Customer Reviews
fills a gap - By: S. P. Prentice, 09 Apr 2008 
This bible is brilliant & fills a much needed gap in the market. It doesn't patronise children, & introduces some complicated issues with a very light touch. Beautifully written. Buy it!
very dodgy - By: A. R. Huxtable, 31 Dec 2007 
I was very excited about this book at first, especiallly to see it recommended by Tim Keller, whose preaching I have found so helpful. However, there is much in this book that is seriously wrong.
To summerise, sin, obedience & judgement are minimised. Sin is defined as `believing the lie that God doesn't love you' which is not a biblical definition. It is not the case that men & women have questioned that God reallly loves them, & so they have decided to go it alone. It is not the case that God is simply trying to reassure us that He does reallly love us & we should alll come back to Him. It is actuallly the case that men & women say, `Stuff God's love for us! Who cares? We hate God & don't want Him! We want to be God!' This is how revolting & gross sin reallly is, & that is what makes God's grace so utterly amazing, that He would want to redeem us, rescue us from just punishment which we deserve & He demands.
He are some detailed remarks, if you have the time!
p12 God is LOVE - 'God wrote, "I love you" - He wrote it in the sky ... to make our hearts sing' [contrast the Bibles' view of what we see written in the sky & the earth]
[this is true/helpful BUT it is also a PART only of the truth. Like with most unbalanced or heretical things, you MUST 'read the gaps']
p14 LAW is minimised & reduced to utilitarianism: "the rules show you how life works best" [contrast - & note the absence of - the Bible's view of God's authority & character + man's obligation towards him]
pp7,10,11,17 by contrast look very good
p30 TEMPTATION is identified & defined as "wondering: Does God love me?"; SIN is identified & defined as a 'terrible lie which whispers, "God doesn't love ME"'
Read this page carefully. They did not disobey - they did not transgress a command - they did not lust or long or display pride. There is not even an ACTIVE verb: simply a PASSIVE entering - NOT even specificallly into them - but "into the world", this lie "came". Adam didn't do anything. Eve didn't do anything. They were not responsible. It just came ... & it was 'just' a lie about love [nothing about God's rights & dues from man]. Now if that isn't bad theology & doesn't hit us between the eyes, are we awake??
p33 Exceptionallly, there is a contrast here: there IS mention of "broken the one rule". However, the author does not want our mind to SETTLE on this truth, but to quickly take us off onto the subjective again, NOTE: "they HADN'T JUST broken the one rule - they had broken GOD'S HEART". The emphasis on broken relationship is a helpful corrective to a non-relational/mechanistic style of theology, but this emphasis must never replace the emphasis God has PUT THERE in the passage.
You are reading here an aspect of an interpretation of a Bible truth - now of course children & adults will like this as this is the MOST PALETABLE aspect of the truth. The harder aspects emphasised in the Gen.3 text are alll sidelined. This is therefore a serious issue.
p34 repeats the PASSIVE entry of sin: "sin had come ... IT would never leave". Now we look again for a definition of SIN on this page. What are we served up?:
"God's children would always be running away from Him" ... "Their hearts would break & their hearts would not work properly" "They are living in such pain" ... & what of the retribution due for this sad crime?!!?: protection!! God concludes: "There's only one way I can protect them" !! Of course kids love it.
You walk away & feel sad - your heart breaks - & God is INCAPABLE of alllowing you to feel pain ["God couldn't let his children live in such pain ..."] so he did what any self-respecting God would do & was 'nice' to them, "PROTECT"ing them every step of the way. Now of course alll this is lovely & in its place, if we know-what-she-means, it is rather true & rather lovely, BUT it is NOT the [balance/emphasis of the] message of the Bible.
