Category: Jessica’s Bible Study Blog

“Giant” King Of of Bashan, Thou = Familiar

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1) Something jumped out at me when I was reading the other day. Deu. 3:11 mentions the size of the bed of a giant (King Of of Bashan) as being “…4 cubits in width according to the standard [or common] cubit”. Why add this whole clause “according to the standard cubit” unless this isn’t the cubit they usually used (royal cubits?) Previously I’d done a little
preliminary research on the cubit and which cubit length would Moses have measured the tabernacle in, seeing good arguments for the length being in royal cubits. I’d like to investigate this anomaly usage of cubit further, but this little gem seems to be one more piece of evidence in favor of that argument. And evidence that the enemy king’s bed was slightly smaller than it sounds ;-).

2) Thou. I was reading up on some biblical Greek grammar stuff, and came across an explanation of why “you” is the same for singular and plural in English. Basically, English *used to* have different conjugations for the two, thou art for the singular, and you are for the plural. Using the plural address (you are) was also occasionally used as a polite/formal version for the singular, and the singular (thou art) was considered more
intimate/informal. Over time the singular informal was replaced with the
formal or plural usage (hence why it is you are not you is). Understanding
this makes it so much more clear why old hymns are so chock full of
vocabulary that sounds antiquated or colloquial today. Why would a hymn say “thou art strong ” rather than “you are strong”? Because it was
emphasizing the familiar intimate relationship we have with God. To someone from that era, a modern worship song that uses you eg “you are my all in all” would sound like God is formal and distant, not accurately representing the character of God.

Science Vs. The Bible

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Last night I watched a History Channel movie called “Decoding the Exodus”. The whole idea was that a film-maker/investigative-reporter tried to research whether or not the whole story in Exodus could be scientifically plausible or not. So most of the movie was basically him presenting scientific research on how science could account for causing all ten of the plagues and the crossing of the red sea and artifact evidence in Egypt, Greece, and the middle east that corroborates the incidence of this event.
Basically, a volcanic earthquake storm off the coast of Greece in the 1500s BC is what the movie proposes triggered the event. He had interesting ways of supporting his case, such as scientific evidence of events more recent in history where similar things happened. Like a volcano spewing out ice and fire together, and citing a lake in Cameroon that turned blood red due to an underground (naturally caused) gas leak in 1986 and how all these crazy things happened near that lake in Cameroon that were similar to several of the plagues (such as people living nearby breaking out in boils and sores, and people and animals dying from a poisonous vapor that resulted). Basically, he had a scientific explanation for every part of the story, and a lot of historical artifacts including writings in stone that corroborate the events from different perspectives. Of course, I can’t say I read hieroglyphics to agree or disagree with his renderings or have been to these sites to really verify these caves “filled with ancient hebrew carvings” are really where he says they are and so forth. But if I needed some confirmation that it is *plausible* that the events of the Exodus could have happened, its really interesting to hear from someone who did some thorough research what scientific and archaeological evidence supports the idea that the events weren’t just mythology, but historical events.

Mike Macintosh on Spiritual Fruit (Jn. 15:1-8)

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Many people have “plastic fruit” in their lives. It has the appearances of fruit…but it doesn’t taste like it.
Application: Do you have real spiritual fruit in your life? Or just look like you have spiritual fruit?

The kind of fruit God is looking for is the kind that is inside us.

A true vine implies there’s a false vine.

To abide takes purity.

Is the NIV an “accurate” translation? What translation should I read?

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I wrote this in response to a bible forum question about translation accuracy, reposting here for reference:

For the most part the NIV is an okay translation–its has criticized a bit for certain omisions and changes of a handful of verses…but there’s many a worse translation out there as far as accuracy goes. But its a very popular translation none the less, perhaps in large part because of marketing and that its a fairly “easy to understand” translation.

I’ve seen a bit less criticisms against the accuracy of NASB and either NKJV or KJV because they use “formal equivalence” rather than “dynamic equivlance” (what NIV uses). Formal equivalence is very word for word, where dynamic is more thought for thought. Formal equivalence tries to emulate the original language sentence structure as closely as possible (less places for the translation to make interpretations in their translation). But that can be difficult for a new reader of the bible to understand, especially since formally equivalent translations often use a lot of big seminary type words that can be hard to understand if you don’t have a good dictionary next to your bible. But as you preserve sentence structure there’s things about the bible you can notice that you won’t see in NIV…like when the writing the point and backing it up his argument by staring a bunch of sentences with the word “For”, often times the For isn’t rendered in NIV. And there’s also an issue in accuracy to consider of bias based on theological and social reasons. Like whether you find “gender inclusive” language more or less accurate…or whether the translating group translated in such a way as to support their personal biases…NIV and RSV are both translations I’ve heard various criticisms of the writers having certain beliefs and “twisting” the word to support their view in subtle ways. In NIV its in large part (but not entire part) related to some of those verse omissions. That and there’s issues like do you leave all the weights and measures in their original terms or translate them into modern weights and measures? If you leave them in ancient terms its hard to relate to whether that’s a lot or a little…but if you change them into american measurements, the quantities may shift (eg if you compare pounds to kilos, 12 pounds is not going to be 12 kilos) so you may lose sight of significant numbers.

