This short but readable book aims to do exactly what it says ‘on the can’: help believers to be confident in God’s Word, the Bible. A chief benefit of this, the two writers rightly say, will be to help us share its message with those around us.
The book is divided into two distinct parts. The first addresses why some people might be turned off the Bible. The following ‘walls’ are to be overcome: problems of illiteracy and implausibility; problems of culture and relevance; and, finally, problems of basic comprehension.
Under the ‘problem of culture’, the writers make the following likeable statement: ‘The Bible is what it says it is, not simply a product of culture but a word from another world. Although we are earth-bound and culture-bound, the Bible isn’t. We don’t sit in judgment over it; it sits in judgment over us’ (p.45). May we ever read and share the Scriptures with that perspective!
The second part of the book addresses the issue of the Bible’s authority. We are urged in different ways to make the Lord Jesus the touchstone of how we understand all of the Scriptures. He, of course, understood them to be the very Word of God.
My one disappointment was that no space was given to encourage us to have confidence in the Word of God ‘from the very first verse’, since Genesis 1-3 are both the most attacked chapters by the world and the most misinterpreted by the church. We need to be encouraged to have confidence in what these chapters teach, and to be shown why they are so important to the rest of the Bible and what the Lord Jesus himself said about them.