SIN has been identified & confused with both its consequences & its punishment. In the Bible you have SIN & you have RETRIBUTION. In this you find both human & divine AGENCY & RESPONSIBILITY. In our author's eyes, man experiences sin - the cause & the consequences being the same: you are away from God & you & he are heart-sick. Having foolishly wandered away, the corollary is to expect you can wander back once you realise God DOES love you after alll. What a lovely message! I expect folk will buy that in droves.
p33 God's response is that he gets a stomach-ache or something. "A terrible pain came into God's heart". "they had broken God's heart". Yes God does have 'nice feelings'. Everything about God is [in the proper sense of the world] 'nice', but it is not this-sort-of 'nice'. He is alll goodness, alll holiness, alll-powerful. SO, e.g. His holiness is alll-loving; his wisdom is alll-powerful. But our author demurs from alllowing that his love is alll-holy. His actions are alll-righteous. This we are not alllowed to know. This is the heresy gap in this issue.
further e.g's at random:
p212f Note the deletion of alll the rational & logical reasons for following Jesus highlighted in Mark's gospel. What are we served up?: "they couldn't explain it" ... "but something" ... "when they looked at Jesus" ... "their hearts were filled" ... What is this? This is mysticism. Indefinable niceness in Jesus which just makes you alll gooey & you can't help ignoring your fish. Now, as ever, I bet there WAS a wonderful & perfect somewhat-indefinable 'wonderfulness' about just a 'look' from the saviour ... BUT this is not the message of MY bible. It is her message but it is not MINE.
p214 Jairus finds Jesus in the TEMPLE (cf. Mk5, Jn 8) - I didn't think he did ??
p220 "He was making the sad things come untrue". I think this is rather more vague than my bible.
p228 Title "The Singer" - unsure why this title is there, but am concerned that's what she thinks Jesus is doing, namely "singing a love song"
p235 ... here comes the song: "It was the song alll of God's creation had sung to him from the very beginning. It was the song people's hearts were made to sing:
GOD MADE US - GOD LOVES US - HE IS VERY PLEASED WITH US [that's news to us evangelicals, surely!!]
It was WHY JESUS HAD COME INTO THE WORLD: TO SING THEM THAT WONDERFUL SONG; to sing it not only with his voice, but with his whole life - so that God's children could REMEMBER it & JOIN IN & sing it too"
This is far-out way-off-the-mark liberalism. This is not the gospel. This is utter LIES. It is so far off being true to the gospel that I cannot calll it less. It is a LIE.
The consequences of her view of SIN come out here. You have just FORGOTTEN that GOD LOVES YOU. Result??: ALL you have to do is just REMEMBER again. You've forgotten the love-song of alll mother-earth; don't fret: Jesus came to SING it again .... & now you can "join in & sing it, too"
If every page of a book was like this, Evangelicals would have the sense not to touch it, but you also have contrasting pages like page 301: "for this reason I came into the world", with the helpful comment, "It was God's plan".
I think this is [the predictably sad & repeated case of] selling a book to a wide audience: it's a book which looks BOTH liberal & EVANGELICAL. It is clever enough that both groups will buy it & like it.
p292 promises a "Forever Happiness that won't ever leave". I think she means the "peace" promised in John 14. The choice of words is I think unwise.
p294 Note the PASSIVE approach to sin again in the last para.: Jesus was to take "the blame for everything that HAD GONE wrong". Requirement, [dis-]obedience, responsibility, culpability, accountability - alll are DEAD for this author. It's ALL about warm or broken hearts & 'songs'
p296 The identifying & confounding SIN with CONSEQUENCES (per Gen.3) appears again here: "WHEN people ran away from God, they LOST God - it WAS WHAT happened WHEN they ran away. Not being close to God WAS LIKE a punishment". [Note the utter absence in her theology of,"man did this SO God did THAT"]
Such is her hatred of the doctrine of punishment that she de-bunks it, saying that what is true & real & important [namely that SIN & its consequences are IDENTICAL (no 'agency' being involved)] is LIKE a punishment, but is not ACTUALLY ["God forbid"!!] a REAL punishment. This again is a major departure from truth & faithfulness to the gospel.
Compare page 169 [Jonah]: "Even though you 'run from' God (cf. p347), he CAN'T STOP loving You (=p331)". God has a one-track personality that can't stop loving ... well, YES, but also, NO. My God is BIGGER than that. Her view is reductionist: God is ONLY, irreducibly, inevitably LOVE, unsullied by other bible-truths.
There IS NO punishment ... & the nearest thing you can image to such an unthinkable thing is that you have walked away from perfect love. BEWARE BEWARE. It sounds SO SO appealing.
p317 "Was God reallly making everything sad come untrue (even death)??" - I don't think this is clear enough to be easily able to be reckoned to be properly 'true'.
