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 Customer Reviews
Jesus story book, 01 Sep 2008
i bought this book for my husband to read with our children ages 11 and 6 years and they absolutely love it. The stories are well written and fun to read and the pictures are good too. It brings the bible stories alive in a real way to all the family and gives us some amazing family time. The kids remember the truths from this and they really enjoy reading it. It really is not a kids book but one for all the family.
fills a gap, 09 Apr 2008
This bible is brilliant and fills a much needed gap in the market. It doesn't patronise children, and introduces some complicated issues with a very light touch. Beautifully written. Buy it!
very dodgy, 31 Dec 2007
I was very excited about this book at first, especially to see it recommended by Tim Keller, whose preaching I have found so helpful. However, there is much in this book that is seriously wrong.
To summerise, sin, obedience and judgement are minimised. Sin is defined as `believing the lie that God doesn't love you' which is not a biblical definition. It is not the case that men and women have questioned that God really loves them, and so they have decided to go it alone. It is not the case that God is simply trying to reassure us that He does really love us and we should all come back to Him. It is actually the case that men and women say, `Stuff God's love for us! Who cares? We hate God and don't want Him! We want to be God!' This is how revolting and gross sin really is, and that is what makes God's grace so utterly amazing, that He would want to redeem us, rescue us from just punishment which we deserve and He demands.
He are some detailed remarks, if you have the time!
p12 God is LOVE - 'God wrote, "I love you" - He wrote it in the sky ... to make our hearts sing' [contrast the Bibles' view of what we see written in the sky and the earth]
[this is true/helpful BUT it is also a PART only of the truth. Like with most unbalanced or heretical things, you MUST 'read the gaps']
p14 LAW is minimised and reduced to utilitarianism: "the rules show you how life works best" [contrast - and note the absence of - the Bible's view of God's authority and character + man's obligation towards him]
pp7,10,11,17 by contrast look very good
p30 TEMPTATION is identified and defined as "wondering: Does God love me?"; SIN is identified and defined as a 'terrible lie which whispers, "God doesn't love ME"'
Read this page carefully. They did not disobey - they did not transgress a command - they did not lust or long or display pride. There is not even an ACTIVE verb: simply a PASSIVE entering - NOT even specifically into them - but "into the world", this lie "came". Adam didn't do anything. Eve didn't do anything. They were not responsible. It just came ... and it was 'just' a lie about love [nothing about God's rights and dues from man]. Now if that isn't bad theology and doesn't hit us between the eyes, are we awake??
p33 Exceptionally, there is a contrast here: there IS mention of "broken the one rule". However, the author does not want our mind to SETTLE on this truth, but to quickly take us off onto the subjective again, NOTE: "they HADN'T JUST broken the one rule - they had broken GOD'S HEART". The emphasis on broken relationship is a helpful corrective to a non-relational/mechanistic style of theology, but this emphasis must never replace the emphasis God has PUT THERE in the passage.
You are reading here an aspect of an interpretation of a Bible truth - now of course children and adults will like this as this is the MOST PALETABLE aspect of the truth. The harder aspects emphasised in the Gen.3 text are all sidelined. This is therefore a serious issue.
p34 repeats the PASSIVE entry of sin: "sin had come ... IT would never leave". Now we look again for a definition of SIN on this page. What are we served up?:
"God's children would always be running away from Him" ... "Their hearts would break and their hearts would not work properly" "They are living in such pain" ... and what of the retribution due for this sad crime?!!?: protection!! God concludes: "There's only one way I can protect them" !! Of course kids love it.
You walk away and feel sad - your heart breaks - and God is INCAPABLE of allowing you to feel pain ["God couldn't let his children live in such pain ..."] so he did what any self-respecting God would do and was 'nice' to them, "PROTECT"ing them every step of the way. Now of course all this is lovely and in its place, if we know-what-she-means, it is rather true and rather lovely, BUT it is NOT the [balance/emphasis of the] message of the Bible.
SIN has been identified and confused with both its consequences & its punishment. In the Bible you have SIN and you have RETRIBUTION. In this you find both human and divine AGENCY and RESPONSIBILITY. In our author's eyes, man experiences sin - the cause and the consequences being the same: you are away from God and you and he are heart-sick. Having foolishly wandered away, the corollary is to expect you can wander back once you realise God DOES love you after all. What a lovely message! I expect folk will buy that in droves.
p33 God's response is that he gets a stomach-ache or something. "A terrible pain came into God's heart". "they had broken God's heart". Yes God does have 'nice feelings'. Everything about God is [in the proper sense of the world] 'nice', but it is not this-sort-of 'nice'. He is all goodness, all holiness, all-powerful. SO, e.g. His holiness is all-loving; his wisdom is all-powerful. But our author demurs from allowing that his love is all-holy. His actions are all-righteous. This we are not allowed to know. This is the heresy gap in this issue.
further e.g's at random:
p212f Note the deletion of all the rational and logical reasons for following Jesus highlighted in Mark's gospel. What are we served up?: "they couldn't explain it" ... "but something" ... "when they looked at Jesus" ... "their hearts were filled" ... What is this? This is mysticism. Indefinable niceness in Jesus which just makes you all gooey and you can't help ignoring your fish. Now, as ever, I bet there WAS a wonderful and perfect somewhat-indefinable 'wonderfulness' about just a 'look' from the saviour ... BUT this is not the message of MY bible. It is her message but it is not MINE.
p214 Jairus finds Jesus in the TEMPLE (cf. Mk5, Jn 8) - I didn't think he did ??
p220 "He was making the sad things come untrue". I think this is rather more vague than my bible.
p228 Title "The Singer" - unsure why this title is there, but am concerned that's what she thinks Jesus is doing, namely "singing a love song"
p235 ... here comes the song: "It was the song all of God's creation had sung to him from the very beginning. It was the song people's hearts were made to sing:
GOD MADE US - GOD LOVES US - HE IS VERY PLEASED WITH US [that's news to us evangelicals, surely!!]
It was WHY JESUS HAD COME INTO THE WORLD: TO SING THEM THAT WONDERFUL SONG; to sing it not only with his voice, but with his whole life - so that God's children could REMEMBER it and JOIN IN and sing it too"
This is far-out way-off-the-mark liberalism. This is not the gospel. This is utter LIES. It is so far off being true to the gospel that I cannot call it less. It is a LIE.
The consequences of her view of SIN come out here. You have just FORGOTTEN that GOD LOVES YOU. Result??: ALL you have to do is just REMEMBER again. You've forgotten the love-song of all mother-earth; don't fret: Jesus came to SING it again .... and now you can "join in and sing it, too"
If every page of a book was like this, Evangelicals would have the sense not to touch it, but you also have contrasting pages like page 301: "for this reason I came into the world", with the helpful comment, "It was God's plan".
I think this is [the predictably sad and repeated case of] selling a book to a wide audience: it's a book which looks BOTH liberal and EVANGELICAL. It is clever enough that both groups will buy it and like it.
p292 promises a "Forever Happiness that won't ever leave". I think she means the "peace" promised in John 14. The choice of words is I think unwise.
p294 Note the PASSIVE approach to sin again in the last para.: Jesus was to take "the blame for everything that HAD GONE wrong". Requirement, [dis-]obedience, responsibility, culpability, accountability - all are DEAD for this author. It's ALL about warm or broken hearts and 'songs'
p296 The identifying and confounding SIN with CONSEQUENCES (per Gen.3) appears again here: "WHEN people ran away from God, they LOST God - it WAS WHAT happened WHEN they ran away. Not being close to God WAS LIKE a punishment". [Note the utter absence in her theology of,"man did this SO God did THAT"]
Such is her hatred of the doctrine of punishment that she de-bunks it, saying that what is true and real and important [namely that SIN and its consequences are IDENTICAL (no 'agency' being involved)] is LIKE a punishment, but is not ACTUALLY ["God forbid"!!] a REAL punishment. This again is a major departure from truth and faithfulness to the gospel.
Compare page 169 [Jonah]: "Even though you 'run from' God (cf. p347), he CAN'T STOP loving You (=p331)". God has a one-track personality that can't stop loving ... well, YES, but also, NO. My God is BIGGER than that. Her view is reductionist: God is ONLY, irreducibly, inevitably LOVE, unsullied by other bible-truths.
There IS NO punishment ... and the nearest thing you can image to such an unthinkable thing is that you have walked away from perfect love. BEWARE BEWARE. It sounds SO SO appealing.
p317 "Was God really making everything sad come untrue (even death)??" - I don't think this is clear enough to be easily able to be reckoned to be properly 'true'.
[=p220 =p321]
p323 [The great commission]. Just compare what's here with Matt 28:18 and READ THE GAPS ! There is a refusal to use the word "obey" (generally) throughout the whole book (cf. disciples/teaching them to obey ...). [Compare p329 (+ p30 above already) - there is no such thing as disobedience, but rather "the poison and the terrible lie and the SICKNESS in their hearts" (which is solved by "You are my child and I love you" p329).
I fear this is a liberal book with evangelical glosses. I sense that perhaps the author and her editor have very different theologies and this book was a compromise OR it is aimed at SELLING WELL.
There are some ASPECTS (helpful) of truth in this book. But it will do much harm if children are raised on it.
Brilliant idea - let down by the drawings and some inaccuracies, 23 Dec 2007
As I pastor I've just finished preaching an overview of the bible - I'm passionate about getting people to see the big picture. So I was really excited to see this for children. The idea is superb, the tying every story to Jesus is magnificent. Our 4 year old daughter has started seeing the connections already. And that excites me. I love how it fits every story in with the plot-line of the bible.
However I have a couple of caveats.
Since children get so much from imagery I was really disappointed with the artwork. The quality is great, but the content very poor, and underscores misconceptions of the bible, actually making the bible look less believable. Noah's ark is shown balancing precariously on the pinnacle of the mountain, as well as being that silly shape that it is often drawn - nothing like the proportions given in the bible. Jericho is a five house town - not much of a conquest there. Goliath is make to look like a gruesome ogre of fairytale proportions. The people of Israel coming to the Red Sea look like a small Sunday school outing rather than 1.5 million people making the exodus. I could go on. For me, the pictures undermine the very thing the words are seeking to do - they push the stories into the realm of fairy tales.