Personally, I like NASB for bible study for its adherence to the grammatical structures (a lot of interesting insights come out of them)…I’ve been memorizing out of NKJV because that was the requirement at bible school and what my church uses in their sunday services. When I was a new christian I really liked NIV because I found it easier to understand. For my early morning devotionals, I’ll sometimes use NCV, because I find it very readable.

Different bibles may suit different purposes. As a rule of thumb, when in doubt about the accuracy of one bible’s translation of a passage, the best thing you can do is compare between translations (ignoring, of course, paraphrase translations like the Message as accuracy is not a strength of paraphrases). Biblegateway and Crosswalk websites make comparing translations really easy to do (and free).

All that said…any translation, even a “less accurate” one can be used for much good and learning about God and his character and how to live a righteous, godly life. If NIV is helping you to be a more godly person, don’t let anyone discourage you from it… But it never hurts to be informed and know both the strengths and weaknesses of your translation of choice so you can defend whether you’re using an appropriate translation for a particular purpose 🙂

Homosexuality vs the Bible

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Well, where I always start is…what does the bible say? I looked up related scriptures in a concordance–I’d suggest looking them up yourself and reading them in context, but I’ll summarize what the bible says 🙂

Gen. 19: 1-11 (related: Isa 3:9, Jude 1:7) – God sends down some angels to investigate this wickedness in Sodom. They go stay with Lot, and townspople demand he send them out that they might sodomize the visitors and they wouldn’t even be appeased that he send out his virgin daughters instead. This is the precipitating event to God’s judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah. Jude calls this “gross immorality” and says these people are “undergoing punishment in eternal fire” (ie. in hell)

Lev. 18: 22, 20: 13 – in the Jewish law laying with a man the way you would a woman is expressly forbidden (along with many other types of other “improper” sexual relations).

Rom 1:26-27 – Men abandoned their “natural relations with women” and “burned in lust” for one another instead and “committed what is shameful” (sodomy?). The context of this is as an example of God giving people up to their vile passions because they suppressed the truth of God. 1:26 labels women doing what appears to be likewise as “against nature”.

1 Cor. 6: 9-10 – Homosexuals and Sodomites specifically listed among the unrighteous who will not inherit the kingdom of God

1 Tim 1:9-10 – the law is made for sinners, not the righteous. Examples of who needs the law includes sodomites and immoral men (immoral in this context = pornos in greek…often translated as fornication, and if you noticed a similarity between that and the english word pornography that’s not a coincidence…but that’s a whole ‘nother bible study)

So, based on what the scriptures say, my interpretation is that sodomy (aka to be blunt, anal sex) is sinful and acting on homosexual lusts/longings is sinful. The bible indicates to me (based on these and other scriptures) that God’s design is that one woman leave her family and cleave to her husband and procreate and fill the earth. Men marrying men or women marrying women, goes against this design of nature for man and woman to carry out the command to “procreate and fill the earth”…as well, its kind of hard to get pregnant that way (short of either having heterosexual sex or man-made doctors office ways of getting pregnant).

I find it important to differentiate living in a homosexual lifestyle from being attracted exclusively (or non-exclusively) to people of your same gender. This in many ways no different than heterosexual lust. Is it wrong for us to be attracted to other people? No. Is it wrong for us to act inappropriately on that attraction? Yes. Just because we are attracted to someone doesn’t mean we should engage in fornication or adultery with someone. Every gay person, regardless of whether or not they were “born that way”, has a choice about what they are going to do with same-sex attractions. They are not required to act on those attractions any more than a pedophiliac is “required” to fulfill their lust for sex with children.

As far as whether or not people are “born gay”, my conviction is that I think God made some people that way intentionally. How can I say that? Read 1 Corinthians 7 carefully (especially 7:35). My belief is that God has a very special purpose for those people–his righteous purpose for those people, should they choose to accept it, is to devote their lives in undivided attention to serving the Lord as an unmarried person. The alternative, of course, is suppress the truth about who God is, and choose to engage in a lifestyle of engaging in homosexual activities.

