Our annual Grace Agenda conference is coming up later this month, and our outside guest is Mike Reeves. You can check out more details on the conference here. The fact that we were having him speak for us motivated me to read a couple of his books, Delighting in the Trinity and Rejoicing in Christ, which I did. And I chose the second one for this month’s book of the month.
Reeves does a great job combining three things that are not usually combined.
First, he has a great eye for the text of Scripture, pointing out new things in familiar passages. This comes from close study of the text combined with an ability to read the entire landscape of biblical theology. Now there is no remarkable ability in projecting things onto the text of Scripture, but there is a manifest gift present when someone points out a feature of the text, which is glaringly obvious once it is pointed out, but was invisible before it was pointed out. That is one of the ways you can tell if someone has the gift of teaching.
The second area is that he is well-versed in historical theology—not just from the early fathers, but he is also steeped in the Puritans. The questions that occur to us as we are reading the Scriptures are usually questions that have occurred to others over the centuries, and are questions which have been exhaustively answered. It is wonderful to have men who are acquainted with those answers, and who can bring them up at appropriate times in our discussions.
And then last, Reeves is a very engaging writer. Too often books of theology are written by men trained as ecclesiastical engineers, fed for years on bland tapioca pudding, who were then required to write the equivalent of a textbook, heavy on the vanilla. “Adjectives? Metaphors? Illustrations? They distract us from our central purpose.” Suffice it to say that Reeves is not like that at all.
You will be blessed by this book. And come hear him speak in Moscow if you can.
there is a manifest gift present when someone points out a feature of the text, which is glaringly obvious once it is pointed out, but was invisible before it was pointed out. Agreed. My pastor has this gift. I have found some comments by Dale Ralph Davis along these lines IIRC. And such a pleasure to read. Seeing motifs repeated in Scripture, or allusions from one book to another, are gratifying; but to see what was previously hidden in plain sight is just profound. I find it hard to think of specific examples, though it would be interesting to read… Read more »
You are in for a treat.