Musings of a Snickerdoodle

The Worldview Study Bible seeks to remind Christians that the Bible is not just a book that we read to feel more religious, we are changed by it, our thinking, our worldview, our perspective of everything is changed when we use it to renew our mind. This Bible has many articles in it, scattered throughout and dealing with various 'worldview' topics, articles like: "Biblical Models for Business", "Engaging LGBT Advocates", "Emperor and King Worship in Biblical Times", "Animal Rights" , "A Biblical Assessment of Abortion", and so on.   Some of the articles are quite interesting and helpful.   Others, I had some trouble with some of the content.   For instance, in the article on "Biblical Formation",   dealing with various ways one can utilize the Scriptures, it says, "Praying through the Bible flows naturally from Scripture meditation.   Giants of the faith, such as Martin Luther, Charles Spurgeon, and e...

The Baker Compact Dictionary of Biblical Studies is a dictionary that seeks to provide definitions and explanations for words that you will find in many books and articles that delve into the study of the text of the Bible.   It gives definitions and brief overviews of places, scholarly terminology, prominent people whose works are mentioned in theological books. It was pretty interesting to just sit and read through a lot of the information in the book, to learn a lot of new things and even to glean some extra helpful information about events, people and places that I already knew a few things about.   If I came across something that I've already become acquainted with I felt sort of reluctant to read those parts, thinking something along the lines of, "this is just a dictionary, what more could it tell me about that?" But I was surprised at some of the extra information I gleaned.   For example,   I have done a bit of reading on the "Counsel of Jamnia...

Tillie Pierce:  Teen Eyewitness to the Battle of Gettysburg by Tanya Anderson gives a very interesting perspective of the battle of Gettysburg.  As the title indicates, Tillie was a teenager at the time the Confederates invaded her state (Pennsylvania) and thence ended up at her hometown of Gettysburg.  As the danger grows Tillie's parents allow her to go with a neighbor who desires to flee, with her two children to a safer spot at her own parents farm.  Ironically, their refuge ends up being a not-so-safe place with war taking place around them and nearby on the Round Tops. Tillie and her friends accept the situation in which they are placed and end up helping with the wounded and helping give water to active soldiers and in so doing she meets various soldiers participating in the battle (including General Meade) all the while worrying about her own family back in the main town.  The book is filled with interesting facts about the Civil War and many ...

Usually, at least for me, when I think of God 'calling' someone to some type of work it is always in the context of some type of 'official' evangelistic type of work, such as one being a missionary overseas, starting a 'prison' ministry, working at a rescue mission, teaching a class at Church on Sundays…etc.    Normally it is always outside of 'everyday life', outside of one's secular profession and outside of one's life at home, it is something recognizably 'spiritual'.  The author of this book has a different perspective(one that I basically agree with).  The premise of this book, Consider Your Calling by Gordon T. Smith,  is  that the work that God  calls Christians to do is not just missionary work, or heading church ministries, but it is also the seemingly 'secular' callings.  I LOVE the premise of the book, I just have some problems with how Mr. Smith tries to teach it.  First,  h...

The Carols of Christmas by Andrew Gant goes through various popular carols of Christmas and tells some of their intricate, and often confusing, history.  You may not come out of the book wiser than when you started it about who wrote such and such a carol but Gant himself warns of this in the intro:  "…if you occasionally get to the end of a chapter in this book slightly unsure about who wrote words or tunes or bits of either, me too…." Apparently we don't know exactly who wrote some of the songs, and many of them were revised from their original written form.   One of the histories I found particularly interesting was that of Hark the Herald Angels Sing, originally Hark How all the Welkin Rings' by Charles Wesley.  Apparently George Whitefield was one of the people who revised the song, one of the verses he changed was "universal nature say 'Christ the Lord is born today!' " to "With th'Angelic hosts proclaim, Christ is born in Bethl...

God commands His people to be happy and therefore being 'happy' is a matter of obedience for Christians. Such is the argument of Randy Alcorn's newest book "Happiness".   It seems that he has encountered a lot of Christians who seem to think, or imply, that happiness is sin and that God's purpose is for us to be holy, not happy.   He declares that the oft cited difference between happiness and joy is in reality a nonexistent difference, that the terms are so alike in meaning they are synonymous.   "The distinction between joy and happiness is not biblical ".      He critiques the view that 'joy' is more 'contentment' without reference to the emotions, while 'happiness' is primarily circumstantial and emotional.   He makes a case that the word "joy" is also emotional in meaning.   He also believes that "happy" is the better term to use in the case of many of the Greek and Hebrew words translated in many...

"From one person God made all nations who live on earth, and he decided when and where every nation would be…" Acts 17:26 (Scripture quoted from the Contemporary English Version © 1991, 1992, 1995 by American Bible Society, Used by Permission.)   It is fascinating to see the events that God had ordained to bring America onto the world scene as an independent nation in 1776.   Independence was not on everyone's mind when the American Revolution began.   Many Americans simply wanted to have adequate representation and influence in the British government of their land.   Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It - by John Ferling highlights some of the thinking that was going on at the time, and some of the events and writings that sparked a change of thought in many people.   Ferling states in the preface that, "This book argues that the colonists were generally happy with the imperial relationship in the early 1760s, and for a conside...

The Printer and the Preacher: Ben Franklin, George Whitefield, and the Surprising Friendship that Invented America by Randy Peterson   is a book that attempts to explore the friendship of George Whitefield and Benjamin Franklin and how that relationship affected the coming united American states.   I have read some biographies on Whitefield (Dallimore's) and knew of Franklin's correspondence with Whitefield, and thought that the topic of this book looked interesting.   Sadly, this book did not satisfy my hopes.   First, though the author's writing style is not boring it is too unorganized for my taste.   I have read books before where the narrative goes back and forth through time and I know that this can be done in an interesting, yet still unconfusing way, but this book does not do it well.   On any given page, especially towards the first half of the book, one can be in Franklin's early life, then his later, or in Whitefield's early life, or his lat...