In our culture, being gay can be such a defining characteristic that it easily can become the main identity of someone, and the identity of being a son of the most high God easily gets obscured in that somewhere–which are you going to put first? Of course, which one you prioritize as more important will define a lot about your life, and how you choose to live it 😉

The bible says sin leads to death. Statistically speaking, on average gay people die significantly younger (like at 40 years old or something) than straight people (what’s that? 70 years?). Hmm, coincidence? At any rate, I’d hate to be one of those people on God’s “dead to me” list (which is what happens when God “turns you over” to your sin after you continually refuse to repent).

But that doesn’t mean you should hate on gay people. “Love the sinner, hate the sin”. I fully believe its possible to have friends who are sinners (sounds so…revolutionary, doesn’t it?) so long as they aren’t pulling you into participating in their sin (who is influencing whom in the relationship?)

I like to keep in mind that people living in a lifestyle of homosexuality are people are enslaved to sin, just like every other sinner. Its hard to break free of sin, regardless of what sin it is. These people need compassion and our prayers. Its not our job to come in and judge people for their sin–that job’s already been taken by the holy spirit. What happens when we ignore the holy spirit? Our hearts get hardened and eventually, if we do not confess our sins to God and repent, he turns us over to the sin. But we have no way of knowing which people are beyond hope…so as long as there is at least one sinner in the world, our job of praying for their salvation is far from done!

And as a final random point, its not like God singles out homosexuality more than other sins or anything. In fact, look how few scriptures God actually feels the need to devote to the topic. Compare that to how many times God discusses (heterosexual) fornication or adultery as sins! But we know God’s take on sin, and that we are instructed to flee from temptation to engage in sin.

PPS… I completely neglected the question of “gays in the church” didn’t i?

The term “in the church” is a little bit fuzzy, because it has multiple meanings. In the bible it talks about “the church” being the body of all people who believe in Jesus. But it also refers to the physical meeting place of both christian and non-christians (typically for a sunday worship service)…

Initially we should welcome everyone into the church (as in welcome to attend) with open arms–because it is so important to hear the Word of God (described in the bible as sharper than a two edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit), that they may begin a relationship with Jesus and begin some godly relationships in their lives (hey, some of us need new friends when we get saved, I know I did). How should they believe if they don’t hear the word of God? (see Romans 10)

At some point, a non-believer in the church could become a distraction and instigating to get people in the church to engage in sin or prevent godly activities (doing distracting things during service for example). At this point, the church leadership has the right to “protect their flock” and remove the disturbance so that the spiritual walk of the others in the church is not adversely affected.

At some point, over time, a person who is saved must begin to repent of sinful behavior. Are these gay people in the church engaging in sin is the million dollar question here…as with all sin, it may cost us dearly (and tear apart our lives if our lives are built around ungodly foundations), but the only biblically “acceptable” thing to do if we are in sin is to repent. Repent means more than just saying “I’m sorry”, it also indicates turning away from the sin, making changes to your life to prevent yourself from continuing in the sin. That turning away and stopping your sin, that’s the hard part.

What if the person is in your church for an extended time and you (say, a leader) know they’re totally in sin, but they just won’t repent? A procedure is clearly outlined in the bible (let me know if you need help finding the exact addresses in the bible of any of these things!) of how if a person is in sin, approach them privately, if they don’t repent, bring two or three witnesses, if they still don’t repent, bring them before the entire congregation…and failing repenting at that point, they should be treated as an unbeliever.

As such, if it comes to the point where a person must be treated as an unbeliever because of unrepentant sin, it would certainly be inappropriate for the person to have a position of leadership within the church, based on the criterion for deacons and elders and whatnot stated in the bible. (see 1 timothy). Basically, they say the leaders in the church should be of Godly character, not recent converts (first they must have time to prove their new nature), above reproach (not living in a lifestyle of sin), and so on. Also, the scriptures hold that he who teaches will be held to a higher standard of accountability…as you get into leading in the church your personal freedoms diminish because it would be bad to lead another into sinning through careless example. Kind of that thing of living a lifestyle without the appearance of evil. Billy Graham won’t let himself alone with any woman other than his wife lest it have the *appearance* of impropriety and cast doubt on his character and discredit his ministry.

Based on the conclusion you’ve reached about what consistutes sin as far as the issue of homosexuality goes, the rest of this question solves itself about whether they should be welcome in the church and to what degree and in what type of roles.

Cities of Refuge

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I was reading an article in this morning’s paper about how Mexico won’t extradite criminals to the US if they will face the death penalty in the US (if they will only be given life without parole, that’s a different story). Reading the article, it kind of reminded me a little of the “cities of refuge” in the bible.

“Okay, so if you can make a run for it, and flee to the place of refuge before your accusers do, you will be safe until you die, unless you leave the place of refuge.”

Kind of a very similar thing–if the criminals can flee to Mexico (or certain other much farther away countries), they’re sheltered from the death penalty unless they ever come back to the US (or another country that will extradite).

