daily java

Daily Java:

Now go and write down these words. Write them in a book. They will stand until the end of time as a witness. (Isaiah 30:8)

I have always believed that the writers of the Bible didn’t know they were writing the Bible when they did.

There is a song in Jesus Christ Superstar that has the apostles singing at the Last Supper. In it is the line: “Always hoped that I'd be an apostle. Knew that I would make it if I tried, Then when we retire we can write the gospels So they'll still talk about us when we've died.” It’s a funny line, but I don’t think anything like that happened.

I believe in verbal plenary inspiration. I believe every word in the Bible is where it should be. However I believe it differently than many others of my comrades in arms. I believe that God guided the men who wrote and that when they wrote they pretty much said what God wanted.

I do not believe, however, that God grabbed them, wrung out a book while they were in a trance and when they woke up, arm cramping in pain, they had written Romans. For one thing, each book bears a definite characteristic of its writer. John is different from Luke, Paul from Peter, and so on. Someone says that God used their style, but to what end. If God had just dictated the book, they would all sound the same.

I do believe that the God of the Universe is big enough and powerful enough to speak the world into existence. Therefore he is big enough to order the minds of men (which he after all created from nothing) to say what he wanted them to say without co-opting their minds and bodies. They could write what he wanted and still be conscious.

But I don’t think they necessarily knew that what they wrote would be preserved for thousands of years. After all, there were a lot of writers in the first century writing a lot of letters to a lot of churches. And each of these letters were essentially Bible classes on paper. In the absence of any central document, every teacher, every apostle, everybody (good and bad included – look at some of the books like the Gospel of Mary Magdalene) wrote them. God guided the hands of those who collected them and let just what he wanted float to the top of the pile. And the Bible was born.

Can you imagine the Lord appearing to you and saying, “I want you to write a book for me to put in my Bible. The book will last for thousands of years, be hotly debated, people will parse and dissect every single word and take much of what you say out of context. Now get busy. We’ll call it Colossians.”

You’d freeze right away. What will I say? How will I say it? You would go through draft after draft and still not be able to say just the right thing in just the right way. It would drive you crazy.

They knew what they were writing was important, that people would read it and get good out of it. They knew it was valuable to the church. But I don’t think they knew it would be THE HOLY BIBLE.

It would surely scare me if I knew these blatherings on my blog would last forever.

daily java

Daily Java:

And I solemnly declare to everyone who hears the words of prophecy written in this book: If anyone adds anything to what is written here, God will add to that person the plagues described in this book. And if anyone removes any of the words from this book of prophecy, God will remove that person’s share in the tree of life and in the holy city that are described in this book He who is the faithful witness to all these things says, “Yes, I am coming soon!” Amen! Come, Lord Jesus! May the grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s holy people. (Revelation 22:18-21)

I have just finished this year’s reading of the Bible. I have a One Year Bible program (http://www.oneyearbibleonline.com/index.html if you are interested) that has a piece of the Old Testament, a piece of the New Testament, a Psalm and a couple of Proverbs every day.

I have read through the Bible several times now. And I always have the same reaction that I had today. When I read the last of Malachi and the last of Revelation, I always feel is a combination of being glad I have done it again, with a certain amount of sadness that I always feel when I finish a book of any kind.

Disciplining yourself to read the Bible daily is an undertaking that is a labor of love. It isn’t easy. There are a million things that come up in the year that try to take you away.

But that is the point of reading: to bring you closer to God and his written will. Hopefully, the more you read, the more you understand.

I have known some people who  have managed to read the Bible through several times, yet never understood what they read on anything but a purely superficial level.

They are like the women spoken of in 2 Timothy 3:7: forever following new teachings, but they are never able to understand the truth.

That’s the sad thing. You can read your Bible cover to cover, year after year, and never really understand it. To do so, you have to first know God. Unless you know God, all you are doing is reading. The stuff you read hits a mental barrier. It is interesting on one level, familiar enough to be enjoyed, yet never makes it into your personal heart of hearts. It just kind of floats to the surface.

That is why you hear bad guys in movies quoting scripture. They sound like they have quite a familiarization with God’s written word, yet they are still bad guys.

