Tag: Bible

The Good News of God’s Groans

The Scream, by Edvard Munch

Sometimes when we lament a problem to another person, we want help finding solutions. Other times we want to be heard, seen, understood. We want to know another person is really there with us.

More than that, there’s power in knowing that what we lament, someone else laments too. That messed up reality I see? You see it too. I hear you say with me, “Yeah… that’s not okay!” Such solidarity brings comfort, validation, and even strength.

The apostle Paul addresses “the sufferings of the present time” in Romans 8. He points us to glory and calls us to hope, but not without deep empathy as he considers our current pain.

In response to suffering, there are three groaning parties in Romans 8:

  1. All of creation groans as it suffers under the weight of its “bondage to decay” (vv. 21-22).
  2. We ourselves—“who have the firstfruits of the Spirit” groan within ourselves (v. 23).
  3. The Holy Spirit groans in wordless intercession for us (v. 26).

I am just beginning to appreciate how the Holy Spirit is standing in solidarity with us, specifically by groaning.

The “groan” roots are all there in Greek. (“Sighs too deep for words” in the NRSV is beautiful, but obscures the “groan” language.) But I missed the connections until reading a compelling essay this morning from Richard B. Hays’s Reading with the Grain of Scripture: “Pneumatology: The Spirit in Romans 8.” In considering what the Holy Spirit does, Hays makes powerful intertextual connections to Ezekiel, Isaiah, and especially Israel’s exodus narrative.

Hays says that all this groaning in Romans 8 is “describing creation’s bondage to death as analogous to Israel’s slavery in Egypt.” The groaning we hear and make now connects to the Israelites’ groaning under slavery in Exodus 2:23-24. Paul is now “envisioning the eschatological redemption of all creation as a new and final exodus, in which the whole created world will share in Israel’s experience of redemption and freedom” (p. 216, my emphasis). A “new and final exodus”? Yes, please!

In the meantime—and it’s a very long meantime, isn’t it?—we’re all groaning for freedom from suffering, “like a woman in labor”:

  1. All creation groans
  2. We children of God groan
  3. The Holy Spirit groans

Hays shows these three as existing in a sort of chain of solidarity: (1) Creation groans, and (2) “the children of God share fully in creation’s suffering and agonized groaning.” The children of God groan, and (3) “God’s Spirit joins in the groaning.”

By groaning, the Holy Spirit is passionately expressing solidarity with God’s children and with all of creation.

The Spirit’s wordless groans are not just disconnected intercessions. I don’t think Paul is making an interesting but stand-alone point about how prayer really works. He’s saying that the Spirit’s groaning is God joining himself in active solidarity with an already-groaning creation and with an already-groaning family of children who are exhausted from their bondage.

The great I AM is also with us as the great I GROAN. “I will be with you” includes “I will groan with you.”

Just as Yahweh rescued Exodus, Paul speaks of hope and deliverance in Romans 8. God’s children and all of creation will be liberated, brought into freedom and glory! Thanks be to God.

Until then, we have a great fellow-Groaner who laments with us in the waiting.

Jesus, Dead as a Doornail

Marley’s Ghost, by John Leech, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

After casting an unclean spirit out of a boy, Jesus takes his disciples away privately. Where does Jesus direct their attention after a triumphant encounter? Surprisingly, he points them to his own death:

And going out from there, they passed through Galilee, but Jesus did not want anyone to know, because he was teaching his disciples and saying to them, “The Son of Man is to be handed over into the hands of people, and they will kill him, and—despite being killed—after three days he will rise again.”
—Mark 9:31-32, my translation

The repetition of “kill” is fascinating. Here’s a wooden read of the Greek, where the verb for kill (ἀποκτείνω/apokteinō) is repeated:

…and they will kill (ἀποκτείνω/apokteinō) him, and—being killed (ἀποκτείνω/apokteinō)—he will rise again.

The first use of “kill” is an active indicative verb: “they will kill him.” Jesus is the object of that verb, the recipient of the action of killing.

The second use of “kill” is a passive participle, with Jesus the subject, translated something like: “and despite his being killed….” Here Jesus is grammatical subject, not object, because he is also the subject of the main indicative verb that the participle modifies: “he will rise again.”

