This is a book that re-tells Old Testament bible stories and then interprets God's grace into the way God interacted with the humans in the stories. Each chapter takes a different bible story or multiple stories and then says "God dealt gracefully with humans" because they didn't deserve such merciful treatment.
This book is a fast light read because we've heard the story of Adam and Eve, Abraham, Jospeh etc many times and 2/3rds of this book is the re-telling/paraphrasing these stories.
Although the book paints a nice picture of a graceful God, I didn't find this book very deep. Example: Stanley takes the creation story and explains that God didn't have to make the world so beautiful - that was grace.. God didn't have to give Eve to Adam - that was grace. God could have destroyed Adam and Eve for the fall, but instead He allowed them to live outside of the garden - by grace.
By the end of the book, I felt it was nice to see that ALL good things are undeserved, unearned and all come from the grace of God. I just wish this book could have had more depth and not been 2/3rds re-telling stories we already know by heart. I feel there are much better and deeper books that would bring us to reflect on the grace of God. This book was just kind of "blah" or "okay". You could easily go without having read it, it wouldn't go in my library and I would never recommend it to others. I'd say "read it if you want but it's only so-so".
Readers may be interested in knowing Andy Stanley is writing from an Arminianist Christian perspective.
Disclaimer: I received this book free of charge from the publisher but I am giving my honest review.
No comments:
Post a Comment