Proclaimer Blog
How to read the Bible through the Jesus lens
This is a book I really wanted to like. Each book of the Bible is taken in turn and using a biblical theological framework the theme of the book is explained (in a pithy sentence) together with what the author calls "the Jesus lens" (essentially how the book relates to Christ) and "contemporary applications" (which does what it says on the tin). The idea is great – imagine a well presented, short-ish (250pp) summary of Bible books that would be useful on your own bookshelf and something you might want to give to others.
Does it work, though?
Here in the office we haven't read it all through. What we've done is take the two or three books that we're working on in detail at the moment and read those chapters. It's those books we're best placed on to comment, otherwise we're just commenting as generalists.
First of all, I looked at Ezra, my current study project. The Ezra chapter is good, theme "God brings the exiles back to Jerusalem and directs that the temple should be built" gets a thumbs up. The lines to Christ are appropriately drawn (new kind of temple, new kind of building etc) and the applications are sharp. A good start. Then I turned to Numbers. This chapter is poorer, though it still has useful stuff in it. The theme is weaker, "God chastens his disobedient people but reaffirms his intent to bring them into the promised land." Scripture is much blunter about this disobedience and it is telling that in this chapter Michael Williams refers neither to 1 Cor 10 nor Hebrews 3/4, two of the major commentaries on Numbers in the NT.
Robin looked at Leviticus. Proverbs and 1 Corinthians. He's much cleverer than me, so he has these three projects on the go at the same time. He thought the analysis in each of these chapters was warm, but not quite spot on; it could be sharper.
Christoph Christopherson thought the chapter on Job good, though once again the theme sentence was a bit thin. He said that four pages on the psalms is always going to be a struggle to do justice to a diverse book, but it was particularly weaker here on lines to Christ. Good on John, he said, but weaker on Romans. He did have a quick flick through Deuteronomy and said the Jesus lens section there was excellent.
So, all in all a book we really wanted to like. The direction and aim are admirable – but for us it didn't quite click. More B than A student, we might say. That's not to say that it might not serve a purpose, particularly with those starting out reading the Bible for themselves. But we hoped for a little more…