Two leading biblical scholars and bestselling authors offer a fresh approach to the question of the unity of the whole Bible. This book shows that God's desire to be with his people is a thread running from Genesis through Revelation. Duvall and Hays make the case that God's relational presence is central to the Bible's grand narrative. It is the cohesive center that drives the whole biblical story and ties together other important biblical themes, such as covenant, kingdom, glory, and salvation history.

Two leading biblical scholars and bestselling authors offer a fresh approach to the question of the unity of the whole Bible. This book shows that God's desire to be with his people is a thread running from Genesis through Revelation. Duvall and Hays make the case that God's relational presence is central to the Bible's grand narrative. It is the cohesive center that drives the whole biblical story and ties together other important biblical themes, such as covenant, kingdom, glory, and salvation history.

Two leading biblical scholars explain that relational presence is central to the grand narrative of the Bible, showing that the thread running from Genesis to Revelation is God's desire to be with his people.

"God is with us." We say this in our sermons, prayers, and songs, but what does it really mean? For many Christians, the whole notion of God's presence remains vague and hard to define. Exploring both the Old and New Testaments, professor J. Ryan Lister seeks to recover the centrality of the presence of God in the whole storyline of Scripture—a theme that is too often neglected and therefore misunderstood. In a world that longs for—yet struggles to find—intimacy with the Almighty, this book will help you discover the truth about God's presence with his people and what his drawing near means for the Christian life.

The main aim of this book is to provide an answer to the question: is there a connection between God’s people’s praise and God’s presence? The central argument is that Scripture in both Testaments testifies to a correlation between human praise and divine presence. This hypothesis has been investigated in the light of contemporary Christian worship culture and the ensuing need for further biblical studies, which represents the background for this investigation. The study achieves the above aim by applying biblical theology as a discipline and canonical and intertextual models as a method.

An invitation to start a friendship between you and God.

The hard work required to make God real, how it changes the people who do it, and why it helps explain the enduring power of faith How do gods and spirits come to feel vividly real to people—as if they were standing right next to them? Humans tend to see supernatural agents everywhere, as the cognitive science of religion has shown. But it isn’t easy to maintain a sense that there are invisible spirits who care about you. In How God Becomes Real, acclaimed anthropologist and scholar of religion T. M. Luhrmann argues that people must work incredibly hard to make gods real and that this effort—by changing the people who do it and giving them the benefits they seek from invisible others—helps to explain the enduring power of faith. Drawing on ethnographic studies of evangelical Christians, pagans, magicians, Zoroastrians, Black Catholics, Santeria initiates, and newly orthodox Jews, Luhrmann notes that none of these people behave as if gods and spirits are simply there. Rather, these worshippers make strenuous efforts to create a world in which invisible others matter and can become intensely present and real. The faithful accomplish this through detailed stories, absorption, the cultivation of inner senses, belief in a porous mind, strong sensory experiences, prayer, and other practices. Along the way, Luhrmann shows why faith is harder than belief, why prayer is a metacognitive activity like therapy, why becoming religious is like getting engrossed in a book, and much more. A fascinating account of why religious practices are more powerful than religious beliefs, How God Becomes Real suggests that faith is resilient not because it provides intuitions about gods and spirits—but because it changes the faithful in profound ways.