Taking God At His Word (Book Recommendation)

bookI thoroughly enjoyed reading Kevin DeYoung’s book, Taking God At His Word, about the authority, sufficiency, reliability and clarity of Scripture.  It’s an easy read and very, very good.  Kevin avoids all the technical jargon and gets to the heart of the issues.  You may be struggling with questions about the Bible and whether we need more words or messages from God today?  This book is for you.  You may be committed to the authority of Scripture and just need an encouragement to keep believing the Bible?  This book is for you.

Here are some quotable quotes from the book to whet your appetite:

About Psalm 119

Surely it is significant that this intricate, finely crafted, single-minded love poem—the longest in the Bible—is not about marriage or children or food or drink or mountains or sunsets or rivers or oceans, but about the Bible itself.

About the authority of the Bible

We go the Bible to learn about the Bible because to judge the Bible by any other standard would be to make the Bible less than what it claims to be.

About the historicity of the Bible

From the very beginning, Christianity tied itself to history. The most important claims of Christianity are historical claims, and on the facts of history the Christian religion must stand or fall. Luke followed all things closely, researched things carefully, and relied on eyewitnesses so that Theophilus could have “certainty” about the gospel story (Luke 1:1–4).

About obedience to the Bible

The goal of revelation is not information only, but affection, worship, and obedience. Christ in us will be realized only as we drink deeply of the Bible, which is God’s word outside of us.

About the reliability of the Bible

We do not follow myths. We are not interested in stories with a nice moral to them. We are not helped by hoping in spiritual possibilities which we know to be historically impossible. These things in the gospel story happened. God predicted them. He fulfilled them. He inspired the written record of them. Therefore we ought to believe them. Nothing in all of the Bible was produced solely by the human will. God used men to write the words, but these men did their work carried along by the Holy Spirit. The Bible is an utterly reliable book, an unerring book, a holy book, a divine book.

About how God speaks to us today

The word of God is more than enough for the people of God to live their lives to the glory of God. The Father will speak by means of all that the Spirit has spoken through the Son. The question is whether we will open our Bibles and bother to listen.

About how Jesus viewed his Bible

Jesus submitted his will to the Scriptures, committed his brain to studying the Scriptures, and humbled his heart to obey the Scriptures. The Lord Jesus, God’s Son and our Saviour, believed his Bible was the word of God down to the sentences, to the phrases, to the words, to the smallest letter, to the tiniest specks—and that nothing in all those specks and in all those books in his Holy Bible could ever be broken.

About why people reject the Bible

We don’t like the people teaching the Bible, and we don’t like what the Bible teaches. So we get our hearts dead set against the word of God…

About the Cross of Christ

No matter how much you like angels or how much you pray or how eager you are to meditate or how much you are into yoga or how much you believe in miracles, if you do not understand, cherish, and embrace the cross, you are not a spiritual person.

Go on, get it!

 

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