2023 Book Recommendations

The Theme of God’s Attributes and Why It Matters

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder and this is our end of the year book recommendation episode. Each year around November we try to give some recommendations that you might use for your own Christmas requests or Christmas lists for others, as well as books that you might think of reading in the new year.

And some books that we recommend are short, and so you can just get through a few of them. If you have a space in your reading schedule, if you think that far ahead, if you're that organized, I am definitely not that organized.

But some of the books we recommend are quite substantial, and that's going to be the case today. And these books you would want to kind of set out a space of a number of months that you could devote to them.

Well, let's jump right in. The theme that we're going to be covering in the books that we recommend this year is a theme that we've recommended before, but there's a reason we are re-recommending it, and that is it's the theme of the existence and the attributes of God, the character of God.

How does God describe himself in Scripture? How do those who know him best describe him? Why is he described in certain ways at certain times in the unfolding of redemptive history, in the lives of believers or unbelievers?

As we look at those passages, oftentimes where it occurs is critical to understanding why he says it, and that's helpful to know, how do we apply those things to our lives? The theme of the attributes of God is so significant.

It's not the only theme in Christianity, but it is the fundamental theme. It is the theme from which every other truth of Christianity, you know, sprouts. It's the soil. So even when we think of a Christocentric approach to Scripture, where God is demonstrating his perfections most clearly in the person, in the work of his Son, it is your understanding of the attributes of God that helps you to see Christ in the right measurements, and not to shrink him down to perhaps a cultural Jesus.

Every passage in Scripture that we read, every passage where we find that pronoun he or him or you or thou, is greatly enlarged by how you understand the character of the person behind those pronouns, he, God, him, thou.

Puritanism as a Tradition of Doctrine, Experience, and Pastoral Application

Well, when we look at the attributes of God, there are a couple of books out there that are particularly helpful, and in my mind, they rise above the average writer, and we're going to recommend two of those today, and they are both from Puritan writers, and they are both books that have been published previously, but are now available in a new format, and I think the new format is so helpful, it's worth going back and introducing you to those, but let's talk about the Puritans for a second.

The Puritan movement is basically from the time of Elizabeth I's coronation, and it lasts about 100 years, 1662. So, 1558 -1662, those are general dates, it's not exact. It is an enormous movement. It covers not only England and Wales and Scotland and Ireland, but also the colonies.

It covers a century of preachers. It covers men who, in their ecclesiology, are Presbyterian, but also men who are Baptist, also men who are Anglicans, and men who are Congregationalists. It goes through the period of the early Puritans, like William Perkins and others, who are very close to the English Reformers, all the way up to men like Matthew Henry, who really is closer to the time of the Great Awakening or the Evangelical Revival men.

So, there's a lot of variety. There's quite a wide spectrum when we talk about Puritanism. But we can say this, there are things that made Puritans closer to each other than they were to any other group.

So, John Bunyan, though a Baptist, held a lot more in common with a man like Richard Baxter or John Owen or even Samuel Rutherford, though they were not Baptist, than he did with fellow Baptists. Puritanism really is an attempt to purify the Church of England from what these men felt were leftovers of an unbiblical pattern, particularly an unbiblical pattern that was represented in centuries of Roman Catholicism.

The Elizabethan Compromise, you remember, when Queen Elizabeth came to power, she did not want any more of the bloodbath that had been under her sister, Queen Mary. So, Elizabeth is in power. She wants to create a peace, and she does.

She creates a compromise that prevents more bloodshed, but it doesn't really satisfy anyone who's very serious about their religion. It doesn't satisfy the Roman Catholic, obviously. It doesn't really even satisfy the Church of England people who wanted to see the Reformation to continue to be applied into every area of church and family and politics and national life.

And so, the people that pressed for more changes were nicknamed by their opponents, Puritans or Precisionists. It was certainly not a name they chose for themselves, but it was a nickname. It was a disparaging title.

You think you're pure. You're so precise. The Puritans basically took the great doctrines that had been rediscovered and re-explained during the Protestant Reformation and built upon that foundation.

So, you don't find Puritan books focusing primarily on the same topics that Luther or Calvin or Zwingli focused on, but really, you find them building on those men. So, you find the application of the gospel, the application of the sufficiency of Scripture in the present situation they were in.

So, the Puritans, if we think of the British Puritans, they are in a situation where, especially in England and Wales, 96 of the nation has been baptized, christened into the Anglican Church. And so, as a Puritan, you're pastoring people who feel that maybe they're okay with God because of that baptism.

