Month: November 2022

Week 48  1 Timothy

The Timothy letters are personal correspondence from Paul to Timothy and I’m almost fifty verses into the first letter before Paul tells Timothy exactly why he’s writing: I am writing these things to you now…so that if I can’t come for a while, you will know how people must conduct themselves in the household of God…the church of the living God.
I had to look back to see what Paul had already said about life in the church. I don’t think chapter one counts…it’s mostly Paul’s introduction. But in chapters 2-3 there’s four topics about church life:
Prayer & women & bishops & deacons.
I’ll read the second-half of 1 Timothy tomorrow but I take a couple of minutes to speed-read ahead. I see a couple of other life-in-the-church things. Paul mentions accurate teaching a couple of times. And he talks about subgroups in the church: old-men & young-men & old-women & young-women & old-widows & young-widows & bishops & slaves.
Some of what Paul says doesn’t exactly line up with my church here in Medicine Hat so I wonder about the differences. One of my bible-reader’s tasks is to figure out how to understand what I’m reading. And at this point the easiest way is to just make straightforward binary decisions about then vs. now. Are those old ideas right-or-wrong? True-or-false? Sensible-or-nonsensible? Acceptable-or-rejectable? Like that.
Which means the first question I need to ask myself before drawing my conclusions is: do I even get to make binary choices about my reading?

Note: quote from 1 Timothy 3:14-15 (NLT)

Week 48  1-2 Thessalonians

If I was a church member in the Roman world in the 1st-century and if I had the choice of getting one of Paul’s letters and if my choices were either Romans Corinthians Galatians Ephesians Philippians Colossians or Thessalonians then I think I’d choose the Thessalonian letters.
What I noticed this year was that the two letters seemed like mostly friendly-reminders to the congregation about things they already knew. I red-underlined the verses:
just as you know (Paul said it twice)
you yourselves know (three times)
as you know (twice)
you know (twice)
each of you know
you yourselves know full well.
It all seemed pretty consistently affirmative to me. Not overbearing or domineering or repressive. More like prompts.
I checked a word book to see how often Paul used the word ‘know’ in the nine letters: about 88 times.
14 of them were in the Thessalonians (but 18 times in Romans & 37 in the Corinthians!) So then I did a quick survey to see how the word was used. In Romans & Corinthians Paul talked more often about a) things he himself knew and b) things the people do not know and c) things that it’d be better not to know.
So by the end of the exercise I figured my hunch was correct and that Paul was being mostly congratulatory with the Thessalonians for the good things they already knew. And I figured I’d like to get the Thessalonian letters most of all.

Note: quotes from 1 Thessalonians 2:1 5 11 3:3 4 4:2 4 5:2 & 2 Thessalonians 2:6 3:7 (NASB)

Week 47  Colossians 1-3

Paul said that when I believed in the Lord I was rescued from the kingdom of darkness and transitioned over to the kingdom of (God’s) son. So…I became a kind of religious émigré. I wondered about what-all exactly this immigration process involved. What happened when a natural-born citizen of Darkness emigrated to the Kingdom?
Unfortunately Paul didn’t seem too interested in saying much more about it. I guess immigration was just one simple example he used to illustrate what happened when I believed – pulling-up stakes…leaving home…moving to a new country.
But I was still curious and wondered if he said more about immigration and so I decided to do a quick read-through focusing on that. (Colossians isn’t a long letter so the exercise was pretty simple.)
What I found was that Paul didn’t say anything more about being an immigrant. But he did add a couple of different but related ideas (once-you-were and now-you-are type of comments):
Once you were far away and now you’re near
Once you were enemies now you’re friends
Once dead now alive
Once preoccupied with earth now interested in heaven
Once with an old nature and now a new one
So the examples are different. But the ideas are similar. Coming into faith means change. Evolution. Development. Process. Metamorphosis.
Static doesn’t seem to be on the agenda.

Note: quote from Colossians 1:13 (NLT). And see 1:21-22 2:13 3:1-2 3:9-10.

