My Devotional Book–Where Did THAT Come From? You’ve known me as Andy Zach, a comic scifi and fantasy author. Where did this Bible devotional come from? Written by Jeffry Smith? Who’s he?
It came from thirty plus years ago. ‘Jeffry Smith’ is my nom de plume for non-fiction.
The book began as a Bible study on the book of Revelation. I was tired of reading all the interpretations and arguments over what it meant. I was just focused on on thing: what did it say?
Going through the book verse by verse, writing every statement down, I got what the book was actually saying.
The first two verses took me like a half an hour or more.
Why?
Look at the verses:
This is the Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things which must happen soon, which he sent and made known by his angel to his servant, John, 2 who testified to God’s word and of the testimony of Jesus Christ, about everything that he saw.
I broke these verses up into these statements:
This (entire book) is the Revelation of Jesus Christ.
Which God gave Him. (Jesus got the book from God the Father).
To show to His servants (Christians are the servants of Jesus Christ.)
The things which must happen soon. (Future events, from the point of view of John, the writer.)
Which He sent and made known by His angel. (Jesus used His angel or messenger to send this message.)
To His servant, John. (John is called Jesus’s servant. He received this book.)
Who testified to God’s word and of the testimony of Jesus Christ. (This is what John wrote)
About everything that he saw. (This testimony is about his visions from God.)
Whew!
TLDR Version – My Devotional Book
This kind of analysis is too complicated for most people. So I made it simpler. Here are the first two verses in the devotional:
January 1 – Revelation 1:1-2
This is the Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things which must happen soon, which he sent and made known by his angel to his servant, John, 2 who testified to God’s word and of the testimony of Jesus Christ, about everything that he saw.
What is the origin of the book of Revelation?
How did John get the book of Revelation? Through which Persons did the Revelation pass?
What is the purpose of the Revelation?
Who is the intended audience of Revelation?
What is in the Book of Revelation?
Prayer: Thank You, Almighty God, for giving us the book of Revelation, directly from You through Jesus Christ our Lord. Thank You for using Your created angels and sons of men to spread Your truth through all the world. Amen.
God gives us the name of the book: the Revelation of Jesus Christ. He gives us the topic, things which must happen soon, and shows the provenance of the book as the knowledge flows from His throne through Jesus, to His angel, to John, and then to the whole church.
My Devotional Book – What You Need to Know
The four icons of the four gospels. Also in Revelation 4.
What is this site? It’s my Square site. What’s that? It’s my OFFICIAL SALES website. I sell you my autographed books at LESS than Amazon AND include free shipping.
How can I do that? I cut out Amazon.
Amazon takes a 30% commission on each sale. It then deducts the printing cost of each book. That leaves me with 30% of your money.
But Square takes a 1% commission. I get most of your money even though you are paying less. That lets me:
Pay for shipping for you
And then pay for taxes for you
Finally I pay for printing the book for you
My Devotional Book – Part 2
So how did this study go from a personal Bible study to a published devotional?
The Revelation Devotional back cover
After I completed the study, it lay in its handwritten version for years. Then I typed it up on my computer, where it resided for more years. Then I decided to make it into a class about Revelation.
I decided I would skip any interpretation and just teach what the book said. That became an eight week class of hour and a half sessions, going through all twenty two chapters.
Teaching the class at my church and then at Bradley University helped me refine it.
My students demanded another book of Revelation class covering the interpretation of its symbols.
So I created a class covering all the symbols in the book, showing how they were used elsewhere in the Bible
Get My Latest Book Autographed – The Story Behind the Book Part 3
The Gospel Medley cover. Click to get
By this time I was pretty familiar with the book of Revelation, forty years after I started studying it. How’d it become a book?
Accidents happen. Especially around zombie turkeys. Then you add zombie humans, and problems proliferate. Mix in some ill-planned genetic engineering, and things get crazy.
The insanity continues, from the story where zombies are merged with cucumbers to the one where two basement-dwelling nerds gain access to all video content from the past two hundred years—from aliens.
Andy Zach pulls out all the stops on his imagination as he serves up this smorgasbord of silliness. Try it. Laughter is good for your soul
Are you curious about Jesus Christ? Do you struggle to understand the Bible? The Gospel Medley includes the four Gospels in a single narrative, faithfully pulling the text from the World English Bible. You are now able to read all the gospel as a single, easy-to-read story.
Each Gospel describes Jesus’s life from a different point of view with different details and insights. The Gospel Medley combines every word into a single perspective with all details and events arranged chronologically.
Unlike other harmonies, The Gospel Medley doesn’t put the four gospels in columns or rows. Instead, the text is integrated word by word into a smoothly flowing narrative. Further, each paragraph references the four gospels so you can read the original citations. You also get footnotes of all the quotes from the Old Testament, giving you the context of Jesus’s words.
