For My Next Title…
I love the Bible. I love the layers upon layers of meaning you find as you study and meditate on the scriptures. I love the simplicity of the gospel, on its surface. I love the ever-growing metaphoric complexity of His word, as you come to know God in all the various aspects that give depth and meaning to His many names. Eventually, if you persist, you come to properly honor and fear God’s absolute sovereignty over His creation. If you dig deep enough, you find that no matter how well you think you know Him, He remains an enigma, a puzzle far beyond human capacity to solve or understand.
Yet, above all this, He desires to have a personal relationship with you, not to make you His slave, as His enemies would have you believe, for that’s what Satan and his minions have done since they were given freedom to roam the earth. Unlike Satan, however, God’s purpose is to set you free in His eternal heavens. First, however, He must test you to know the limits of your faith. He must prune you and prepare you so that you are ready to accept the burden of responsibility that freedom and eternity both require. God must know, before giving you a place in Heaven, that you have chosen of your own free will to spend eternity with Him.
The Bible is a book of many stories about diverse people and events that take place over thousands of years. On the surface those stories are something of a historical record of human events, both literal and metaphoric, beginning with the creation of all things and ending with a prophecy and a promise for the eternal future. There are relatively few people who truly understand the connecting tissue of those many stories. Most people are not even aware that a connection exists, but just beneath the surface of the scriptures, hidden from the world’s sight, is a single story that is connected from the beginning of the Bible to its end. It is the greatest story ever told. It is the responsibility of the Christian church to reveal that story to a lost and dying world. As an artist, author, and member of the Body of Christ, I have chosen the literary art to pass on God’s revelation of Himself to the world around me.
Between the lines of scripture lie limitless layers of story. In the Bible Book Club Series, I try to create novels of fiction based on the stories I see there, and on the message and meaning of the subject scripture. As with the creation itself, the series begins at the beginning, in Genesis. My novel, “The Oubliette“, the first in the series, is based on the stories revealed to me in the scriptures from Genesis 1:1 through 11:9. As with all the titles in this series, The Oubliette is a novel of fiction, it is not scriptural commentary or an interpretation confined by strict orthodoxy. The series is not intended to be used as a Bible study, but it could be used for a Bible study, in conjunction with the Bible itself.
My next novel, “Patriarch”, the second in the Bible Book Club series, tells the story of Abraham, the “friend of God” and Patriarch to the Hebrew people, the children of faith, and also the sons of Ishmael. Because of the great complexities of Abraham’s life and the many-layered meanings in the Biblical story of him, Patriarch is tightly focused on two aspects of his story. His mission of faith, to carry the knowledge of God to the Pagan lands of Canaan, and his prior knowledge of God’s continuing plan for the destruction of wickedness, this time in Sodom and Gomorrah. To try to cover more of Abraham’s life would require at least three novels and perhaps more, novels that may come in obedience to the Holy Spirit but are not currently part of the plan.
