Bible Study Review: The Joy of Fearing God

Jerry Bridges is the author of the very good book by the same title. I read it years ago and started the companion Bible study back then. For some reason, I quit doing the study. I just recently picked it back up again.

 I’d like to preface this review by saying that any Bible study is profitable, simply because you are getting into the Word of God. Having said that, I felt let down by this one. The whole study seems to have been put together by someone else, like maybe an editor did it, and not Mr. Bridges himself. It did not seem to be consistent throughout. Some verse lists and applications were excellent, and others had nothing to do with the question asked. Many verses had different contexts than the questions and were off-message. I felt like someone (maybe the publisher) created the workbook to be a companion to the book, but that the person who assembled the workbook only used a concordance to find word ideas and didn’t really search out meanings and contexts. It is disjointed.

I also felt that whoever wrote the study was on a completely different plane than I was. (Maybe it’s me who’s in outer space? I don’t know.)

I was disappointed with this study, and I frankly wouldn’t recommend it. I can, however, recommend the book, The Joy of Fearing God, which has some rich insights and beautiful language.