God Over Good

     BOOK REVIEW:   Trusting God when God doesn't live up to your expectations.   God is good. Except...God doesn't always seem to be what we would call good. A good father wouldn't make it so difficult to get to know him, would he? And if God is all-powerful, wouldn't God ensure that we never suffer? Either our understanding of God is incorrect, or our definition of good is inadequate.
     In a world that is messy and a church that is imperfect, it's easy to let our faith be lost. But that doesn't mean we have to lose God. It means we must consider that perhaps our idealized expectations are wrong.
     With transparency about his own struggles with cynicism and doubt, pastor Luke Norsworthy will help you trade your confinement of God to an anemic definition of good for confidence in the God who is present in everything.

     MY REVIEW:   This book is thought-provoking and brings up many points that I have not considered. Everyone struggles with the question, If God is Good, why isn't everything Good? As explained in this book, Faith is a Leap. Sometimes you just have to believe that God is Good throughout all that happens. One example given is a woman who was struck in the neck by a wayward arrow. Not only did she survive, but when the doctors performed some tests, they discovered a tumor that would soon create a fatal stroke and were able to prevent it. This seems pretty extreme, but often, if we are looking for it, our suffering can be used to bring greater joy. This book by no means answers all questions and puts to rest all doubt, but it can offer a fresh view of who God is, and how to trust Him more.
     In the chapter about the Bible, this stood out to me as he defended the sometimes contradictory passages found in it:

"When I stopped trying to make the Bible fit my format, these contradictions transitioned from being disqualifiers to being authenticators. The human hand in the text shows that it wasn't a fabrication created by a single person in the dark recesses of some ivory tower but the honest testimony of a collection of people who'd experienced a life-altering event. 

.....If all the accounts in the Bible were smoothed out and every detail identical, that would raise red flags about the validity of the events, because it would seem as though the authors had conspired to tell the same fabricated story. The differences don't need to be evaded but celebrated, revealing the authentic testimony of a community's life-changing experience. The Bible's authority is in its complexity."

And this also caught my attention, both with the authenticity of the varying accounts, and the "sharper than any two-edged sword"ness of the Bible:

"The Bible will not fail us because it points to Jesus, and Jesus deserves our trust. The person of Jesus is without flaws, errors, or contradictions. 

As Scripture tells us, Jesus is the Word of God. Jesus is what is infallible. When the weight of validity is on Jesus, not on an account of Jesus, we don't force the Bible to carry more weight than it should.

For our Muslim neighbors, the sacred miracle of their religion is the creation of the Koran. The Prophet Muhammad had a role, a significant one, but what is paramount in Islam is the creation of the Koran. Muslims base their religion on their book.

Christianity's  sacred miracle is not the Bible; it is Jesus. It is the Word becoming flesh. The words of the Bible testify about the sacred miracle, but the miracle of Christianity isn't Word becoming flesh and then regressing back into words. 

The sacred miracle is the Word becoming flesh. 

The Bible never claimed to be smooth---only sharp. 

It's sharp, because it points to Jesus."

     I would just like to mention this portion about the command in 1 Peter 3:15 to "be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you":

"Maybe we should stop reading this as a command to weaponize intellectual arguments with clenched fists and instead see it as a call to be able to articulate the blessing we've experienced through a life-style of practices that have shaped us into Jesus' cruciform posture, because that's an answer that deserves to be heard."

     I really enjoyed this book. I thought he could have used a few more pronouns at times to make the sentences flow a bit better, and occasionally I found a difficultly structured sentence/phrase. But overall Luke writes with an easy, humorous hand, and the book doesn't drag. There are a few practices/ideas expressed that I disagree with, but on a scale of 1-10 I'd give a high rating.

I received a copy of this book from BAKER PUBLISHING and was not required to write a positive review.