Life's Big Questions: Six Major Themes Traced Through the Bible

Vaughan Roberts - Life's Big QuestionsThe Christian Bible is the worldwide best-selling book that has been published in numerous languages and translations. Spanning over 2000 years of history, it was originally written by about 40 human authors in 2 languages who utilized many different literary genres. It is an enormous volume of 66 divinely inspired and authoritative books that form God's Word to us. With its variety of literary forms and extensive recording of history, any reader would soon wonder how this extraordinary Book could be read in an ordinary way. How can anybody read and understand the Bible as a whole? How can it have a single message that links together all the different accounts of God's work?

In Life's Big Questions, show more Vaughan Roberts shows us how there is unity in the diversity of the Scriptures. Building off of his previous acclaimed work (God's Big Picture, 2003), Roberts presents the Kingdom of God as a unifying theme for the whole Bible and then seeks to answer six of life's big questions with this theme in mind. For this book review, I hope to critically analyze the author's thesis/purpose, the methods he has used in explaining it, and his success in achieving his purpose.

Life's Big Questions is a compact yet concise volume that aids Christians in understanding and applying the Kingdom of God as it unfolds through the Scriptures. Vaughan Roberts has written a book that is easy to read and still beneficial to seminarians or Pastors, for he puts forward a framework that helps readers use this unifying theme of kingdom to walk through the entire Bible. The inclusion of numerous figures is very useful in elaborating on the different parts of Roberts proposed framework as it relates to each chapter's question. However, it would have been more beneficial if Roberts gave better mention in the text of the book about what the figures relate to (cf. Figure 26 and page 151 where he did do this well). Despite this minor faux pas, Life's Big Questions is an amazingly practical tool for applying biblical theology to all of life's issues - an aid to seeing the Scriptures as a unified whole. It is a Bible help that rightly keeps Jesus Christ front and center as the reigning Lord of the Kingdom of God.

Full review: http://www.sixsteps.org/2008/03/26/book-review-vaughan-roberts-lifes-big-questio... show less