The Upper Register

The Jesus Storybook Bible

The Jesus Storybook Bible is a popular children’s Bible that does something unique. Rather than telling the stories of the Bible with a moralistic intent, it retells each story as part of a grand narrative in which God is fulfilling his plan to redeem a lost world through Christ. The author, Sally Lloyd-Jones, rightly sees that Jesus the Messiah is the hero of the Bible. In keeping with that Christ-centered vision, she takes pains to retell each Bible story in a way that shines the spotlight on the Messiah. For this reason, this volume will be initially attractive to many who are looking for a Christ-centered children’s Bible that tells the story of redemptive history. Unfortunately, after the initial attraction has worn off, a critical reading of the book will reveal its serious flaws.

Continue here for the full review.

The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God

Some helpful observations by D. A. Carson on the love of God:

If people believe in God at all today, the overwhelming majority hold that this God – however he, she, or it may be understood – is a loving being. But that is what makes the task of the Christian witness so daunting. For this widely disseminated belief in the love of God is set with increasing frequency in some matrix other than biblical theology. The result is that when informed Christians talk about the love of God, they mean something very different from what is meant in the surrounding culture. 

I do not think that what the Bible says about the love of God can long survive at the forefront of our thinking if it is abstracted from the sovereignty of God, the holiness of God, the wrath of God, the providence of God, or the personhood of God – to mention only a few nonnegotiable elements of basic Christianity. The result, of course, is that the love of God in our culture has been purged of anything the culture finds uncomfortable. The love of God has been sanitized, democratized, and above all sentimentalized.

If the love of God is exclusively portrayed as an inviting, yearning, sinner-seeking, rather lovesick passion, we may strengthen the hands of Arminians, semi-Pelagians, Pelagians, and those more interested in God’s inner emotional life than in his justice and glory, but the cost will be massive.

D. A. Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2000), 9-11, 22.