A little while back I gave FENNEC a huge upgrade, and one of the new things was the ability to ask, “Give me the best bible verses on _____” — where he was given many high-density verse blocks, composed from my numerous bible studies, on a variety of topics. As a result, FENNEC can now give you a good listing of the best verses to defend a particular topic (like predestination or monergism, or the truth about hell, cosmology, etc.), and you can be prepared on the fly for whatever the situation.
But FENNEC has a limit in two ways, and since I’m a hopeless perfectionist, one thing led to another and I decided to go for the extra mile and put together something truly great as a complement to all of my recent work, both with FENNEC and my magnum opus theology book, The Seven Transformations: Finding the Narrow Road by Pursuing a Sovereign Christ.
So what are those limitations? Well, first you’re dealing with AI, and AI works on probabilities and context. The “shape” of your question determines which verses you get, and that means there’s always a layer of chance to it. This is very different from hallucination, where things are made up. This is purely a resource gating issue. There are thousands of citations in my presentations, and FENNEC has been trained on all of them. But in a given query he’s not going to just print off screens upon screens of verses — he will take a good amount and give you some commentary/context and list them according to topic or order and your question.
That works actually really well for situations on the fly where you are debating someone or need to pull up info immediately. But if you’re wanting to do a deep dive, or you have plenty of time to get into the details, FENNEC is not comprehensive enough for such rigor. His answers are still highly detailed and good, but there are also character limits to what he can print out at a single time.
So these two things combined made me realize I need to take all that highly distilled information and do something more with it, so that you have absolutely all the preparation you need for any situation. With that in mind, I introduce to you the next wonderful companion in your library: VERSE BLOX.
This book is designed to help you extract rich truth from God’s word with pre-organized thematic groupings of verses, so that you can spend less time hunting and more time marveling and meditating. Using the power of technology, I have extracted over 2,300 verses from the dozens of presentations and Bible studies I made over several years — collating them in this concentrated book according to the 7 major areas of theology, along with sub-topics and an appendix by individual verse and page location for reference.
All 66 books of the Bible are indexed. This book is a distillation of thousands of hours of work and over 3,200 pages of presentation notes — all so that you can study more effectively, be prepared for any discussion or debate, or lead your own studies and presentations with the legwork already done for you.
Although the last thing I wanted to do was publish yet another book, it is often the case that my perfectionism and going down a rabbit hole that leads to one thing and then another all get the better of me :) I believe this book actually serves many unique purposes and makes an excellent addition to everything I’ve created. Here are some important reasons:
My book The Seven Transformations has, by God’s grace, been a popular item. I am very excited that people are learning and discovering truly marvelous things. Although the book itself offers solid defenses for all 7 major areas of theology, it is not designed to provide total comprehensive coverage and exhaustive prooftexts. That’s where VERSE BLOX comes in, because it is organized according to the 7 major areas, in order, to parallel the teachings in The Seven Transformations so that between the two you have exhaustive defenses on every single area of theology.
Some asked me for a more “portable” version of my bible studies volumes, which are 800 pages each, but this was a difficult thing to honor. I have dozens of bible studies, so to make each of them into a book would take an enormous amount of work and formatting, and it would clog up the inventory list on the book page. Nevermind purchasing ISBNs for each of them! But in this way, you have literally 3200+ pages of presentation notes distilled down into about 300 pages, organized both by topic and by verse (in the appendix), making the focus on God’s word so you can get to the heart of any issue quickly and thoroughly
Lastly, I have always encouraged you to do something with what you learn from my content. My goal is to train leaders, not merely feed people for a day or two. My success is measured on wether you, in turn, impact the lives around you. That doesn’t necessarily mean starting a YouTube channel, but it does mean taking action. In the last year or two I’ve seen several of you do that, and it makes me happy. So although this book is excellent for personal study, it is even more valuable for leaders wishing to have their own home churches or bible groups, creating their own presentations, engaging in debates or discussions regularly and so on. You will find great value in it because the legwork has already been done for you to organize these verses into coherent, systematic theology groupings with commentary and cross-referencing. We’re talking hundreds of hours of work done for you, all you need to do is use the material.
Overall this is an excellent addition to anyone’s library, especially those who are hungry students of the Bible. I hope that this resource blesses you for years to come and you marvel at both God’s word and plan for your life.
NOTE: If you purchased a USB Digital Upgrade early on before this book was released, the new book PDF has been uploaded to the books folder and you can now download it.
This is fantastic, thank you for your dedication to helping others learn how to lead and through your study tools. This looks very helpful.