Armchair Book Review: Unveiling Mercy

 Chad Bird's devotional balances everything about as well as any devotional out there.

When I first met Steve Byrnes from 1517 Publishing, he kept telling me how I have to read this Chad Bird guy. I must admit I had never heard of Bird before. I later found I had come across a quote of his but he wasn't a name that I had particularly taken note of. Reading his devotional Unveiling Mercy: 365 Daily Devotions Based On Insights from the Old Testament Hebrew has totally changed that. I now stop to catch videos of his when I see them pass through my Facebook feed, listen to his "40 Minutes in the Old Testament" podcast, and hope at some point to get his book The Christ Key. To put it simply, Bird's book was the right kind of everything.

I believe language is important, but no one demonstrates this as well as Bird. In just about every devotion I read, I found the word study he offered enlightening. Yet the book is not heavy or anything. It is perfectly accessible to anyone all the while I always found it insightful and not too shallow. It deepens your biblical knowledge. I first used it for my church's weekly prayer pauses where we would read from a devotional, and eventually switched over to it for my own personal daily devotions as I enjoyed it so much.

The book is very well drawn out. Each devotion is ascetically pleasing to the eyes, easy to delineate between date, title of the devotion, Hebrew word, biblical text, and devotion itself. No page looked cluttered or busy. No devotion felt too long or drawn out. Along with showing the word in the Hebrew letters at the top, in the devotion itself he would transliterate it in italics so it was always clear one was encountering a Hebrew word. The devotion would often give background on the word such as its roots or where else it was used in scripture or its wider meaning. In each way one felt they had a better grasp on the devotional text at hand. 

But the most important piece, what makes this such a good devotional and so highly recommended, was that every devotion ultimately moves towards Christ. Bird's Old Testament commentary is the most Christocentric devotional I've ever read. I love that about the book. It helps us truly understand Jesus as the heart of the Scripture, fights against the modern marcionistic tendency to divorce Jesus from the God of the Old Testament, and sheds new lights on both the devotional text at hand and Christ himself. This feature alone, even if it didn't have the wonderful word studies would make this devotional as evangelical (in the true sense of the word) as any and worth my recommendation. 

Each devotion ends with a very brief prayer, sometimes from the scriptures themselves. The devotions would sometimes from one day to another be one texts rather close to one another, really enriching therefore some biblical texts as a whole.

I honestly have no critique of this book. I can't speak highly enough about it. People who want a Jesus-focused, enlightening, accessible daily devotional will likely do no better than this book. It earns my highest grade.