Birthday Books

Even though my birthday was waaayyy back on 11 January, I was only able today to go spend the money I received on my birthday. I buy almost all my physical, paper books from Augustine Bookroom, and that is where I bought these books today.

My Birthday Books

I haven't read anything of Spurgeon's for some time, so I decided to include at least something of Spurgy's today (Satan a Defeated Foe). 

The next book I bought is Anthony Hoekema's The Bible and the Future, a book on eschatology from an amillennial perspective. 

The last book I bought is AMG's Comprehensive Dictionary of New Testament Words.This book is of great help to those who do not know any New Testament Greek. It is a book of 1364 pages. Of course, this is not the kind of book you would read from cover to cover. It is a reference work.

The blurb on the back cover explains:

"As a premier provider of Christian books and Bibles that help the average person understand the Bible in its original languages, AMG Publishers is proud to present this important reference tool. This volume will help you discover the rich meaning of the words in the Greek New Testament.

"PART ONE contains defintions (sic) or cross-references for more than 8,000 English terms, definitions that are based on the meaning of the more than 5,500 Greek words in the Greek New Testament. Unlike some other tools, where you have to know the Greek alphabet or must first look up a Strong’s number before you get to the real meaning of things, this dictionary is organized alphabetically by the English words.  It covers all the common words and all the names of people and places found in the New Testament, and most often lists all the Scripture references where each English word is used. The primary entries also list the Greek words and Strong’s numbers so that you have them as a reference to other works.

"PART TWO is a simple lexicon of the Greek New Testament words, organized by Strong’s numbers, defined by terms found in Part One. Most lexicon entries list the other English New Testament words that translators used for that Greek word. To dig deeper, look up those other English words in Part One."

To help the user find the correct words in this reference tool, the vocabulary of seven (7) translations was used to build the dictionary. These translations are: J. N. Darby, KJV, NKJV, NASB, NIV (1984), NIV (2011), and ESV.

In order for you to understand how this tool works, have a look at these images:

I have 2 issues with this book:

1. Why was J. N. Darby's vocabulary included in this book? Who uses this translation?
2. The possibility exists for someone who does not know Greek, in using this book, such a person could start thinking that they know enough about a word or words in the New Testament to proclaim that "knowledge" far and wide as set in stone. The same problem exists with Strong's Concordance. These types of tools give just enough information to make people dangerous in their knowledge. Please understand that I am not shooting this book down for the "Greekless" user. All I am trying to do is to warn "Greekless" users not to push their knowledge picked from these tools too far.

However, this book can help many in their own Bible Studies.

Kingdom Come: The Amillennial Alternative

I come from a very dispensational background, and attended a Bible college that is also very dispensational. However, while in college I started seeing things in the Scriptures that did not sit well with my dispensational education. I consequently dropped the dispensational distinctive of a rapture (a pre-tribulational, pre-millennial eschatology – pretrib-premil) before a 7 year tribulation on the earth and accepted a historical pre-millennial position (post-tribulational, pre-millennial eschatology – posttrib-premil), meaning that I believed that Jesus has only one second coming, and that is after the tribulation, before the millennium.

However, the longer I have studied Scripture, and reading books like Revelation, the more I realised that interpreting the Bible across the board with a wooden literalism, will lead to a misunderstanding of the Bible, especially those that deal with end-times prophecy. The fact is that the Bible was not written in only one genre, but several. If we interpret books like Revelation as if it is a simple history written before it happens, then we will see all kinds of weird things.

Sam Storms’ book, Kingdom Come: The Amillennial Alternative, was released in 2013. I read it. And, it was good! Sam Storms was also a dispensationalist, but came out of that many years ago. In this book he deals with the claims of dispensationalism and debunks its eschatological theology while successfully laying down his beliefs of amillennialism.

Storms’ book is well written, easy to read and he deals with all the relevant passages to refute on the one hand dispensational doctrine, and to state on the other hand what he believes about these passages. Passages such as Mt 24; Dan 9; Rom 11, Rev 13, 17, 20; and 2 Thess 2.

After having read this book, I certainly feel that it may be the time to study amillennialism in more detail.  That detail is certainly provided in Storms’ book, and I may need to to read his book again, but this time more intently.

What I am writing here is not a book review as such, but more of a recommendation. For a quick and easy review, you can read this one at Amazon.

All I can say is that this book has triggered something in me to take amillennialism more seriously and that is what I am going to.

I give this book: