Richbarbi

I know I am odd, but I almost cannot imagine reading a book and not wanting to read the author’s acknowledgments. Even in the most technical of books by the most erudite of authors, the acknowledgments serve as a reminder that the author is a human being, dependent upon the good graces of others to complete the long and lonely work of writing a publishable book.

Several acknowledgments through the years have made me smile. For example, Moisés Silva, after thanking several students and colleagues for reading a draft of the manuscript, made a tongue-in-cheek comment that pokes fun at the cliche about these people not being to blame for any errors that remain:

Of course, all of these friends expressed total agreement with everything claimed in this book, and they take full responsibility for any remaining errors.

B.M. Pietsch—whose fascinating dissertation turned book is actually a delight to read!—decided to have a little fun and blame the people in his life for the book he produced:

I blame all of you. Writing this book has been an exercise in sustained suffering. The casual reader may, perhaps, exempt herself from excessive guilt, but for those of you who have played the larger role in prolonging my agonies with your encouragement and support, well . . . you know who you are, and you owe me.

There are other acknowledgments that leave the reader—at least this one—with a sense of sadness:

I have seen more than one author’s preface include apologies to children who frequently asked during the writing of the book, “When is Daddy going to be finished?” This book has taken so long from start to finish that my children have all grown up and moved away during that time. Maybe they asked about it in former days, but they gave up long ago if they did.

My apology is aimed at others—at those editors, colleagues, family member, employers, students, and ultimately readers whose lives have been made at least somewhat uncomfortable by the book’s delay.

At least it finally got done.

Yikes! I felt guilty just turning the page to begin the book.

The other day I read John Piper’s “A Word of Thanks” in his new book, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture, which is a sequel to his book, A Peculiar Glory: How the Christian Scriptures Reveal Their Complete Truthfulness.

Having co-edited Piper’s Collected Works, I think I have read the acknowledgements in all fifty of his books. But this is a uniquely beautiful meditation on the meaning of gratitude as a writer enters his eighth decade of life.

The kind of thanks one feels at age seventy is not entirely the same as when one was forty. It is more obvious now that every minute of life is a gift. Every pain-free moment is a gift. Every memory of something read or thought, one more year’s gainful employment, each day’s renewal of energy, friends who have not yet died or moved away, hearing the doorbell, seeing words on a page, one more spectacular October maple in Minneapolis just outside my window—all gifts.

Of course, they have always been gifts. But the closer you are to saying good-bye to a friend, the more precious he feels. Don’t get me wrong. My thoughts are indomitably future-oriented. I’m not dead yet. In fact, nearing the end makes me feel more alive, not less. That could be owing to the smell of heaven blowing back into this world. For heaven is a very alive place. Or it could be the adrenaline of urgency with less and less time left to do more and more.

In any case, I am thankful for every day, and every gift. I love being alive. And I love writing. Some things you just feel made to do. I suppose that’s what Eric Liddell meant when he said, “God made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure.” I’m not fast. In fact, the list of competencies that I don’t have is painfully long. Writing is not about being great. It’s about making something. Writing is my carpentry, my masonry, my culinary arts, my painting and sculpting and carving, my gardening, my knitting and crocheting and needlepoint, my coin collecting.

Writing is about the joy of creating—as Dorothy Sayers would say, sharing “the Mind of the Maker.” What an amazing thing: to make much of the Maker by making like the Maker. So I am thankful for the calling and the freedom and the pressure to write. I am thankful for Desiring God, where I work full-time, and where they expect me to write. They pay me to write. And they expect me to write what is true and what is beautiful. They hold me to it.

What a gift! The whole team is precious to me. And David Mathis, executive editor, stands out, because he reads everything I write, and his suggestions make it better. I thank God for David’s leadership of a great team of writers at Desiring God—Jon Bloom, Tony Reinke, and Marshall Segal. How can one not write with joy when surrounded by such thinkers and writers?

In one sense, publishing is secondary to my writing. If nobody wanted to read what I write, I would still write, because it’s how I see things, and how I savor reality. It’s how I learn. But the fact is that God has blessed me with an amazing partnership with Crossway. I love their vision, and they have been willing to publish my books. This is a gift to me. It’s much more than a business arrangement. It’s a camaraderie in Christ and in his global cause of glorifying the Father.

On the home front, the children are all grown and gone their ways. So only Noël and I (and the dog) are left. That leaves only Noël to celebrate in this paragraph. And what a gift she is! She has supported this calling to write from the beginning. She is a good writer herself. She is working on a biography of a missionary to China. God has been good to me in such a wife. I can’t imagine what life would have been without her. I said to her the other day, “I’m really glad you’re here to come down to from my study at the end of the day.”