For a unique perspective of the four gospels, read ‘The Gospel Medley’ today.
Oops and More – Free Short Stories
A queen from long ago
The first mistake is a tragedy–a queen’s husband and son died through drowning.
One queen saw the problem more clearly than anyone else. Her king and prince had both drowned only a short distance from the shore because no one saw them signing for help. The queen sat vigil all night long, and in the morning she sent heralds with large signs in every language to all the humans, elves, dwarves, fairies, leprechauns, and even a dragon. She pled with all to find something that would let creatures communicate without signs or gestures when they couldn’t see each other. She promised she would give whatever was in her power to whoever could accomplish this.
Andy Zach during his doctoral research – on the Phoenix
Where is my mistake in this story? You’ll have to read and find out!
A Phoenix Tale
I left the air-conditioned comfort of the taxi, and the sights, sounds, and smells of the old bazaar in Jeddah assailed me: a robe-clad man on camel plodded by, an adjacent fishmonger added his smell to the fresh dung in the street, and the hawkers yelled their wares.
I could only speak Arabic at a middle school level, but as I strolled through the bazaar, I heard “Fresh dates!”…”Highest quality rugs!”…”Finest gold jewelry!”… “Ancient books! The rarest in Saudi Arabia!”
My head snapped around. A bald, stumpy man in a white caftan saw me look and said, “Books? You want ancient books?”
“Yes.” I spoke carefully, knowing my poor accent. “Can you speak English?” I didn’t have much hope.
This story begins with a girl in a wheelchair being transported by accident to–find out below!
The scene was chaos! I knew immediately I was in a different country, judging by the languages I couldn’t understand. I had also determined this was no modern city—I seemed to be on the outskirts of town amid a swarming crowd. Men were shouting and women were crying; meanwhile, I was still trying to figure out how I had gotten there and where exactly I was. Several seconds later, however, that question was answered.
Genetic engineering seems to be the last place to make mistakes. But that’s what Brice Butterworth does.
Now, what was he going to do? Brice Butterworth’s boss just told him to double the productivity of Vegan Inc.’s pickle strain they used for their Kilwowski Pickle brand. That was completely impossible.
But keeping his job required it. Brice was the low man on the genetic engineering totem pole at Vegan Inc., the last one hired and the first one to be fired if another recession hit.
He couldn’t think. He couldn’t face this. So he cruised the internet. “The origin of zombie turkeys? I didn’t know they’d found that. Hmm, a Midley Beacon exclusive, the foremost zombie news source,” he read out loud.
Brice is one of my favorite characters. I’m eager to write a book just about him.
“Whatcha doing, Brice?” asked my boss Wilma O’Reilly after sneaking up behind me.
I jumped. As usual, I was cruising the internet, bored with my job. How awkward.
We worked at Vegan Inc., an agricultural conglomerate. I was their lead geneticist in charge of enhancing the qualities of the corporation’s vegetable products through genetic modification.
Zombie Shift Anthony Jones, warehouse worker and his wifeRaven
In this Oops! Short Story we start with a car accident.
He woke up staring out his windshield at the green grass of the highway median. Dully, Anthony listened to the sound of his car’s engine cooling, ticking like a clock. He didn’t know why he was here or how he got here.
“Hey, are you okay in there?” came a voice from outside the car.
Turning his head toward the sound, he realized he was upside down, supported by his seat belt and his legs, which were strangely numb.
“Uh,” he croaked.
* * *
“We’re going to cast your leg,” said the nurse in the ambulance. Her name tag read Louise Tall, but she didn’t seem tall. “What’s your name?”
“Uh, Anthony. Anthony Jones.”
“Do you know your height and weight, Anthony?”
“Five-eleven. Two ten. I need to lose some weight. Ow!”
I’m not immune from mistakes. This is how one mistake make my parents into zombies.
I need to tell you about my own zombie story. It’s about how my parents became zombies.
As soon as the zombie turkeys appeared in Illinois, I started cultures of their zombie turkey bacteria in petri dishes. When other animals, squirrels, rabbits, and cows began turning zombie, I added cultures of their bacteria. I sought the ultimate source of animal revivification. It was my PhD thesis and my life’s work.
I’ve always wanted to revive animals from the dead. It seemed the secret was through the special bacteria for each species. Naturally, when humans became zombies, I cultivated their bacteria too.
He was dead. At least, his business was. And without his business, his wife would leave him and take their new baby. Then he might as well be dead.