(A far better set of illustrations are by Gail Schoonmaker in the The Big Picture Story Bible written by David Helm.)
The other caveat is that sometimes Lloyd-Jones is a little loose to the story, making up things that aren't in the passage. For example - Jesus being bathed in a golden light at his baptism, there being three wise men, Jesus winking at the boy who brought the 5 loaves and saying "watch this" and others. It's little things like she says Jacob had to wait 7 years to marry Rachel instead of just a week, like God creating by saying "Hello Light", like using "Papa" for Father - a word which doesn't carry the same connotations as Abba. Like the feeding of the '5000 people', rather than 5000 men, plus a lot more women and children. Like Jesus playing games with children. Like Zacchaeus being so small that he had to take a flying leap to get up into his chair for breakfast.
In one sense they're small things, and it is in the style of other children's books. And therein lies the problem - the bible isn't another children's book. It's true in every detail - so when it comes to a Children's version of the Bible, it should be true in every detail. We owe that to our kids.
I'd prefer not to have to edit the story as I tell it. Growing up, we had the Child's Story Bible by Catherine Vos read to us. Time and time again when we thought she was stretching the text, when we looked up our bibles we found she was exactly right. Since we read it so many times, a vast quantity of accurate bible knowledge was imbibed. That's what I look for in a children's bible.
Having said all that - the links to Jesus often make you stop and praise God for Jesus. We've read it following on from the aforementioned Big Picture Story Bible - which I would heartily recommend. And that's probably the best way - read it along with other children's bibles and correct it as you go.
Looking forward to the revised edition of this potentially tremendous asset.
Brilliant Bible, 11 Dec 2007
We have read a number of Bibles to our two young boys and enjoyed most of them. However, having recently bought the Jesus Storybook Bible we have been absolutely delighted with the way it reads, its illustrations and the way it points to Jesus. Our boys are enjoying it too. A must for parents who want their children to understand and enjoy the Bible from a young age.
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Customer Reviews
Jesus story book, 01 Sep 2008
i bought this book for my husband to read with our children ages 11 and 6 years and they absolutely love it. The stories are well written and fun to read and the pictures are good too. It brings the bible stories alive in a real way to all the family and gives us some amazing family time. The kids remember the truths from this and they really enjoy reading it. It really is not a kids book but one for all the family.
fills a gap, 09 Apr 2008
This bible is brilliant and fills a much needed gap in the market. It doesn't patronise children, and introduces some complicated issues with a very light touch. Beautifully written. Buy it!
very dodgy, 31 Dec 2007
I was very excited about this book at first, especially to see it recommended by Tim Keller, whose preaching I have found so helpful. However, there is much in this book that is seriously wrong.
To summerise, sin, obedience and judgement are minimised. Sin is defined as `believing the lie that God doesn't love you' which is not a biblical definition. It is not the case that men and women have questioned that God really loves them, and so they have decided to go it alone. It is not the case that God is simply trying to reassure us that He does really love us and we should all come back to Him. It is actually the case that men and women say, `Stuff God's love for us! Who cares? We hate God and don't want Him! We want to be God!' This is how revolting and gross sin really is, and that is what makes God's grace so utterly amazing, that He would want to redeem us, rescue us from just punishment which we deserve and He demands.
He are some detailed remarks, if you have the time!
p12 God is LOVE - 'God wrote, "I love you" - He wrote it in the sky ... to make our hearts sing' [contrast the Bibles' view of what we see written in the sky and the earth]
[this is true/helpful BUT it is also a PART only of the truth. Like with most unbalanced or heretical things, you MUST 'read the gaps']
p14 LAW is minimised and reduced to utilitarianism: "the rules show you how life works best" [contrast - and note the absence of - the Bible's view of God's authority and character + man's obligation towards him]
pp7,10,11,17 by contrast look very good
p30 TEMPTATION is identified and defined as "wondering: Does God love me?"; SIN is identified and defined as a 'terrible lie which whispers, "God doesn't love ME"'
Read this page carefully. They did not disobey - they did not transgress a command - they did not lust or long or display pride. There is not even an ACTIVE verb: simply a PASSIVE entering - NOT even specifically into them - but "into the world", this lie "came". Adam didn't do anything. Eve didn't do anything. They were not responsible. It just came ... and it was 'just' a lie about love [nothing about God's rights and dues from man]. Now if that isn't bad theology and doesn't hit us between the eyes, are we awake??
p33 Exceptionally, there is a contrast here: there IS mention of "broken the one rule". However, the author does not want our mind to SETTLE on this truth, but to quickly take us off onto the subjective again, NOTE: "they HADN'T JUST broken the one rule - they had broken GOD'S HEART". The emphasis on broken relationship is a helpful corrective to a non-relational/mechanistic style of theology, but this emphasis must never replace the emphasis God has PUT THERE in the passage.
You are reading here an aspect of an interpretation of a Bible truth - now of course children and adults will like this as this is the MOST PALETABLE aspect of the truth. The harder aspects emphasised in the Gen.3 text are all sidelined. This is therefore a serious issue.
p34 repeats the PASSIVE entry of sin: "sin had come ... IT would never leave". Now we look again for a definition of SIN on this page. What are we served up?:
"God's children would always be running away from Him" ... "Their hearts would break and their hearts would not work properly" "They are living in such pain" ... and what of the retribution due for this sad crime?!!?: protection!! God concludes: "There's only one way I can protect them" !! Of course kids love it.
You walk away and feel sad - your heart breaks - and God is INCAPABLE of allowing you to feel pain ["God couldn't let his children live in such pain ..."] so he did what any self-respecting God would do and was 'nice' to them, "PROTECT"ing them every step of the way. Now of course all this is lovely and in its place, if we know-what-she-means, it is rather true and rather lovely, BUT it is NOT the [balance/emphasis of the] message of the Bible.
SIN has been identified and confused with both its consequences & its punishment. In the Bible you have SIN and you have RETRIBUTION. In this you find both human and divine AGENCY and RESPONSIBILITY. In our author's eyes, man experiences sin - the cause and the consequences being the same: you are away from God and you and he are heart-sick. Having foolishly wandered away, the corollary is to expect you can wander back once you realise God DOES love you after all. What a lovely message! I expect folk will buy that in droves.
p33 God's response is that he gets a stomach-ache or something. "A terrible pain came into God's heart". "they had broken God's heart". Yes God does have 'nice feelings'. Everything about God is [in the proper sense of the world] 'nice', but it is not this-sort-of 'nice'. He is all goodness, all holiness, all-powerful. SO, e.g. His holiness is all-loving; his wisdom is all-powerful. But our author demurs from allowing that his love is all-holy. His actions are all-righteous. This we are not allowed to know. This is the heresy gap in this issue.
further e.g's at random:
p212f Note the deletion of all the rational and logical reasons for following Jesus highlighted in Mark's gospel. What are we served up?: "they couldn't explain it" ... "but something" ... "when they looked at Jesus" ... "their hearts were filled" ... What is this? This is mysticism. Indefinable niceness in Jesus which just makes you all gooey and you can't help ignoring your fish. Now, as ever, I bet there WAS a wonderful and perfect somewhat-indefinable 'wonderfulness' about just a 'look' from the saviour ... BUT this is not the message of MY bible. It is her message but it is not MINE.
p214 Jairus finds Jesus in the TEMPLE (cf. Mk5, Jn 8) - I didn't think he did ??
p220 "He was making the sad things come untrue". I think this is rather more vague than my bible.
p228 Title "The Singer" - unsure why this title is there, but am concerned that's what she thinks Jesus is doing, namely "singing a love song"
p235 ... here comes the song: "It was the song all of God's creation had sung to him from the very beginning. It was the song people's hearts were made to sing:
GOD MADE US - GOD LOVES US - HE IS VERY PLEASED WITH US [that's news to us evangelicals, surely!!]
It was WHY JESUS HAD COME INTO THE WORLD: TO SING THEM THAT WONDERFUL SONG; to sing it not only with his voice, but with his whole life - so that God's children could REMEMBER it and JOIN IN and sing it too"
This is far-out way-off-the-mark liberalism. This is not the gospel. This is utter LIES. It is so far off being true to the gospel that I cannot call it less. It is a LIE.
The consequences of her view of SIN come out here. You have just FORGOTTEN that GOD LOVES YOU. Result??: ALL you have to do is just REMEMBER again. You've forgotten the love-song of all mother-earth; don't fret: Jesus came to SING it again .... and now you can "join in and sing it, too"
If every page of a book was like this, Evangelicals would have the sense not to touch it, but you also have contrasting pages like page 301: "for this reason I came into the world", with the helpful comment, "It was God's plan".
I think this is [the predictably sad and repeated case of] selling a book to a wide audience: it's a book which looks BOTH liberal and EVANGELICAL. It is clever enough that both groups will buy it and like it.
p292 promises a "Forever Happiness that won't ever leave". I think she means the "peace" promised in John 14. The choice of words is I think unwise.
p294 Note the PASSIVE approach to sin again in the last para.: Jesus was to take "the blame for everything that HAD GONE wrong". Requirement, [dis-]obedience, responsibility, culpability, accountability - all are DEAD for this author. It's ALL about warm or broken hearts and 'songs'
p296 The identifying and confounding SIN with CONSEQUENCES (per Gen.3) appears again here: "WHEN people ran away from God, they LOST God - it WAS WHAT happened WHEN they ran away. Not being close to God WAS LIKE a punishment". [Note the utter absence in her theology of,"man did this SO God did THAT"]
Such is her hatred of the doctrine of punishment that she de-bunks it, saying that what is true and real and important [namely that SIN and its consequences are IDENTICAL (no 'agency' being involved)] is LIKE a punishment, but is not ACTUALLY ["God forbid"!!] a REAL punishment. This again is a major departure from truth and faithfulness to the gospel.
Compare page 169 [Jonah]: "Even though you 'run from' God (cf. p347), he CAN'T STOP loving You (=p331)". God has a one-track personality that can't stop loving ... well, YES, but also, NO. My God is BIGGER than that. Her view is reductionist: God is ONLY, irreducibly, inevitably LOVE, unsullied by other bible-truths.
