Today I wrote a few things regarding an introductory session I had on John’s Gospel that I’m leading at my church.

“When people want to study the Bible seriously, one of the steps they take is to learn the language. As I teach language students, I am still always faced with the challenge of persuading them that they will not succeed simply by learning enough of the language to engage in translation. Truly learning the language requires leaving English behind, entering the world of the text and understanding the language in its Hebrew context without creating English words in their minds. They must understand the Hebrew as Hebrew text” (Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One, 9).

One of my contentions in modern study of the ancient languages is that this desire to teach and learn the languages for the purpose of only being able to translate has led to some major problems in the understanding of the biblical text amongst scholars and preachers. Being able to translate a text is not the same as being able to understand the text. And the best translators will be the ones who really understand the languages.

I find myself right now searching online for classical/Hellenistic Greek and classical Hebrew resources for kids. I have a 2 year old and back before he could speak a word of English I thought it would be fun if his first word was Greek. Since some of his first sounds were “k,” “a,” and something resembling “oo” I tried, foolishly, to get him to say “ἀκούω,”  (akouo) the Hellenistic Greek for “I am listening.” But he didn’t get it. Why didn’t I try something easier like, “μεθερμηνευόμενον” (methermeneuomenon)? Oh wait, something easier like, “καί” (kai)? 3 syllables was too many! Well, hindsight is 20/20. I decided to let it be after that but only to be picked up at a later date.

When I think about the desires I have for my son, they are plenty. Primary among them is for him to desire to and, in fact, love Jesus. If only this happened I would be a happy man. Following from this I have many desires with respect to his character and education. Not only do I believe having desires for our children is good, I think it is inevitable that we will have them. Some may care more than others, but we have desires and we do have a responsibility with our children. We decide, at least in their younger ages, what they watch, what they learn, etc. I don’t want to be naive and think my wife and I have the only influence in his life (nor should we) but we are strong influencers with great responsibility nonetheless.

Of course this can be mishandled. Just as the failed wannabe NHL superstar can foist upon their son their own dreams of NHL stardom and work the kid ruthlessly through rep hockey, so I can foist upon my son the education I never had with wrong motives (My education wasn’t a poor one, it just didn’t include classical languages and the study of the Bible). And while this is a danger to avoid, we as parents do have control over many of the influences our children will encounter and the education he or she will receive. What are we going to do with that influence and responsibility?

If we care about the Bible as God’s Word to us, then chief among our children’s education should be a grounding in the Word; English, German, Spanish, whatever. And this next part isn’t for everyone, but maybe some of us will begin to teach our children the original languages of the Bible from a young age: Greek and Hebrew. I’m sure that sounds daunting for someone who doesn’t themselves know the languages, but for those of us who do (and maybe we can create resources and training for other kids) is it a worthy endeavor?

It seems to require wisdom based on the personality of the child, but how is teaching them Greek any different from teaching them math? I’m not sure yet if two years old is too young without immersion in a native context (which unfortunately doesn’t exist), but some exposure surely can’t hurt and I want to show my son that I love Jesus, love his Word, and love the study of it in the original. Something might rub off as I begin to teach him.

Give a child a modern language and they can read in their time. Give a child a classical language and they can read beyond their time. Hmm, doesn’t have the same ring as the “fish proverb” but I think it makes a point. Learning Greek and Hebrew wouldn’t be helpful only for biblical study but also to be able to read widely in classical literature and gain all that comes from being multilingual.

Have you considered this or in fact started this endeavor with your kids? I’d love to know how you’ve approached it. And if you have any resources to recommend, please share!

…

Two resources I have quickly found that look like they could be good (though I haven’t spent a good deal of time investigating them yet) are:

Greek for Children from Classical Academic Press; and

these Hebrew books from EKS Publishing Co.

I have added a video to the ‘about’ page. I’m hoping I can start something video related but we’ll see how things go. Here is the video:

Regarding my health, for those interested, I met with doctors in Toronto this week and I won’t be proceeding with a stem-cell transplant for my Leukemia at this time. The risks greatly outweigh the benefits right now. The chance of death would be 1 in 3 to 1 in 2. And if I did survive I could end up with another disease anyway. Not doing the transplant now is great since the procedure is awful. It’s like bringing you to the point of death and then relying on a donor’s stem-cells to bring you back to life with no guarantee that it will work. Keep in mind many have had successful transplants, but this is my scenario based on my cytogenetics and the donor match that was found. A transplant could still happen if I relapse.

Am I going to continue my John studies on here? Yes. I’ve been tired recovering from chemo but I hope to pick things up soon!

