In case you missed something

Some of you have been unable to attend one or two classes and wanted to be able to get the audio from it.  In order to help, I have opened a new website that is nothing but a file directory so that you can go to that site and download the mp3 (well, one is a wma) file.  It is www.briangorman.org

Sin pt 1

In speaking to a particular group of people, I made a couple of quick comments. They asked me about what I meant, so I thought I would share my answers with everyone.

Questions (paraphrased):

You stated that God hates divorce. Is this because it is a sin in itself or because it alters shalom (peace)? And you said that you did not believe that God puts two people together as the person they have to marry. You said that you thought God did not put individuals together but groups of people together. If so, did you mean ethnic groups . . . racial groups . . . or something else?

Answers:

1. The actual word for “divorce” in the text is a word that means “put out”. The image is when one spouse puts the other spouse out of the house the safety of a home. God “divorces” Adam and Even when He puts them out of the garden, and He actually claims to have given divorce papers to the northern tribes of Israel before the Assyrians come in and take them over. So if the act itself is a sin, that would mean that God has sinned. Since that can’t happen, that means that the vandalism of shalom that occurs in and around a divorce is what God hates. There are very few acts that are sins purely by themselves. It is the damage to God’s plan that is the sin. That is why a person can actually be committing a more heinous sin in trying to rebuke another sinner than the sinner they are trying to rebuke, as Jesus teaches in the parable of the speck and the plank.

2. Okay, now this one may need a little backtracking. When I said that God puts groups of people together, what I meant was that God made each person to live in a particular time period with all of the other people of that time period. He then chooses to put certain people within close proximity of others. And occasionally He even has them “rub shoulders” together, but He does not force them to actually meet and connect with one another because that would be an invasion of free will. It is similar to the way you may introduce one friend to another friend whom you believe will get along wonderfully. You have done the introduction because they are bother in your group of relationships, but it is their choice as to whether or not they actually connect with one another.

Bible pt 3

Question (paraphrased):
I feel as though I trouble "connecting all of the dots" of how scripture passages relates to one another. How can I learn to better connect the dots?

Answer:
After my last few posts which have been rather lengthy, I will keep this one short. I like movies. I will watch just about any movie. (I even saw Sense and Sensibility in the theater, which neither made sense nor created any sensibility.) But there are certain movies I watch almost every chance I get. I saw Dark Knight twice, I love the Usual Suspects, Signs was cool in my opinion, Citizen Cane was amazing, and (perhaps the greatest piece of cinematography ever made) Tommy Boy.

I love these movies (with the exception of Tommy Boy) because of all the twists and turns, and the foreshadowing. Throughout the movies there are scenes and statements made that allude to something that is going to happen in the future, but you usually don't catch them the first time you watch the movie. The more you watch, the more of those moments you begin to pick up on.

The Bible is very similar, the more you read it, the more you will find these threads of thought that flow through the book.

Now for my even more opinionated opinion. Once someone is a follower of Jesus, I believe that they do themselves a disservice to spend the majority of their time reading the New Testament. If God wanted us to spend all of our time in the NT then He would not allow so many trees to be destroyed just to make His book look bigger with the inclusion of the Old Testament.

Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, 1&2 Samuel, Judges, Daniel, Jonah, Nehemiah, et. al. are all great books that help the reader make more sense out of the New Testament. Then move on to Deuteronomy, Leviticus, 1&2 Kings, Isaiah, Malachi and you will see even more of the New Testament come to life.

Without reading the Old Testament, then reading the New Testament will be like walking into a great film when there is only 45 minutes left to watch. The movie just won't seem as good that way, until you watch the whole thing.

Bible pt 2

Question (Paraphrased):
It seems as though there is no easy answer in the Bible. To find the truth requires time and study to truly understand it. Why is this, and is what can we do to make it simpler?

Answer:
The apostle Paul writes, "For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love."