There IS NO punishment ... and the nearest thing you can image to such an unthinkable thing is that you have walked away from perfect love. BEWARE BEWARE. It sounds SO SO appealing.
p317 "Was God really making everything sad come untrue (even death)??" - I don't think this is clear enough to be easily able to be reckoned to be properly 'true'.
[=p220 =p321]
p323 [The great commission]. Just compare what's here with Matt 28:18 and READ THE GAPS ! There is a refusal to use the word "obey" (generally) throughout the whole book (cf. disciples/teaching them to obey ...). [Compare p329 (+ p30 above already) - there is no such thing as disobedience, but rather "the poison and the terrible lie and the SICKNESS in their hearts" (which is solved by "You are my child and I love you" p329).
I fear this is a liberal book with evangelical glosses. I sense that perhaps the author and her editor have very different theologies and this book was a compromise OR it is aimed at SELLING WELL.
There are some ASPECTS (helpful) of truth in this book. But it will do much harm if children are raised on it.
Brilliant idea - let down by the drawings and some inaccuracies, 23 Dec 2007
As I pastor I've just finished preaching an overview of the bible - I'm passionate about getting people to see the big picture. So I was really excited to see this for children. The idea is superb, the tying every story to Jesus is magnificent. Our 4 year old daughter has started seeing the connections already. And that excites me. I love how it fits every story in with the plot-line of the bible.
However I have a couple of caveats.
Since children get so much from imagery I was really disappointed with the artwork. The quality is great, but the content very poor, and underscores misconceptions of the bible, actually making the bible look less believable. Noah's ark is shown balancing precariously on the pinnacle of the mountain, as well as being that silly shape that it is often drawn - nothing like the proportions given in the bible. Jericho is a five house town - not much of a conquest there. Goliath is make to look like a gruesome ogre of fairytale proportions. The people of Israel coming to the Red Sea look like a small Sunday school outing rather than 1.5 million people making the exodus. I could go on. For me, the pictures undermine the very thing the words are seeking to do - they push the stories into the realm of fairy tales.
(A far better set of illustrations are by Gail Schoonmaker in the The Big Picture Story Bible written by David Helm.)
The other caveat is that sometimes Lloyd-Jones is a little loose to the story, making up things that aren't in the passage. For example - Jesus being bathed in a golden light at his baptism, there being three wise men, Jesus winking at the boy who brought the 5 loaves and saying "watch this" and others. It's little things like she says Jacob had to wait 7 years to marry Rachel instead of just a week, like God creating by saying "Hello Light", like using "Papa" for Father - a word which doesn't carry the same connotations as Abba. Like the feeding of the '5000 people', rather than 5000 men, plus a lot more women and children. Like Jesus playing games with children. Like Zacchaeus being so small that he had to take a flying leap to get up into his chair for breakfast.
In one sense they're small things, and it is in the style of other children's books. And therein lies the problem - the bible isn't another children's book. It's true in every detail - so when it comes to a Children's version of the Bible, it should be true in every detail. We owe that to our kids.
I'd prefer not to have to edit the story as I tell it. Growing up, we had the Child's Story Bible by Catherine Vos read to us. Time and time again when we thought she was stretching the text, when we looked up our bibles we found she was exactly right. Since we read it so many times, a vast quantity of accurate bible knowledge was imbibed. That's what I look for in a children's bible.
Having said all that - the links to Jesus often make you stop and praise God for Jesus. We've read it following on from the aforementioned Big Picture Story Bible - which I would heartily recommend. And that's probably the best way - read it along with other children's bibles and correct it as you go.
Looking forward to the revised edition of this potentially tremendous asset.
Brilliant Bible, 11 Dec 2007
We have read a number of Bibles to our two young boys and enjoyed most of them. However, having recently bought the Jesus Storybook Bible we have been absolutely delighted with the way it reads, its illustrations and the way it points to Jesus. Our boys are enjoying it too. A must for parents who want their children to understand and enjoy the Bible from a young age.
Faith confirmed - What a wonderful book, 04 Jul 2001
Faith confirmed is the ideal book for anyone preparing for confirmation. With its beautiful pictures and wonderful words written by two who are greatly experienced in preparing people for this great religious ceremony.
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Prayers to Know by Heart
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Customer Reviews
Jesus story book, 01 Sep 2008
i bought this book for my husband to read with our children ages 11 and 6 years and they absolutely love it. The stories are well written and fun to read and the pictures are good too. It brings the bible stories alive in a real way to all the family and gives us some amazing family time. The kids remember the truths from this and they really enjoy reading it. It really is not a kids book but one for all the family.
fills a gap, 09 Apr 2008
This bible is brilliant and fills a much needed gap in the market. It doesn't patronise children, and introduces some complicated issues with a very light touch. Beautifully written. Buy it!
very dodgy, 31 Dec 2007
I was very excited about this book at first, especially to see it recommended by Tim Keller, whose preaching I have found so helpful. However, there is much in this book that is seriously wrong.
To summerise, sin, obedience and judgement are minimised. Sin is defined as `believing the lie that God doesn't love you' which is not a biblical definition. It is not the case that men and women have questioned that God really loves them, and so they have decided to go it alone. It is not the case that God is simply trying to reassure us that He does really love us and we should all come back to Him. It is actually the case that men and women say, `Stuff God's love for us! Who cares? We hate God and don't want Him! We want to be God!' This is how revolting and gross sin really is, and that is what makes God's grace so utterly amazing, that He would want to redeem us, rescue us from just punishment which we deserve and He demands.
He are some detailed remarks, if you have the time!
p12 God is LOVE - 'God wrote, "I love you" - He wrote it in the sky ... to make our hearts sing' [contrast the Bibles' view of what we see written in the sky and the earth]
[this is true/helpful BUT it is also a PART only of the truth. Like with most unbalanced or heretical things, you MUST 'read the gaps']
p14 LAW is minimised and reduced to utilitarianism: "the rules show you how life works best" [contrast - and note the absence of - the Bible's view of God's authority and character + man's obligation towards him]
pp7,10,11,17 by contrast look very good
p30 TEMPTATION is identified and defined as "wondering: Does God love me?"; SIN is identified and defined as a 'terrible lie which whispers, "God doesn't love ME"'
Read this page carefully. They did not disobey - they did not transgress a command - they did not lust or long or display pride. There is not even an ACTIVE verb: simply a PASSIVE entering - NOT even specifically into them - but "into the world", this lie "came". Adam didn't do anything. Eve didn't do anything. They were not responsible. It just came ... and it was 'just' a lie about love [nothing about God's rights and dues from man]. Now if that isn't bad theology and doesn't hit us between the eyes, are we awake??
p33 Exceptionally, there is a contrast here: there IS mention of "broken the one rule". However, the author does not want our mind to SETTLE on this truth, but to quickly take us off onto the subjective again, NOTE: "they HADN'T JUST broken the one rule - they had broken GOD'S HEART". The emphasis on broken relationship is a helpful corrective to a non-relational/mechanistic style of theology, but this emphasis must never replace the emphasis God has PUT THERE in the passage.
You are reading here an aspect of an interpretation of a Bible truth - now of course children and adults will like this as this is the MOST PALETABLE aspect of the truth. The harder aspects emphasised in the Gen.3 text are all sidelined. This is therefore a serious issue.
p34 repeats the PASSIVE entry of sin: "sin had come ... IT would never leave". Now we look again for a definition of SIN on this page. What are we served up?:
"God's children would always be running away from Him" ... "Their hearts would break and their hearts would not work properly" "They are living in such pain" ... and what of the retribution due for this sad crime?!!?: protection!! God concludes: "There's only one way I can protect them" !! Of course kids love it.
You walk away and feel sad - your heart breaks - and God is INCAPABLE of allowing you to feel pain ["God couldn't let his children live in such pain ..."] so he did what any self-respecting God would do and was 'nice' to them, "PROTECT"ing them every step of the way. Now of course all this is lovely and in its place, if we know-what-she-means, it is rather true and rather lovely, BUT it is NOT the [balance/emphasis of the] message of the Bible.
SIN has been identified and confused with both its consequences & its punishment. In the Bible you have SIN and you have RETRIBUTION. In this you find both human and divine AGENCY and RESPONSIBILITY. In our author's eyes, man experiences sin - the cause and the consequences being the same: you are away from God and you and he are heart-sick. Having foolishly wandered away, the corollary is to expect you can wander back once you realise God DOES love you after all. What a lovely message! I expect folk will buy that in droves.
p33 God's response is that he gets a stomach-ache or something. "A terrible pain came into God's heart". "they had broken God's heart". Yes God does have 'nice feelings'. Everything about God is [in the proper sense of the world] 'nice', but it is not this-sort-of 'nice'. He is all goodness, all holiness, all-powerful. SO, e.g. His holiness is all-loving; his wisdom is all-powerful. But our author demurs from allowing that his love is all-holy. His actions are all-righteous. This we are not allowed to know. This is the heresy gap in this issue.
further e.g's at random:
p212f Note the deletion of all the rational and logical reasons for following Jesus highlighted in Mark's gospel. What are we served up?: "they couldn't explain it" ... "but something" ... "when they looked at Jesus" ... "their hearts were filled" ... What is this? This is mysticism. Indefinable niceness in Jesus which just makes you all gooey and you can't help ignoring your fish. Now, as ever, I bet there WAS a wonderful and perfect somewhat-indefinable 'wonderfulness' about just a 'look' from the saviour ... BUT this is not the message of MY bible. It is her message but it is not MINE.
p214 Jairus finds Jesus in the TEMPLE (cf. Mk5, Jn 8) - I didn't think he did ??
p220 "He was making the sad things come untrue". I think this is rather more vague than my bible.
p228 Title "The Singer" - unsure why this title is there, but am concerned that's what she thinks Jesus is doing, namely "singing a love song"
p235 ... here comes the song: "It was the song all of God's creation had sung to him from the very beginning. It was the song people's hearts were made to sing:
GOD MADE US - GOD LOVES US - HE IS VERY PLEASED WITH US [that's news to us evangelicals, surely!!]
