God's Plan for Your Future

[Note:  This book was provided free of charge by Books Go Social/Net Gallery.  All thoughts and opinions are my own.]

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did, but even with mixed feelings I still feel there is much to admire about the author's approach.  Although the book is given a future-looking title, the contents of the book are mostly about the history of God's working with humanity from Creation onward from a historical perspective and it is only the last third of the book or so that looks towards prophecy, and there the author has much to say that resembles other prophetic speculation of a pro-Israel nature [1].  The author is praiseworthy in seeking to defend the worth of the Bible and to point out the Bible's moral and ethical demands as they relate to the sanctity of life and sexual morality, but despite the fact that I find much to praise about this book and appreciate it just feels as if something is missing that would make this book even better and easier to recommend wholeheartedly.

The contents of this book are sprawling and immense, although the ending is very much to the point.  The first half of this book is taken up by a few very long chapters that detail the history of God's working with man, beginning with the Creation through the flood to the selection of Abraham and the Patriarchs and the Exodus of Israel from slavery and their failures in the wilderness as well as throughout the period of Joshua and Judges and the kingdom into exile and return and on and on.  The author spends a bit of time talking about the relationship between Islam and Roman Catholicism and the antichrist and also talks about the failure of modern society relating to the fall of Rome as well as the wickedness of ancient Israel.  There is a lot of prophetic speculation here, especially towards the last part of the book, and the book as a whole ends with a series of appendices that relate to matters of contemporary interest like evolution, abortion, sexual immorality, the genealogies of Jesus Christ, and other mini-sermons of like kind.  If you like the author's approach in general you will probably like these too.

I think, in the end, that what makes this book fall short is the way that the author appears to think of himself as a solitary preacher in the wilderness towards a fallen society and even civilization and that he appears to be disconnected from the larger unity of the faith and the family of God.  Even where he understands that the Sabbath will be kept, he doesn't feel under any obligation to keep it now.  Even though he believes that followers of God and Jesus Christ will become the bride of Christ and married to him in a future wedding, he doesn't seem to feel a close bond with other believers today.  Even as he properly castigates the Roman Catholic Church for their unbiblical beliefs about purgatory and authority, the book is filled with unbiblical statements about hell, the nature of God, the rapture, and the supposed immortality of the soul.  The author appears unable or unwilling to recognize the contrast between the whole biblical corpus of law and his own picking and choosing among the Bible that makes him rather typical for a certain type of Protestant writer.  Rather than being alone as a believer he is part of a general group of people that is aware of the shortcomings of the world at large but unable to recognize his own lack of biblical understanding and obedience.  He calls on the world to repent does not see where he himself falls short, and because of that this book falls short of where it could have been too.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017/07/20/book-review-reveling-through-revelation-part-ii/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017/02/27/book-review-the-book-of-revelation-decoded/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017/01/13/book-review-amen-hallelujah-insights-into-the-book-of-revelation/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017/01/13/book-review-revelation-gods-word-for-the-biblically-inept/