Part 1 is driven by one key question: "What is God like?" So many of us grow up with an image of God as fearful, wrathful, angry -- or as Jersak puts it, "The 'Mighty Smiter'" (pp. 32ff). There are other false images of God that often pervade: The doting grandfather, the deadbeat dad and Santa Claus Blend. And Jersak addresses each in turn. But it's the "Mighty Smiter" that seems to have the most hold on our theological imaginations.
It's this wrathful God that Jersak insists is so bound up with the notion of "unbounded sovereign will". Using Augustine, A More Christlike God explores how wrong this notion is, and argues instead for a God who looks "Exactly like Jesus" (p. 22).
Part 2 explores what this means. And it's here that Jersak explores what it means to look to the Cross as the key to understanding not only Scripture, but more importantly God. According to Jersak, the incarnation and atonement reveal the divine nature to be defined by humility, service, and self-sacrifice. God's glory is precisely that he is humble, he is infinitely close, he is caring, and he is cruciform: "even as God is the foundation before and beneath our every moment and every breath, we behold that God as none other than a slain Lamb!" (p. 129).
In Part 3, then, Jersak applies this picture of the non-coercive, cruciform and kenotic God to the dogged problem of divine wrath as it emerges in the pages of Scripture. And it's the concluding chapter that had me wanting to shout from the rooftops to the glory of this God.
That's what makes A More Christlike God a provocative book -- in the best sense of the word. It calls out -- provokes -- a richly worshipped vision of who God is and what God does in Jesus Christ.
Simply put: Everyone should read this book.
__________________
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, as part of the Speakeasy book review program, in exchange for my honest review here.