​Luke 2:43 glossed over it so fast, but…WHAT?! are you freaking kidding me?! Mary and Joseph lost Jesus! For 3 days! Can you imagine a picture of 12-year-old Jesus on a milk carton? How can they lose Jesus?! He’s only the most important person in the world!
 
As a parent myself, with my attention constantly divided, I can empathize. When I can’t find my toddler for 30 seconds, sheer panic sets in. But can you imagine Joseph praying, “Uh God? You know that Messiah you sent us? uhm, do you have another one? what? Only-begotten? crap!”
 
Just imagine the arguments between Mary and Joseph on the camel-ride back to the temple. “I thought he was with you!” You think you messed up? You think you dropped the ball in the final seconds of the game? The salvation of the world was on the line and Mary&Joe blew it. Whatever mistake you’ve made in life can’t possibly be worse.
 
But was it the end of the world? Did tragedy bring even God to despair? However horrible the situation, it’s never beyond the sovereignty of God. He has a plan for us that can’t be thwarted by even the most foolish mistakes. God is in control.
 
Did something good come out of it? That’s the wrong question. There was nothing good about losing Jesus, no matter how you look at it. But even in the worst circumstance, when you want to scream at the world, or at yourself, know that God is already at work to make his plans come true, whether in saving the world, or helping you in…finding Jesus

of Sardis. This criticism is only valid if the book was indeed meant only to be a theological commentary. Instead, this is more of a sermon.
 
It is not MacArthur's intention to "turn this country back to God." Rather, it's to turn the church back to God. He is definitely not a post-millennialist, although there used to be a strong tendency for such in his dispensational theology. In essence, he's saying, "Stop trying to change the world and make it a better place. Instead, be the church." He unpacks God's message to the 7 churches in the book of Revelation to show what it means to be the church.
 
I expected a moral tirade and a desperate call to repentance. Instead, he just presents the Word as it is, and let the message convict the reader, or not. He doesn't slap the reader to attention. Almost unemotionally, he explains, like a commentary, what Jesus demands from his church and the consequences of disobedience. The subtitle of the book is Christ's Call to Reform the Church, not "John MacArthur's Call." He doesn't go off on his own criticism of what the church is now and all the things that need to change. He rarely says, "The church has to..." Actually, he rarely addresses the Church at all. He lets Christ speak for Himself, as he soundly exposits the passages in Revelation like a commentator. I wished he would speak out more, because he has clout, and people would listen to him, and he does so behind the pulpit and other venues, but in this book MacArthur is just a messenger. It's not his personal call to the church based on his convictions and observations.
 
However, it is in the final chapter that we actually get what we were looking for when we picked up this book - John MacArthur's assessment, criticism, and call to reform the church. I wished that he started off with this chapter, because that's what we really want to read, not a commentary on Revelation. But then, it would be seen as a just a personal message, from a mere man, albeit a respected and proven pastor. By putting this chapter at the end, it serves as a culminating warning that summarizes and puts into today's context the rebukes of Jesus from Revelation. It's hard to disagree with the man, when he's simply mimicking the words of our Lord (although I do disagree with a few of his generalizations).
 
It's a must-read for anyone who even vaguely recognizes that there's something terribly wrong with the Church today. At least, read the last chapter.

​I would like to thank Moody Publishers for an advance copy of this book:

They are not unappealing because they are difficult to understand, but because we actually don’t like what we read, the parts where God sounds so mean, the parts where children are killed, the verses you would never use in a bedtime story.
 
Not only does he collect these unhighlighted verses, he says there’s a bigger story behind it. It shows the God who is real, who is there in the discomforts, even causing them. It shows the God we can’t put into a box, a God who is stranger than we think.
 
Having been so well read, I’m embarrassed that I’ve never read Kandiah before, because he is quite the prolific writer! He draws you in so well in the first chapter, you’ll be hooked to the rest of what he wants to show.
 
Through Abraham, he shows that trusting is God is very complicated – that’s not what you heard from a 3-point sermon. Believing in God actually creates more questions than answers. But is that ok? Through Jacob, he shows that God actually hurts us, that he’s the author of the pain in our lives. Why? Isn’t that strange? He proposes some Biblical reasons by showing us the full narrative of Jacob, juxtaposed in our very real modern situations.
 
A good teacher doesn’t merely make good observations; he asks the hard questions, even questions we are afraid to ask. “Where was God when the bombs were falling on Aleppo?” (97) Why did God turn up so late? too late. Or like in the book of Ruth, God doesn’t even show up (Ch. 5). Or, why does God kill a servant named Uzzah who was just trying to help, yet not intervene when a terrorist truck driver mows down a crowd of people in France? (158)
 
In a way, each chapter is like a really long 1-point sermon, with plenty of related tangents, which could become another sermon in itself. Each chapter is also very detailed, and it deals with our real world circumstances. It’s like the plight of Gideon is more relevant today than it was 20 years ago, or 2000 years ago. For example, he likens Gideon’s act of destroying a Baal altar to the religiously insensitive act of burning a Quran (107), a culturally sensitive issue more in our social consciousness today than even 10 years ago. And then he flips the script and says it’s really more like removing anti-Christian graffiti from the walls of a church, not just aggravating an opposing religion.
 
These strange and unhighlighted sections of the Bible show that these are not cookie-cutter bedtime stories filled with heroic characters. These were real situations. These were real people, and if we know people, we know that even the greatest among us are far from perfect. So in the Bible, heroes like Moses and David are also seen as real people, with real sins, and real pathetic weaknesses. We’ve judged them harder (or skip those uncomfortable stories) because we’ve put them in a pedestal, but you won’t blame a friend who has similar displays of bipolar emotions. This honesty of the Bible “shows us authentic humanity across the spectrum of human experience” (162).
 
Chapter 7 wasn’t as interesting because of its changed perspective. There’s only a little bit of the notion of Isaiah encountering a stranger God. The bulk of the chapter is more like a long sermon that’s a little disconnected from the theme of the book. However, Isaiah also includes some teachings on how this strange God deals with people, and how we should deal with strangers. He ends the chapter by saying that when we open up our hearts to strangers, we open up our hearts to God (203). I thought that would be just a minor side note in the book, but apparently it takes up the whole chapter and is actually the overarching theme of the entire book, being “the litmus test of the Christian confession” (254), or “the litmus test of authentic discipleship” (256), the thing that shows whether our faith is genuine, our “response to the needy” (260). I would disagree with that, but he builds up an excellent case as the book continues. And he adds that this is the way Christianity will “win a hearing for the gospel” in today’s global community (310).
 
I think I saw this book listed in the theology section. Although the author is a very able theologian, a theology book this is not. His theological training is evident in his use of good hermeneutics to manuever the hard-to-accept passages in the Bible that portray God as abusive to women (223). The genre is more Christian Inspiration or Christian Living. It’s also social commentary, as he consistently intertwines the lessons over the backdrop of the current refugee crisis.
 
This book is awesome. The best book I’ve read in 3 years. If there is one criticism, he overuses the term “turn up.” The first 10 times seemed current and refreshing, and then it got old real fast.
 
I would love to read a hypothetical God is Stranger Part II, with more insight and observations into more “unhighlighted” passages of this stranger God. But alas, that is not his point. He selects these specific examples to highlight his own agenda – to teach that a true Christianity that follows the real God loves and actively helps the refugees and strangers of the world.
 
In the end, he shows that this stranger God gives us a better understanding of God and his relation to the world. And it is not that he is so different from what we expect or want him to be. It is actually that we have been the stranger all along.

Other Honest Book Reviews:
​Dwell by Barry Jones
Fool's Talk by Os Guinness