So, Puritans really hammered away at the themes of regeneration, true and false conversion, the Christian life that flows from that, sanctification. Really, all of life, as we've used this phrase before, all of life lived to the glory of God.

And in doing that, really, a Puritan is a pastor who focuses on pneumatology, the doctrine of the work of the Spirit. What does the Holy Spirit do in taking the object of truths of the Christian religion and applying it in every area of individual and corporate Christian living?

So, what we find in the Puritan movement is an attempt to wed the objective and the subjective aspects of Christianity. And I feel that they did, really, a very good job. Not a perfect job, of course.

The only perfect book is the Scripture. But if you want to read writers who have the wedding of intellect and heart, of objective and experiential aspects of Christianity, I think it's very difficult to beat the Puritans.

George Swinnick and *The Incomparableness of God*

So, let's consider our first recommendation for the end of the year, and that is a book that is entitled The Incomparableness of God by George Swinnick. Now, this book is available in two formats, and I want to talk about the formats later.

We're going to talk about who George Swinnick is first. But here is the newest edition of this book, printed by Banner of Truth in their Puritan paperback series. If you're familiar with the Puritan paperback series, you can tell by the look of the spine and the front cover that they have redesigned the entire series of Puritan paperbacks.

And these are very lightly edited key works, kind of the best of the best of the Puritan works in the area of devotional Christian living. Another format that you can find this in is a book published by Reformation Heritage Books, and it's in their small series called The Puritan Treasures for Today.

And it's given a new title, and it's a little more edited than the Banner version by a man named Stephen Yule, but it is a really good job. And it's not, even though it looks a lot thinner, it's not that much more edited.

And its title is The Blessed and Boundless God. And Yule does really a great job of this. I tend to be a bit of a stickler. You know, when it comes to old books, I want the original, not heavily edited.

But in both of these examples, the editing only takes away the difficult archaic language and leaves everything that's helpful. So I highly recommend either of those. Now let's talk a little bit about George Swinnick, because I want to introduce you to the author.

Swinnick, actually, not much is known about him. Here is a set of his books that Banner publishes, and I think volume four is the volume from which that book is taken. So Swinnick wrote a lot, but we don't know that much of his life.

I have a book here by Stephen Yule, and this is published by Wipf and Stock Publishers, or Paternoster. And this is a company that generally does PhDs and then republishes them. So it's a part of this series called Studies in Christian History and Thought, Puritan Spirituality, the Fear of God in the Affective Theology of George Swinnick.

So there it is. I believe this is Mr. Yule's PhD, slightly edited and made in a popular version, but not edited too much, because you can tell it's a PhD because there are hundreds and hundreds of footnotes, and it's written in a slightly academic way.

Now, if you want to get to know more about the theology and the life and the times, the context of George Swinnick, this is a great book that you could pick up. Well, Swinnick, let me just give you what we do know about him.

He was born in 1627 in Kent, England, and his father died while he was still a boy. So George was raised by his uncle. His uncle's name was Robert Swinnick. And Robert was an influential man. He was the mayor of the town of Maidstone, and he was a very godly man.

The town itself was significantly impacted by Puritan preaching. Robert would often lead the family in prayer and worship. And I want to read you a quote that George gives about his uncle's home and what it was like living in that place.

And he called it the school of religion. It was a place where he learned about the Lord. He said, my uncle's house had holiness to the Lord written on it. And then he explains what he means. His manner, his uncle's manner, was to pray twice a day by himself, once or twice a day with his wife, and twice a day with his family, besides singing psalms, reading, and expounding the scriptures to the family.

Remember, his uncle was not a pastor. He's a mayor. Which morning and evening he daily did. The Sabbath he dedicated wholly to God's service, and did not only himself, but took care that all within his gate should spend the day in secret and private duties, and in attendance on public ordinances.

Of their proficiency, by the last, he would take an account upon after their return from the assembly. That's the old way of saying, after they went to church, he would sit down and talk with the servants of the home, the family members, and with George, his nephew, and ask them, you know, what did you get from worship today?

What did you learn? How are you going to apply that? So that was the home he was brought up in. Swinick eventually went to Cambridge University, to the college that we call Emanuel College, and this was a very Puritan college.

It was so Puritan that the queen called the man who founded the college in, and she said to him, basically, I hear that you have planted a Puritan college, you know, and this was against, you know, her wishes, and he said to the queen, certainly not, I would never do anything against your wishes.