Without trying to come across argumentative, there really are some easy answers in the Bible, you just won't get the whole answer.

For example; is Jesus the savior of the world? Yes. Admittedly that does not explain what it means to be the savior of the world, but that understanding is not needed in its fullness to follow Jesus.

Is Jesus the only way into heaven? Yes. That does not answer how he is the only way or what it means to experience heaven, but Jesus is the only way.The Bible is simple enough to get started on your journey with God, and it is complex enough to never find the fullness of all the questions. Only the most brilliant author could write such a simply complex book.

My wife and I were discussing the essentiality of baptism a few weeks ago (please don't get the idea that these are normal conversations at my house. My wife is normally bored out of her mind when I start talking about these things.)

She had heard me trying to explain the power of baptism to a mutual friend. I shared with them why, biblically, this is a requirement of a complete relationship with God in order for Him to make us into a new creation. My wife felt that I failed our friends in my explanation. She felt that all I really needed to share was that Jesus said that baptism is something Jesus commands us to do, so we should do it. He teaches that we must be baptized and learn to obey all that he taught in order to be a disciple. What more do they need to know.

Misty is right, that is all that is needed for many people. I was baptized at an alarmingly young age because I knew Jesus said to do it and had no idea what I was committing to. As I grew older I began to question whether or not there really any value in baptism so I was forced by my curiosity (and I believe God's calling) to search for the "why" of baptism. That is when I began to see the way God always makes a new creation by a breaking or a parting of water. That is even the phrase we equate to going into labor with a new baby.

Misty was right in her answer, and I was right in my answer because they both came to the same conclusion, it was just the road we took to get to that answer that was a bit different.

God wrote His book in such a way that we can learn everything we need to know to survive by simply reading it and allowing Him to speak through it. And we can learn more about Him by diving deeper and deeper to see how far the rabbit hole goes.And when you feel that you are looking at the words on the page of your Bible, and it is just like trying to read a thesis on the power of mathematic theory in daily life (which, for me, would quickly begin to look like one of those picture-inside-a-picture things from the 80's and 90's when you were supposed to be able to see a sailboat or a scooner or something by looking through the dots), then fall back on the words of Paul who tells us to have the faith to keep reading and pushing through, the hope that God will reveal Himself to us through His book, and the love of Him and the love of people because of Him.

Now for the simple answer; read the book a lot more and the hard answers will start to become more simple.

Bible pt. 1

Question (paraphrased):
So what is the deal with the Apocrypha?

Answer:
Before we go to far, we have to set the parameters for the discussion. Often times when people today refer the The Apocrypha, they are referring to the collection of "books" (sometimes it is only a chapter or two) that the Catholic church has chosen to include in their Bible. In reality, there are a large number of apocryphal books; including Christian apocrypha, Jewish apocrypha, Judeo-Christian apocrypha, and a few other catchy names.

For the purpose of our study, we are going to focus only on the apocryphal books found in the Catholic Bible (many of them prefer the term deuteroconanical rather than apocrypha). These books include:
Tobit
Judith
additions to the book of Esther
Wisdom of Solomon
Ecclesiasticus
Baruch
The Letter of Jeremiah
additions to the book of Daniel
1,2,3 &4 Maccabees (1 is actually a pretty good read and is where Hanuka comes from)
1 (sometimes 1&2) & 2 (sometimes 3&4) Esdras (sometimes additions to Ezra and Nehemiah)
Psalm 151
Prayer of Manasseh

The title "Apocrypha" is actually a transliteration of the Greek word apokrupha, which loosely translated means "hidden things". The actual author and the authority that these books were written with are hidden and unsubstantiated. We have a hard time tracking down the exact time, place and author, making them "hidden". Many Catholic scholars prefer "deuterocanonical" because they view them as a "secondary (deutero) listing of psudo-sacred writings (canonical).

First we will look at their background and what they are, and then we will look at why we don't have them in the protestant Bible.

