Welcome to this week’s Reading Journal entry! These entries serve as short, weekly opportunities for me to share what I’ve been reading and digest it. My hope is that they also help others as they decide what to read and think through what they’ve read.
This week, I’ve continued working my way through O. Palmer Robertson’s, The Christ of the Covenants, and started the final book in S. D. Smith’s Green Ember series, Ember’s End. Although very different from each other, these books have both been helpful to me in different ways.
Let’s go ahead and get right to it!
The Christ of the Covenants
My reading in this book this week centered on the Mosaic and Davidic covenants as Robertson presents them, with an intervening chapter comparing dispensationalism with covenantalism. There was also a chapter on circumcision, which was excellent. He draws a lot of themes in Scripture together and lists the things that circumcision represents. He also briefly discusses baptism in relation to circumcision but not as much as I thought he would. Regardless, he explained the meaning of circumcision and its relation to baptism very well, using Scripture as his basis for what he argues.
Robertson’s explanation of the Mosaic covenant and its relation to the New Covenant was excellent and helped me understand it better than any other description I’ve heard. He goes over the different purposes, aspects, and symbols of the Mosaic covenant, explaining each with Scripture. His explanation was clear and consistent and articulated some ideas I’d been trying to figure out how to communicate for a little while now.
For example, he discusses how the Mosaic covenant was a further revelation of God’s will. He ties this in with Paul’s discussion in Romans 7, where Paul is defending the Law, basically saying that he would not have known about coveting outside of the Law; it revealed to Paul that coveting is against God’s will and, subsequently, that he was covetous. Sin, now that Paul knew coveting was wrong, drove him to covetousness. But the Law against coveting is good. Robertson goes on to explain that much of the error of the Jews that the NT authors spend time addressing is a misunderstanding of the Law’s purpose. The Law was never meant to save but to reveal God’s will, man’s sinfulness, and the need for a once-and-for-all sacrifice. However, many of the Jews of the NT era saw the Law as the path to salvation. Robertson also has an excellent explanation of how this ties in with Paul’s commentary in 2 Corinthians 3:5-18; however, there’s too much there to go into it here, so I recommend you go read his section on that on your own. This chapter on the Mosaic covenant has been the most helpful to me so far.
As I mentioned, Robertson goes on what he calls a brief excursus to discuss covenantalism as opposed to dispensationalism. He goes through each covenant/dispensation, comparing the position he lays out in this book to notes from the Scofield Study Bible, both the original and the edited editions, and other works by dispensational authors. I’ll admit to being surprised by some of the comments from the original Scofield Study Bible, although most of them were heavily edited in the newer edition he references. Even having grown up in a dispensationalist church, I was not explicitly taught the system. The dispensationalism I was taught was almost entirely related to eschatology. Robertson does what I believe to be a fair job comparing the two systems, although I’m sure a dispensationalist would disagree.
Ember’s End
This is your spoiler warning, as these paragraphs will get into some things that could spoil some of the surprises of the story. If you plan to read these books, I recommend you skip this section for now.
As I mentioned above, this is the final book in the main Green Ember series by S. D. Smith. It started off at a fast pace and has maintained it as far as I’ve gotten in the last week or so. Thus far, I’ve enjoyed it. He maintains the tension in the story under the new circumstances in which the rabbits find themselves at the end of the third book, while adding new factors at which he’d only hinted before.
The rabbits, having won their capital city back from the birds of prey, are in a hopeless situation. There seems to be no way for them to win this war. The rabbits that came from the other land in the last book, by whom they were betrayed and who have now allied themselves with the Prey Lords, have only given them three days to prepare before they attack them. The birds of prey are preparing a major assault along with the wolves that could happen any day.
Heather and Smalls are both alive in a cave on the Forbidden Island. Heather has used the tonic, which she’d received from an old healer, on Smalls, not quite realizing that the tonic had incredible healing properties. She only realized as she herself was on the brink of death that this tonic had properties unlike any other medicine she’d used. She used it for Smalls, who recovered enough to give her some of the tonic as well, which healed her.
I’m going through this book relatively quickly, so a lot has happened. A major thing that the reader finds out is that there were apparently dragons in the land at one point and, when the rabbits defeated them, they didn’t destroy the remaining eggs but preserved them in a cave on the forbidden island. You now know that Forbidden Island is where Smalls and Heather are, and they’ve met the dragon keeper. There’s been a dragon who serves as the keeper of the eggs and has a conference with every rabbit king who comes to the throne. Now, there are several keepers who haven’t ever met with a king. The keeper has been telling Heather and Smalls this history, and they don’t quite know what to make of it. Neither of them trusts him completely, although he seems to be telling the truth as far as he’s said. They’re just not sure if he’s telling all of the truth.
It becomes clear after a time that this dragon is not the actual keeper and that he’s trying to use Heather and Smalls to get out of the caves in which the dragons are imprisoned. He has persuasive powers and uses them to get Heather and Smalls to help him. At first, they believe they’re helping him support the caverns and, eventually, have his conference with the rabbit ruler. However, it becomes apparent that he is simply trying to use them to release a whole horde of dragons into the world, where they oppress and torture the creatures they can.
This whole adventure with Heather and Smalls has been an interesting arc. I’m curious to see how Smith ties it into the main story as the rabbits of the capital are preparing for war both with the birds of prey and the rabbits that betrayed them.
That wraps it up for this week! Let me know what you think in the comments, and feel free to share what you’re reading!
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In Him and for His Glory