It was WHY JESUS HAD COME INTO THE WORLD: TO SING THEM THAT WONDERFUL SONG; to sing it not only with his voice, but with his whole life - so that God's children could REMEMBER it and JOIN IN and sing it too"
This is far-out way-off-the-mark liberalism. This is not the gospel. This is utter LIES. It is so far off being true to the gospel that I cannot call it less. It is a LIE.
The consequences of her view of SIN come out here. You have just FORGOTTEN that GOD LOVES YOU. Result??: ALL you have to do is just REMEMBER again. You've forgotten the love-song of all mother-earth; don't fret: Jesus came to SING it again .... and now you can "join in and sing it, too"
If every page of a book was like this, Evangelicals would have the sense not to touch it, but you also have contrasting pages like page 301: "for this reason I came into the world", with the helpful comment, "It was God's plan".
I think this is [the predictably sad and repeated case of] selling a book to a wide audience: it's a book which looks BOTH liberal and EVANGELICAL. It is clever enough that both groups will buy it and like it.
p292 promises a "Forever Happiness that won't ever leave". I think she means the "peace" promised in John 14. The choice of words is I think unwise.
p294 Note the PASSIVE approach to sin again in the last para.: Jesus was to take "the blame for everything that HAD GONE wrong". Requirement, [dis-]obedience, responsibility, culpability, accountability - all are DEAD for this author. It's ALL about warm or broken hearts and 'songs'
p296 The identifying and confounding SIN with CONSEQUENCES (per Gen.3) appears again here: "WHEN people ran away from God, they LOST God - it WAS WHAT happened WHEN they ran away. Not being close to God WAS LIKE a punishment". [Note the utter absence in her theology of,"man did this SO God did THAT"]
Such is her hatred of the doctrine of punishment that she de-bunks it, saying that what is true and real and important [namely that SIN and its consequences are IDENTICAL (no 'agency' being involved)] is LIKE a punishment, but is not ACTUALLY ["God forbid"!!] a REAL punishment. This again is a major departure from truth and faithfulness to the gospel.
Compare page 169 [Jonah]: "Even though you 'run from' God (cf. p347), he CAN'T STOP loving You (=p331)". God has a one-track personality that can't stop loving ... well, YES, but also, NO. My God is BIGGER than that. Her view is reductionist: God is ONLY, irreducibly, inevitably LOVE, unsullied by other bible-truths.
There IS NO punishment ... and the nearest thing you can image to such an unthinkable thing is that you have walked away from perfect love. BEWARE BEWARE. It sounds SO SO appealing.
p317 "Was God really making everything sad come untrue (even death)??" - I don't think this is clear enough to be easily able to be reckoned to be properly 'true'.
[=p220 =p321]
p323 [The great commission]. Just compare what's here with Matt 28:18 and READ THE GAPS ! There is a refusal to use the word "obey" (generally) throughout the whole book (cf. disciples/teaching them to obey ...). [Compare p329 (+ p30 above already) - there is no such thing as disobedience, but rather "the poison and the terrible lie and the SICKNESS in their hearts" (which is solved by "You are my child and I love you" p329).
I fear this is a liberal book with evangelical glosses. I sense that perhaps the author and her editor have very different theologies and this book was a compromise OR it is aimed at SELLING WELL.
There are some ASPECTS (helpful) of truth in this book. But it will do much harm if children are raised on it.
Brilliant idea - let down by the drawings and some inaccuracies, 23 Dec 2007
As I pastor I've just finished preaching an overview of the bible - I'm passionate about getting people to see the big picture. So I was really excited to see this for children. The idea is superb, the tying every story to Jesus is magnificent. Our 4 year old daughter has started seeing the connections already. And that excites me. I love how it fits every story in with the plot-line of the bible.
However I have a couple of caveats.
Since children get so much from imagery I was really disappointed with the artwork. The quality is great, but the content very poor, and underscores misconceptions of the bible, actually making the bible look less believable. Noah's ark is shown balancing precariously on the pinnacle of the mountain, as well as being that silly shape that it is often drawn - nothing like the proportions given in the bible. Jericho is a five house town - not much of a conquest there. Goliath is make to look like a gruesome ogre of fairytale proportions. The people of Israel coming to the Red Sea look like a small Sunday school outing rather than 1.5 million people making the exodus. I could go on. For me, the pictures undermine the very thing the words are seeking to do - they push the stories into the realm of fairy tales.
(A far better set of illustrations are by Gail Schoonmaker in the The Big Picture Story Bible written by David Helm.)
The other caveat is that sometimes Lloyd-Jones is a little loose to the story, making up things that aren't in the passage. For example - Jesus being bathed in a golden light at his baptism, there being three wise men, Jesus winking at the boy who brought the 5 loaves and saying "watch this" and others. It's little things like she says Jacob had to wait 7 years to marry Rachel instead of just a week, like God creating by saying "Hello Light", like using "Papa" for Father - a word which doesn't carry the same connotations as Abba. Like the feeding of the '5000 people', rather than 5000 men, plus a lot more women and children. Like Jesus playing games with children. Like Zacchaeus being so small that he had to take a flying leap to get up into his chair for breakfast.
In one sense they're small things, and it is in the style of other children's books. And therein lies the problem - the bible isn't another children's book. It's true in every detail - so when it comes to a Children's version of the Bible, it should be true in every detail. We owe that to our kids.
I'd prefer not to have to edit the story as I tell it. Growing up, we had the Child's Story Bible by Catherine Vos read to us. Time and time again when we thought she was stretching the text, when we looked up our bibles we found she was exactly right. Since we read it so many times, a vast quantity of accurate bible knowledge was imbibed. That's what I look for in a children's bible.
Having said all that - the links to Jesus often make you stop and praise God for Jesus. We've read it following on from the aforementioned Big Picture Story Bible - which I would heartily recommend. And that's probably the best way - read it along with other children's bibles and correct it as you go.
Looking forward to the revised edition of this potentially tremendous asset.
Brilliant Bible, 11 Dec 2007
We have read a number of Bibles to our two young boys and enjoyed most of them. However, having recently bought the Jesus Storybook Bible we have been absolutely delighted with the way it reads, its illustrations and the way it points to Jesus. Our boys are enjoying it too. A must for parents who want their children to understand and enjoy the Bible from a young age.
Faith confirmed - What a wonderful book, 04 Jul 2001
Faith confirmed is the ideal book for anyone preparing for confirmation. With its beautiful pictures and wonderful words written by two who are greatly experienced in preparing people for this great religious ceremony.
delightful book for young children, 09 Jun 2002
lovely book for young children with simple but original prayers and captivating illustrations
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Customer Reviews
Jesus story book, 01 Sep 2008
i bought this book for my husband to read with our children ages 11 and 6 years and they absolutely love it. The stories are well written and fun to read and the pictures are good too. It brings the bible stories alive in a real way to all the family and gives us some amazing family time. The kids remember the truths from this and they really enjoy reading it. It really is not a kids book but one for all the family.
fills a gap, 09 Apr 2008
This bible is brilliant and fills a much needed gap in the market. It doesn't patronise children, and introduces some complicated issues with a very light touch. Beautifully written. Buy it!
very dodgy, 31 Dec 2007
I was very excited about this book at first, especially to see it recommended by Tim Keller, whose preaching I have found so helpful. However, there is much in this book that is seriously wrong.
To summerise, sin, obedience and judgement are minimised. Sin is defined as `believing the lie that God doesn't love you' which is not a biblical definition. It is not the case that men and women have questioned that God really loves them, and so they have decided to go it alone. It is not the case that God is simply trying to reassure us that He does really love us and we should all come back to Him. It is actually the case that men and women say, `Stuff God's love for us! Who cares? We hate God and don't want Him! We want to be God!' This is how revolting and gross sin really is, and that is what makes God's grace so utterly amazing, that He would want to redeem us, rescue us from just punishment which we deserve and He demands.
He are some detailed remarks, if you have the time!
p12 God is LOVE - 'God wrote, "I love you" - He wrote it in the sky ... to make our hearts sing' [contrast the Bibles' view of what we see written in the sky and the earth]
[this is true/helpful BUT it is also a PART only of the truth. Like with most unbalanced or heretical things, you MUST 'read the gaps']
p14 LAW is minimised and reduced to utilitarianism: "the rules show you how life works best" [contrast - and note the absence of - the Bible's view of God's authority and character + man's obligation towards him]
pp7,10,11,17 by contrast look very good
p30 TEMPTATION is identified and defined as "wondering: Does God love me?"; SIN is identified and defined as a 'terrible lie which whispers, "God doesn't love ME"'
Read this page carefully. They did not disobey - they did not transgress a command - they did not lust or long or display pride. There is not even an ACTIVE verb: simply a PASSIVE entering - NOT even specifically into them - but "into the world", this lie "came". Adam didn't do anything. Eve didn't do anything. They were not responsible. It just came ... and it was 'just' a lie about love [nothing about God's rights and dues from man]. Now if that isn't bad theology and doesn't hit us between the eyes, are we awake??
p33 Exceptionally, there is a contrast here: there IS mention of "broken the one rule". However, the author does not want our mind to SETTLE on this truth, but to quickly take us off onto the subjective again, NOTE: "they HADN'T JUST broken the one rule - they had broken GOD'S HEART". The emphasis on broken relationship is a helpful corrective to a non-relational/mechanistic style of theology, but this emphasis must never replace the emphasis God has PUT THERE in the passage.
You are reading here an aspect of an interpretation of a Bible truth - now of course children and adults will like this as this is the MOST PALETABLE aspect of the truth. The harder aspects emphasised in the Gen.3 text are all sidelined. This is therefore a serious issue.
p34 repeats the PASSIVE entry of sin: "sin had come ... IT would never leave". Now we look again for a definition of SIN on this page. What are we served up?:
"God's children would always be running away from Him" ... "Their hearts would break and their hearts would not work properly" "They are living in such pain" ... and what of the retribution due for this sad crime?!!?: protection!! God concludes: "There's only one way I can protect them" !! Of course kids love it.
You walk away and feel sad - your heart breaks - and God is INCAPABLE of allowing you to feel pain ["God couldn't let his children live in such pain ..."] so he did what any self-respecting God would do and was 'nice' to them, "PROTECT"ing them every step of the way. Now of course all this is lovely and in its place, if we know-what-she-means, it is rather true and rather lovely, BUT it is NOT the [balance/emphasis of the] message of the Bible.