I have simply planted an acorn, from which a mighty oak will grow. It was definitely a Puritan-oriented college, and it's amazing if you look at the history or the biographies of the most famous Puritans, the ones we tend to have their books today, you'll find that so many of them went to Cambridge, and most that went to Cambridge went to Emanuel.

Eventually, he became the vicar or a pastor in 1650, where he served in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, until 1660, so 10 years he's a pastor, and then the Great Ejection, where the tide of political favor turns, and in 1662, the king and the newly empowered anti-Puritan parliament remove the Puritan pastors, so thousands kicked out in one year, and for the next decade, Swinnick serves as a chaplain in the family of Richard Hampton, of Great Hampton in Buckinghamshire, following the Declaration of Indulgence in 1672, so basically 10 years he's a tutor to a family where he can, you know, practice pastoral ministry over a few people, while it's illegal for him to be a pastor.

10 years of doing that, the government kind of eases up on the Puritans a few times. There's some back and forth, but in 1672, he returns to minister in his hometown, and he dies one year later. Well, let me tell you a little bit about the book that he wrote, The Incomparableness of God, and I'm going to use the new Boehner edition to give you the description.

If you look at it, it has 26 chapters. It's only about 195 pages, so it's not an enormous Puritan book, and Swinnick is one of the easiest of Puritans to read. The book is divided up in major sections with multiple chapters under each section, so of the 26 chapters, they kind of lay out like this.

First, the first major section is the being of God. God is incomparable. There is no one like God. He is solitary in his glory, in his being, and he speaks about the incommunicable attributes of God's greatness, you know, the eternity of God, the infinity of God.

These are aspects of God's character, or his being, rather, that are not shared with any other being. He also speaks of the attributes of God's moral goodness, and these are the communicable attributes, attributes which God does, in some measure, share in the sense that, you know, he causes that to be reflected in his creation.

So, the attributes of holiness, or righteousness, or, you know, purity, or goodness, or love, and patience, and these are the things that we do, as we walk with the Lord, we do begin to reflect him. And he ends that first section by speaking of how unique God's being is.

In the second major section, he speaks of the works of God, primarily the creation, the providence of God, where God rules over all matter, and the redemptive work of God, and he talks about how God does this work.

It is effortless. He is not helped in any of these. The third major section of this book speaks of the Word of God, and how there is no word, no communication from any being that compares to the communication of God, and all of its perfections.

And finally, he ends the book with a fourth major section, which I would say could be divided into two. Warnings, or admonitions. If God is incomparable, consider the incomparable guilt, and shame, and judgment due to those who reject this God, who reject his works, who, you know, who have no interest in those, who won't listen to his incomparable Word.

And then finally, the exhortations, or the encouragements. If you have embraced this incomparable God, you know, desire to know him more. And he gives so many encouraging statements in that last section.

Now, if you choose to read this in the other form that Yule has edited, you'll see that he has, one of the things he has done, other than just kind of updating the archaic language, is he has totally reorganized the chapters.

So instead of having 27 longer chapters, you have 45 smaller chapters. And so all he's done is taken the major subpoints of each chapter in the original book, and he's made each of those a small chapter.

So instead of having 26, you know, eight-page or nine-page chapters, you have 46 two or three-page chapters. And so in some ways, he has simplified it for you. So, you know, he has the same major sections, God's incomparable being, God's incomparable attributes, his incomparable works, his incomparable words, and then applications.

But under each of those, we find that he gives the subpoints are separate chapters. So in some ways, he makes it very easy for you to work through that. Let me say, the strengths of this book, whichever form you read it in, it is to the point.

It is, for a Puritan, it's a pretty short book. They probably would have called it a tractate, you know. It's kind of their idea of a pamphlet. And so it gets right to the point and says such helpful things without a lot of added explanation or sermonic material.

And so if you kind of just want the nuts and bolts of the incomparableness of your God, either of these books would be helpful. It is easier to read than some other Puritans, but it is not as complete as the other book recommendation that we're going to give you.

Practical suggestion, 26 chapters if you use the Banner of Truth edition. And you know, that in my mind, you could do a couple of things with that. You could, in one month, read a chapter a day. As I mentioned, it's under, it's 194 pages.

So a chapter a day is doable. If you don't read it on Sundays or don't read it on Saturdays, if you give yourself one day a week off, basically you can read through this in one month. Give yourself one day a week where you got too busy to read.

And so if you were to take this and just decide that for one month, you would give serious, earnest focus on the incomparableness of your God, I think it would be a really sweet month. I always suggest that you have a notebook or a computer near you.