The things they read are on the same level as Shakespeare or Milton or someone like that. They are there and they can recall them and quote them, but they really do not understand them nor their power.

There is no power in the words, but in the God behind the words. So reading the words will do no good unless you know the God behind the words.

So I am finished for this year. I start again tomorrow with Genesis 1, Matthew 1, Psalm 1 and Proverbs 1.

May I know him like I know his word.

the bible words: magic or not

I read an interesting article and a response to it in the link recently. Evidently there are some in the Catholic Church who are trying to make a new prayer manual/liturgy that is in the exact words of the Latin Vulgate.

The Latin Vulgate is probably one of the oldest translations available to us today. It was put out in the fourth century by a man named Jerome and is considered the benchmark translation to the Catholic Church.

The man who wrote the article argues that although we want to be close to what God says, what God says is not a magic formula to be recited. It is more than that. He even goes so far as to say that so many Christians see the words of the Bible as magic incantations on the order of Harry Potter magic, rather than divinely inspired guidelines for our lives.

I agree.

In the movie The Book of Eli, the antagonist wanted a copy of the Bible. He wanted it because he felt it had power that he could use. If he could just get a copy and then say the magic words, he could have true power.

He was looking for magic in the guise of religion.

The prayer of Jabez is another example. I have known people to recite the prayer of Jabez faithfully every day.

Jabez was a minor character in the Old Testament only mentioned once or twice by name. But he received a tremendous answer to his prayer.

He was the one who prayed to the God of Israel, “Oh, that you would bless me and expand my territory! Please be with me in all that I do, and keep me from all trouble and pain!” And God granted him his request. (1 Chronicles 4:10)

The ones who recite his prayer feel that if they can say those words the same thing will happen to them. If they can repeat the prayer just right, God will bless them and expand their territory (whatever that means) just as he did for Jabez.

The only problem is that God doesn’t work that way. He does not give magic formulas for us to recite. He gives us guidelines that will come through no matter what the translation.

There were and still are in some circles, tremendous battles over which translation to use. Those in the definite group say that the translation has to be totally accurate, a word-for-word translation so that we can get the exact meaning of what God wants. Usually they mean a translation with which they are familiar and have already learned passages from. The others say that thought for thought translations will still get us where God wants us to go.

It becomes a from of bibliolatry when it comes down to it. When we spend so much time in making sure every dot and comma is absolutely correct (which it cannot be) then we lose the fuller force of what God has to say.

And they cannot be exact because there are no original texts anyway. We are reading copies of copies of copies of copies when we read our Bibles. The Greek texts that some parse so fervently are copies of copies. There are no original Greek texts. Nor are there original Hebrew texts. The ones we use are from, for the most part, the ninth century AD. That is only a little over a thousand years old. Considering that the Old Testament took place more than three thousand years ago, that is not all that old. There were some found in the Dead Sea scrolls, but again, they are only about two thousand years old.

The point comes down to a question of how powerful is God. Is he powerful enough to give us here today in 2011 his word? And the answer is yes.

If God is able to speak the universe into existence, he is able to preserve his word so that we can read it and know him. Even in the Living Bible, one of the worst translations out there, we can see the will of God and understand it.

If not, then God is not that powerful. If we have to see the original words, to say the original phrases, then God is not that powerful. This would mean that the words and phrases are powerful, not God.

But words and phrases are worthless without God behind them. Reading your Bible, no matter how assiduously you may do it is worthless if you do not know the God behind the Bible.

You can know the word and not know the God behind the word.

And there is no magic in the word. There is only power in God.

lot of people think the bible is gibberish

If the Good News we preach is hidden behind a veil, it is hidden only from people who are perishing. (2 Corinthians 4:3)

A lot of people think the Bible is gibberish. They claim to see inconsistencies and mistakes and all that and think that it is impossible to understand anything written that long ago. They just do not understand this stuff.

There are a lot of reasons people do not understand the Bible.

I believe people don’t understand a lot of times because they use an extremely outdated translation. They will read a King James Version with all the thees and thous and words like wist and shew. They do not understand because of the simple fact that the translation needs a translation itself.

They don’t understand too because they start out not expecting to.