SIN has been identified and confused with both its consequences & its punishment. In the Bible you have SIN and you have RETRIBUTION. In this you find both human and divine AGENCY and RESPONSIBILITY. In our author's eyes, man experiences sin - the cause and the consequences being the same: you are away from God and you and he are heart-sick. Having foolishly wandered away, the corollary is to expect you can wander back once you realise God DOES love you after all. What a lovely message! I expect folk will buy that in droves.
p33 God's response is that he gets a stomach-ache or something. "A terrible pain came into God's heart". "they had broken God's heart". Yes God does have 'nice feelings'. Everything about God is [in the proper sense of the world] 'nice', but it is not this-sort-of 'nice'. He is all goodness, all holiness, all-powerful. SO, e.g. His holiness is all-loving; his wisdom is all-powerful. But our author demurs from allowing that his love is all-holy. His actions are all-righteous. This we are not allowed to know. This is the heresy gap in this issue.
further e.g's at random:
p212f Note the deletion of all the rational and logical reasons for following Jesus highlighted in Mark's gospel. What are we served up?: "they couldn't explain it" ... "but something" ... "when they looked at Jesus" ... "their hearts were filled" ... What is this? This is mysticism. Indefinable niceness in Jesus which just makes you all gooey and you can't help ignoring your fish. Now, as ever, I bet there WAS a wonderful and perfect somewhat-indefinable 'wonderfulness' about just a 'look' from the saviour ... BUT this is not the message of MY bible. It is her message but it is not MINE.
p214 Jairus finds Jesus in the TEMPLE (cf. Mk5, Jn 8) - I didn't think he did ??
p220 "He was making the sad things come untrue". I think this is rather more vague than my bible.
p228 Title "The Singer" - unsure why this title is there, but am concerned that's what she thinks Jesus is doing, namely "singing a love song"
p235 ... here comes the song: "It was the song all of God's creation had sung to him from the very beginning. It was the song people's hearts were made to sing:
GOD MADE US - GOD LOVES US - HE IS VERY PLEASED WITH US [that's news to us evangelicals, surely!!]
It was WHY JESUS HAD COME INTO THE WORLD: TO SING THEM THAT WONDERFUL SONG; to sing it not only with his voice, but with his whole life - so that God's children could REMEMBER it and JOIN IN and sing it too"
This is far-out way-off-the-mark liberalism. This is not the gospel. This is utter LIES. It is so far off being true to the gospel that I cannot call it less. It is a LIE.
The consequences of her view of SIN come out here. You have just FORGOTTEN that GOD LOVES YOU. Result??: ALL you have to do is just REMEMBER again. You've forgotten the love-song of all mother-earth; don't fret: Jesus came to SING it again .... and now you can "join in and sing it, too"
If every page of a book was like this, Evangelicals would have the sense not to touch it, but you also have contrasting pages like page 301: "for this reason I came into the world", with the helpful comment, "It was God's plan".
I think this is [the predictably sad and repeated case of] selling a book to a wide audience: it's a book which looks BOTH liberal and EVANGELICAL. It is clever enough that both groups will buy it and like it.
p292 promises a "Forever Happiness that won't ever leave". I think she means the "peace" promised in John 14. The choice of words is I think unwise.
p294 Note the PASSIVE approach to sin again in the last para.: Jesus was to take "the blame for everything that HAD GONE wrong". Requirement, [dis-]obedience, responsibility, culpability, accountability - all are DEAD for this author. It's ALL about warm or broken hearts and 'songs'
p296 The identifying and confounding SIN with CONSEQUENCES (per Gen.3) appears again here: "WHEN people ran away from God, they LOST God - it WAS WHAT happened WHEN they ran away. Not being close to God WAS LIKE a punishment". [Note the utter absence in her theology of,"man did this SO God did THAT"]
Such is her hatred of the doctrine of punishment that she de-bunks it, saying that what is true and real and important [namely that SIN and its consequences are IDENTICAL (no 'agency' being involved)] is LIKE a punishment, but is not ACTUALLY ["God forbid"!!] a REAL punishment. This again is a major departure from truth and faithfulness to the gospel.
Compare page 169 [Jonah]: "Even though you 'run from' God (cf. p347), he CAN'T STOP loving You (=p331)". God has a one-track personality that can't stop loving ... well, YES, but also, NO. My God is BIGGER than that. Her view is reductionist: God is ONLY, irreducibly, inevitably LOVE, unsullied by other bible-truths.
There IS NO punishment ... and the nearest thing you can image to such an unthinkable thing is that you have walked away from perfect love. BEWARE BEWARE. It sounds SO SO appealing.
p317 "Was God really making everything sad come untrue (even death)??" - I don't think this is clear enough to be easily able to be reckoned to be properly 'true'.
[=p220 =p321]
p323 [The great commission]. Just compare what's here with Matt 28:18 and READ THE GAPS ! There is a refusal to use the word "obey" (generally) throughout the whole book (cf. disciples/teaching them to obey ...). [Compare p329 (+ p30 above already) - there is no such thing as disobedience, but rather "the poison and the terrible lie and the SICKNESS in their hearts" (which is solved by "You are my child and I love you" p329).
I fear this is a liberal book with evangelical glosses. I sense that perhaps the author and her editor have very different theologies and this book was a compromise OR it is aimed at SELLING WELL.
There are some ASPECTS (helpful) of truth in this book. But it will do much harm if children are raised on it.
Brilliant idea - let down by the drawings and some inaccuracies, 23 Dec 2007
As I pastor I've just finished preaching an overview of the bible - I'm passionate about getting people to see the big picture. So I was really excited to see this for children. The idea is superb, the tying every story to Jesus is magnificent. Our 4 year old daughter has started seeing the connections already. And that excites me. I love how it fits every story in with the plot-line of the bible.
However I have a couple of caveats.
Since children get so much from imagery I was really disappointed with the artwork. The quality is great, but the content very poor, and underscores misconceptions of the bible, actually making the bible look less believable. Noah's ark is shown balancing precariously on the pinnacle of the mountain, as well as being that silly shape that it is often drawn - nothing like the proportions given in the bible. Jericho is a five house town - not much of a conquest there. Goliath is make to look like a gruesome ogre of fairytale proportions. The people of Israel coming to the Red Sea look like a small Sunday school outing rather than 1.5 million people making the exodus. I could go on. For me, the pictures undermine the very thing the words are seeking to do - they push the stories into the realm of fairy tales.
(A far better set of illustrations are by Gail Schoonmaker in the The Big Picture Story Bible written by David Helm.)
The other caveat is that sometimes Lloyd-Jones is a little loose to the story, making up things that aren't in the passage. For example - Jesus being bathed in a golden light at his baptism, there being three wise men, Jesus winking at the boy who brought the 5 loaves and saying "watch this" and others. It's little things like she says Jacob had to wait 7 years to marry Rachel instead of just a week, like God creating by saying "Hello Light", like using "Papa" for Father - a word which doesn't carry the same connotations as Abba. Like the feeding of the '5000 people', rather than 5000 men, plus a lot more women and children. Like Jesus playing games with children. Like Zacchaeus being so small that he had to take a flying leap to get up into his chair for breakfast.
In one sense they're small things, and it is in the style of other children's books. And therein lies the problem - the bible isn't another children's book. It's true in every detail - so when it comes to a Children's version of the Bible, it should be true in every detail. We owe that to our kids.
I'd prefer not to have to edit the story as I tell it. Growing up, we had the Child's Story Bible by Catherine Vos read to us. Time and time again when we thought she was stretching the text, when we looked up our bibles we found she was exactly right. Since we read it so many times, a vast quantity of accurate bible knowledge was imbibed. That's what I look for in a children's bible.
Having said all that - the links to Jesus often make you stop and praise God for Jesus. We've read it following on from the aforementioned Big Picture Story Bible - which I would heartily recommend. And that's probably the best way - read it along with other children's bibles and correct it as you go.
Looking forward to the revised edition of this potentially tremendous asset.
Brilliant Bible, 11 Dec 2007
We have read a number of Bibles to our two young boys and enjoyed most of them. However, having recently bought the Jesus Storybook Bible we have been absolutely delighted with the way it reads, its illustrations and the way it points to Jesus. Our boys are enjoying it too. A must for parents who want their children to understand and enjoy the Bible from a young age.
Faith confirmed - What a wonderful book, 04 Jul 2001
Faith confirmed is the ideal book for anyone preparing for confirmation. With its beautiful pictures and wonderful words written by two who are greatly experienced in preparing people for this great religious ceremony.
delightful book for young children, 09 Jun 2002
lovely book for young children with simple but original prayers and captivating illustrations
This book is Wonderful!, 12 Jul 2006
We first heard about this book when we heard a story from it read aloud in an all-age worship service. Our four year old suddenly stopped wriggling and sat up and listened intently to the whole reading. We looked at each other and mouthed 'buy it'! Although it has a colour picture to go with each Bible story, it is really for kids who can listen to a story being read aloud. The stories are beautifully re-written, often letting me hear them in a new way, and the language accessible for kids. The day after we bought it, our four year old invited our neighbours' kids in to read it to him! We really like this book. And one story is never enough...
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My Very First Prayers
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Customer Reviews
Jesus story book, 01 Sep 2008
i bought this book for my husband to read with our children ages 11 and 6 years and they absolutely love it. The stories are well written and fun to read and the pictures are good too. It brings the bible stories alive in a real way to all the family and gives us some amazing family time. The kids remember the truths from this and they really enjoy reading it. It really is not a kids book but one for all the family.
fills a gap, 09 Apr 2008
This bible is brilliant and fills a much needed gap in the market. It doesn't patronise children, and introduces some complicated issues with a very light touch. Beautifully written. Buy it!
very dodgy, 31 Dec 2007
I was very excited about this book at first, especially to see it recommended by Tim Keller, whose preaching I have found so helpful. However, there is much in this book that is seriously wrong.