Ulrich Zwingli, by William Boekestein is, as the series is titled, a "Bitesize Biography" but there is a good amount of content in that 'bite'.   Despite this biography's size, it gives a lot of information to Zwingli. It actually seems to 'introduce' you to him as opposed to making you a mere acquaintance of his life.   The things I most remember about Zwingli, from other books and sources on him, are that he died in a not-so justifiable battle/war and that he debated and opposed Luther on the presence of Christ in the 'Lord's Table'.   I've found out that there were several things I didn't know about his life, these things include sanctifying works of God in and through his life such as his doing away with preaching on Bible texts assigned by the Catholic Church, and opting for a verse by verse, book by book method of preaching instead. On the negative side, there were the manifestations of the sinful 'remnants' of...

This is going to sound wrong, but for a study Bible, this is a lame one.   Not the Scriptures themselves of course, but the study notes, or rather, lack of notes in this edition.   It has several essays at the beginning of the book, on topics such as "the historical reliability of the Bible', "From text to doctrine:   the Bible and theology", "Biblical interpretation: a short history.   But I didn't like them much as they had several concepts and statements that were more biased towards Covenant Theology, promoting concepts like Christian Jews and Gentiles all being a part of the 'Israel of God', and the Promised land not being limited to a small geographical location like Israel, but now includes the whole earth…or something along those lines.   Also promoted is a 'Christocentric' hermeneutic…which I still don't quite get.   Why not use a Theocentric hermeneutic, or what about a literal grammatical historical one?   Some of the se...

No Greater Valor:   The Siege of Bastogne And the Miracle That Sealed Allied Victory by Jerome Corsi deals with the surprise attack by Nazi forces against the Americans in Belgium that hinged upon the capturing/holding the town of Bastogne.   It is a very detailed account, almost too detailed for my taste, for instance, there are intricate accounts of the weapons used, what kinds they were, how many…etc.   Which just didn't capture my interest, but it makes absolute sense to have that type of info in a book about war.   And many probably prefer such attention to detail.   There are many maps in the book as well, illustrating what was happening, and many photographs from that time too.   The thing I really didn’t like about this book was that, though trying to have a Christian aspect to it, it didn't really succeed in anything but showing that many of the allied forces were theists.   One of the main persons focused upon is a Catholic Priest rath...

The People, the land, and the future of Israel is a collection of essays on those topics by various people including   Michael Rydelnik, John Feinberg and Walter Kaiser Jr.   The Essays are Divided into several groupings, in sections like Practical Theology, Hebrew Scriptures, New Testament..etc.   All of these men are defending the Biblical view that God is not done with the Jews as a people, that they have a future in   the land of Israel, a future in which as believers in Jesus as the Messiah, and as the Atonement for their sins, they will live in peace in the land under their Messiah's rule(The Millennial Kingdom). At first I liked the idea of having multiple people contributing in one book, but when I read it, or rather as I was reading it,   I changed my mind.   It just wasn't a smooth flow, once you got used to one person's style of writing you ended up with another one.   And then some of the essays were interesting, some weren't so intere...

The NIV Once a Day Bible is a great concept, not only is it chronologically arranged, but it is also divided into 365 daily readings.   Last year our church went through the Bible in a year using a chronological reading plan.   Though it was really neat to be reading it chronologically, it was a bit tiring flipping back and forth to the different texts for each individual day.   Then I started reviewing Bibles that were already chronologically arranged, and that helped a lot.   Some, or all of them, had one year Bible reading plans listed in the back of the Bible; this Bible is neat in that it is already arranged that way so you don't have to flip to the back of the book, you just read until the next 'Day' heading.   It would be nice if they would come out with a hardcover edition as the softcover feels a bit flimsy.  At the end of each day's readings, there are little reflective paragraphs at the end, talking about what you've just read.   Some...

Erwin Lutzer gives a high level overview of the return of Christ and the events that will be associated with this return.   Writing from a premillennial standpoint he examines the events that have yet to take place and helps us think, "how should I live in light of this?"   The chapters are all written in light of our Lord's coming, as is evidenced by their titles, "The King Returns for us", "The King Judges us", "The King Marries His Bride", and so on.   He states that, "Some of the events associated with His glorious return will be shocking, ,especially for those who think of Jesus only in terms of the gospel accounts, when He went about healing the sick, raising the dead, and blessing the poor.    In the event before us, we see not only the love of Jesus but the meticulous justice of Jesus."   And so you also have chapters like, "The King Destroys Nations" and "The King Returns to Conquer".   I like ...

Martyn-Lloyd Jones' enthusiasm about this 11th chapter of Romans is evident in every chapter of this book.    My dad likes to point out that the most interesting messages are given by people who are actually interested in what they are speaking about.   Lloyd-Jones is definitely interested and excited about sharing what he has learned in God's word, and so this commentary(a collection of his sermons on this chapter)is very interesting.   In Romans 11 Paul is continuing his explanation of what is going on with the ethnic people God chose, namely the people of Israel, and whether or not God is done with them as an ethnicity.   The majority of Jews were rejecting the Gospel, while most of the people who were responding to the 'call' were   Gentiles.    Despite his apparently Amillennial views, Lloyd-Jones emphatically rejects the view that the term 'Israel' is speaking of the 'Church' anywhere in this passage.   He explains that it is spe...