The winner of a brand-new NLT Mosaic Bible is…

Katie V.!

Congrats Katie, I’ll be contacting you to find out the best way to get you your Mosaic.

In order to pick a winner, I listed everyone’s name as I got a comment or ReTweet in an excel file. In the picture below, contact info has been redacted for privacy. Literally. After doing that, I went to random.org and used their randomizer to give each contestant a number. The only truly random number assigned was the first one, as each after that would become n-1 chances. (Astute readers will notice that I added extra difficulty, but starting the numbering in the wrong row. Whoops!)

I then went back to Random.org and had it give me one last random number to give me the winner:

In 1650, Archbishop James Ussher published his book “Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world,” in which he calculated that the date of creation was October 23, 4004 BC, which would make the world 6,013 years old today.

Ussher’s work is usually thought of in two ways today–a laughingstock of science or veritable scripture itself. And as one person pointed out in this video introducing Genesis, both sides are wrong. It certainly isn’t Scripturally obvious that this is so, but neither should it be a scientific whipping post. As Fred Sanders, who is an Old Earth Creationist, says:

Ussher excelled all previous attempts mainly by his precision and his encyclopedic learning: he correlated Biblical accounts with classical and Middle Eastern history, and with Jewish calendar systems. He made independent judgments about the superiority of the Hebrew text to the Greek translation of the Old Testament, about reconciling the Julian calendar to the Gregorian, and about anything else that got in his way. All in Latin, all festooned with quotations from classical authors.

Ussher was simply using the best research of his day, being far more educated than given credit for. So, although I disagree with Ussher’s final conclusion on the age of the earth, I’m still inclined to celebrate today the work of someone who used the best that he had, and who also highly valued the Scripture as God’s word. Happy birthday, Earth!

Update: Matthew over at Cryptotheology, threw the earth a party! There’s even cake.

Sojourn Community Church, where I am a member, has just released their newest album nationwide. The album is called “Over the Grave,” and contains songs inspired by and adapted from the hymns of Isaac Watts. Here’s what SojournMusic.com has to say about the album:

In the midst of the Reformation in England, Isaac Watts recognized that people needed to see the gospel in the psalms and hymns of the church, and they needed to sing them in language and metaphors that they understood. In this, he became not only the father of the modern hymn, but the pace-setter for contextualizing the gospel for the people of God.

As musicians, pastors and songwriters, our desire was to explore the hundreds of hymns that Watts wrote during his lifetime, to learn from the incredible range and depth of his lyrics, and to re-envision those songs with modern language and melodies. In particular, we gravitated towards themes that seem unfortunately absent in modern worship — themes about God’s wrath and judgment, His righteousness, and a dramatic vision of the cross and atonement of Christ.

This CD is the first installment of the Isaac Watts Project: songs inspired by and adapted from his hymns. The record was written and performed entirely by musicians from Sojourn Community Church — 35 in all. It is our hope that this project, like Watts’s hymns, will point us beyond the music and lyrics to see the glorious Savior who inspires them.

You can purchase the cd at Sojourn Music. You can also purchase the album on itunes or at amazon, where you can also preview the songs.

So, I’ve always wanted to do a give-away on my blog, but have never been able to do so. That is, until now. I am giving away a free copy of the The Holy Bible: Mosaic, thanks to the good people at Tyndale House Publishers. How do you get your copy? Well, it’s easy:

All you have to do is comment on this post, giving a reason for why I want to get the Mosaic. It doesn’t have to be why you “need” it, although that’s fine too. I really want to hear why you want. Commenting will get your name put into a drawing using super-secret, state of the art processes for determining a winner.¹ Of course, include an email (you have to anyways) so I can get in touch with you for mailing details if you win.

Bonus! Those of you who want can get your name put in a second time simply by tweeting the following:

@bryanlilly is offering a chance to win a free NLT Mosaic! Check out his blog for more details: http://bit.ly/3xZJPK

You must include the @bryanlilly, so that I can see the tweets in my replies and give you credit for it. That’s it!

The winner will be drawn and announced this following Monday, sometime after 2:30pm (i.e. after class and work).

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post from Keith Williams, general editor of the Holy Bible: Mosaic. Keith has agreed to write this post for me as a stop on the Holy Bible: Mosaic Blog Tour. I have enjoyed getting to know Keith better through emails, twitter, and even meeting him for coffee as he and his wife were travelling through Louisville. Keith was willing to step up and write this post with limited time after an unfortunate timing conflict kept our original guest author from writing (a conflict beyond his control). Truly, Keith is a man dedicated to his work.

Holy Bible: Mosaiccelebrates the diversity of the church in many ways. The collection of art, writings, prayers, and quotes from around the world and throughout the centuries in the Mosaic material highlights this diversity quite noticeably. A lot has been made of the diversity of the content, and it truly is a great feature of Mosaic, but I think the unity of the church amidst this diversity is the more important point.

One of the reasons we chose the title Mosaic for this Bible was to point to this truth. All of us, those who have been incorporated into Christ Jesus, are pieces of a larger whole: the body of Christ (Gal. 3:26-29). This body, like a mosaic, is made up of individual pieces that are each distinct, yet they come together to make a whole that is far more beautiful than any single piece, or even an group of pieces, would be on its own. Some of the pieces are beautiful on their own. And some are rather unremarkable. But as a whole, every piece is elevated by pointing to the central unifying reality: Jesus Christ.

Some of the pieces that are brought together in Mosaic are quite different. I know Mark Driscoll (p. m184) is very different from Doug Pagitt (p. m22). And both of them are very different from Anna Pak Agi (p. m139) and Augustine of Hippo (throughout). Amidst all of their differences, one thing unites them all: Jesus Christ. Jesus is the one who motivates these men and women from all over the globe and throughout history to write and speak and create art that proclaims his glory. What an awesome Lord we serve, that he has brought together a body made up of all these different pieces.

This emphasis on unity does not negate the fact that there are real differences between the way some of these people express their faith in Christ from others. Those differences should not simply be smoothed over and ignored; rather, they should be explored. Not everything we find will be agreeable to us, but many (I daresay most) of them will expand and enrich our faith rather than mislead us. God is far too big to be contained by any one person or group or culture of people that serve him. The most important thing we can do is to listen to one another and discover what God might be teaching us through the people he has called to himself from places and times distant from ourselves. Perhaps through them, we can get a better sense of what God is calling us to do in our culture, in our time, in our community.

Holy Bible: Mosaic only gives a glimpse into the mosaic of voices that God has provided us with through his people around the world and throughout history, but I hope that this glimpse will encourage believers to be mindful of the diversity within our unified body of Christ, and to celebrate both the differences and the oneness that we share.