I've recently become aware of the struggles we have in relating to the message of scripture. Obviously scripture was written in languages other than our own and getting the message from the original language into our language is more complex that we imagine. Scholars have given their whole existence to parsing the Hebrew or the Greek for the true meaning of the text and then moving that meaning into Latin, or English, or whatever language that people use. It is not a simple enterprise.
When Jesus suggested that not one "jot or tittle" of the law would be set aside, he was referring to the minute punctuation marks of the Hebrew language that would ultimately determine a word's meaning. Imagine with me that a simple dot could change a word's meaning completely and the whole text with it, and that these dots were provided by scribes who hand copied and recopied the ancient texts for people to read. Then imagine this process being duplicated over several thousand years and then translated into our language. Then further imagine with me for just one moment the additional process of creating what seems like a hundred different translations in our language that either clarify or simplify the text for our understanding. How close do you think we are to the original thought that the Holy Spirit inspired the writers to pen in the first place?
I know, most of you don't want to go there. Most of us prefer to believe the book we call the Bible fell from heaven in tact, in the translation we prefer, and contains accurate information for us to follow today. You will be relieved to find that this article is not about that. I am going to save that for another day. I might even couple that subject with the history of how the sixty-six books we claim as authentic actually came to be and further rattle the proverbial spiritual cages we choose to do life in. For the present, lets assume that what each of us read is correct and exactly represents what was written long ago and that our NASB, KJV, NKJV, NIV, NIVR, NLT, GNT, ESV, LB, Message, or other personal translation of choice somehow say the same thing. I believe that we still have a significant language barrier to overcome in understanding and applying scripture today. Key words within our own language used in the undergirding our faith have been redefined over time. The result...a faith that is radically different from that of scripture and of history.
Let me give an example. When I say the word believe, we see believing or faith totally different than others before us. Believing or faith in the scripture had to do with the idea of trust. People who believed in God centered their whole existence around him and trusted in his intervention in their lives. The back end of Hebrews 11 explains how believing was experienced by the people of scripture. Believing today is more appropriately aligned with being accepting of or giving assenting to a truth than with active trust. We can believe today without any additional corresponding action. Other than assenting to the facts of the cross and accepting its forgiveness believing has no ongoing connection between God and his people. Faith is something that can be held apart from corresponding action and in total isolation from life in general. Compared to the use of faith or believing in scripture in which lives clung to the living God in life and death matters, we have something new in the way faith is defined.
How about the word disciple? Disciple is an archaic word. When we say disciple today we see it as something totally different than its original context. We have nothing in our culture today that resembles a disciple. In scripture disciple was a relevant term used in everyday to describe one who left everything to learn at the feet of a rabbi. Since we no longer use that term in our everyday living, we replace the word disciple with the word believer. In some circles a disciple is simply labeled a convert. What is a convert or a believer? Someone who has believed or accepted Jesus! Compared this to the language that Jesus defines disciple with...taking up our cross, hating our lives, hating our family (I need to be careful with these words...in comparison to our love for him), losing our lives, etc. No wonder we stick with believer!
What about Kingdom? My pastor friends and I have been engaged in the task of coming up with a metaphor for Kingdom. We are struggling. Why, because we are not monarchical in our thoughts. We are Americans. Monarchs rule and reign in kingdoms, the citizens do not. Citizens of kingdoms obey their king. Because we are Americans, we vote for our king and then believe that he is obligated to serve us. If he doesn't we vote for a new one. That is the American way. But what about Kingdom? The Kingdom in scriptural language is summed up in this question, "Why do you call me Lord, and do not do what I say?" Since we don't understand Kingdom, we replace it with something called heaven. We've swapped heaven for Kingdom. In reality we are no closer to understanding heaven than Kingdom but we at least have pictures to help us define heaven. We have images of cute little cherubs, an endless banquet table, a massive gated community of mansions, or a throne with a bearded, long-haired Jesus on it to help us define heaven. Besides, heaven is for life after death so why sweat it. So Kingdom means heaven and heaven is made up of disciples...excuse me believers...who have accepted Jesus into their lives.
Now we get to a key word...freedom. What does freedom mean. Scriptural freedom implied liberty and applied liberty to the idea of liberation from bondage. Israel experienced freedom when delivered from the oppression of Egypt in order to serve God through obedience. Paul says we've been called to liberty, but we are not to use our freedom as an occasion for selfish living but instead become slaves to others. The good news of freedom in scriptural language, is that the bondage to sin, oppression, death, fear, etc. is broken so that we can freely serve God with all of our hearts. But freedom today is nowhere near this idea. Freedom instead is seen as autonomy. Freedom is Independence to choose and act as we see fit. Freedom is the concept that liberates us from responsibility and enables us to pursue life as we see fitting. (That is one of the reasons that we are experiencing trouble in America, because we have wrested the word from the intentions of our Founding Fathers!) So the freedom found in the Gospel is realized in choosing Jesus and expressed by living autonomous lives in the grace of God.
What about God? How does our language with its definitions work when it comes to the Big Guy Upstairs? Scriptural language reveals God to be the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, holy, jealous, transcendent, imminent being who created this whole thing. But the thought of defining each of these terms is more exhausting than its worth. Instead, lets define God as love. He is the being that loves everyone and hopes that they out of their freedom will love him in return. Some try to define God as angry as well but adding a second term to the definition overly complicates things and so we pretty much need to stick with love. Because God is love, he is considered a friend, a buddy, a pal, a source of help when times get tough. He is warm, fuzzy, comfortable, approachable, and even cuddly at times. So this loving being invites us to heaven where everyone who accepts Jesus eats at an endless banquet table with cherubs...or something like that.
It gets more interesting when we begin to define things like the love of God. In scripture, God's love was always a mystery that somehow cut through his transcendence and found its way into undeserving and often unappreciative human beings. It was his charity in action through his undeserved favor that was defined by grace. But love doesn't mean that at all today. Our language today shows that love means feeling really good about something. If we feel really good enough, and deeply enough about someone, we might live with them and if we are radical in how we feel, we might actually marry them. When we stop feeling it, we move on to hopefully find the feeling for someone else. Love is a feeling that incorporate into the lyrics of our music, dialogue of our movies, and hope that someone will bestow upon us. It is the emotion behind gratuitous sex in romance stories and the target that Madison Avenue hopes to strike in getting you to buy something. The love of God then is the biggest emotion of all that tells us that God feels really really good about us. As the song goes, "like a rose, trampled on the ground...he thought of me above all."
There are other important terms that I think we could deal with as well. That may come at another time but these terms will have to do for now. It is difficult put all these definitions into practice let alone add others to it. I think I have it down though. Let's see...Because God is loving and good He has very special feelings for me that he hopes that I will enough to accept Jesus and as a believer experience heaven when I die.
Whatever happened to the God whose presence caused men to faint as though dead and whose very being provoked fear and awe? Whatever happened to believing that translated into such trust that a man's own son was placed on an altar in total all-out devotion to God? Whatever became of the idea that our liberation was to better serve? Whatever happened to the Kingdom made up of disciples who were so committed to the risen Lord that they "loved not their lives to the end" and embraced the King at a cost of martyrdom? Whatever happened to a Kingdom whose claims were to be carried out "on earth as it is in heaven" by obedient disciples? Whatever happened to the idea that love was about charity, measurable in acts of kindness, generosity, obedience, and virtue? I guess that maybe these things were meant for another language. I wonder how our language will define these things in another twenty years. It is frightening to think about.
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