His dad had run the Elysium Fields Mortuary for thirty years and had made a killing at it. The first and only mortuary in their small town of Hillvale, everyone got buried there. He charged normal prices, he was friendly, and he helped their community. His dad said to him when he was a teen, “Irving, after you get your college degree, go to mortuary school, and when you come out, I’ll hire you and then turn the business over to you. You’ll be set for life.”
What kind of accidents can happen with zombie corgis?
Breeding zombie corgis wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
Heather Mallorn sighed as she reviewed accounts for Her Majesty’s Corgis in Hanna City, Illinois. Certainly, she made plenty on each zombie corgi she sold. Normally, corgi puppies went for $1,200. She earned double that for zombies. The zombie corgies were invincible guard dogs, and cute too, with bright-red eyes. They were no harder to train than regular corgis, just slightly more aggressive. Well, a lot more aggressive.
What trouble can a pet hamster cause? Find out below!
How fascinating! Dancer thought. This book says there are libraries where hundreds of books live. It also says the fiction books are in order by author name.
Dancer scurried off Your Sixth Year Reader to look at Jeremy Gentle’s bookshelf again. Jeremy was Dancer’s owner and unknowing educator. Ever since he’d taught himself to read by studying the newspapers lining the bottom of his cage, Dancer had craved reading.
He hadn’t figured out why he’d started reading. One day he’d noticed patterns in the markings. He saw they repeated themselves in clumps. Then the clumps formed more patterns. He also listened to his owners differently. They also spoke in patterns. “Jeremy” was always called “Jeremy” or “Jeremy Gentle” by his mother, and sometimes by his father.
“Arrrgh! Me hearties, eat hearty!” said a short, stocky pirate with an eye patch and a captain’s hat seemingly copied from Cap’n Crunch. The pirate gestured, with a hook instead of a right hand, toward an enormous banquet table laden with food. The one visible eye gleamed red.
“Arrrgh! Where’s the skilly and duff?” said a refrigerator-sized bald pirate with an enormous mustache. His eyes also shone crimson.
“Arrrgh! That be the tacos and enchiladas,” said a small, beautiful pirate with dark hair bound by a red bandanna and smiling blood-red eyes. She pointed with her cutlass toward the Mexican section of the smorgasbord.
“Arrrgh! You be a Mexican pirate?” said a blond pirate with broad shoulders and a Cockney accent. She wore her hair in a long queue emerging from a bloody headband around her forehead. She also had glowing ruby eyes.
“That’s your problem, isn’t it? Try the local apartments. Look for rooms to rent on the internet. It’s not that hard to find a place in Ohio.”
I could tell by his grim expression he was serious this time. He’d been nagging me for nearly a year to move out and “set up housekeeping” ever since I’d graduated from the state university with my BA in video game art and my minor in computer science. I’d managed to wheedle him out of it and delay the date. Until now.
Let me know what you think of my gifts for you by clicking here or emailing me at [email protected]. As always, everyone who responds with a comment or email will get a free book from me.
What did you like best about this Oops! and More on Sale blog post?
Oops! Grab Yourself Some Short Stories!! Just for laughs, try some free samples of my wacky sci-fi stories. Then grab the book for .99! Click here!It’ll be on sale from November 3rd to 7th.
“But wait Andy–what is Oops! all about?”
It’s all about what can go wrong before, during, and after a zombie turkey apocalypse.
The first story contains a tragedy–a queen’s husband and son died through drowning.
One queen saw the problem
Her king and prince had both drowned only a short distance from the shore because no one saw them signing for help. The queen sat vigil all night long, and in the morning she sent heralds with large signs in every language to all the humans, elves, dwarves, fairies, leprechauns, and even a dragon. She pled with all to find something that would let creatures communicate without signs or gestures when they couldn’t see each other. She promised she would give whatever was in her power to whoever could accomplish this.
Before turning to fiction, Andy published his Ph.D. thesis “Methods of Revivification for Various Species of the Kingdom Animalia” in the prestigious JAPM, Journal of Paranormal Medicine.
Where is my mistake in this story? You’ll have to read and find out!
Learn all about Brice Butterworth, genetic engineer
Now, what was he going to do? Brice Butterworth’s boss just told him to double the productivity of Vegan Inc.’s pickle strain they used for their Kilwowski Pickle brand. That was completely impossible.
But keeping his job required it. Brice was the low man on the genetic engineering totem pole at Vegan Inc., the last one hired and the first one to be fired if another recession hit.
He couldn’t think. He couldn’t face this. So he cruised the internet. “The origin of zombie turkeys? I didn’t know they’d found that. Hmm, a Midley Beacon exclusive, the foremost zombie news source,” he read out loud.
Let me know what you think by clicking here or emailing me at [email protected]. As always, everyone who responds with a comment or email will get a free book from me.
