Review of One Thousand Gifts by WORLD Mag editor-in-chief

WORLD Magazine is a biweekly conservative evangelical Protestantism news magazine and the most widely-read Christian news magazine in the United States. WORLD’s editor-in-chief, Marvin Olasky — who wrote in print columns in the magazine, in regards to One Thousand Gifts, “… lilting prose… biblical thanksgiving…. it’s a pleasure to turn to a remarkably gifted writer who poetically describes God’s grace in big things and small. Amen” — here offers the following thoughts…

It is good to have a high view of Scripture and want to protect it against those who would diminish God’s Word. Some writers do misuse and abuse Scripture.

Voskamp’s use of imagery  [in the last chapter of One Thousand Gifts] to show the intimacy of our relationship to God, has raised the question, “If we, as Christians, were supposed to think about our relationship with God in sexual terms, wouldn’t God have made that clear in His word?”

Well, He did describe the relationship in those terms, repeatedly and explicitly in the Song of Solomon and in the prophets, both positively and negatively; see, for example, Ezekiel 16.

I once taught a course on Puritan writing, and I recall that they used imagery in the same way Voskamp does.

Puritan Francis Rous in 1661 preached on “Mystical Marriage” and described “a chamber within us, and a bed of love in that chamber, wherein Christ meets and rests with the soul.”

John Cotton of First Church in Boston, describing how we should long for Christ, wrote, “It will inflame our hearts to kisse him again.”

Isaac Watts wrote that pastors would frequently “express the fervor of devout love to our Savior, in the style of the Song of Solomon.”

More recently, Charles Spurgeon and A.W. Tozer have also used  the same imagery in describing God’s closeness to and care for us.

Since it’s beyond us to know the depths of God’s love but not beyond us to grasp marital love, God describes the former by the latter.

Good writers convey the unknown by showing us what we know —  and using that to explain what we don’t know.

Marvin Olasky
Editor-in-Chief
WORLD Magazine

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