A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel

I've quoted Brad Jersak more than any other writer on this site, and if you've read more than one or two posts here, you've already met him without necessarily knowing it. It's time I gave the book itself its due.

A More Christlike God is not a quick read, and it doesn't try to be. Jersak spent years as a pastor among addicts, the poor, and people the church had already given up on, and that pastoral weight shows up on every page. This isn't an academic exercise written at a desk far from real grief. It's a book written by someone who has sat with people in their worst hours and refused to hand them a smaller God than the one Scripture actually reveals.

What the book actually argues

Jersak's core claim is stated almost as simply as it can be: God looks exactly like Jesus. Not mostly like Jesus. Not Jesus-plus-an-asterisk for the parts of God's character that seem harder to reconcile with love. Exactly like Jesus.

That sounds obvious until you start tracing what it actually requires of us. If God looks exactly like Jesus, then every picture of God we've inherited — the angry judge keeping score, the distant sovereign who predestines some to glory and others to ruin, the deity who needs blood before He can forgive — has to be tested against the cross, not assumed alongside it.

Jersak spends a good portion of the book taking apart what he calls "the wrath of God" as it's typically preached, and rebuilding it from the ground up using Scripture's own witness. He doesn't deny God's wrath exists. He redefines what it actually is: not retaliation, but the natural consequence of turning away from the source of life. Wrath, in Jersak's reading, isn't God doing something to us. It's what happens when we cut ourselves off from the One who is Light.

God's wrath is not God's plan to punish, but God's love letting us experience the consequences of our own choices. — paraphrased from the book's central argument

Where the book is strongest

The chapters on the cross are, for me, the heart of the book. Jersak walks through the major historical models of the atonement — penal substitution chief among them — and asks a question I had genuinely never let myself ask before reading this book: does this model actually look like the Father Jesus describes, or does it require us to imagine a Father whose anger has to be absorbed before He's willing to love us?

He doesn't throw out the cross. He recovers what he calls a more "Christlike" reading of it — one where the cross reveals what God has always been willing to absorb on our behalf, rather than a transaction that changes God's disposition toward us.

If you've ever sat in church and quietly wondered why the "good news" sometimes sounded like it depended on God needing to be talked out of His own wrath, this section alone is worth the price of the book.

Where I had to sit with discomfort

I want to be honest with you, the way Jersak is honest in the book. Some chapters move fast through territory that deserves slower treatment — particularly his handling of certain Old Testament violence texts, where I found myself wanting more space given to the difficulty rather than a quicker resolution. He's working hard to be readable and pastoral, and I think that occasionally costs him some of the depth a reader hungry for more technical engagement might want.

That's a minor critique, and it doesn't undercut the book's central argument. It's simply worth knowing going in: this is a pastoral book first, written to be read and absorbed by people in pain, not a technical monograph. If you want the philosophical heavy lifting, Talbott or Hart will take you further into the weeds. Jersak's gift is different — he makes the case in a way that meets you where you actually are.

How it connects to what we explore here

If you've read the "Nothing New Under the Sun" series on this site, you've already absorbed a good deal of Jersak's framework — judgment inside grace rather than outside it, fire that heals rather than fire that merely destroys, a Father who runs toward the prodigal rather than waiting at a distance for the apology to finish. Reading the book after the series will feel like meeting an old friend. Reading it before will give you a strong foundation for everything that follows.