I think the biggest difference, however, is not the scale (that Mexico is a country and the cities of refuge, cities), but rather that the cities of refuge were for *unintentional* criminals, where there was no premeditation of the crime and no existing hatred toward the slaughtered. Murderers, it seems, *after* standing before the congregation of the the city for judgment, could be “delivered into the hands of the manslayer” (the person sent to come for the criminal’s life), unlike those who committed involuntary manslaughter for whatever reason. Kind of a trial by jury right it seems.

One other little detail in the cities of refuge was a secondary clause that the exception to the rule about having to remain in the refuge city for life was if the high priest died, in which case, he was free to go. I could draw try to draw some parallels between than and major upheaval within the political system meaning its okay to return. But, I suspect that the waiting until the high-priest died was more symbolic of blood (death) being required for the remission of the (unintentional) sin. Death of the high priest could atone for the sin of all who needed atonement.

Bible Art: 2 Cor 10:3-4, John 10:10

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Eager Expectation (Rom 8:19)

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If you want a good illustration of “eager expectation” (George’s favorite definition of hope… an eager expectation that God is going to do something good in your life today), just look at Murray (my parents dog) when my mom says “are you ready to go on a WALK Murray?” or when my mom starts cutting up his dog food. Now that’s eager expectation.

Wow, the Lord is so cool

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Deadline is on for finances for the plane tickets to Africa. So anyway, we had some prayer last night. And then I got home and couldn’t sleep hardly at all and spent a lot of time in prayer. And then when I woke up, I’d just had a dream where I was praying in my dream (among some other good stuff)…and anytime you’re praying in your SLEEP obviously, the Spirit is with you, and I prayed some more and God gave me a vision almost immediately of a bible scene and started relating it to the present situation. Sweet

So I call up Jasmine to share the dream, because she was one of the main characters, and I felt like I needed to warn her about something from the dream before she encountered that distraction in the flesh. Well, dream totally ministered to her, and some of the details that hadn’t really “made sense” to me made perfect sense when she started explaining some context of circumstances she was dealing with that I didn’t know about.

And then I called up Darren to tell him about this vision and dream because part of it pertained to him also. And after I tell him the whole dream he says that’s funny because he’d been praying last night for dreams and visions for the team, but God hadn’t given him anything, nada, zilch. And the dream and vision both totally encouraged him as well, as spiritual gifts are intended–to exhort and edify the body of Christ. I tend to be very wary of use of spiritual gifts as they can be a little iffy seeming to me at times, but wow, seeing them correctly applied, wow, that’s way different.

And then twice this morning I just opened my bible and it landed on exactly the scriptures from the dream & vision and made things even clearer.

And the other crazy thing was, relating to the dream but not in the dream God had kind of spoken a few words to me for Darren as well that didn’t really make a whole lot of sense to me. Okay, so there’s something on Darren’s calendar this morning that doesn’t belong there, that’s not from God, and he needs to take it off and spend the time in the prayer closet. Obviously I don’t know what was on his calendar and had a couple guesses about potential distractions to pray specifically against, but nothing concrete or “that’s the thing”. But within a minute of me telling him what I felt like the Lord was speaking to me, the Lord brought to light what the distraction on his calendar was–calling people about the prayer dinner. And the thing was, like the dream said, it wasn’t like a bad thing he was distracted with, in fact it was a good thing, it just wasn’t what he was supposed to be focused on at the time.

So it was just crazy how God was totally weaving all the details together so carefully, and how it all fits together, and just that God is calling us to the prayer closet and saying “this battle will be won or lost in the prayer closet, go pray”.

Prayer group updates

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So at this week’s prayer meeting Mwela (who you may remember is from the Congo) had a big praise report on the specific items we’ve been praying for him. He had his interview with the immigration department last week and they didn’t have any problems with his asylum application, so he will be getting finalized immigration papers next week on the 5th, so he’ll be able to start working legally and not just taking English classes. And its hard to say which is bigger praise report, but he ALSO had a praise report that his family (that he hasn’t talked to in two years) including wife and kids were finally located, safe and sound, at a refugee camp in Zambia. He hopes to bring them here by around November, so we still some big prayer requests to keep praying for.

As for Shamim, she also had praises again. Last week it was that her son’s grades were up in school and he has been more applying himself since we prayed for that. This week it was that one of her friends from Africa (I think from the refugee camp in Kenya?) is scheduled to come to San Diego on the next flight of refugees next month.

Other than that, we’ve been having a lot of people showing up who are either signed up for the BWO trip to Africa or who are strongly considering putting in an application. We had a record 21 people this week, beating our first week in La Mesa which had our previous record of 17, so God’s doing something crazy I’m sure. But its cool that that many people are going out of their way to spend time praying during the week. Maybe Pastor Benjamin’s vision of their house being filled with people praying will yet happen ;-).