I prefer pen and paper, and I don't like to have the thing that I'm recording on able to, you know, tell me that I got a new email every 20 minutes or a new text. So I like the old way. But however you do it, I would definitely have something where I can record the things that God is teaching me through this, some of the applications.

And I would highly suggest that you take the passages that he mentions, those passages on these aspects of God that really grip you as you're reading them, and set them aside and make a list of verses to be memorized.

I think you will find that for the sake of meditation, it will do your soul so much more good. I remember reading Charles Bridges on Psalm 119, and Bridges said that passages not meditated on, he said they rarely carry any significant impact to our lives.

Superficial knowledge, he says, doesn't help. So that's our first recommendation. Now let me give you the second recommendation. It's one that we've recommended before, but it's in a new format. So I'm not going to say as much about it, but it's these two big brown volumes, and it is The Existence and Attributes of God by Stephen Charnock, and it's been recently republished by Crossway.

Now it's by Stephen Charnock who wrote, I think, Banner Has a Five Volume Set. These two red volumes are two of the five. I've loaned out or lost the other volumes in that set, but the first two volumes are really are what you find in these two big brown books.

What Crossway has done is such a helpful thing, and we'll talk about why I think this is the best format for Charnock's famous book that I've ever seen, and I have always loved Banner's edition or Baker.

I think the other one I have is an old Baker print that's 900 pages, so it's like a giant brick, but I really think that Crossway has done just a super job with these. So quickly, Stephen Charnock, born in 1628 in London, went to the same college as our friend George Swinnick, Emanuel College, and it was during that time in college under a very godly tutor who later became, I believe, the Archbishop of Canterbury, but a Puritan Archbishop of Canterbury.

Under this man's influence, Charnock was converted. When he was converted, it not only changed, of course, everything about his spiritual relationship with God and the way he acted toward other people, but it radically altered his studying and his work ethic, and he excelled academically in the field of religion.

Eventually, he left there and went to work with a family as a tutor for a short while. He was eventually in Ireland living with Oliver Cromwell's son, Henry Cromwell, and while he was there, he ministered and preached in the area.

Eventually, in 1660, with the restoration of King Charles, and then 1662, the Great Ejection that I mentioned previously of the Puritan ministers, for 15 years, he goes back to London and unable legally to pastor a church or to teach in a school, teach religion in any way like that.

He lives with a and kind of becomes a chaplain to an individual wealthy man's family and privately teaches little studies and tries to help people as he can. After the government relaxes its restrictions, 1675, he becomes a pastor again, and he becomes a co-pastor at this time with a famous Puritan, which you probably know.

His name, Thomas Watson, and for five years they labored together until he died. Sharnock died at age 53. That's quite significant to me because I'm 53. He dies at age 53, and he was preaching. He was at the end of preaching through a very long series of sermons on the existence and attributes of God.

The books, these two brown volumes. Although he wrote a lot, and it's as a writer he's best known, it's interesting that only one book was published by Sharnock when he was alive. Every other book was published posthumously after he had died.

They took his Latin notes and translated them into English. So, again, what about this book? Well, he covers the major attributes of God. He starts with chapter one on the existence of God, the evidences for God's existence.

Chapter two, or discourse two, is on practical atheism. I think that that's worth buying the book. What he talks about when he talks about practical atheism, in my opinion, is so penetrating and convicting.

Living as if God doesn't exist, or living as if. So, not saying you don't believe God exists, but living as if he doesn't. Or the second way he says that practical atheism can show up is saying you believe in the God of the Bible, but living as if he is different than he describes himself to be in the scriptures.

And he gives about 80 pages on that, and it's just so helpful, especially for a modern evangelical, where we would, you know, go down fighting saying we believe in the God of the Bible and not a God of any other culture.

And yet, when he talks about practical atheism, we have to ask ourselves, is that me? Now, in the new format, it's two-volume instead of the giant one-volume baker. So, that's much easier to handle.

And I wish I had other older editions to show you, but to compare with this. But this print and the page, the color of the page, the clarity of the print, the size of the print, the way it's laid out, you know, it's not a spiritual thing, but it really makes a difference when you're reading a long book, how the company has laid it out, the size of the margins, you know.

It's just so well done. I think this is kind of a faux leather cover with kind of the fancy old-style spine. And even though it isn't real leather, it really does feel and look nice. And so, okay, so those are all the aesthetic issues that aren't so important.