Of course, behind all these gifts is the Giver. I thank God for Jesus, and for loving me in him, and for giving me his Holy Spirit, and covering all my sins. Noël and I look to him and say,

The Lord, our God, shall be our strength,
And give us life, whatever length
On earth he please, and make our feet
Like mountain deer, to rise and cleat
The narrow path for man and wife
That rises steep and leads to life.

One New Testament scholar described the Gospel of Mark as a “passion narrative with an extended introduction.”[1] This is why Andreas Köstenberger and I coauthored The Final Days of Jesus: if you want to understand who Jesus is, you have to understand the most important week of his earthly ministry.[2] The Gospel writers, like Jesus himself, set their faces to Jerusalem and refused to look back (Luke 9:51, 53).

But Where Did It All Begin?

But something built into the human spirit wants to go back, to see how it all started. God himself, of course, begins the biblical storyline, “In the beginning” (Gen. 1:1). And the story of Jesus, as the preincarnate word, likewise starts, “In the beginning” (John 1:1).

Although we would never complain about how the Spirit of God chose to guide his inspired writers, we sometimes wish the narrative of Jesus’s first days would slow things down and add some more detail. Obviously we cannot add more chapters to the Bible. God has given us everything we need to worship him in a way that pleases and glorifies his great name and equips us for every good work (2 Tim. 3:16-17). But we can slow down. And we can go deeper. This is where Köstenberger and Stewart, gifted biblical theologians and New Testament scholars, can help us.

Familiarity Breeds Laziness

People say that familiarity breeds contempt, but when it comes to Bible reading, I’ve found that familiarity is more likely to produce laziness. I tend to skim when I already know the story. How many times in my life have I read or heard preached the following familiar words?

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And all went to be registered, each to his own town. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the town of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. And while they were there, the time came for her to give birth. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. (Luke 2:1-7)

We’ve heard it so many times that we assume we know what it all means.

But then we start to ask questions.

• Who was Caesar Augustus?
• When did he rule?
• Over what exact area did he rule?
• Why did he want all the world to be registered?
• Who was Quirinius?
• Is the Syria in this passage the same as the modern country of Syria?
• Don’t some Bible scholars say that Luke’s history about the timing of the census is inaccurate here?
• Why did Joseph have to go to Bethlehem instead of registering in Nazareth?
• How big was Bethlehem?
• Why did Mary need to go with him?
• And why doesn’t it say she rode on a donkey—is that in another account, or is that just what we’ve seen on TV?
• How exactly is betrothal different from engagement?
• Where is the innkeeper? A
• nd what kind of an “inn” was this—a cave, a room in a house, or an ancient hotel?

These are fourteen questions off the top of my head, and we’ve only covered seven verses. As we keep reading, the questions keep coming. Even though we’ve read or heard it dozens of times, it is humbling to recognize just how much we still don’t know.

The book you hold in your hands has no gimmicks or clever sales pitches. It won’t reveal a “gospel” you never knew. (If it did, you should throw it away [Gal. 1:8].) It doesn’t purport to finally disclose the secrets of Jesus’s childhood or what he did in Egypt. Instead, it takes us back to Scripture, the only infallible source of how God became man and dwelt among us.

I think you will find several benefits in reading The First Days of Jesus:

1. This book can help you slow down.

The biblical narrative contains details that you probably haven’t noticed before. These details reflect historical realities you probably didn’t know before. And these biblical and historical realities have implications for your life that you probably haven’t thought of before. Köstenberger and Stewart guard us from racing through familiar words and guide us in seeing what we have not yet fully seen.

2. This book can help you go deeper.

The incarnation—God become man—is a deep mystery. Pastor-theologian Sam Storms poetically captures some of the paradoxes at play:

The Word became flesh!
God became human!
the invisible became visible!
the untouchable became touchable!
eternal life experienced temporal death!
the transcendent one descended and drew near!
the unlimited became limited!
the infinite became finite!
the immutable became mutable!
the unbreakable became fragile!
spirit became matter!
eternity entered time!
the independent became dependent!
the almighty became weak!
the loved became the hated!
the exalted was humbled!
glory was subjected to shame!
fame turned into obscurity!
from inexpressible joy to tears of unimaginable grief!
from a throne to a cross!
from ruler to being ruled!
from power to weakness![3]

The wonder of the incarnation deserves a lifetime of thought, and this book is a faithful resource to prompt deeper reflection on the foundation of our salvation.