To summerise, sin, obedience and judgement are minimised. Sin is defined as `believing the lie that God doesn't love you' which is not a biblical definition. It is not the case that men and women have questioned that God really loves them, and so they have decided to go it alone. It is not the case that God is simply trying to reassure us that He does really love us and we should all come back to Him. It is actually the case that men and women say, `Stuff God's love for us! Who cares? We hate God and don't want Him! We want to be God!' This is how revolting and gross sin really is, and that is what makes God's grace so utterly amazing, that He would want to redeem us, rescue us from just punishment which we deserve and He demands.
He are some detailed remarks, if you have the time!
p12 God is LOVE - 'God wrote, "I love you" - He wrote it in the sky ... to make our hearts sing' [contrast the Bibles' view of what we see written in the sky and the earth]
[this is true/helpful BUT it is also a PART only of the truth. Like with most unbalanced or heretical things, you MUST 'read the gaps']
p14 LAW is minimised and reduced to utilitarianism: "the rules show you how life works best" [contrast - and note the absence of - the Bible's view of God's authority and character + man's obligation towards him]
pp7,10,11,17 by contrast look very good
p30 TEMPTATION is identified and defined as "wondering: Does God love me?"; SIN is identified and defined as a 'terrible lie which whispers, "God doesn't love ME"'
Read this page carefully. They did not disobey - they did not transgress a command - they did not lust or long or display pride. There is not even an ACTIVE verb: simply a PASSIVE entering - NOT even specifically into them - but "into the world", this lie "came". Adam didn't do anything. Eve didn't do anything. They were not responsible. It just came ... and it was 'just' a lie about love [nothing about God's rights and dues from man]. Now if that isn't bad theology and doesn't hit us between the eyes, are we awake??
p33 Exceptionally, there is a contrast here: there IS mention of "broken the one rule". However, the author does not want our mind to SETTLE on this truth, but to quickly take us off onto the subjective again, NOTE: "they HADN'T JUST broken the one rule - they had broken GOD'S HEART". The emphasis on broken relationship is a helpful corrective to a non-relational/mechanistic style of theology, but this emphasis must never replace the emphasis God has PUT THERE in the passage.
You are reading here an aspect of an interpretation of a Bible truth - now of course children and adults will like this as this is the MOST PALETABLE aspect of the truth. The harder aspects emphasised in the Gen.3 text are all sidelined. This is therefore a serious issue.
p34 repeats the PASSIVE entry of sin: "sin had come ... IT would never leave". Now we look again for a definition of SIN on this page. What are we served up?:
"God's children would always be running away from Him" ... "Their hearts would break and their hearts would not work properly" "They are living in such pain" ... and what of the retribution due for this sad crime?!!?: protection!! God concludes: "There's only one way I can protect them" !! Of course kids love it.
You walk away and feel sad - your heart breaks - and God is INCAPABLE of allowing you to feel pain ["God couldn't let his children live in such pain ..."] so he did what any self-respecting God would do and was 'nice' to them, "PROTECT"ing them every step of the way. Now of course all this is lovely and in its place, if we know-what-she-means, it is rather true and rather lovely, BUT it is NOT the [balance/emphasis of the] message of the Bible.
SIN has been identified and confused with both its consequences & its punishment. In the Bible you have SIN and you have RETRIBUTION. In this you find both human and divine AGENCY and RESPONSIBILITY. In our author's eyes, man experiences sin - the cause and the consequences being the same: you are away from God and you and he are heart-sick. Having foolishly wandered away, the corollary is to expect you can wander back once you realise God DOES love you after all. What a lovely message! I expect folk will buy that in droves.
p33 God's response is that he gets a stomach-ache or something. "A terrible pain came into God's heart". "they had broken God's heart". Yes God does have 'nice feelings'. Everything about God is [in the proper sense of the world] 'nice', but it is not this-sort-of 'nice'. He is all goodness, all holiness, all-powerful. SO, e.g. His holiness is all-loving; his wisdom is all-powerful. But our author demurs from allowing that his love is all-holy. His actions are all-righteous. This we are not allowed to know. This is the heresy gap in this issue.
further e.g's at random:
p212f Note the deletion of all the rational and logical reasons for following Jesus highlighted in Mark's gospel. What are we served up?: "they couldn't explain it" ... "but something" ... "when they looked at Jesus" ... "their hearts were filled" ... What is this? This is mysticism. Indefinable niceness in Jesus which just makes you all gooey and you can't help ignoring your fish. Now, as ever, I bet there WAS a wonderful and perfect somewhat-indefinable 'wonderfulness' about just a 'look' from the saviour ... BUT this is not the message of MY bible. It is her message but it is not MINE.
p214 Jairus finds Jesus in the TEMPLE (cf. Mk5, Jn 8) - I didn't think he did ??
p220 "He was making the sad things come untrue". I think this is rather more vague than my bible.
p228 Title "The Singer" - unsure why this title is there, but am concerned that's what she thinks Jesus is doing, namely "singing a love song"
p235 ... here comes the song: "It was the song all of God's creation had sung to him from the very beginning. It was the song people's hearts were made to sing:
GOD MADE US - GOD LOVES US - HE IS VERY PLEASED WITH US [that's news to us evangelicals, surely!!]
It was WHY JESUS HAD COME INTO THE WORLD: TO SING THEM THAT WONDERFUL SONG; to sing it not only with his voice, but with his whole life - so that God's children could REMEMBER it and JOIN IN and sing it too"
This is far-out way-off-the-mark liberalism. This is not the gospel. This is utter LIES. It is so far off being true to the gospel that I cannot call it less. It is a LIE.
The consequences of her view of SIN come out here. You have just FORGOTTEN that GOD LOVES YOU. Result??: ALL you have to do is just REMEMBER again. You've forgotten the love-song of all mother-earth; don't fret: Jesus came to SING it again .... and now you can "join in and sing it, too"
If every page of a book was like this, Evangelicals would have the sense not to touch it, but you also have contrasting pages like page 301: "for this reason I came into the world", with the helpful comment, "It was God's plan".
I think this is [the predictably sad and repeated case of] selling a book to a wide audience: it's a book which looks BOTH liberal and EVANGELICAL. It is clever enough that both groups will buy it and like it.
p292 promises a "Forever Happiness that won't ever leave". I think she means the "peace" promised in John 14. The choice of words is I think unwise.
p294 Note the PASSIVE approach to sin again in the last para.: Jesus was to take "the blame for everything that HAD GONE wrong". Requirement, [dis-]obedience, responsibility, culpability, accountability - all are DEAD for this author. It's ALL about warm or broken hearts and 'songs'
p296 The identifying and confounding SIN with CONSEQUENCES (per Gen.3) appears again here: "WHEN people ran away from God, they LOST God - it WAS WHAT happened WHEN they ran away. Not being close to God WAS LIKE a punishment". [Note the utter absence in her theology of,"man did this SO God did THAT"]
Such is her hatred of the doctrine of punishment that she de-bunks it, saying that what is true and real and important [namely that SIN and its consequences are IDENTICAL (no 'agency' being involved)] is LIKE a punishment, but is not ACTUALLY ["God forbid"!!] a REAL punishment. This again is a major departure from truth and faithfulness to the gospel.
Compare page 169 [Jonah]: "Even though you 'run from' God (cf. p347), he CAN'T STOP loving You (=p331)". God has a one-track personality that can't stop loving ... well, YES, but also, NO. My God is BIGGER than that. Her view is reductionist: God is ONLY, irreducibly, inevitably LOVE, unsullied by other bible-truths.
There IS NO punishment ... and the nearest thing you can image to such an unthinkable thing is that you have walked away from perfect love. BEWARE BEWARE. It sounds SO SO appealing.
p317 "Was God really making everything sad come untrue (even death)??" - I don't think this is clear enough to be easily able to be reckoned to be properly 'true'.
[=p220 =p321]
p323 [The great commission]. Just compare what's here with Matt 28:18 and READ THE GAPS ! There is a refusal to use the word "obey" (generally) throughout the whole book (cf. disciples/teaching them to obey ...). [Compare p329 (+ p30 above already) - there is no such thing as disobedience, but rather "the poison and the terrible lie and the SICKNESS in their hearts" (which is solved by "You are my child and I love you" p329).
I fear this is a liberal book with evangelical glosses. I sense that perhaps the author and her editor have very different theologies and this book was a compromise OR it is aimed at SELLING WELL.
There are some ASPECTS (helpful) of truth in this book. But it will do much harm if children are raised on it.
Brilliant idea - let down by the drawings and some inaccuracies, 23 Dec 2007
As I pastor I've just finished preaching an overview of the bible - I'm passionate about getting people to see the big picture. So I was really excited to see this for children. The idea is superb, the tying every story to Jesus is magnificent. Our 4 year old daughter has started seeing the connections already. And that excites me. I love how it fits every story in with the plot-line of the bible.
However I have a couple of caveats.
Since children get so much from imagery I was really disappointed with the artwork. The quality is great, but the content very poor, and underscores misconceptions of the bible, actually making the bible look less believable. Noah's ark is shown balancing precariously on the pinnacle of the mountain, as well as being that silly shape that it is often drawn - nothing like the proportions given in the bible. Jericho is a five house town - not much of a conquest there. Goliath is make to look like a gruesome ogre of fairytale proportions. The people of Israel coming to the Red Sea look like a small Sunday school outing rather than 1.5 million people making the exodus. I could go on. For me, the pictures undermine the very thing the words are seeking to do - they push the stories into the realm of fairy tales.
(A far better set of illustrations are by Gail Schoonmaker in the The Big Picture Story Bible written by David Helm.)
The other caveat is that sometimes Lloyd-Jones is a little loose to the story, making up things that aren't in the passage. For example - Jesus being bathed in a golden light at his baptism, there being three wise men, Jesus winking at the boy who brought the 5 loaves and saying "watch this" and others. It's little things like she says Jacob had to wait 7 years to marry Rachel instead of just a week, like God creating by saying "Hello Light", like using "Papa" for Father - a word which doesn't carry the same connotations as Abba. Like the feeding of the '5000 people', rather than 5000 men, plus a lot more women and children. Like Jesus playing games with children. Like Zacchaeus being so small that he had to take a flying leap to get up into his chair for breakfast.