But let me say this. At the beginning of each of the major sections, each of his chapters is about 100 pages long. And the book as a whole, the two volumes taken together, about 1 ,000 to 1 ,200 pages, depending on which edition you have.

So, each chapter, a chapter dealing with the all-power of God, the omnipotence of God, will be about 90 pages long. That's a lot of material. And Sharnock is not like John Owen where he has hundreds and hundreds of subpoints.

Sharnock is much easier to understand, but Crossway has made it even easier because their editor and contributor to this, Mark Jones, a modern author, you may know some of his books that he's written.

Mark Jones writes an editor's introduction to each section. So there's just a few pages where Jones says, this is what Sharnock's going to cover, and this is how he's going to approach this topic. And having read those couple of pages, you're really ready to benefit from the chapter that will be 100 pages long in a way that you wouldn't have been without that.

So Crossway, whether it's the way they have bound it, printed it, or added editorial comments, has done such a great job of making this book on the attributes of God, which I think that in the English language is the single greatest help that we have outside of Scripture, to knowing the superlative, incomparable God and in His perfections.

So I'm very grateful. I was a little skeptical when it first came out because I'm always loyal to the old editions that I've had before. The Baker edition, I've talked through that many times with small groups of...with the church or with small groups of ministerial candidates.

And I have all my notes. You know, I write a lot in books, and so every page is kind of covered in my responses to what Sharnock says. And I would never give that up, but when I saw this edition, I am very tempted to work through it again.

And I think that you'll find it helpful. Let me give one last suggestion. While this is a hefty read, it will repay you tenfold for all the labor it requires. And it might be a year long. Not all large books, not all Puritan books are worth all the reading, but this is.

So I cannot think of a more significant help, a more significant step forward outside of meditation on scripture and prayer and applying that than reading Sharnock on the attributes of God. Some of the attacks he gives in his applications, you know, so he'll give positive applications and he gives warnings.

If God is this way, then, you know, beware of these sins. Some of the applications the Puritans give are outdated, or they may be there. At least I feel they're outdated for my culture where I'm at in North Mississippi.

For example, much of their writing was against the Roman Catholic Church because of their present situation. And so I don't have a lot of contact with Roman Catholicism in North Mississippi. So I don't read every single word on every single page.

When I see sections where he says, now a word about the Pope, you know, I just move to the next section, the next subheading. But in spite of that, I think it's just wonderful. So my final suggestion before we close down our podcast is that if you are a brave reader, you could take one of these, whichever edition that you prefer, and you could take Sharnock's two volumes and a notebook or your computer, and you could set aside 2023 to work through this book and these two Brown books.

I would probably, if I were doing it, I would be reading Sharnock. And then as I reached a place in Sharnock that talked about something that Swinnick speaks about. So when he speaks about God's incomparable power, and I'm reading about the power of God here, I would read Swinnick at the same time and just kind of compare what they say.

Again, I think you'll find that Swinnick gives you the same basic thoughts that Sharnock does. But what Sharnock does is he just gives you so many illustrations and he draws from the entire Bible so that it's just a much more complete and full treatment.

Both of them have their benefits. Well, so whether you're shopping for someone else or whether you're shopping for yourself or planning some reading for next year, George Swinnick, The Incomparableness of God, or the same book under a different title, The Blessed and Boundless God, Banner of Truth, Reformation Heritage Books, or Crossway's new two-volume, Stephen Sharnock's The Existence and Attributes of God.

So you can choose from those books, different ways you could use them. I would also recommend that both of these men that we mentioned were mightily impacted during their college years. If you know young men, young ladies in college who are earnest believers, new believers, especially those young men training for the ministry, they may not think that they're ready to read a big two-volume book like that, or they may not even be interested in a Puritan book, but I don't always wait for people to be interested to give them the best.

If they love the Lord, they will get interested in it. It would be a wonderful gift for them. The things that God does in the life of a young person during that stage of learning, you know, you're figuring out who you are and what the Christian life is.

Wonderful opportunity to give them the very best. Everything we've talked about, you can find links to those in the show notes.

Giveaway Announcement and Closing

Hold on just a second before you go. During the episode, we forgot to announce we're running a giveaway of all the books John highlighted in this episode. We're also including the latest book Medi Gratiae just published.

It's the sermons from our first major study, Behold Your God, Rethinking God Biblically. We're going to pull the winner from our email list, so if you already receive our two emails a week, you don't have to do anything more.

You're already entered. If you don't get our emails but you'd like to enter the giveaway, click the link in the description below. We'll see you next week.