My son would decide he didn’t like a food before he tasted it. I would say, eat some anyway. He would pick up the spoon of whatever, shake his head, take a bite and shake it again. Of course he didn’t like it. He decided from the beginning that he wasn’t and it became a self-fulfilled prophecy. He hated it because he expected to hate it.

Somebody tells someone else that the Bible is hard to understand and sure enough, it is. In the Middle Ages, there was one Bible in the whole town. It was usually in Latin and chained to the pulpit in the church.

The priest went on at length to tell everybody that the words God gave us were so difficult that there needed to be an interpreter. And sure enough, what do you know, he was it. Then he would tell you whatever he wanted you to hear.

Any time you expect something to be too hard, it will probably be.

But the main reason they do not understand it is because they do not have the mind of God in them to help them understand.

I understand the Bible. I don’t understand it because I am so smart, or educated, or because I have studied the Greek and Hebrew. In fact, sometimes that can stand in the way. We try to do it ourselves.

I understand it because God is in my heart. He shows me the answers. As convoluted as my thinking is, I do not think I could understand it at all if not for him. I always make too much of stuff and try to read too much into things.  I would have something that was so strange figured out.

But I don’t. I sit back and allow him through the power of his Holy Spirit to open all of this to me. I let him tell me what it says.

It is not some weird process where I access the divine database, or say the key words and get my mantra right or anything else. I just read it and wait for what it means. It isn’t really done on any conscious level necessarily. I just do it.

I read it and figure out what it means. If it makes sense, it is from God. If it doesn’t, it isn’t. it is that simple. His mind has worked so long in my mind that there is not a conscious delineation between the two. It just is there.

If the mind of God is not in you, all you will read is gibberish.

People who do not want to understand it and read it only for “the beauty,” of which it has a lot, will read an older translation. That way it sounds good and, since it is so old, they can’t understand it anyway. They do not have to try.

I firmly believe that a lot of people use old translations so they do not have to understand. They love the Bible, that is true, but their love is for a combination of sounds and rhythms, not what is said.

In fact, one man I was corresponding with over the internet confessed that his relationship was really with the King James Version anyway, not necessarily the Bible. His excuse? He was Church of England and they loved tradition.

People who do not have God cannot fully understand the Bible. And if they read it baffled without understanding it at all, they need God in their lives. He will show them the answer.

daily java

Daily Java:

You search the Scriptures because you think they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me! Yet you refuse to come to me to receive this life. (John 5:39-40)

I love my Bible. I have studied it for over 40 years now and am very acquainted with it. It is like an old friend that I talk to a lot.

I have a large print NIV, 1984 version because I do not like the newer one, and I read it a lot. I use it to preach from, too. Here lately I have been reading online out of the New Living Translation. It seems to strike a chord in me and I like it. I may even go to it as my regular translation.

There was a time, when I had my library, that I had almost fifty Bibles in it, as many different translations as I could get. I loved to check them out, to collect them, to find esoteric translations that no one else had. I even have a link on my browser’s toolbar that goes to a parallel Bible if I need it if I want to compare now.

But, as much as I love my Bible and  know it and memorize it, it is just a book. It is not God. He gave it and I think that it is hard to have as good a relationship with him without knowing it intimately.

But it is not God.

The mistake we make is when we go to our Bible and forget the God behind it. It would be like my wife reading the letters I wrote to her before  we were married professing my love, and forgetting me. The letters were good, yes, especially since I wrote them to her from Europe. But I am here now and she can talk to me.

In Jesus’ day, they had immersed themselves in the scriptures, which of course were the Old Testament, especially the first five books of the Old Testament. They had learned them and studied them, commented on them and assiduously kept them. They became the focal point of their faith.

Unfortunately, they rarely worshiped God, just his word.

Jesus told them that they search the Scriptures but miss the point. The point was that Jesus was coming. Now that he was here, those scriptures had fulfilled their purpose. But they would not see what was so obvious: the life he brought.

The Bible is useful. It is good and holy and I believe that it is inerrant. But it is useless without God. Without him, all it becomes is an ancient writing, on a par with Shakespeare or the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam or Socrates. It is not holy in and of itself. It is only holy when we allow God to speak through it.