I draw two conclusions from this:

First, Jesus has gone from passive recipient of a heinous action (“they will kill him”) to active agent that overcomes it (“despite being killed, he will…”). As my friend Mark used to say, “That’ll preach!” I think of the oft-used protest mantra, that I preached about the other week: “They tried to bury us; they didn’t know we were seeds.”

Second, Jesus is repetitive in saying, “they will kill him… and being killed he will….” I think Jesus is emphasizing his death on purpose.

Mark and Jesus don’t need to use “kill” (ἀποκτείνω/apokteinō) twice. In fact, in Mark 8:31, when Jesus predicts his death to his disciples, even a similar verbal formula uses “kill” just once. Perhaps because you can only kill a person once! Dead is dead.1

And yet in Mark 9, Jesus says “kill” twice. Maybe it’s because the disciples didn’t understand his impending death in Mark 8. So Jesus recapitulates the prediction here and adds some emphasis in hopes that they’ll get it this time in Mark 9.2 Maybe Jesus also wants to highlight the power of his resurrection—that he rose from the actual dead. He didn’t wake up from a merely “mostly dead” state:


In Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol it says, “Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.” Dickens could have just said “Old Marley was dead!” Dead is dead. You either are or you aren’t.

But since Ebenezer Scrooge will see the ghost of Marley, Dickens wants to emphasize that it really is a ghost, because Marley really is dead when the story begins.

I think Mark and Jesus are doing the same thing here: “they will kill me, and—even though I’ve really been killed, dead as a doornail—I will rise again.”

Mark sets the stage here for a powerful response of awe when Jesus does rise again—from full-on, actual death, over which Jesus has authority.

 

  1. Disclosure: I did not read through any commentaries before posting this, but I’m sure many commentators have seen the same thing. Fascinatingly, the NET Bible chooses NOT to translate the second “kill,” inexplicably chalking it up to “redundancy in the statement” in the Greek text. ↩
  2. They don’t. ↩

Yet Another Beautiful Hebrew-English Bible

Someone at Koren Publishers invited me to review their new Hebrew-English Tanakh (The Magerman Edition). After taking one look at a picture of the book, I was convinced. (Thanks to Koren for the review copy, which did not consciously affect the objectivity of this review.)

Check it out:

 

 

Yes, I judged this book by its cover, but the judgment was proven right by its insides.

The edition above has both the Hebrew text (beautifully typeset) with a new English translation that I’ve found to be significantly more readable than the previous one Koren published.

For example, there is more gender accurate (i.e., “gender inclusive”) language where it did not exist in the previous edition, although I thought this translation didn’t go as far in the direction of gender accuracy as it could have.

The transliteration decisions are more fluid. This English reader still stumbled over, for example, Yeḥezkel for Ezekiel, but this was a conscious decision on the translation’s part to “convey the authenticity of the Hebrew original.” I respect that.

Not only is this Bible beautiful, but the binding is sewn. It will last a long time.

Here is the lovely Hebrew typography:

 

 

Especially awesome is that the shewa appears differently in the text whether it is silent or vocalized. I have repeatedly found that helpful as I’ve tried to read the text aloud:

 

 

There are ribbon markers:

 

 

There are colorful charts and tables and diagrams and timelines throughout. Not so many that this already heavy Bible gets heavier, but not so few that the reader needs an additional study Bible for background overviews.

 

 

 

 

Here is a bit more from the publisher:

The Hebrew-English Koren Tanakh respects the classical Jewish interpretive tradition, while being cognizant of contemporary scholarship. It includes simple notes to aid comprehension of words and names, and features extensive, full-color reference material including genealogies, timelines, maps, charts, archaeological artifacts, and more. Proper names have been transliterated (Yaakov, not Jacob; Moshe, not Moses) to convey the authenticity of the Hebrew original. This edition also includes a thumb tab index to aid in finding sources and references, making the Tanakh easily accessible for its readers.

You can find The Magerman Edition of the Hebrew-English Koren Tanakh here, with more available here.

What Does It Mean to Call the Bible “Inspired”?

“St. Paul Writing His Epistles,” by Valentin de Boulogne (17th Cent.)

 

I preach from the Bible whenever I preach. God spoke through and to humanity by the Word. My primary goal as a preacher is to create a space where we can hear God speaking to us today again through that Scripture that is “living and active.” And that we would respond faithfully.