In one sense they're small things, and it is in the style of other children's books. And therein lies the problem - the bible isn't another children's book. It's true in every detail - so when it comes to a Children's version of the Bible, it should be true in every detail. We owe that to our kids.
I'd prefer not to have to edit the story as I tell it. Growing up, we had the Child's Story Bible by Catherine Vos read to us. Time and time again when we thought she was stretching the text, when we looked up our bibles we found she was exactly right. Since we read it so many times, a vast quantity of accurate bible knowledge was imbibed. That's what I look for in a children's bible.
Having said all that - the links to Jesus often make you stop and praise God for Jesus. We've read it following on from the aforementioned Big Picture Story Bible - which I would heartily recommend. And that's probably the best way - read it along with other children's bibles and correct it as you go.
Looking forward to the revised edition of this potentially tremendous asset.
Brilliant Bible, 11 Dec 2007
We have read a number of Bibles to our two young boys and enjoyed most of them. However, having recently bought the Jesus Storybook Bible we have been absolutely delighted with the way it reads, its illustrations and the way it points to Jesus. Our boys are enjoying it too. A must for parents who want their children to understand and enjoy the Bible from a young age.
Faith confirmed - What a wonderful book, 04 Jul 2001
Faith confirmed is the ideal book for anyone preparing for confirmation. With its beautiful pictures and wonderful words written by two who are greatly experienced in preparing people for this great religious ceremony.
delightful book for young children, 09 Jun 2002
lovely book for young children with simple but original prayers and captivating illustrations
This book is Wonderful!, 12 Jul 2006
We first heard about this book when we heard a story from it read aloud in an all-age worship service. Our four year old suddenly stopped wriggling and sat up and listened intently to the whole reading. We looked at each other and mouthed 'buy it'! Although it has a colour picture to go with each Bible story, it is really for kids who can listen to a story being read aloud. The stories are beautifully re-written, often letting me hear them in a new way, and the language accessible for kids. The day after we bought it, our four year old invited our neighbours' kids in to read it to him! We really like this book. And one story is never enough...
My Very First Prayers Book, 30 Jun 2007
A fantastic, good price and good quality book for the younger reader.
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Customer Reviews
Jesus story book, 01 Sep 2008
i bought this book for my husband to read with our children ages 11 and 6 years and they absolutely love it. The stories are well written and fun to read and the pictures are good too. It brings the bible stories alive in a real way to all the family and gives us some amazing family time. The kids remember the truths from this and they really enjoy reading it. It really is not a kids book but one for all the family. fills a gap, 09 Apr 2008
This bible is brilliant and fills a much needed gap in the market. It doesn't patronise children, and introduces some complicated issues with a very light touch. Beautifully written. Buy it! very dodgy, 31 Dec 2007
I was very excited about this book at first, especially to see it recommended by Tim Keller, whose preaching I have found so helpful. However, there is much in this book that is seriously wrong.
To summerise, sin, obedience and judgement are minimised. Sin is defined as `believing the lie that God doesn't love you' which is not a biblical definition. It is not the case that men and women have questioned that God really loves them, and so they have decided to go it alone. It is not the case that God is simply trying to reassure us that He does really love us and we should all come back to Him. It is actually the case that men and women say, `Stuff God's love for us! Who cares? We hate God and don't want Him! We want to be God!' This is how revolting and gross sin really is, and that is what makes God's grace so utterly amazing, that He would want to redeem us, rescue us from just punishment which we deserve and He demands.
He are some detailed remarks, if you have the time!
p12 God is LOVE - 'God wrote, "I love you" - He wrote it in the sky ... to make our hearts sing' [contrast the Bibles' view of what we see written in the sky and the earth]
[this is true/helpful BUT it is also a PART only of the truth. Like with most unbalanced or heretical things, you MUST 'read the gaps']
p14 LAW is minimised and reduced to utilitarianism: "the rules show you how life works best" [contrast - and note the absence of - the Bible's view of God's authority and character + man's obligation towards him]
pp7,10,11,17 by contrast look very good
p30 TEMPTATION is identified and defined as "wondering: Does God love me?"; SIN is identified and defined as a 'terrible lie which whispers, "God doesn't love ME"'
Read this page carefully. They did not disobey - they did not transgress a command - they did not lust or long or display pride. There is not even an ACTIVE verb: simply a PASSIVE entering - NOT even specifically into them - but "into the world", this lie "came". Adam didn't do anything. Eve didn't do anything. They were not responsible. It just came ... and it was 'just' a lie about love [nothing about God's rights and dues from man]. Now if that isn't bad theology and doesn't hit us between the eyes, are we awake??
p33 Exceptionally, there is a contrast here: there IS mention of "broken the one rule". However, the author does not want our mind to SETTLE on this truth, but to quickly take us off onto the subjective again, NOTE: "they HADN'T JUST broken the one rule - they had broken GOD'S HEART". The emphasis on broken relationship is a helpful corrective to a non-relational/mechanistic style of theology, but this emphasis must never replace the emphasis God has PUT THERE in the passage.
You are reading here an aspect of an interpretation of a Bible truth - now of course children and adults will like this as this is the MOST PALETABLE aspect of the truth. The harder aspects emphasised in the Gen.3 text are all sidelined. This is therefore a serious issue.
p34 repeats the PASSIVE entry of sin: "sin had come ... IT would never leave". Now we look again for a definition of SIN on this page. What are we served up?:
"God's children would always be running away from Him" ... "Their hearts would break and their hearts would not work properly" "They are living in such pain" ... and what of the retribution due for this sad crime?!!?: protection!! God concludes: "There's only one way I can protect them" !! Of course kids love it.
You walk away and feel sad - your heart breaks - and God is INCAPABLE of allowing you to feel pain ["God couldn't let his children live in such pain ..."] so he did what any self-respecting God would do and was 'nice' to them, "PROTECT"ing them every step of the way. Now of course all this is lovely and in its place, if we know-what-she-means, it is rather true and rather lovely, BUT it is NOT the [balance/emphasis of the] message of the Bible.
SIN has been identified and confused with both its consequences & its punishment. In the Bible you have SIN and you have RETRIBUTION. In this you find both human and divine AGENCY and RESPONSIBILITY. In our author's eyes, man experiences sin - the cause and the consequences being the same: you are away from God and you and he are heart-sick. Having foolishly wandered away, the corollary is to expect you can wander back once you realise God DOES love you after all. What a lovely message! I expect folk will buy that in droves.
p33 God's response is that he gets a stomach-ache or something. "A terrible pain came into God's heart". "they had broken God's heart". Yes God does have 'nice feelings'. Everything about God is [in the proper sense of the world] 'nice', but it is not this-sort-of 'nice'. He is all goodness, all holiness, all-powerful. SO, e.g. His holiness is all-loving; his wisdom is all-powerful. But our author demurs from allowing that his love is all-holy. His actions are all-righteous. This we are not allowed to know. This is the heresy gap in this issue.
further e.g's at random:
p212f Note the deletion of all the rational and logical reasons for following Jesus highlighted in Mark's gospel. What are we served up?: "they couldn't explain it" ... "but something" ... "when they looked at Jesus" ... "their hearts were filled" ... What is this? This is mysticism. Indefinable niceness in Jesus which just makes you all gooey and you can't help ignoring your fish. Now, as ever, I bet there WAS a wonderful and perfect somewhat-indefinable 'wonderfulness' about just a 'look' from the saviour ... BUT this is not the message of MY bible. It is her message but it is not MINE.
p214 Jairus finds Jesus in the TEMPLE (cf. Mk5, Jn 8) - I didn't think he did ??
p220 "He was making the sad things come untrue". I think this is rather more vague than my bible.
p228 Title "The Singer" - unsure why this title is there, but am concerned that's what she thinks Jesus is doing, namely "singing a love song"
p235 ... here comes the song: "It was the song all of God's creation had sung to him from the very beginning. It was the song people's hearts were made to sing:
GOD MADE US - GOD LOVES US - HE IS VERY PLEASED WITH US [that's news to us evangelicals, surely!!]
It was WHY JESUS HAD COME INTO THE WORLD: TO SING THEM THAT WONDERFUL SONG; to sing it not only with his voice, but with his whole life - so that God's children could REMEMBER it and JOIN IN and sing it too"
This is far-out way-off-the-mark liberalism. This is not the gospel. This is utter LIES. It is so far off being true to the gospel that I cannot call it less. It is a LIE.
The consequences of her view of SIN come out here. You have just FORGOTTEN that GOD LOVES YOU. Result??: ALL you have to do is just REMEMBER again. You've forgotten the love-song of all mother-earth; don't fret: Jesus came to SING it again .... and now you can "join in and sing it, too"
If every page of a book was like this, Evangelicals would have the sense not to touch it, but you also have contrasting pages like page 301: "for this reason I came into the world", with the helpful comment, "It was God's plan".
I think this is [the predictably sad and repeated case of] selling a book to a wide audience: it's a book which looks BOTH liberal and EVANGELICAL. It is clever enough that both groups will buy it and like it.
p292 promises a "Forever Happiness that won't ever leave". I think she means the "peace" promised in John 14. The choice of words is I think unwise.
p294 Note the PASSIVE approach to sin again in the last para.: Jesus was to take "the blame for everything that HAD GONE wrong". Requirement, [dis-]obedience, responsibility, culpability, accountability - all are DEAD for this author. It's ALL about warm or broken hearts and 'songs'
p296 The identifying and confounding SIN with CONSEQUENCES (per Gen.3) appears again here: "WHEN people ran away from God, they LOST God - it WAS WHAT happened WHEN they ran away. Not being close to God WAS LIKE a punishment". [Note the utter absence in her theology of,"man did this SO God did THAT"]
Such is her hatred of the doctrine of punishment that she de-bunks it, saying that what is true and real and important [namely that SIN and its consequences are IDENTICAL (no 'agency' being involved)] is LIKE a punishment, but is not ACTUALLY ["God forbid"!!] a REAL punishment. This again is a major departure from truth and faithfulness to the gospel.