 

Week 47  Colossians 2

A pretty practical bible-reader’s question came into my mind today.
It started with Paul talking about specific OT religious things – food laws & celebrations & the Sabbath day. Then he referred to them as being: a mere shadow of what is to come…The substance belongs to Christ
Another version called them: a shadow of the…reality…found in Christ
Another: shadows of the real thing (which is) Christ himself.
So my question was that if those things in the OT were ‘shadowy’ were they the only shadowy things? Or were there others?
I figured it like this…if reality came when Christ appeared then reality appeared in the NT. Which sounds like the OT is in the Pre-Reality Shade. There’s the OT Shadowy Section. And the NT Reality Section.
Which means that if Paul is discriminating between the two big sections of the bible then that has a pretty significant outcome for me reading the bible. It pushes me in the direction of another question: do I even have to read the (shadowy) OT?
Let’s say I asked 1000 people this question: if you were restricted to reading only one of the testaments for the rest of your life which one would it be? Nobody would say the OT. Not even one.
But a bible-reader’s question isn’t just a matter of preference. It’s something more like this: do I think I’ll get enough out of the Great Shadow Section to make reading it worth my while?

Note: quote from Colossians 2:17 (NASB NIV NLT)

Week 47  Ephesians 3

I noticed the word “mystery” used several times in Ephesians so I got out a word book. “Mystery” is used 28-times in the bible:
6-times in the OT (by Daniel)
22-times in the NT (17 by Paul. 6 of those in Ephesians).
Some mysteries stay mysterious but Paul revealed one of the OT mysteries: this is the secret plan: the Gentiles have an equal share with the Jews in all the riches inherited by God’s children.
All through the OT the Hebrew tribes/nation didn’t know about this plan (even though technically they were insiders). So it’s no big surprise that Gentile-outsiders didn’t know either.
But…(and this is the interesting part to me) there was another group that wasn’t aware of the mystery either: God’s purpose was to show his wisdom…to all rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms.
I realize that the Total Geographic Extent of Bible World includes a) the real-natural world and b) an invisible mostly-inaccessible-to-me region. I know almost nothing about the Inaccessible Region and I don’t know who the rulers and authorities are – they might be angels and demons – but whoever they-all are my sense is that they’re probably smarter than humans. But Paul’s point is that no one anticipated the heavy-weightedness of Jesus – not a) people in the regular world and not b) supra-beings in the supra-regular world.
I’ve tended to assume that supra-beings pretty much know it all. But it looks like they have knowledge constraints too.

Note: quotes from Ephesians 3:6 10 (NLT)

Week 47  Ephesians 3

Yesterday I’d decided that chapter three was a side-note from the main letter. And even though I personally don’t much care for digressions I had to admit that Paul said something interesting about where he got his data for his part of the NT.
The four men who wrote the gospels had good knowledge about the Lord. Matthew & John had actually lived with him. By contrast I don’t think that Mark & Luke had personal contact with the Lord but they likely had firsthand contact with the people who did.
Anyway the point is that Paul was a Johnny-come-lately NT writer with no first-hand and maybe not even any second-hand contact with the Lord. So people would have been wondering “Hey…where did you get your data from?” Paul’s reply was: God himself revealed his secret plan to me
Another version said: by revelation there was made known to me the mystery
Another version: the mystery (was) made known to me by revelation.
I don’t know if I noticed this idea today because I’d read Galatians last week. But I paged back and read this: I (Paul) solemnly assure you that the Good News of salvation which I preach is not based on mere human reasoning or logic. My message came by direct revelation from Jesus Christ himself. No one else taught me.
So even though he was a step removed Paul insisted his data was rock-solid.

Note: quotes from Ephesians 3:3 (NLT NASB NIV) and Galatians 1:11-12 (NLT)

Week 47  Ephesians 3

A long time ago I sat in an English Composition class learning about Unity-and-Coherence. The teacher would’ve said: when you write a composition it should be a) unified & b) coherent. She might have given an example of a unified-&-coherent essay. So today I’m thinking that a good example of a non-unified-non-coherent essay would be Ephesians 3.
Paul began: for this reason, I Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ, for the sake of you Gentiles – . Then he just stopped…and switched tracks!
I figure that the dash means “I’m not going to apply the Unity-and-Coherence rule. I’m going off on a tangent.”
I checked another bible. It used an incomplete sentence and a dash too.
I scanned chapter three looking for a second dash. There wasn’t one. I did see that chapter three ended with “Amen” and chapter four started with: I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, entreat you… (which looks a lot like Paul is picking up where 3:1 left off). I’m thinking that all of chapter three is a tangent.
I already knew that Paul hopped around a lot. And today was a reminder that a) Paul makes un-signaled lane-changes and b) my being miffed by it won’t alter his writing style anytime soon.

