A friend emailed me and asked what I thought of the Message as a Bible, and these are the thoughts I shared with her... I do have a copy of the Message. It is an interesting thing to me in our culture is that so often we want things to be easy for us. The Message is a paraphrase. When it first came out, everyone knew that and looked at as such. But, with the popularity of The Purpose Driven Life (which doesn't differentiate between translations and paraphrases, but says at the back of the book how good it is to read different versions so that we can understand it differently), the message came to be viewed (I think) in popular Christian culture as much more of a Bible that can be read as a primary Bible, essentially as a translation. That is disconcerting to me. I believe that it is God and the Holy Spirit that help us to understand the Word. I don't think the NIV or ESV are culturally irrelevant and hard to understand. But, I think it is easier to read and digest the mes...