Thursday, January 17, 2013

Who is God? A book review

I finally reached the halfway point of this book but I think I'm going to throw in the towel. I chose Who is God, And What Has He Ever Done For Us? (by David L. Jemison) to read and review because of an ongoing discussion I am having with an atheist. I thought this book might help.

From the Amazon description:
If you are one of those people who are not convinced that there is a God, this book is for you. If you are one of those Christians who desire more power with God, this is the right book for you. If you are one of those ministers who want more power in your preaching and teaching, this is indeed the book for you, and you will all want to read excerpts from it over and over. Many will want to use it for a reference book.

For starters, it is painfully obvious that the book was self-published. I'm sure that there are self-published books that are well edited but this book was not. I've found typos and grammar mistakes. There are no page numbers. The formatting makes this book hard to read, especially for someone who is already prejudiced against e-books. The chapters are long, ramble, and I cannot determine exactly how the book demonstrates who God is other than quoting huge numbers of Bible texts with very little commentary to tie them together.

As for content, I'm skeptical of the author's claims. Very early on, he shares a letter that he says was dictated by God. In the letter, it says that "the inhabitants of the earth had forsaken me, and I had to destroy it by water twice. The second time, I preserved mankind by providing a way for my servant Noah and his family to escape" (chapter two). Unless I missed something in my Bible study, there was only one flood.

The author goes on to say that "ironically, the only negative responses that I have received have been from people who are supposed to be saved, some church members; they find fault with a couple of things. But wasn't it church people who opposed Jesus, when He walked among men? Tell me; since there are two powers in the world, YAHWEH and Satan, do you think that Satan would write such a letter? I leave it up to you, to judge." I find this an incredibly poor argument for why I should believe that the letter came from God and no reason to trust the author's "visions."

Thank you BookSneeze for providing a free copy in exchange for my honest opinion. Unfortunately, I cannot and will not recommend this book.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

WOW! There is one mixed up author! Glad you didn't waste any more time on that book!

Carrie said...

I think I would definitely skip this one!