Compare page 169 [Jonah]: "Even though you 'run from' God (cf. p347), he CAN'T STOP loving You (=p331)". God has a one-track personality that can't stop loving ... well, YES, but also, NO. My God is BIGGER than that. Her view is reductionist: God is ONLY, irreducibly, inevitably LOVE, unsullied by other bible-truths.
There IS NO punishment ... and the nearest thing you can image to such an unthinkable thing is that you have walked away from perfect love. BEWARE BEWARE. It sounds SO SO appealing.
p317 "Was God really making everything sad come untrue (even death)??" - I don't think this is clear enough to be easily able to be reckoned to be properly 'true'.
[=p220 =p321]
p323 [The great commission]. Just compare what's here with Matt 28:18 and READ THE GAPS ! There is a refusal to use the word "obey" (generally) throughout the whole book (cf. disciples/teaching them to obey ...). [Compare p329 (+ p30 above already) - there is no such thing as disobedience, but rather "the poison and the terrible lie and the SICKNESS in their hearts" (which is solved by "You are my child and I love you" p329).
I fear this is a liberal book with evangelical glosses. I sense that perhaps the author and her editor have very different theologies and this book was a compromise OR it is aimed at SELLING WELL.
There are some ASPECTS (helpful) of truth in this book. But it will do much harm if children are raised on it.
Brilliant idea - let down by the drawings and some inaccuracies, 23 Dec 2007
As I pastor I've just finished preaching an overview of the bible - I'm passionate about getting people to see the big picture. So I was really excited to see this for children. The idea is superb, the tying every story to Jesus is magnificent. Our 4 year old daughter has started seeing the connections already. And that excites me. I love how it fits every story in with the plot-line of the bible.
However I have a couple of caveats.
Since children get so much from imagery I was really disappointed with the artwork. The quality is great, but the content very poor, and underscores misconceptions of the bible, actually making the bible look less believable. Noah's ark is shown balancing precariously on the pinnacle of the mountain, as well as being that silly shape that it is often drawn - nothing like the proportions given in the bible. Jericho is a five house town - not much of a conquest there. Goliath is make to look like a gruesome ogre of fairytale proportions. The people of Israel coming to the Red Sea look like a small Sunday school outing rather than 1.5 million people making the exodus. I could go on. For me, the pictures undermine the very thing the words are seeking to do - they push the stories into the realm of fairy tales.
(A far better set of illustrations are by Gail Schoonmaker in the The Big Picture Story Bible written by David Helm.)
The other caveat is that sometimes Lloyd-Jones is a little loose to the story, making up things that aren't in the passage. For example - Jesus being bathed in a golden light at his baptism, there being three wise men, Jesus winking at the boy who brought the 5 loaves and saying "watch this" and others. It's little things like she says Jacob had to wait 7 years to marry Rachel instead of just a week, like God creating by saying "Hello Light", like using "Papa" for Father - a word which doesn't carry the same connotations as Abba. Like the feeding of the '5000 people', rather than 5000 men, plus a lot more women and children. Like Jesus playing games with children. Like Zacchaeus being so small that he had to take a flying leap to get up into his chair for breakfast.
In one sense they're small things, and it is in the style of other children's books. And therein lies the problem - the bible isn't another children's book. It's true in every detail - so when it comes to a Children's version of the Bible, it should be true in every detail. We owe that to our kids.
I'd prefer not to have to edit the story as I tell it. Growing up, we had the Child's Story Bible by Catherine Vos read to us. Time and time again when we thought she was stretching the text, when we looked up our bibles we found she was exactly right. Since we read it so many times, a vast quantity of accurate bible knowledge was imbibed. That's what I look for in a children's bible.
Having said all that - the links to Jesus often make you stop and praise God for Jesus. We've read it following on from the aforementioned Big Picture Story Bible - which I would heartily recommend. And that's probably the best way - read it along with other children's bibles and correct it as you go.
Looking forward to the revised edition of this potentially tremendous asset. Brilliant Bible, 11 Dec 2007
We have read a number of Bibles to our two young boys and enjoyed most of them. However, having recently bought the Jesus Storybook Bible we have been absolutely delighted with the way it reads, its illustrations and the way it points to Jesus. Our boys are enjoying it too. A must for parents who want their children to understand and enjoy the Bible from a young age. Faith confirmed - What a wonderful book, 04 Jul 2001
Faith confirmed is the ideal book for anyone preparing for confirmation. With its beautiful pictures and wonderful words written by two who are greatly experienced in preparing people for this great religious ceremony. delightful book for young children, 09 Jun 2002
lovely book for young children with simple but original prayers and captivating illustrations This book is Wonderful!, 12 Jul 2006
We first heard about this book when we heard a story from it read aloud in an all-age worship service. Our four year old suddenly stopped wriggling and sat up and listened intently to the whole reading. We looked at each other and mouthed 'buy it'! Although it has a colour picture to go with each Bible story, it is really for kids who can listen to a story being read aloud. The stories are beautifully re-written, often letting me hear them in a new way, and the language accessible for kids. The day after we bought it, our four year old invited our neighbours' kids in to read it to him! We really like this book. And one story is never enough... My Very First Prayers Book, 30 Jun 2007
A fantastic, good price and good quality book for the younger reader. The truth about Jesus, 28 Dec 2007
Thank you for this unearthing of truth. The words and meanings are timeless, the teachings transcending.The many layers of meaning hidden within the text have made this little book a constant source of reference. A eye opening look at "Christianity" in another view., 12 Jun 2006
A great level of understanding has gone into this work.
A beautiful poetry it contains, and it differs greatly from
other "Christian" works. I felt compelled not to put it down...
It resonates subtle parts of Ma'at philosophy and is a positive
ray of light.
My only dig, is the cover.Which does not represent Jesus
historically correct. Refer to the book of revelations and
ezekiel. "hair like wool, skin the color of brass"
Other wise this book is refreshing.... Comments, 14 May 2006
Lets just analyse the last speakers claim which was put forward so rudely. Gnosticism is "a belief in salvation through knowledge" as opposed to "faith in JC" and is therefore "a tool of Satan". Has anyone bothered to explain to this person that knowledge is superior to faith as it relies on reason. If reason isn't superior why does he complain about the obvious inconsistencies in the apocryphal texts? Inconsistencies based on reason no doubt, and yet he claims that reason isn't important. Also it might be worth mentioning that there are countless inconsistencies based on reason apparent in the OT and NT accounts. Texts chosen on the basis of a Pauline Theology rather than any revealed or divine religion direct from God. All in all this is an excellent well written and rational account of the Gnostic Gospels. Worth buying. Four amazing early Christian Gnostic texts from Nag Hamadi, 17 Apr 2003
Ancient Gnostic texts have revealed a long-forgotten type of relationship with between humanity and the divine, and a surprisingly unique perception of the divinity in these circles. This book presents the latest translations of four texts from the Nag Hammadi library of Gnostic texts. The four texts chosen are classic Gnostic scriptures of particular importance to early Christianity. They are, "The Secret Book of James" (written by Jesus' brother), "The Gospel of Thomas" (the most prominent classic of Gnostic Christian spirituality, by Jesus' twin, Judas Thomas), "The Book of Thomas", and "The Secret Book of John" (by Jesus' disciple, John the fisherman). Amazingly, each of these four authentic texts are specifically identified by the mysterious ancient authors, in the first verses, as containing secret information from Jesus Christ himself! These texts in particular make an essential contribution to our understanding of gnosticism and its role in early stages of the development of Christianity, seeming to shed welcome new light on some previously uncertain aspects of Christianity. We should be extremely grateful for the opportunity to read these fascinating documents, which were until recently all but lost forever. The Gnostic movement was systematically oppressed, and its legacy systematically destroyed, long ago by its powerful opponents. The Gnostics were triumphant in this epic story, because, in their wisdom, they deliberately sealed away their sacred knowledge to be re-discovered at a time in the distant future such as this when they would be respected and appreciated. The Nag Hammadi library comprises 52 documents in 13 books, most of which were entirely unknown until the Nag Hammadi artefacts were discovered. In this book an informative introduction, including the remarkable story behind the texts, prepares a clear passage for the reader's journey into this repository of ancient wisdom. The notes at the end of the book provide a concise commentary, with useful explanation and reference to other scriptures including the Bible, to complete the reader's learning experience. The relatively thin size of this volume makes it highly accessible - most people could probably read the whole book in a single weekend! If you have the slightest interest in history or religion - especially Gnosticism or Christianity, then you will certainly enjoy this book. The texts in this book really are an amazing and important part of human history, and everyone should at least have a look at them.
Four amazing early Christian Gnostic texts from Nag Hamadi, 16 Dec 2001
Ancient Gnostic texts have revealed a long-forgotten form of relationship with between humanity and the divine, and a surprisingly unique perception of the divinity in these circles. This book presents the latest translations of four texts from the Nag Hammadi library of Gnostic texts. The four texts chosen are classic Gnostic scriptures of particular importance to early Christianity. They are, "The Secret Book of James" (written by Jesus' brother), "The Gospel of Thomas" (the most prominent classic of Gnostic Christian spirituality, by Jesus' twin, Judas Thomas), "The Book of Thomas", and "The Secret Book of John" (by Jesus' disciple, John the fisherman). Amazingly, each of these four authentic texts are specifically identified by the mysterious ancient authors, in the first verses, as containing secret information from Jesus Christ himself! These texts in particular make an essential contribution to our understanding of gnosticism and its role in early stages of the development of Christianity, seeming to shed welcome new light on some previously uncertain aspects of Christianity. We should be extremely grateful for the opportunity to read these fascinating documents, which were until recently all but lost forever. The Gnostic movement was systematically oppressed, and its legacy systematically destroyed, long ago by its powerful opponents. The Gnostics were triumphant in this epic story, because, in their wisdom, they deliberately sealed away their sacred knowledge to be re-discovered at a time in the distant future such as this when they would be respected and appreciated. The Nag Hammadi library comprises 52 documents in 13 books, most of which were entirely unknown until the Nag Hammadi artefacts were discovered. In this book an informative introduction, including the remarkable story behind the texts, prepares a clear passage for the reader's journey into this repository of ancient wisdom. The notes at the end of the book provide a concise commentary, with useful explanation and reference to other scriptures including the Bible, to complete the reader's learn | | |