The Book of Isaiah speaks in troubled times. Its message for God's people Israel stretches across prosperity, loss, disaster and the beginnings of a fresh hope. It is rooted in the events of its time and conveys God's message about how to be faithful people and how to be a part of God's people in their time. As Christians try to serve the kingdom in our own time, the Book of Isaiah speaks to us of the need to seek God, to listen and to understand his word. This commentary seeks to explore some of these themes and reflections. It looks to create a space in which Christian readers can think and reflect about what God is calling us to now as we seek to serve the Kingdom of our God. Engaging with critical scholarship but designed to be accessible for those beginning formal theological study or Christians who want to go deeper in their understanding of the book, The Kingdom of Our God demonstrates that the words of the prophets can still speak to us today

ECPA Top Shelf Book Cover Award When the Israelites exclaimed, "Here are your gods!" at the sight of the golden calf, they were attempting to hold on to the God of their history while fashioning idols for their own purposes. In today's Western world, plenty of shiny false gods still hold power--idols of prosperity, nationalism, and self-interest. Christians desperately need to name and expose these idols. We must retrieve the biblical emphasis on idolatry and apply it anew in our journey of following Jesus. In "Here Are Your Gods," Old Testament scholar Christopher J. H. Wright combines a biblical study of idolatry with practical discipleship. He calls readers to consider connections between Old Testament patterns and today's culture, especially recurring temptations to trust in political power. Now as much as ever, we need a biblically informed understanding of the many ways humans make gods for themselves, the danger of idols, and how God calls us to join him in the battle against idolatry as part of his ongoing mission to be known and worshiped by all peoples.

Previous scholarship hints at the connection between Judges 19-21 and Ruth (as set in dialogue), but there has yet to be a study to articulate this relationship. Through a Bakhtinian-canonical perspective, a comparative analysis of these texts unveils intertextual correlations. Lexical and thematic connections include shared idioms, contrasting themes of ("ban") and ("loving-kindness," "covenant-faithfulness"), silence and speech, abuse and potential for abuse, gendered violence and feminine agency. This case-study reveals that Ruth, as a text and as a woman, embodies a voice of answerability to the silenced and abused women in Judges 19-21

After a long and painful wait for the Jewish exiles, Ezra and Nehemiah lead their people back to the Promised Land. Despite hardships and setbacks, they would rebuild their nation in time for the arrival of its Messiah. Whenever we are tempted to doubt the promises of God these books remind us that that God is a promise-keeper that is able to redeem any situation. God inspired the Bible for a reason. He wants you read it and let it change your life. If you are willing to take this challenge seriously, then you will love Phil Moore's devotional commentaries. Their bite-sized chapters are punchy and relevant, yet crammed with fascinating scholarship. Welcome to a new way of reading the Bible. Welcome to the Straight to the Heart series.

Roy L. Heller looks at the prophets Elijah and Elisha in the books of Kings charting a two-fold characterization that portrays these prophetic figures in both positive and negative lights. In the narratives of Kings Elijah and Elisha often parallel other prophetic figures from Israel's history: they perform miraculous signs, they speak in the name of God, and they pronounce judgments upon the nation of Israel for its idolatrous worship. There are, however, other stories which have troubled readers and scholars alike: Elijah's cowardly running from the threats of Jezebel, his self-pitying complaint to God that he was the only true Israelite left, and Elisha's cursing a group of little boys who, in turn, are slaughtered by two female bears. Scholars have traditionally ignored or belittled the negative stories of the prophets, seeing them as either late additions to the biblical text or as minor, unimportant stories that can easily be dismissed. Heller, however, argues that the dual characterization of Elijah and Elisha reflects an ambivalent attitude that the narrator of Kings has toward prophecy as a whole, an attitude that is reflected in the book of Deuteronomy itself. This forces readers of the biblical text to pose the question; "how may Israel best know and follow God?" The stories of Elijah and Elisha make the answer clear: the words and lives of the prophets are a possible way for God to reveal how Israel is to live, but those words and lives must always be considered with a degree of suspicion and must always be evaluated in light of the clear and straightforward teaching of Deuteronomy.

Drawing insights from gender studies and the environmental humanities, Demonic Bodies and the Dark Ecologies of Early Christian Culture analyzes how ancient Christians constructed the Christian body through its relations to demonic adversaries. Through case studies of New Testament texts, Gnostic treatises, and early Christian church fathers (e.g., Ignatius of Antioch, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian of Carthage), Travis W. Proctor notes that early followers of Jesus construed the demonic body in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways, as both embodied and bodiless, "fattened" and ethereal, heavenly and earthbound. Across this diversity of portrayals, however, demons consistently functioned as personifications of "deviant" bodily practices such as "magical" rituals, immoral sexual acts, gluttony, and pagan religious practices. This demonization served an exclusionary function whereby Christian writers marginalized fringe Christian groups by linking their ritual activities to demonic modes of (dis)embodiment. The tandem construction of demonic and human corporeality demonstrates how Christian authors constructed the bodies that inhabited their cosmos-human, demon, and otherwise-as part of overlapping networks or "ecosystems" of humanity and nonhumanity. Through this approach, Proctor provides not only a more accurate representation of the bodies of ancient Christians, but also new resources for reimagining the enlivened ecosystems that surround and intersect with our modern ideas of "self."