Book Review: When People Are Big and God is Small
Have you ever started reading a book and thought, “This is exactly what I needed!”? Well I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if you did the same for Edward Welch’s book When People are Big and God is Small.
Everyone, young and old, deals with peer pressure in one form or another. It’s a very difficult battle! This book attempts to help believers understand how to interpret and handle our “fear of man.”
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The first chapter clearly lays out the issue being dealt with, and how different groups of people have gone about handling it. It includes a personal story about how the author himself has struggled with the issue of peer pressure and an honest admission that the surface level biblical answers were not enough to help him. Welch sees the American culture coming to the end of a phase that focused on codependency.
This was the idea of being controlled or unhealthily being dependent on other people. Secular culture’s answer to this was “love yourself more.” Christians responded to this by saying that God loves you more than you think.
The author contends that the secular answer is incorrect, biblically speaking, and that the answer that Christians have come up with is incomplete. Yes, God’s love is amazing, and it is paramount to understanding ourselves in light of His love toward us, but essentially, the focus is wrong. With both answers, the focus is self. Welch uses the rest of the book to explain his perspective and give advice on how to biblically deal with being under the control of other people, whether it be in terms of codependency, peer pressure, or the fear of man.
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The book starts with how and why we fear others. Welch states that we fear people because they can humiliate, reject, and oppress us. We can be humiliated when our sin is exposed. He reminds us that we are deficient because of our sin and have no reason to feel good about ourselves, apart from Christ’s work. Our shame was taken away when we were declared forgiven because of Christ’s work on the cross. However, the author goes one step further here by encouraging us to check if we have sin that needs confessed that is rightly making us fear people because of the possibility of exposure.
We fear rejection because people are our favorite idol, and so we are more concerned about looking stupid than we are about acting sinful. People are created beings and do not deserve our loyalty or worship. We think they have power to give us something we want or think we need. Indeed, this does give them power, and soon, we are at their mercy without even realizing it. It also reveals where we put our trust.
In the next section, the author attempts to explain how to overcome the fear of man. This is the majority of the book. He gives several steps:
“Identify where your fear of man has been intensified by the assumptions of the world. “ He goes into such things as emphasizing self-esteem, assumptions about God, emotions being an ultimate authority, etc.
“Understand and grow in the fear of the Lord. The person who fears God will fear nothing else.” He carefully defines what true “fear of the Lord” is and points the readers to the awesomeness of God.
“Examine where your desires have been too big. When we fear people, people are big, our desires are even bigger, and God is small.” People tend to think that they need someone else to do something so that things can change or get better, but really, we need to take responsibility for the part we play and change our thinking. He discusses what God says we “need.” Having desires is fine, but how much we desire something or for what purpose we desire it is the key. The Bible speaks of denying self rather than feeling better about ourselves. Jesus didn’t die to increase our self-esteem. It’s all about bringing glory to the Father. It doesn’t go far enough to praise God for what He has done for me. God deserves praise simply because He is God.
Here are two questions the author uses to compare what should be our old way of thinking verses our new: “Where can I find my worth?” versus “Why am I so concerned about myself?”
Positives
Edward Welch has a wealth of knowledge to pass onto us that I am grateful to do my best to glean. I found it wonderfully refreshing that he admitted that the same old answers don’t go deep enough. His use of modern language (peer pressure, co-dependency, etc) helps the reader see how the Bible really does speak to today’s issues. His examples from his own counseling experiences are invaluable as they help the reader see how the biblical principles play out in someone’s life. The reflective questions he uses really change your perspective of the situation. The review sections at the end of each chapter make it easy for this book to be studied as a group.
Constructive
As I stated, the first chapter was my favorite. Unfortunately, after the third or fourth chapter I started losing interest. I was hungry for “the answer” to the issue the author had set up so well in the first chapter, however; after reading the book twice, I still didn’t have a clear idea about what to do about fearing man and making people big while minimizing God. After combing through it for the purposes of writing this review, I could see more clearly his “answer” for combating the fear of man, but it seems as though the message got lost among a lot of good counseling information that could have been left out or organized differently.
Conclusion
The danger with all book reviews is to assume the review is enough to get all the good stuff out of the book. On the contrary, I could not possibly fit all the good information this author has to share with us in this simple review. Please consider reading the book yourself to glean even more good insight about this topic and how to battle it in your own life (you can borrow my copy!). It is worth the read though the “answer” may not be as clear and concise as one would hope. I would attempt to sum up the answer using this one sentence based on the book: “We should let go of self-concern by fearing God and knowing our grace-motivated duty.”