", "...pantheists believe we can become God.  But we had a beginning; God did not.   How can people who had a beginning become the One who never began?  Pantheists believe that they can (by enlightenment) become God.   But God has always known he is God.  Anyone who suddenly realizes "I am God," isn't God."   The content of the Bible is used as the ultimate proof of God being God and I love that much attention is paid to whether or not Jesus is God.  Lots of Scriptures are used to demonstrate that Jesus was God, and that you can't reject that reality without contradicting Him.  They show that belief in a god is not enough, belief in The God of the Bible and belief of what God says in His word is shown to be crucial for all people. 

I only gave this book four stars because I have found that the authors are apparently 'Old-earth Creationists'.  Using statements like, "If the universe had expanded faster than it did, no planets could have formed.  If no planets could form, there would be no earth."  Its not too explicit, they don't go into how much time the word 'day' is describing is in Genesis one, but it is implied that a day is a LOT longer than a day.  Later on, when they are talking about the existence of miracles, they state that "A genuine miracle happens instantly - not over a period of time."  So when God said, "Let there be light", was there light?  Or when God spoke the sun and the moon and the stars into existence, was it so? Or did it take a long period of time, longer than an evening and a morning, one day(Genesis 1: 19)?  This is why I don't know that I would recommend the book to non-Christians, as this might encourage them to not take the Beginning literally and so they may not take other narrative accounts in the Bible literally.   

Thanks to Bethany House Publishers for giving me a free copy of this book in exchange for my review(which does not have to be favorable)

The Forgotten Father

Recently there seems to have been a trend towards a Christocentric hermeneutic, and  an overall focus on Christ altogether in Christian circles.  It has been frustrating to see, as the focus of the Bible is not on Christ, but on the Father.  Christ Himself points to the Father!   When I saw the title of this book, it intrigued me…that's exactly what I and my dad(a pastor) have been talking about: people forgetting about God the Father.  As Mr. Smail writes, "God the Father "has been regularly and ritually confessed, but his being and work as Father has been out of the centre of concern.  It is of course true that in recent years there has been a great deal of concentration on God.  It has, however, been a mainly apologetic concern, about the basis, possibility and meaning of speaking about God at all, rather than a properly dogmatic discussion with in the Christian family on the basis of shared faith about the nature and character of the God who in Christ has revealed himself to his people as Father, as well as Son and spirit.  The question about God that people have been asking has been whether he exists rather than who he is. " 

This Christocentric focus, or even Pneumacentric focus is evidenced in who people are praying to,  again, quoting Mr. Smail:  "There is a type of protestant prayer that concentrates in an unhealthy way on Jesus, and that can easily become familiar and sentimental, because it has forgotten who Jesus is - the only Son of and the only way to the Father.  There is a Jesuology that can lavish an all too human love on an all too human Jesus and banish God to such remote transcendence, that we are back with the idea that we have to cling to a loving Jesus to keep us  right with a remote and probably angry God.  There is equally a prayer that concentrates on the Holy Spirit and the gifts and blessings he can bestow in a way that forgets that these things matter only when we use them to witness to the Son and to serve the Father in amore effective obedience.  To pray TO Jesus rather than THROUGH him, TO the Spirit rather than IN him, as the established habit of our prayer, is to betray a doubt about our relationship to the Father." 

Smail does a good job at addressing this issue, reminding us that the Spirit points us to Christ, and Christ opens the way for us to know the Father, to directly know the Father.  Again, pulling up some of the author's statements on prayer, "Prayer is through Christ….in John 16…'I do not say I will ask the Father on your behalf.'  He will not go instead of us, we are to come ourselves because the way is open.  Yet it is immediately clear that our ability to do so is entirely dependent on Christ and our relationship to him.  We do not come by ourselves, but it is we ourselves who come through him.  The same idea of mediation is implied in Hebrews 4:16.  Because he has gone into the holiest of all as High Priest we can

'approach the throne of grace with confidence'…….It was into all this that Christ initiated his disciples when he said, 'When you pray, say Abba,'…" Christ's death did not just save us spiritually, it gives us access to the Father!