Rare, however, is the full sermon I preach about the Bible: what it is, how we got it, what it does, and how we can respond. I had that privilege this last Sunday, as I preached on the first of five parts of our church’s vision: Scripture guides us. To say Scripture guides us invites reflection on at least two questions: (1) what is Scripture and (2) why should that be what guides us? (Not to mention: how would we know, months and years from now, if Scripture actually were guiding us?)

Despite 40+ years of my life steeped in the Bible, despite memorizing whole books of the New Testament as a kid, despite reading the Bible through multiple times, and despite reading it in Hebrew and Greek… I found it surprisingly challenging to concisely share about, “What is the Bible?” and the follow-on question: “So what?”

In the end I broke it down broadly into two -ations: Revelation and Invitation. God’s Word is revelation. God’s word is an invitation.

To call the Bible revelation means that it is a received word. It is a given word. It is not something we went looking for and figured out by pure reason or emotion or will—in contrast to starting points in other disciplines, like philosophy. All the world’s Pulitzer Prize winners combined couldn’t conjure up God’s Word if they tried. Scripture is God’s self-revelation, and we have it, available to us. Deuteronomy 30:11-14 says:

This command I am giving you today is not too difficult for you, and it is not beyond your reach. It is not kept in heaven, so distant that you must ask, ‘Who will go up to heaven and bring it down so we can hear it and obey?’ It is not kept beyond the sea, so far away that you must ask, ‘Who will cross the sea to bring it to us so we can hear it and obey?’ No, the message is very close at hand; it is on your lips and in your heart so that you can obey it.

Notice who is doing the work, so to speak, in finding “the message”—not you! Not me! God says the people of Israel already have it—on their lips and in their heart. Not because they set it there, but because God put it there. In the 21st century, we might add that we have God’s Word at our very fingertips—just a search string and a click away.

The more specific word Scripture uses for revelation is inspiration. 2 Timothy 3:16-17 says:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Maybe a better English word (or at least a more literal one) for “God-breathed” would be theo-spired. God breathed his words into the Bible. Just as he breathed life into Adam and Eve and created them in his image, he breathed himself into Scripture, showing us even more of his image. Scripture is not just humans guessing at who God is; it’s God himself telling us who he is.

Millard Erickson, in his wonderful Christian Theology, puts it this way:

By inspiration of Scripture we mean that supernatural influence of the Holy Spirit on the Scripture writers that rendered their writings an accurate record of the revelation or that resulted in what they wrote actually being the Word of God.

Just how does inspiration work? If the Bible was both written by God and written by humans, what percentage of each author is at play in each passage, or across the whole Bible? Or is that the wrong way to think about it? Is it more like the incarnation: fully divine, fully human, both at once?

I think the best answer to this question is: we just don’t know. Erickson says it more articulately:

It is our contention here that inspiration involved God’s directing the thoughts of the writers, so that those thoughts were precisely the ones that he wished expressed. At times these thoughts were very specific; at other times they were more general. When they were more general, God wanted that particular degree of specificity recorded, and no more.

I suppose Erickson’s claim could be seen as a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc , where someone infers causation (or intent) just because one thing chronologically follows the other. In other words, “We have it how we have it, so God must have wanted it that way.” But I believe he’s right, and so do millennia of interpreters.

Speaking of philosophy, Erickson tells this story about Edmund Husserl:

Edmund Husserl, the phenomenologist, had a devoted disciple and assistant, Eugen Fink. Fink wrote an interpretation of Husserl’s philosophy upon which the master placed his approval. It is reported that when Husserl read Fink’s article, he exclaimed, “It is as if I had written it myself!””

So, too, God’s relationship to Scripture.

That’s all revelation. But this revelation of God calls for a response: it’s also an invitation. I’ll write more about this in a future post.

François Fénelon on Not Knowing What to Pray

Quite some time ago I purchased this little book by François Fénelon from a used theological bookstore:

 

Meditations and Devotions by François Fénelon (book cover)

 

The first section of the book has meditations on some sentences of Scripture. Here is one I appreciated reading yesterday:

 

Image from text is reproduced below

 

Here is the text from the image above:

Teach us to pray.–ST. LUKE 11:1.