3. This book can help you make connections.

Even though the Bible devotes only four and a half chapters (out of 1,189) to Jesus’s first days, Köstenberger and Stewart show us that the incarnation is the hinge of redemptive history—with the Old Testament leading up to it and the rest of the New Testament flowing from it. Reading this book will help you see how the whole story line fits together.

C. S. Lewis once confessed that in his own reading, “devotional books” did not produce in his mind and heart the results they promised. He suspected he was not alone: “I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hands.”[4] You may want to contextualize away the pipe depending on your own preferences and convictions, but I think the advice is sound, and I found this to be the case when reading The First Days of Jesus.

This is not the dry-as-dust formula of dumping data and dates onto the pages of a book. This is not a book of theology void of history or a volume of history minus theology. It is a work of confessional theology rooted in historical investigation and devoted to a careful reading of Scripture, all designed to help us worship our God and Savior, Jesus Christ. I hope you find this book as meaningful and fruitful as I did.

Justin Taylor

Maundy Thursday, 2015

[1] Martin Kähler, The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ (1892; repr., Philadelphia: Fortress, 1964), 80.

[2] Andreas J. Köstenberger and Justin Taylor with Alexander Stewart, The Final Days of Jesus: The Most Important Week of the Most Important Person Who Ever Lived (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014).

[3] Sam Storms, “The Most Amazing Verse in the Bible,” February 20, 2010.

[4] C. S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 205.

Endorsements

“The First Days of Jesus is a revealing look at the earliest days of Jesus in Matthew, Luke, and John set against some of the skeptical takes on these passages. Add to this a taste of Jewish messianic expectation and you have a nice overview of the start of Jesus’s career and where it fits in God’s plan. Solid yet devotional, it is a great introduction to the first days of our Lord.”
Darrell L. Bock, Executive Director of Cultural Engagement, Howard G. Hendricks Center, and Senior Research Professor of New Testament Studies, Dallas Theological Seminary

“The First Days of Jesus combines Scripture passages, historical background, scholarly insight, and practical application to cast Christ’s incarnation in fresh light. Few tasks are more urgent than for today’s Christians worldwide to rediscover and deepen their connections with their origins. This book is a valuable resource for achieving that aim. Like the star of Bethlehem itself, this volume leads those who seek God to find him afresh in the events of Jesus’s historical appearance, the prophecies that preceded, the apostolic testimony that accompanied, and the social world that God split wide open when he sent his Son.”
Robert W. Yarbrough, Professor of New Testament, Covenant Theological Seminary

“Köstenberger and Stewart admirably unpack the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke along with that beautiful first movement of John’s Gospel against both the grand sweep of biblical history and the nitty-gritty details of first-century events and culture. The result may dismantle a few of your nativity-scene notions about the Christmas story even while building up your faith in and commitment to the Word become flesh.”
George H. Guthrie, Benjamin W. Perry Professor of Bible, Union University

“Köstenberger and Stewart provide for us a faithful and useful guide to the early days of Jesus. This book should serve well those desiring to learn about the early chapters in the Gospels and those who desire to preach and teach these narratives.”
Thomas R. Schreiner, James Buchanan Harrison Professor of New Testament Interpretation, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

“Written with exceptional clarity, The First Days of Jesus pays close attention to the key biblical texts on Christ’s nativity in an illuminating way. It deals briefly yet helpfully with critical scholarship and presents the events surrounding Jesus’s conception and birth in both a canonical and a chronological fashion. It addresses unashamedly the difficulties with these birth stories, tackling the problem of variant accounts, the use of sources, the nature of prophecy and typology, and much more. It challenges us readers to respond to the Word of God with the obedience of faith, like Mary did, and with praise, worship, and witness, as the shepherds did. I know of no other book that so masterfully weaves together these infancy narratives on so many fronts. I thoroughly enjoyed it and highly recommend it!”
Gregg R. Allison, Professor of Christian Theology, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

“There is more to Christmas than you may think. Cut through the layers of tradition and the fog of nostalgia, and discover the scandal of how it all started. The Bible has more to say about Jesus’s earliest days than you might expect, and this book is a reliable guide.The First Days of Jesus blends world-class scholarship with real-world concern for everyday Christians. Here attention to detail, in the text and in history, complements warm devotion and pastoral care.”
David Mathis, executive editor, desiringGod.org; pastor, Cities Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota

