Evangelicals Now
<< November 1999 >>

The Bible Made Plain and Simple

THE BIBLE MADE PLAIN & SIMPLE
By Mark Water
OM Publishing. 127 pages.
ISBN 1 85078 346 2

The Bible Made Plain and Simple is a friendly book with big headings, bullet-point paragraphs, maps, tables and colourful pictures.

It aims at people who want to get to grips with the Bible but might be daunted by thicker volumes. Any book that sets out to open people's minds and hearts to the Bible is one that we would want to cheer, but though this one looks - from a distance - to be nourishing, on a closer inspection, it turns out to be half-baked. It is a book of bite-sized details, all quite interesting in themselves, but for details to have any life, they need to be put to work in a larger scheme of things. The car's parts are laid out for us and labelled, but there is no sense of how they fit back together again to make the car. If you want to breed in me an appetite for driving, you will need to present me with more than a collection of cogs.

So the section on 'biblical birds' is the same size as the chronology of the life of Jesus. In that chronology we are told, for example, that: 'Jesus' second Galilean tour' is followed by 'Jesus' parables about the kingdom'. A fair observation - but what am I to do with it? And is it any more significant than the fact that: 'Palestine lies below one section of a major air route for birds'? When it comes to the death of Jesus, we are given the details of the events and several key Scripture verses, but the book does not make it 'plain and simple'. Rather, to make sense of the book, I would need a prior understanding of the Bible's teaching on salvation. This might function as a handy reference book for when you want to remind yourself of where to find the parable of the lost coin, but if we want to help people into the heart of the Bible, we need to do more than list a few prophecies fulfilled in Jesus. We need to unfold the story of salvation so that readers are not just collecting up the number of years each Judge ruled (see table p.64) but are gripped by the truth of John 5.39b.

Mike Cain