Anybody can use it to show just about anything, if they take it out of context and, A Peter said, those who are ignorant and unstable have twisted his letters to mean something quite different, just as they do with other parts of Scripture. (2 Peter 3:16-17).

We have to remember that people called on the name of God and knew God before the New Testament was complete. They knew him and understood him even during the Middle Ages when there was one translation, a Latin Bible chained to the pulpit of the church. So I know that God is big enough to work anyway.

But I have his written word now and I will use it and I will know it. And I will know him above all.

I have trouble understanding how someone can know the Bible and not know God, but I have seen it a number of times. Someone can quote great blocks of the Bible (many times the book of Revelation),yet not have the slightest idea of what it means.

It is the God behind the Bible that empowers the Bible in our lives. And it is Jesus who truly gives us life.

the bible is full of weird people

The LORD then said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation.
18 The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth. (Ham was the father of Canaan.) 19 These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the whole earth.
20 Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. 21 When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. 22 Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside. 23 But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father’s naked body. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father naked.
24 When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, 25 he said,
    "Cursed be Canaan!
    The lowest of slaves
    will he be to his brothers.” (Genesis 8 and 9)

There are things in the Bible that are just plain old strange, weird even. The world had turned bad. There were no better people than Noah and his three sons, so God saved them from a world-wide flood to begin the human race again.

As soon as the flood is over and Noah gets his crops planted and then harvested, he makes some wine, drinks it and passes out naked in his tent.

Shem, one of his sons, comes in sees him and goes out laughing to the other sons. They cover their father. When Noah wakes up and finds out what Shem has done, he curses him.

Now, why? If Shem was good enough to save, what must that say about the rest of the people who died? And really, what did he do wrong that required him to be turned into a family of slaves? And how much worse was it than Noah getting drunk and passing out naked?

The Bible is full of things like this: righteous people favored of God who are jerks. Noah here. Abraham, a man called a Friend of God (James 2:23 and Genesis 15:6), lied twice about his marriage to Sarah to save his own life. Lot, who God saved from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, got drunk and his daughters had sex with him because they thought they were the only people left in the world.

Jephthah, in Judges 11 who promised God that he would sacrifice the first thing he saw. His daughter was the first thing he saw when he got home, so evidently he sacrificed her. The text isn’t real clear on that, but still.

Samson, who was blessed by God with great strength, but who didn’t even seem to worship God.

David, a man after God’s own heart (Acts 13:22), couldn’t keep his hands off other women, even to the point of killing their husbands to cover his tracks.

Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, but who married 300 women and had 700 concubines. In fact, if you read the text about most of the men of God, most had not only wives, but also concubines, or mistresses in modern terms, and who were polygamists.

Elijah, a prophet who was so good, God took him into heaven in a flaming chariot rather than let him die (2 Kings 2:11). However, he suffered from such depression that even on the end of a very successful fight against prophets of an idol, he fell into self-pity and misery. God had to tell him, in essence, shut up your whining.

So what’s the point, you ask. I guess it is that I wonder how in the world God could use these men and how in the world he could bless them and hold them up as paragons of faith.

These men were flawed. And I have voluntarily joined a denomination founded by a woman who was deeply flawed herself. And I am a minister of God and am deeply flawed.

The Bible is a strange book in that it doesn’t gloss over the faults of its great people. It mentions them and then moves on. Why? I think it is because God is trying to tell us that with all our failures and problems he can use us too.

So you face problems with pornography, or a drinking problem, or drugs, or overeating or depression or anything else. That means you are no different than the great men of God.

In the book of James, the writer even goes so far as to hold Elijah up as a great man of God and then say, Elijah was a man just like us (James 5:17). Yet it seemed that he was never happy and was a whiner at times, and really depressed.

Interesting thought.

more thoughts on the book of hebrews

Some thoughts from Hebrews chapter 4.
 
12 For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.
Therein lies the way into his rest: by meditating on his word. The writer of Proverbs says that in much study is much pain. The more we study the more we know and the more we know the more we recognize our own failings.

It was only when Job came into contact with that strong, undiluted Word of God, God’s own pronouncements, that he realized that he didn’t have the answers, and in most instances, didn’t even know the questions.

