Philip Yancey has a way of confronting our most cherished but misguided notions about faith. In The Bible Jesus Read, he challenges the perception that the New Testament is all that matters and the Old Testament isn’t worth taking the time to read and understand. Yancey admits that, like many Christians, he usually avoided the Old Testament. After all, why bother with writings that can be so baffling, boring, even offensive to the modern mind? But a surprising discovery awaited Yancey when he began to explore how the Old Testament related to his life today. Those seemingly irrelevant Hebrew Scriptures took on a startling immediacy, portraying a passionate relationship between God and people against the broad backdrop of human experience. Like nothing else, the Old Testament depicts the cries, the complaints, the deep, insistent questionings of the heart, the stuff of life we all must contend with. With his candid, signature style, Yancey interacts with the Old Testament from the perspective of his own deeply personal journey. From Moses, the amazing prince of Egypt, to the psalmists’ turbulent emotions and the prophets’ oddball rantings, Yancey paints a picture of Israel’s God--and ours--that fills in the blanks of a solely New Testament vision of the Almighty. Probing some carefully selected Old Testament books--Job, Deuteronomy, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and the Prophets--Yancey reveals how the Old Testament deals in astonishing depth and detail with the issues that trouble us most. The Old Testament in fact tackles what the New Testament often only skirts. But that shouldn’t surprise us. It is, after all, the Bible Jesus read. The Bible Jesus Read will give you abundant new insights into the heart of God the Father. And as you read with a fresh eye the prayers, poems, songs, and bedtime stories that Jesus so revered, you will gain a profound new understanding of Christ. "The more we comprehend the Old Testament," Yancey writes, "the more we comprehend Jesus."

Amazon.com Review
Philip Yancey, editor at large and columnist for Christianity Today, follows up his back-to-back bestselling books, What's So Amazing About Grace and The Jesus I Never Knew, with The Bible Jesus Read, an exploration of the significance of the Old Testament to today's Christian.

Given previous book titles--Where Is God When It Hurts, Disappointment with God, and The Gift of Pain--one might jokingly suggest that in the Old Testament Yancey has found his true home. He acknowledges that in studying key sections of the Hebrew Bible (he concentrates on Job, Deuteronomy, The Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and the Prophets) he found himself confronted by the core questions that haunt his Christian faith: Do I matter? Does God care? Why doesn't God act? As always, Yancey explores these central human questions with a style that is marked by directness, humor, and honesty. He writes not as theologian or mystic but as a questioning seeker. Rather than providing simple answers--he in fact says that "by no means did Jesus resolve the problem of pain"--he instead affirms the words of Thomas Merton, which he quotes in his Introduction: "There is ... nothing comfortable about the Bible--until we manage to get so used to it that we make it comfortable for ourselves."

Even as he finds the Old Testament a "companion for my pilgrimage," so is Yancey a companion for his readers, precisely through his willingness to ask --and his courage not to answer--all the hard questions. --Doug Thorpe