Review: Your Marriage Masterpiece: Transform Your Relationship Through God's Amazing Design

Your Marriage Masterpiece: Transform Your Relationship Through God's Amazing Design by Al Janssen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I realise that I had subconsciously come to expect poor theology to line the pages of the any popular level book about marriage. I am so very pleased to admit that I could not be more wrong - Janssen has gifted us (both bible scholars and "lay" Christians) a most wonderful gift in this amazing piece of literature! The content was so finely edited that the 250 pages felt like only a hundred as I devoured page after page; the flow of the book's thesis was extremely easy to follow along and I found that Janssen held my interest and attention throughout. I enjoyed the encouraging and the painful accounts of marriages alike that served as vivid illustrations. But what I savoured the most was his remarkable ability to retell bible narratives! Often when we read Scripture, we do not really understand the narrative well because our modern day context is so far removed from the ancient times.

As a seminary student, I recall spending hours if not days trying to retell the parable of the good Samaritan in an updated, modern day context. Even if I did not want to keep the book for its solid theology and marriage applications (I do of course and will discuss that in a while), this book will be a required reading if I were to ever teach a course on hermeneutics (how to interpret Scripture). For this reason, I felt that Chapter 8 titled "The greatest love story of all time" was worth the price of the book; I was so so very delighted when I found that chapter 18 titled "The great adventure" also was an outstanding paraphrase of a biblical narrative. I did not complete buy a couple of Janssen's interpretations, for example that Adam watched passively when Eve was conversing with the serpent or that the Shunammite woman husband was a king... But theologians can have disagreements and yet hold another in high regard...

As I closed the pages of the book, I felt a sense of awe at the magnitude and the impossibility of the task set ahead of me as a husband to be. Yet at the same time I was encouraged and inspired by the worldview changing presentation of Christ's love for his bride (the church), and our ensuing responsibility to live it out through its metaphor - our marriage.

I heartily recommend this book! This is one of the few titles that I regard to be 6 stars, because it is in a class of its own.

I received this book from the Baker Publishing Group's Bethany House Blogger Program for the purposes of providing an unbiased review. All views are my own.

View all my reviews

Walton on not violently bending and imposing on Scripture

Wise words from respected Old Testament John Walton that I cannot agree more emphatically with, “We are not free to impose our own questions, our own culture, our own agendas, our own issues on the biblical text, and demand that it address our situation. It’s addressed to an ancient culture, in an ancient language, in an ancient time. And we need to make sure that we are entering that world instead of dragging the text as if it were talking to our word and in our terms. The message transcends the culture, but the form is culture bound. And so we have to recognise then that we are reading the text as outsiders… If we are going to get the full focus of God’s revelation to us and get the full force of its authority, we have to try to take our place in that audience, and try to hear as that audience would have heard it…”

Source: Outsiders: Reading the Bible Out of Context