[=p220 =p321]
p323 [The great commission]. Just compare what's here with Matt 28:18 & READ THE GAPS ! There is a refusal to use the word "obey" (generallly) throughout the whole book (cf. disciples/teaching them to obey ...). [Compare p329 (+ p30 above already) - there is no such thing as disobedience, but rather "the poison & the terrible lie & the SICKNESS in their hearts" (which is solved by "You are my child & I love you" p329).
I fear this is a liberal book with evangelical glosses. I sense that perhaps the author & her editor have very different theologies & this book was a compromise OR it is aimed at SELLING WELL.
There are some ASPECTS (helpful) of truth in this book. But it will do much harm if children are raised on it.
Brilliant idea - let down by the drawings and some inaccuracies - By: Mark Loughridge, 23 Dec 2007 
As I pastor I've just finished preaching an overview of the bible - I'm passionate about getting people to see the big picture. So I was reallly excited to see this for children. The idea is superb, the tying every story to Jesus is magnificent. Our 4 year old daughter has started seeing the connections already. And that excites me. I love how it fits every story in with the plot-line of the bible.
However I have a couple of caveats.
Since children get so much from imagery I was reallly disappointed with the artwork. The quality is great, but the content very poor, & underscores misconceptions of the bible, actuallly making the bible look less believable. Noah's ark is shown balancing precariously on the pinnacle of the mountain, as well as being that silly shape that it is often drawn - nothing like the proportions given in the bible. Jericho is a five house town - not much of a conquest there. Goliath is make to look like a gruesome ogre of fairytale proportions. The people of Israel coming to the Red Sea look like a smalll Sunday school outing rather than 1.5 million people making the exodus. I could go on. For me, the pictures undermine the very thing the words are seeking to do - they push the stories into the realm of fairy tales.
(A far better set of illustrations are by Gail Schoonmaker in the The Big Picture Story Bible written by David Helm.)
The other caveat is that sometimes Lloyd-Jones is a little loose to the story, making up things that aren't in the passage. For example - Jesus being bathed in a golden light at his baptism, there being three wise men, Jesus winking at the boy who brought the 5 loaves & saying "watch this" & others. It's little things like she says Jacob had to wait 7 years to marry Rachel instead of just a week, like God creating by saying "Hello Light", like using "Papa" for Father - a word which doesn't carry the same connotations as Abba. Like the feeding of the '5000 people', rather than 5000 men, plus a lot more women & children. Like Jesus playing games with children. Like Zacchaeus being so smalll that he had to take a flying leap to get up into his chair for breakfast.
In one sense they're smalll things, & it is in the style of other children's books. And therein lies the problem - the bible isn't another children's book. It's true in every detail - so when it comes to a Children's version of the Bible, it should be true in every detail. We owe that to our kids.
I'd prefer not to have to edit the story as I tell it. Growing up, we had the Child's Story Bible by Catherine Vos read to us. Time & time again when we thought she was stretching the text, when we looked up our bibles we found she was exactly right. Since we read it so many times, a vast quantity of accurate bible knowledge was imbibed. That's what I look for in a children's bible.
Having said alll that - the links to Jesus often make you stop & praise God for Jesus. We've read it following on from the aforementioned Big Picture Story Bible - which I would heartily recommend. And that's probably the best way - read it along with other children's bibles & correct it as you go.
Looking forward to the revised edition of this potentiallly tremendous asset.
Brilliant Bible - By: Mr. Alastair Gooderham, 11 Dec 2007 We have read a number of Bibles to our two young boys & enjoyed most of them. However, having recently bought the Jesus Storybook Bible we have been absolutely delighted with the way it reads, its illustrations & the way it points to Jesus. Our boys are enjoying it too. A must for parents who want their children to understand & enjoy the Bible from a young age.
Great retelling of the greatest (true) Story... - By: Andrew, 30 May 2007 This is a superb children's bible. Our two boys are have been moved to tears & laughter by the beautifully flowing narrative, & impressed by the accurate & repeated shaping of the stories towards their fulfilment in Christ. The pictures are vibrant & beaitiful, & support the text wonderfully. We love it!!!