The best correlation that I can find in the modern world to the ancient apocryphal writings are found in the Left Behind series or The Purpose Driven Life. Left Behind and Purpose Drive Life became immensely popular among Christian readers and some none Christian readers. These two books have been found in an overwhelming number of homes, but no one today (hopefully) considers these books to be great sacred texts on par with the Bible itself. They are good books (depending on your definition of "good) that many people have found profitable and good but not sacred.

That is a basic understanding of how the Jewish community of Jesus' day viewed the apocryphal books. They were good to read, there were some nice ideas in them but they were not the inspired word of God. When the Jewish scholars translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greed (the Septuagint or LXX) they included all of the books of the Catholic apocrypha with the exception of one. They were at the end of the scroll so as to not be confused with God's Holy Word.

After the Jews were massacred in AD 70 many of the faithful Jews that were left decided to burn and destroy their apocryphal books because they felt that reading and following them was a form of idolatry, and one reason why God would choose to punish them so severely.

When Jerome decided to translate the Hebrew Old Testament into Latin he chose not to add the majority of these books because he could not find any Hebrew texts. You see, these additional books have only been discovered in Greek, which speaks to their authenticity.

It was not until 1546 when the apocryphal books began to be seriously considered as equal to scriptures at a church council called the Council of Trent. They chose to include them for a number of reasons, but two seem to stand out.
1. By this point in church history, there was a lot of teaching that was not purely biblical and these councils demanded loyalty from the churches. The best way to command loyalty was to make an edict that said any decision of the council, and any other council in history, was considered to be on equal par with scripture as being binding. To come to that conclusion also opened the door for other writings to be equal to scripture as well.
2. In 4 Esdras there is a reference to texts that are to be hidden by only the wise until the appointed time, which is similar to Daniel 12:4,9. These apocryphal books were considered by some to be those hidden texts. Ironically this portion of the apocrypha was never even included when the Jews added the others into the Septuagint translation.

The King James Bible did include these books once more, but there were put together as a collection of writing between the Old and New Testament because they still felt the books were "profitable and good but not sacred". Today's modern Catholic Bibles often include them as equal parts of the Old Testament.

Now for some of the reasons these books are not included in the protestant Bibles.
1. Since almost all of the discovered texts were written in Greek (and one in Latin) it raises questions as to the validity of the sources. Many of these books are titled in such a way that they claim to be authored by some great biblical hero, but the text and writing clearly shows this not to be true.
2. Jews never considered them sacred, good but not sacred.
3. There are numerous false doctrines that are found in these books which have since become a vital part of modern Catholic teachings; such as purgatory, the immaculate conception of Mary, and the idea of giving money as way of buying your way out of suffering in purgatory.

Now that we are all thoroughly confused, next time I will try to keep it simpler.

Gospel pt 2.1

Okay, I realized that my statement, "when the ancient rabbis chose to translate the Hebrew texts into Greek they almost always took both of the Hebrew words and made them into the one word euangelion, or some variation of that," is not entirely true. There is a second Greek word that shows up regularly that does refer to "good" that is just a normal (not directly from God) good. The word is agathos. This is where we get the modern name "Agatha" from.

The reason I did not share that in the class or in the other blog is because it is much easier to distinguish in the text than the Hebrew words for good. When the New Testament is talking about "good news" or "gospel" then the word is euangelion but when it is talking about "good" as in 2 Timothy 3:17 when Paul refers to scripture spuring us on to "good works", then he uses the word agathos.

I hope that clears up some of the confusion.

Gospel pt 2

I will try to answer two questions today.

Questions 1&2 (paraphrased):
In the Hebrew there are the words tobh and basar for "good". Tobh usually refers to something that is good from God and basar usually refers to something that is just good. How do those words compare to the Greek translations and how can we determine which word is being used as we read our Bibles in English.