God’s Word, his will, goes beyond the Bible. The Bible is our own measure of the will of God. It is inspired and given to us that we can be complete as his people.

Anything that other people bring up as his will or a word from the Lord or whatever, must be measured by the only true and definitive word we have, his Bible. If what someone says is from God collides with what we know is from God, then that person is not true.

And not only is it a measure, it is also living and active. It is applicable in whatever culture or century we live in. It is always applicable. It was intended as a one-time given measure for all time. And it is sharp.

You don’t have to read long to know that it can be painful knowing what God wants. After all, we do not measure up, and the more we read the more we know that we fail. However, the more we read, the more we also know that God loves us anyway.

The word does more than just point out surface problems, it goes into the heart and soul of a person and tells them what they are thinking. And that probing character of the word is painful.

It was Jeremiah who ate the word the angel gave to him. His comment: it was sweet to his mouth, but bitter to his belly. In other words, reading was nice, but application was hard.

I firmly believe that is why so many like the KJV. They can read it and roll around in its familiar cadences and archaic language, much as Capt. Picard in Star Trek likes to quote Shakespeare; it is when it is in familiar language, however, that it becomes painful.

In modern language, it demands a response. It becomes the real words of a real God who says real stuff, not just poetic sounding prose. It is hard to deal with a God who is modern.

The Bible is what he wants us to do, true, but he also loves us when we fail. He also knew from the beginning that there is no way we can live up to the letter of his word. And he provided the power of the one man who did to give us strength – Jesus.

13 Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.
There is no circumstance, no cultural oddity, no specific instance that is spared from the knowledge of God. He sees all and knows all. Not only that, but his word is applicable to all of those instances.

People who go so strongly into the cultural background at the expense of the modern application of his word do people a disservice. They make it esoteric and useless, a museum piece that is of great interest to old people and archaeologists. Nothing for us now, but, you know, something that was probably pretty good in its day.

But, as the word itself says, today is the Day and now is the time to obey him. And the word’s duty was to point out God, both in its incarnate form as Jesus and in its incarnate form in the Spirit, The word of God is there to show us his way.

mistaking cultural conditioning for biblical teaching

I read somewhere recently that Americans frequently mistake cultural conditioning for Biblical teaching.

That is true. Of course, it is hard to imagine cultures other than your own and you live in yours. You not only live in it, you are immersed in it. You think it is normal to do what you do.

For instance, we eat three meals a day in America. That is not the case in a lot of countries. Nor is it the case in much of history. It is only relatively recently that people did that.

However, if we do not get our “three hots and a cot” we get all worried. Things are out of whack and it bothers us.

The same with how we view things.

Alcohol was not viewed as a sin until in the latter part of the 19th century with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Prohibition came out of that and a lot of “biblical teaching” that many times was not true.

In Jesus’ day, alcohol consumption was common. The water was bad and the only way to drink it was to cut it with wine so that the alcohol killed the bacteria. Jesus himself was called a wine-bibber and the apostles were accused of being drunk. Neither denied the consumption of wine, just the charge of excess.

Much of our whole way of looking at things is based on our culture. And there is nothing wrong with that.

After all,  this is where we live.

On the other hand, other cultures are not perfect either. Public nudity is common in Europe, but that doesn’t make public nudity right. Many Muslim cultures feel honor killings – the killing of a girl because she will not obey her parents or her husband – is fine, but that is a reprehensible custom. Some of the Indian cultures in North America viewed hospitality as the lending of one’s wife to a visitor for the night. Obviously I would not care for that, in addition to the fact that adultery is always wrong.

The same with a lot of other cultures.

The thing is, because a culture has a certain custom does not make the custom right or wrong. And you cannot preach that custom, no matter how good it may be, as Christian. Biblical teaching is based on the Bible, not on what we want.

That is a mistake that many missionaries have made in the past: trying to get the “natives” to become more American in their viewpoint instead of biblical.

The word of God is a flexible, one size fits all document made to fit any culture, no matter who diverse from any other it may be. There are immutable rights and wrongs, but there is also a lot of gray area.

The Lord is God and his word is great. Remember that when you try to make others fit your idea of God.

More later.