LORD, I know not what to ask of Thee. Thou only knowest what I need. Thou lovest me better than I know how to love myself. O Father, give to Thy child what he knows not how to ask. I dare not ask either crosses or consolations. I stand before Thee. I open my heart to Thee. Behold my needs that I know not of; behold and do Thou according to Thy mercy. Smite me or heal me, depress me or lift me up: I adore all Thy purposes without knowing them. I am silent. I offer myself to Thee. I yield to Thee. I no longer have any desire but to do Thy Will. Teach me to pray. Pray Thou Thyself in me.

 

Treasure Trove of a Website for Bible Translation (or just richer Bible reading)

 

I just learned about this fascinating Website intended for Bible translators, which is also useful for preachers or anyone who wants to better understand the Bible. It’s called TIPs, which stands for “Translation Insights and Perspectives.” Here’s the site description:

God’s communication with humanity was intended from the beginning for “every nation, tribe, and language.” While all languages are equally competent in expressing the message of the Bible, each language has particular and sometimes unique capacities to communicate certain biblical messages in exceptionally enriching ways that other languages cannot. The Translation Insights and Perspectives (TIPs) tool collects these outstanding translation insights in the form of stories so they can be made available to everyone in the church as well as researchers and other interested parties.

There’s a great explainer video here.

You can search the site by word or phrase or even language.

Here’s just one of many insights at the TIPs site. Revelation 3:20 says, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me” (NIV). Searching the TIPs site yields this translation anecdote:

For the translation of this verse into Maasina Fulfulde Doug Higby tells this story:

“[We] had the word for ‘door’ and also a word for knocking or ‘hitting’ a door. But as I thought about it, Jesus was coming to visit! The Fulani don’t even have doors on their traditional huts, and they certainly don’t bang on the reed coverings used to keep the dust out of the doorway. If Jesus came, he would go to the entrance of the courtyard and say, ‘Salaam Alaikum.’ This would announce his presence in the same way that knocking on a door would in Western contexts. But I was concerned… the Greek text says ‘door’ and I wanted to be faithful to the original. Yet, I felt the Fulani customary greeting was exactly what Jesus would do in this context, so I continued. To my great surprise, the next part of the verse went: ‘Anyone who hears my voice and opens the door…’ Voice?! Who said anything about Jesus speaking, I thought he was knocking… So now the Fulani greeting makes even more sense with the cultural version which goes like this: ‘I stand at the entrance (to your courtyard) and greet (in peace). Whoever hears my voice and lets me in, I will enter and eat together with him.’ (Hettina, miɗo nii darii e damal miɗo salmina. Neɗɗo fuu nanɗo daande am so udditi, mi naatan galle mum, mi ɲaamda e mum.).”

You can access the site here.

“I’m not really a scholar”–the Late J. Alec Motyer

I realize that–without really meaning to–I’ve developed an affinity for Anglican priest-scholar types. To name just a few: R.T. France, Fleming Rutledge, N.T. Wright.

Add to that list the late J. Alec Motyer. I can hardly imagine studying Isaiah without Motyer’s work. And his commentary on Zephaniah is a model of scholarship that praises God.

I recently came across this great quote from him:

I’m not really a scholar. I’m just a man who loves the Word of God.

J. Alec Motyer

I’m not sure I’m in danger of being called a scholar. All the same, his words resonate deeply with me, as what I aspire to.

Praying “Thanks in Advance”

“Thanks in advance” is a funny phrase.

“Thanks in advance” is what you say when you thank someone for something they haven’t done yet.

You: “Hey, here’s 10 bucks.”
Me: “Thanks; I’ll pay you back.”
You: “Okay, thanks in advance.”

Or, I might say to my spouse, “Honey, I have had A DAY. Thanks in advance for doing the dishes and putting the kids to bed while I watch random YouTube videos.”

Psalm 100:5 says, “For the LORD is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.”

The Psalmist models a prayer that looks ahead with confidence, knowing that we will see God’s “steadfast love” and “faithfulness to all generations.”

For his love and faithfulness we can give thanks in advance, because their existence in the future is guaranteed.

Mark Twain is supposed to have said: “I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” I guess a lot of it was in his head. We worry!

Another writer says that “Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance.”

If we spend time worrying about the future, why can’t we spend time giving God thanks for the future? If we let ourselves experience failure in advance, why not let ourselves experience something much more certain in advance, namely, God’s steadfast love and faithfulness?

Even Job can say with confidence, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God” (Job 19:25-26).

Our prayers, then, can include the envisioned experience of God’s future faithfulness. So we can say with confidence, “Lord, thanks in advance!”