Answer:
When the ancient rabbis chose to translate the Hebrew texts into Greek they almost always took both of the Hebrew words and made them into the one word euangelion, or some variation of that. Ultimately the idea is that if it is good, than it must be from God, so all good was attributed to that one root word. The main reason, it seems, that the Hebrew language would have two different words comes back to the idea that, in Hebrew, an item is inseparable from the material that the item is made from. A wooden post, for example, is not a metal post. They are not considered the same at all other than in general appearance. In the same way, a good that is from God (tobh) is not the same as a good from man (basar). In Greek, it is all just good.

As for how you tell the difference between the two when you are reading in English; you have to get an interlinear Hebrew-English Bible, get some decent translation software, learn how to read Hebrew, or you can just think like a Greek and just consider all good (regardless of the word) to be a good that is from God.

Gospel pt 1

Question (paraphrased):  

If "Gospel" and "Evangelize" are the same work, why are they translated differently?

Answer: 

First I need to admit a mistake here.  "Gospel" and "Evangelize" are not exactly the same word in Greek.  The word "gospel" in Greek is euaggelion, which is sometimes translated "good news". 

The word "evangelize" is not actually in the Bible, but he word "evangelist" is, and it is the Greek word euaggelistës.  They are the same root word with a different suffix.  

The word "evangelist" was basically just a transliteration of the word euaggelistes, which roughly translates into a carrier of good news.

You will also find the Greek word euaggelizö translated as "proclaiming the good news."  This again comes from the same root word.  

Here is the reason for the different translations; God only speaks Old English.

I learned this while sitting in church as a young boy.  There were a few people in my church that I was certain had face to face conversations with God in their own personal tents of meeting.  They were truly brilliant Bible scholars and godly people. 

When they would pray in church, they would go from speaking the language of good ol' southern Indiana farmer and begin speaking like a good ol' southern Indiana farmer in King Arthur's court.  All of a sudden they would begin using words like "Thee", "Thou", "Countenance", "Dost", and other words that I had never heard outside of prayer.  

Obviously if these people prayed like that, it must have been because God only understood Old English.  

(After that completely worthless sidetrack) The word "gospel", as best I understand it, comes from the combination of the  two Old English words god which means "good" and spel which means "news".  Godspel was later lost the "d" (which sometimes happens in a move across centuries. Heck I still haven't found all of my tools after a 10 mile move) to become the word "Gospel".

As for why translators continue to use the word "gospel" rather than "good news" is a matter of the translators' preference.  Most of the times euaggelion is used it is translated as "gospel", but not every time.  There is not a lot of rhyme or reason to it.  As the prophet Mel Brooks taught us, "it is good to be king."  The translators are the one with the publishers, so they win.  

To prove this point, Eugene Peterson decided to use the word "Message" for euaggelion almost every time it shows up in his "Message" paraphrase.  

When I finally take over the world, I will require all Bibles to be retrofitted with "good news", but until then the word "gospel" will be circulated.

My introduction

For now, the purpose of this blog is going to be to further the study of my "What @ . . ." class at First Christian Church. Each week, I will do my best to take some of the questions that have been raised in class and help provide some futher answers and other resources for people that want to go deeper. Or, it could just be helpful for people to see the types of questions that people have. If you have a question that you don't feel we have fully answered here, feel free to send me an email or post a response asking for futher information.

I realize that I will not be able to give exhaustive conclusions to every issue because if it was that easy than these discussions would not have continued for centuries. My hope is to help you in your search for truth, and to know that I and the church, have not come to these conclusions lightly or without study and thought.

Thanks,
Brian

The purpose of this blog

Starting Wednesday, Sept. 3, I will be leading a new class called "What About . . ." I am going to invite members of the class to ask questions on a variety of topics and do my best to create a discussion of what the Bible has to say about them. If there are questions that need to be answered or seem to have gone incomplete during the class time, I will attempt to further the discussion here and at my myspace page. These two pages will be the same, it is just that some people are uncomfortable with using MySpace.