He makes the case that you don't know the true God if you do not believe in the Deity of Christ, you do not know the true Gospel if you do not believe in the Trinity.  Knowing about the trinity, the relationship of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost  is important.  He asks, "what is the significance, status and nature of the Father/Son relationship? Is it the MEANS of revelation and salvation or, more than that, is it the CONTENT of revelation and salvation?.......The doctrine of the Trinity does not lay an irreverent philosophical mystery on top of a simple scriptural gospel; it simply makes explicit what is implicit in the biblical gospel…….How can the act of atonement on the cross be reconciling, effective, creative and of universal importance for all men, unless the agent of it is himself God?.....It takes the Trinity to make sense of the atonement…….The cross is atoning and saving precisely because on it God offers to God the obedience that is appropriate to us……"  And then… "In the new Testament, as understood in the mainstream of Christian tradition, we meet the same God three times.  First of all we meet him in the Father, whom Jesus prayed to and obeyed, at whose bidding he came, lived, suffered and died, by whose hand he was raised from the dead.  But in Jesus Christ himself, we encounter the same divine love and power appearing personally among us as our fellowman.  God is now not only exalted in heaven but made man on earth.  The acts of Jesus are the acts of God, the words of Jesus are the words of God, the suffering of Jesus is the self-sacrifice of God, the person of Jesus is the person of God, so that the confession of the Church echoes the confession of Thomas (John 20:28) and addresses not the Father in heaven but the risen human Jesus, 'My Lord and my God'.  But with Jesus ascended there comes according to his promise allos Parakletos, 'Another of the same kind of Advocate Counselor.'  The Holy Spirit who keeps on relating Christians to Christ and the Father, and then to one another, is himself God, God at work in and among men.  He does not hand us over to another, but in this other he keeps on coming to us himself." 

He doesn't focus on the Christocentric Hermeneutics issue, but he didn't need as his biblically based plea for us to learn more about the Father deals with the issue itself.   All in all he does a good job.   It might surprise you, as it surprised me, to learn that Mr. Smail is a charismatic.  His leanings show up more towards the end of the book, so be watching out for that.  But even his this is not so 'bad', as he is critical of the movement, desiring it to focused on the Father, not on the Spirit, to be biblical rather than emotionally/needs based(focused on miracles, speaking in tongues).   Speaking of which he says, "If the charismatic renewal is to continue and deepen... It must cease to fabricate a distorted Christ who says, 'Come and I will give you whatever you want,' and face up to the real Christ who says, 'Come and I will send you wherever I choose.'"  And again, "There are those who think that renewal has nothing to do with theology and will find too much theology in this book.  They have to learn that there is no such thing as a renewal without a theology but only a renewal with a bad theology or a renewal with a good one.  I have tried to suggest that the right theology for renewal is not a testimony-based teaching about experiences and gifts, but the classical Trinitarian theology that has its roots in the New Testament and that centre in the incarnation, death and resurrection of the only Son the Father as the focal point of all creation and recreation……"

Sorry this review is so long, but I wanted to give you more of an idea of what this book is about, as the main thing that I had to go off of was the Title(I asked for it for Christmas), so I'm trying to give others a bit more to go off of. 

I'll end with one of my favorite quotes from the book, which is also a good summary of it:  ""…we have had in recent years a Jesus movement and a charismatic movement.  The one has almost disappeared and the other is threatening to run out of steam, perhaps because each is in a different way inadequate to the gospel, which his basically a Father movement.   It is not first a Jesuology (a doctrine about Jesus) or a pneumatology (a doctrine about the Spirit) but it is a theology or even a patrology - a doctrine about God the Father.  It starts not with the cross of Jesus or with the gift of the Spirit, but with the Father who so loved the World that he gave his Son in his Spirit."