The Voice from on High: God Announces His Son as Israel’s Liberating King

Although the title sounds generic and somewhat uninteresting, this short book was great! It is a part of the Voice Project, which for those who haven’t heard about it, is a scripture project to rediscover the story of the bible. It’s a huge undertaking where various songwriters, authors, musicians, pastors, and theologians are coming together to help people grow spiritually and explore theologically using Scripture. The team is really focusing on staying close to the original text, while adding a sense of literary flow, artistic elements, and how it would read in public. They also have come out with a couple CDs of music artists singing through the psalms.

So, this particular work is the story of Jesus from Genesis to Revelation. Because I didn’t grow up in the church, I often feel confused by anything pre-New Testament (sidenote: why is it that pre-youth group seems to focus a lot of the old testament and youth group on focuses mainly on the new testament? Not a very good idea in my opinion). Anyway, this short journey through some of the history and prophets was really good for me to walk through….it helped me understand the bigger story a little better. A cool feature of this is that it came with a cd that you could listen to as you read. Each of the 6 sections had a song that helped you to enter into the theme of that part of Scripture. It was a true interactive worship experience.

I would really encourage you to check out more on this project. I have begun to collect the works of this project (although I’m behind now), but I hope to have the entire set some day. Some of the writers on this project include: Chris Seay, Brian McLaren, Leonard Sweet, Lauren Winner, the Chaffers, Eric Bryant, Sara Groves, Charlie Hall, Donald Miller, and Matthew Paul Turner. Then they have a list of 23 bible scholars who make sure that the writers are faithful to the original text. I think so far they’ve come out with renditions of the four gospels, Hebrews, acts, and the final week of jesus’ life. I think they’d be especially helpful for people who work with youth or young adults… in large group worship settings, personal devotional times or even small group bible studies.