“In this accessible and reliable guide to how the Gospels present the early years of Jesus ‎Christ’s life, Köstenberger and Stewart provide an exceptionally helpful study, informed by ‎the best of modern scholarship. Drawing on what we know of the historical context, they ‎expound with clarity both the meaning of the biblical text and its relevance for modern ‎readers. In doing so, they enable us to grasp afresh how a detailed appreciation of Jesus’s first ‎days contribute significantly to a deeper understanding of his whole life.‎”
T. Desmond Alexander, Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies, Union Theological College, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK

Introduction: Separating Fact from Fiction

Part 1: Virgin-Born Messiah

1. The Long-Awaited Messiah: Son of Abraham, Son of David
2. God with Us, Born of a Virgin
3. Conflict between Two Kings and Two Kingdoms
4. Exile, Holocaust, and Nazareth: Prophecies Fulfilled

Part 2: Light of the Nations

5. Two Miraculous Conceptions
6. God at Work Again at Last! Deliverance for Israel
7. Israel’s Restoration
8. The Humble King Is Laid in a Manger
9. The First Witnesses: Shepherds
10. Light of Revelation for the Gentiles: Further Witnesses

Part 3: Incarnate Word

11. Preexistence: The Word Was God
12. Witness: A Man Named John
13. Incarnation: The Word Became Flesh
14. Culmination: The Law, Grace, and Truth
15. The King’s Rejection and Return

Epilogue
Appendix: Messiah Is Coming! Second Temple Jewish Messianic Expectations
Advent Reading Plan

Download an excerpt.

John Piper:

God is never irritable or edgy.

He is never fatigued or depressed or blue or moody or stressed out.

His anger never has a short fuse.

He is not easily annoyed.

He is above any possibility of being touchy or cranky or temperamental.

Instead he is infinitely energetic with absolutely unbounded and unending enthusiasm for the fulfillment of his delights.

This is hard for us to comprehend, because we have to sleep every day just to cope, not to mention thrive.

We go up and down in our enjoyments.

We get bored and discouraged one day and feel hopeful and excited another.

We are like little geysers that gurgle and sputter and pop erratically.

But God is like a great Niagara—you look at it and think: surely this can’t keep going at this force for year after year after year. It seems like it would have to rest. Or it seems like some place up stream it would run dry. But, no, it just keeps surging and crashing and making honeymooners happy century after century.

That’s the way God is about doing us good. He never grows weary of it. It never gets boring to him.

Let those who desire my vindication shout for joy and be glad, and say evermore, “Great is the LORD, who delights in the welfare of his servant!” (Psalm 35:27)

—John Piper, The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God’s Delight in Being God, rev. ed. (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2000), 185.

From the new Bible Project:

You can find out more information here.

Noted linguist John McWhorter once wrote:

For years, I have been amazed at how an obscure series of books published by the Assimil company in Europe can give the solitary learner a decent conversational competence in any language in just six months of home study, so cleverly are the lessons arranged to impart what is really needed to speak the language in real life.

In another piece, he explained further:

As a linguist, I get a letter or message about once a month asking me what the best way is to learn a foreign language at home. I always answer “The Magic Books,” by which I mean the wonderful Assimil series. I’ve been giving people Assimil sets for 20 years now. It’s the With Ease series you may have seen — Russian with Ease, Dutch with Ease, and so on.

These are some of my favorite Christmas gifts because they’re the only self-teachers I know that work. In just 20 minutes a day — if you do exactly what they tell you to with the books and accompanying recordings — then presto! You will be talking like, roughly, an unusually cosmopolitan three-year-old. No, you won’t be “conversing like a native” the way the ad copy says, unless you already are one, which would presumably make one’s use of the set somewhat peculiar. And, they can only give you so much vocabulary. But the magic is that you will be able to carry on a decent conversation, instead of just being able to count to 100 and say things like “My uncle is a lawyer but my aunt has a spoon.”

I did the German one a long time ago, and when I got to Germany and had finished explaining to a waitress that I didn’t want onions in my salad because they might make me throw up, a guy told me “You speak German better than anyone I’ve ever known who has only been here a week.” Or, after I did the Hebrew one, an Israeli said “Hey, you can actually talk!”

Both of these faintly hedged compliments were right on the nose. Fluent? Of course not, nothing can get you there short of speaking the language all day for months. But at least I could converse sparklingly with toddlers, while faking it well with everybody else, instead of quietly hoping somebody would ask me what kind of silverware my aunt had.

The With Ease books don’t get around much in the United States, actually. They’re translated from French originals, and are mostly sold in the United Kingdom. But they’re available online and in specialty bookstores, and they’re well worth the cost. Their pages even smell good. (One caveat: Unfortunately, the Arabic one is a complete wash-out, and so avoid it.)

The materials aren’t easy to find, but here’s what you can get through Amazon.