In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.

//In the beginning. The Greek word translated “beginning” can be either a verb or a noun; either “beginning” or “began.” It’s a toss-up. Either our Bible starts with “In the Beginning, God created …” or it starts with “When God began to create …” In the first, we have creation ex nihilo, out of nothing. But in the second, when God begins to create, the formless void of the earth is already there. Creation is the act of bringing stability to chaos.

This second interpretation actually fits better with other stories of creation in the Bible. For example, the book of Job, chapter 38, describes creation as a struggle between God and the primordial forces of chaos. God overcomes and controls a monstrous personification of the formless, watery deep that existed before the world began.

Psalm 74 also envisions creation as establishing cosmic order out of chaos:

It was you who set all the boundaries of the earth; you made both summer and winter. –Psalm 74:13-17

In Proverbs chapter 8, God has a co-creator (wisdom), and this version of creation is reflected by the prologue of John’s Gospel (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God”). But, again, the creation is a matter of setting boundaries for the sea, and fixing the foundations of the earth.

By all accounts, then, we have mistranslated Genesis 1:1. God did not create the universe; he merely brought order to a chaotic existence.

★★★★★

Wray starts her book with a five-question quiz, which any faithful Bible reader should pass with ease, but the vast majority cannot. It’s the same quiz she uses to open each new course at Salve Regina University, where she teaches as an Associate Professor of Religious Studies. When she next recommends that I go purchase a Bible and read her book with the Bible open in front of me, I felt a nostalgic flashback to my University days.

After the pop quiz opening, I expected the book to be a Bible Introduction course, and I worried that perhaps it wouldn’t hold my interest. I was wrong. It’s true, Wray writes down to the level of readers who know little or nothing about the Bible, but her writing is insightful and fun. Wray “seeks to address the real and urgent problem of contemporary biblical illiteracy,” not by teaching us everything that’s in the Bible, but by stimulating a curiosity about it, so that we’ll read it for ourselves.

So this book is not a Bible overview. It is instead, after a short Bible Basics lead-in, an insightful discussion of seven critical issues that we should all find vital to our philosophy of life and spiritual well-being. Precisely the sort of instruction we expect to find by turning to our Bibles—yet most of us hold an erroneous assumption about what the Bible really says. These seven topics are:

[7] Prayer and worship

All seven proved to be great reading! Made me want to sign up for her class.

★★★★★

Let me say first that this is shaping up into a great series! This is the second book, following closely on the heels of Banned Questions About the Bible. As with book one, Piatt’s MO here is to collect a number of uncomfortable questions, typically issues that we would feel awkward about discussing with our pastor, and then pose the questions to contributors. There are fifty questions in each book.

While it deserves a five-star review in its own way, I found the second book a little different in flavor from the first. Book two is more inspiring and comforting, less thought-provoking. Less puzzle-solving and more opinions. Or maybe it just seemed that way.

Partly, the differing flavor is because some of the questions are simply impossible to answer with only a Bible in your hand! Was Jesus ever sick? How soon did he know he was divine? Was he ever wrong? Yeah, we all want answers to these questions, but who’s got them? Contributors in book two are forced to dig inside themselves, and discover what Jesus’ life really means.

But the book has its theological doozies as well. When Jesus participates in the Last Supper, doesn’t that mean he’s eating his own body and drinking his own blood? If Jesus had to die in order to save us from sin, how did he get away with forgiving people of their sin before he died?

As with book one, I loved it and hope to see the series continue!

“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”

//Scholars have often pointed out that the sayings of Jesus often mimic those of the rabbis. I’ve even heard the Jewish opinion that “anything good in the gospels is nothing new; anything new is nothing good.” If you thought Jesus’ manner of speaking in parables was unique for his times, that’s just not true; Jewish literature preserves more than four thousand rabbinic parables. Today’s verses may be a derivation of one such rabbinic saying:

A person in whom there are good deeds and who has studied the Torah extensively, what is he like? A man who builds first [of] stones and then afterwards [of] mud bricks. Even if a large quantity of water were to collect beside the stones, it would not destroy them. But a person in whom there are not good deeds, though he has studied Torah, what is he like? A man who builds first [of] mud bricks and then afterwards [of] stones. Even if only a little water collects, it immediately undermines them.

Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth.

//A branch? (Hebrew: nazar). Who wants to be governed by a branch?

Jeremiah means, of course, a descendant of David, and this was indeed a strong expectation of the coming Messiah. He must have the blood of the great warrior-king David surging through him.