66 Love Letters

Skeptic, do you want to know what the Bible is really about? 

Critic, do you want to discover what is really behind all those rules and wars and judgments?

Christian, do you want to hear God's love in all things at all times in every word from the Word? 

66 Love Letters by Dr. Larry Crab is the answer to those questions. 

I found it at the library but quickly ordered my own personal copy. 

Each chapter features one book of the Bible, a one-sentence summary of how God is at work in that book, and a dialogue between the author and God, to discover God's love for us in Christ throughout every one of those 66 glorious books. Reading it has been a refreshment and a journey and an encouragement. I'm exactly halfway right now, but I am still certain that it is a wonderful book.

Here's a little something to whet your whistle 

On Genesis: 

"I never underestimated how thoroughly you'd mess up your life or how painfully you would struggle and suffer, and I don't want you to underestimate your failures or struggles either. They're all part of the story I'm telling. But neither have I underestimated by determination or ability to enter the mess you've made and the pain you feel and turn everything around. I can, and I will, make everything good again"

On Leviticus: 

"You want Me to solve your problems, but you don't know what your worst problem is, the one responsible for all the others. You don't yet realize that distance from Me is the most lethal problem you have"  

On Deuteronomy: 

"If you love Me only when I immediately satisfy your desires, your love is merely one form of self-centeredness. Your love becomes trust only when you choose to believe that I brought you out of something bad to bring you into something good before you experience that something good"

On 2 Chronicles: 

"I owe you nothing. I give you everything" 

On Job:

"When you stand before Me in mystery, you will eventually rest within Me in trust. When you can't figure Me out, you will give up the illusion of predictability and control and discover the joy and freedom of hope" 

On Ezekiel: 

"To know Me in My holiness is to know yourself in your sinfulness" 

On Joel (my favorite chapter so far): 

"A wife should always wear her wedding ring, as should her husband. Wherever she goes, whomever she's with, whatever she's doing, she is to remember her husband and the vows she made to him. In every moment and detail of her life, she is to live as his treasure, valuing his love above all other wonders, never violating her highest calling to further his purposes in all she does. And her husband must never give himself to another. He is to find his richest delight in seeing his wife come fully alive in all her beauty and talents and opportunities, and his purposes must never suppress but always release her to be all that she is and can become. I am that husband. But you are not that wife...Let every difficulty, big or little, reveal whether you are My faithful or My adulterous wife" 

Thanks be to God for revealing himself in his word!