Note: quotes from Ephesians 3:1 4:1 (NASB). The NLT version made 3:1 a full sentence and did not use a dash so gave the impression the passage was actually unified-and-coherent. Final thought: Paul might be jumpy but when it comes to Topical Parkouring Proverbs is #1.

 

Week 47  Galatians 6

Paul writes a lot about the conflict between a) ethnic-Jews who believed in the Lord and b) non-Jews who also believed in the Lord. (At some point I’ll try tracking how often Paul does this but for now my estimate is: pretty often.)
One part of the question is: why did ethnic-Jewish-believers harangue non-Jewish believers about becoming like them and adopting a bunch of OT traditions? But the other part of the question is why some guy – let’s say a casually-religious & non-Jewish Cypriot who came to belief in the Lord – would want to add-on a bunch of Hebrew religious practices. What’s attractive about that?
But then today I read this: those who are trying to force you to be circumcised are doing it for just one reason. They don’t want to be persecuted for teaching that the cross of Christ alone can save.
Which is interesting. Did becoming-a-Jewish-recruit exempt you from persecution? I did a quick outside-the-bible search for “Jewish religion in the Roman empire” and sure enough it looks like Judaism had some kind of official status with Rome. Meaning (maybe) that the equation looked like this for a non-Jewish believer: I believe in the Lord + I adopt Judaism + I come under the Jewish umbrella = I survive.
There’s likely more to it than that. But this is a big practical reason for why the Jesus-believer guy from Crete might be tempted by a Jewish recruiter.

Note: quote from Galatians 6:12 (NLT)

Week 46  Galatians

I got a little reminder today about bible-reading.
Actually it was reminder about how I read the bible.
Actually it was reminder about a mistake I slide into when I read the bible.
It’s like this: when I’m reading I almost instinctively focus on what’s simple and I ignore what’s difficult.
I concentrate on what’s interesting and I neglect what’s tedious.
I mentally highlight my preferences and disregard what I can’t make much sense of.
I do it all the time.
I could easily rewrite the bible so that it includes just the things I like (I mean…it’d be a long exercise. But not too difficult.)
So anyway my little reminder of this tendency was this: you have been called to live in freedom – not freedom to satisfy your sinful nature, but freedom to serve one another in love.
In my MHJ Revised Version of the bible I’d obviously want to include the you have been called to live in freedom piece. And since my version would redact what’s difficult or boring or non-sense-making I’d edit out the second clause about not freedom to satisfy your sinful nature, but freedom to serve one another in love.
I want to be free. Freedom is my natural preference. Serving someone else isn’t.
So today was a vexing little reminder about how I process my reading.

Note: quote from Galatians 5:13 (NLT)

Week 46  2 Corinthians

One of the marquee paragraphs in the Corinthian letters says: though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
Paul picks up on this idea near the end of the letter when he’s talking about what he called his thorn-in-the-flesh. The ‘thorn’ was a disability he had and it was one he never got rid of. A long time ago a guy told me he figured Paul’s thorn-in-the-flesh was a problem with his eyesight…and as guesses go I guess that’s as good a guess as the next one. Maybe. Paul said the reason he got his thorn-in-the-flesh was: to keep me from becoming conceited because of (the) surpassingly great revelations he’d received.
Anyway Paul’s permanent disability was a problem. But not unilaterally or exclusively problematic since the Lord utilized it as a problem-resolver. The problem that tormented Paul also functioned as a conceit-prevention mechanism. The problem served double-duty. Had two consequences.
So if Paul filled-out this Pain Questionnaire I think his answers would be:
Q: Is Non-Pain preferable to Pain? A: Yes.
Q: Is Pain preferable to Pride? A: Yes.

Note: quotes from 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 12:7 (NIV)