Review: John Through Old Testament Eyes

 

          John Through Old Testament Eyes (A Background and Application Commentary) by Karen H. Jobes is one of the first releases in this new series of commentaries that seek to work from the fact that the Bible of the New Testament authors was the Old Testament, and, as they write, the write with the Old Testament Scripture, history, and symbols of the Old Testament.  Thus, it is difficult to understand the New Testament fully without seeing it “through Old Testament Eyes.”

            As Saint Augustine writes, “The new is in the old concealed; the old is in the new revealed.”

            As commentaries do, this commentary goes through the text of the Gospel and explains it – though not every verse.  The original languages are used sparsely, so this is not a barrier to ministers or teachers using this commentary.

            In addition to the running commentary, there are shaded blocks of several types: “what the structure means,” “through Old Testament Eyes,” and “going deeper.” The first looks at significant structural issues that make a difference in interpreting the text, the second shows the connection of the texts between the testaments, and the third explores the issue or term in the text and invites personal reflection on what this means practically.

            The commentary ends with a list of abbreviations, pagination of the three types of shaded blocks (as above), a selected bibliography, endnotes, and a Scripture index.

            This commentary, and the others in the series should prove very useful for preachers and teachers to help them understand the fulness of the text better – especially as the two testaments relate to each other.

            [This review appears on my blog, Amazon.com, Kregel.com, and Goodreads.com.]

Review: Later

 

Jamie Conklin has a gift:  he can see – and talk with – the dead – for a short time after they die.  He doesn’t know why, and his mother urges him to keep it to himself.

His mother has a girlfriend who is a police officer and lives with them.  Sometimes she is nice, sometimes they get drunk and yell at each other, but it usually blows over.

One day the wife of their neighbr dies, and Jamie talks to her and tells her husband where to find her rings.  That leads to them talking about Jamie’s gifts, and the evelaiton from the professor that the dead cannot lie – they have to tell the truth.

However, when Jamie sees a criminal commit suicide, the person he meets after his death is not the same – and he doesn’t go away.  Can the dead be possessed by demons?

Later by Stephen King gives the reader pauses to think and run with Jamie from danger.

            [This review appears on my blog, Amazon.com, and Goodreads.com.]

Review: Call Me By Your Name

 

Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman is a romance – a love story between a teenager and a graduate student abroad working on his thesis.

The writing is smooth, flowing, and engaging.  It carries the reader along and makes the book difficult to put down.  The story comes to a reasonable conclusion.. 

However, I didn’t find the characters engaging.  I read the story and enjoyed the writing, but it came to the characters, I was not drawn to care for them.

I am told the movie version is excellent.  Maybe I’ll watch it.

            [This review appears on my blog, Amazon.com, and Goodreads.com.]

Review: Time and Eternity: Exploring God's Relationship to Time

            Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time by William Lane Craig is a readable book, but one to think through and come back to.

The major issue – as one would expect – is God’s relationship to time. Craig gives the following options:

Is God temporal or timeless?

Put another way, is God dynamic or static?

Still another way, is God tensed or tenseless?

Craig walks the reader through what each of these distinctions means and why he favors one over another.

He then moves on to the issue of God and creation. Craig argues that Creation must occur within time (thus there is a problem with the theory of the “big bang”), and time had to have a beginning. If this is not true, the self-existence of God is at risk.

Finally, he considers whether God’s foreknowledge is open or actual – and where human responsibility falls in each of these views.

Craig looks at what are in many ways – the basic issues that one needs to think through and to begin to grasp God’s relationship to time. It is a great place to begin thinking about these issues.

            [This review appears on my blog, Amazon.com, and Goodreads.com.]

Review: "Cat in an Indigo Mood"

 

In Carole Nelson Douglas’ Cat in an Indigo Mood:  A Midnight Louie Mystery, Lt. Carmen Molina finds a woman garroted and stabbed in the throat – beside her car – with the words, “she left,” written on her car. It won’t be the last woman, so Temple Barr starts to investigate.

Meanwhile, Midnight Louie, reluctantly accepting his daughter, Midnight Louise’s help, are hired by Miss Fanny Furbelow to find out what happened to her gentleman friend, Wilfred.

The stories run parallel and come to a satisfying conclusion.

            [This review appears on my blog, Amazon.com, and Goodreads.com.]