Taking its title from Hebrews 1:2, These Last Days addresses eschatology and its implications with chapters from speakers at the 2010 Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology.

I found it interesting that although the book puts forward an amillennial perspective, the editors say they were not intentionally promoting a single millennial view (page xi). In general, I thought the millennial view was held in a humble way, acknowledging differences in how the millennium has been perceived among thoughtful Christians throughout history.

Read more...

Through Blogging for Books, the publisher gave me 31 Days of Drawing Near to God: Resting Securely in His Delight by Ruth Myers in exchange for a review. This devotional book attempts to help the reader know the love of God. Myers said many good things, but I have serious reservations and cannot recommend it.

My biggest problem with this book was the role of Jesus. I would expect a book encouraging us to "draw near" to God would spend considerable time looking at where that language is found in Hebrews, but this book was previously released under another title. Even disregarding the title, Jesus must be central to any understanding of God’s love. Scripture makes it plain that Jesus is the way God has shown us His love, saying "but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8 ESV) and "By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers." (1 John 3:16 ESV).

Read more...

In my "About" page, I say that I blog "about books and reading to glorify God by encouraging others to read that which is abundant in truth and quality in a way that is edifying and delightful." One of the ways I intend to reach that aim is by writing reviews of books.

I don’t review every book I read, and I don’t finish reading, much less review, most books that don’t seem "abundant in truth and quality". However, there are times that I post reviews of books that I wouldn’t want to encourage others to read. With most of these reviews, I have some obligation to post the review, generally through one of the book for review programs, but there are a few other circumstances in which I might choose to post a negative review.

Read more...

In Christianity Today’s 2011 Book Awards, Elise Erikson Barrett’s What Was Lost: A Christian Journey Through Miscarriage won the award for "Christian Living." While I’m sure there are a number of Christian treatments of suffering in general, there do not seem to be an abundance of books on the subject of miscarriage, so I decided to give this one a try.

I expected to disagree with the author, a pastor in the United Methodist Church (the denomination in which I grew up) on some matters, since theologically I fit labels like "Calvinist," "credobaptist," and "complementarian" better than typical UMC labels like "Wesleyan/Armenian," "paedobaptist," and "egalitarian" (the last being obviously descriptive of the author). I was hoping the book would contain more of what is common to all Christians than what we would disagree on. Unfortunately, I disagreed a lot with the book.

Read more...

Through the Blogging for Books program, Multnomah provided me with a copy of Randy Alcorn’s book If God is Good to review. This book addresses how evil and a good and omnipotent God can coexist. While I didn’t agree with all of Alcorn’s conclusions, I appreciated his efforts at being logical and true to Scripture.

I thought the book was at its best when pointing out that we are sinners with a limited view, God is good and sovereign, and eternity, not this lifetime, is where we will see the complete picture of justice and beauty. I especially found this passage poignant:

Read more...

Through Book Sneeze, Thomas Nelson gave me a copy of the Special Edition of Then Sings My Soul by Robert Morgan to review. This book looks at 150 hymns, providing a hymn (or piece of a hymn) on one page followed by a second page providing the date, a short piece of scripture, then a short story related to the hymn. I love hymns and expected to enjoy reading about them, but this book drove me crazy.

Without any additional writing to explain the choices Morgan made, the author’s choices were confusing. This special edition was broken into the sections. Within each section, the hymns were mostly in chronological order, but the order was not entirely chronological, with some hymns out of order and the Easter section contained two distinct chronological sequences. The selection of which hymns went into each section also confused me; "Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee" was considered a Christmas song while "His Name Is Wonderful" was placed within "Easter" despite the story ending with "Though it was inspired on Christmas day by a traditional Christmas text, ‘His Name is Wonderful’ has never been pegged as a Christmas hymn. It’s been a favorite of Christians around the world throughout the year" (page 85).

Read more...

Dancing With Max by Emily Colson gives a glimpse into the life and heart of a single mother raising her autistic son, taking the reader on a journey of both extreme pain and joy.

The writing style was clear and engaging, and the stories she told kept my interest. I thought the cover design, featuring Max’s signature, was appropriately unique.

Read more...

I read a complimentary PDF copy of Cruciform Press’s recently released book Servanthood as Worship by Nate Palmer. Written from a reformed perspective, this book encourages every Christian in the "privilege" of servanthood, in the local church, for the glory of God.

Palmer sets out to "provide the theological framework that Christians need to understand what serving in the local church is really all about." (page 9) He describes serving as something we are always doing, and says "There is never a moment when we are not serving someone . . . Most of the time we are simply serving ourselves—pouring our energy and hope for happiness into the nurture of our own desires" (page 9).

Read more...

I was encouraged and challenged by reading Paul David Tripp’s War of Words: Getting to the heart of your communication struggles. Focusing on the theoretical nature of the heart struggles revealed in our words, this book is based on four main ideas:

• God has a wonderful plan for our words that is far better than any plan we could come up with on our own.
• Sin has radically altered our agenda for our words, resulting in much hurt, confusion, and chaos.
• In Christ Jesus we find the grace that provides all we need to speak as God intended us to speak.
• The Bible plainly and simply teaches us how to get from where we are to where God wants us to be. (page 5)

Read more...

Through Book Sneeze, Thomas Nelson gave me a copy of Beyond Opinion to review. With Ravi Zacharias as general editor, this apologetics book is a compilation from members of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM), claiming to be "intended to encourage and challenge the nonexpert to feel comfortable talking about the gospel without feeling the burden of needing a high level of philosophical training" (page xix). I found the book disappointing.

The writing style varied from chapter to chapter, but despite being intended for "the nonexpert," it was frequently stuffy and academic with sentences such as "So in conclusion, it is significant to note that the councils of the church that met to confirm the canon and counteract the increasing number of fourth century forgeries and heresies were a representative group of the geographical breadth of the church" (page 12) and "We can also legitimately surmise that in the coming together of the apparent determinism of classical macrophysics and the uncertainty at the quantum level, even inanimate nature reflects the complementarity in the being of God" (page 243).

Read more...