Pressed into action by third party sellers offering the first edition for $35 because it was “out of print” and therefore somehow “rare and valuable” (rolling my eyes as I type that), I finished my rewrite.
The Bridge: Crossing Over Into the Fullness of Covenant Life is a plea to the Body to re-evaluate the Father that Jesus Christ/Yeshua the Messiah preached and to enter into the relationship that He created us for and longs for. The Bridge is my love-letter to the Father, an apologetic of sorts for the type of relationship we are called to live with Him as His children, ambassadors, servants and Bride. Whereas King, Kingdom, Citizen explores the reality of God as King, and ourselves as the citizens of His very real Kingdom, The Bridge is all about the Body as a Family with God as the Patriarch. In a world where families are so often twisted and mangled with abuse, addiction and dysfunction, that too many believers simply have no idea how families were always meant to relate to one another in an atmosphere of absolute trust and loyalty. Too many modern fathers are absent and we need, as a Body, to learn what it truly means to have a good Father. I call my message “restoration theology,” returning Christianity to the factory specs – I don’t much like reformations and protests, I think they are more about being angry at other believers and what they believe. I believe in going forward into what Messiah and His disciples taught and how they lived.
I rewrote the Bridge after a year of extensive Ancient Near Eastern and First Century research, some of which disproved a few items I wrote about on page 208 of the original edition in the chapter “So what about Christmas and Easter?” Sadly, I fell prey to my own poor scholarship by passing on some very popular urban legends that I disproved last summer, but hadn’t remembered writing about (it isn’t as easy to remember everything in a book as you would think, even if you wrote it yourself). When I figured it out, I realized that one paragraph was hurting the witness of the rest of the book and so I pulled it from the market and put the rest of the book under the microscope. I removed 4,000 words that weren’t really necessary and added 20,000 more of new material – including expanded understandings on subjects like animal sacrifice, tithing, headcoverings, women teaching, and the Roman legislated/forced split between Christianity and Judaism in the 4th century.
If you already own the original, I am not asking you to buy a new copy. First weekend in March, Amazon will allow me to give it away for free on Kindle for a few days and you can get a free Kindle ap for your computer, phone, or android device. If you subscribe to my blog you will get the notification when it is available.
I can’t even begin to express how much I regret that one paragraph, but it did give a more experienced me a chance to offer a better book for new readers. I just couldn’t sell the old one anymore. No matter how many people believe something, we have to be able to prove it in order to teach it as truth – theory is for evolutionists and goodness knows we bash them over the head with their need for absolute proof in order to be credible. We are servants of the Most High – we have to do better and as much as possible, what we teach has to be above reproach, especially when we claim to be teaching from the archaeological record. I was lazy and I assumed that everyone else was doing their homework so I didn’t have to – even though I had carefully researched the Bible verses and made sure that they said what I claimed, I fell short when it came to “common knowledge” of some things that aren’t in Scripture but could have been researched. The bulk of what I teach rested upon the integrity of one paragraph, and I was devastated when I saw that I had fallen short. Our Heavenly Father and His Messiah deserve better. When we teach about Him, His reputation is at stake, not simply ours. People see us, they don’t see Him – we have to do our very best.
So I did better. It still isn’t Hemingway, Bronte, or Austen – but I feel a lot better about what I have produced.