Nonetheless, discussing the more difficult question of the time references is an important part of coming to grips with the passage. And it appears to me that many today assume much of it to be referring to the eschaton without giving much thought to the fulfillment in the Jewish War and destruction of the temple in 70 A.D. But this is very clearly involved in the question from the disciples that leads to all of this discourse. So, I tried to get my group to start considering whether some or all of it could have been fulfilled in 70.

One of the most interesting discussions occurred around 13:10 where it says, “And the gospel must first be preached to all nations” (NIV). Since the common assumption is that this can ONLY be future to us, I had some fun trying to get them to see if it could mean anything else.

The reason I wanted to seriously consider that Mark’s text may be saying the gospel will first go out to all nations and be fulfilled by 70 A.D. is its immediate co-text. Verse 9 says, “You must be on your guard. You will be handed over to the local councils and flogged in the synagogues. On account of me you will stand before governors and kings as witnesses to them” (NIV). Given that this is Jesus addressing his disciples in either 30 or 33 A.D. and Christianity proper has not gotten under way and there is no split with the synagogue here, this text should have made sense to the disciples as occurring pre 70 A.D. It doesn’t make so much sense today though. But if v. 9 is referring to something pre-70 A.D., why does it ping pong to the eschaton in verse 10 when it talks about the gospel going out to all nations first? And then v. 11 still makes sense with what has preceded it as pre-70 A.D.

So, the question becomes, does verse 10 HAVE to be understood as only referring to the end times? Is it possible at all to understand it as to be fulfilled by 70 A.D.? I think it’s at least possible.

What 1st c. document details the rise of the early church? Correct, the “Acts of the Apostles” written by Luke. How does it begin in relation to this issue? Acts 1:8: “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Now, it is possible to take that literally from today’s standpoint and include every single nation upon the earth, however we define “nation.” And this is what I commonly see done. But, how does the book of Acts proceed and finish? It proceeds by showing the progress of the gospel moving from Jerusalem outward. It finishes with Paul preaching the gospel in Rome, a metropolitan capital of the empire far away from Jerusalem, potentially thought of as the ends of the earth from a 1st c. middle east perspective.

So, when Mark 13:10 says that the gospel will go out to all nations could it be that it indeed is talking about its progress prior to the destruction of the temple?

I think it could. And if it doesn’t, does that make the text schizophrenic to be ping-ponging back and forth between the temple’s destruction and the future eschaton without any warning whatsoever? That would seem really odd linguistically.

If you’ve read this far with me and are upset at the possibility that this can no longer act as a proof text for the missionary idea that all nations of the earth must first hear the gospel and then the end will come, keep in mind that this is not the only text in the NT that talks about nations and others hearing the gospel/worshiping God. So there is more to the story.

But with respect to Mark 13, I’m still processing this. And I’ve only addressed one issue here. I haven’t talked about other parts of the text that may be future referring (from our modern vantage point).

What do you think?

Reflections on Tweeting

I posted a new tweet every 5-10 minutes. I probably annoyed anyone who doesn’t follow many people on twitter since I would be the only person showing up all day. For those that follow a substantial number of people the tweets would have looked staggered (somewhat).

Tweeting through Isaiah 1–12 was helpful to me as I had to think about how to communicate the message of those chapters in so few characters. If I were to do it again I would have done more summary of the content interspersed with quotations from Isaiah.

Reflections on Isaiah 1–12

What a magnificent passage of Scripture! Scary, but magnificent. God’s judgment is cast in pretty strong language. The vineyard imagery of chapter 5 is one such example. Justice appears to be a major theme of the section as Judah is condemned for their lack of having justice on the oppressed.

But the passage is also filled with hope. We see that God’s judgment of Judah is not the last word. Yes they will go into exile as part of God’s judgment for their rebellion, but then God will turn and judge Assyria (conquerers of Judah).

Even more than this, there are beautiful moments of hope for the future. Chapter 4 shares the Branch of the Lord and tells of a time when the Lord will wash away the filth of the women of Zion and cleanse the bloodstains from Jerusalem. The end of chapter 8 and into chapter 9 speaks of a great light that is to shine in the darkness. It then talks of the child to be born, the son to be given. It gives him divine names like, “Mighty God,” and talks about him as the coming Davidic king who will rule forever. Chapter 11 talks about the coming Messiah again in terms of the shoot coming up out of the stump. Judah is leveled but a stump remains and out of this stump (read, remnant) the messiah will come who will have the Spirit of the Lord resting on him. Then it talks about how the nations will rally to him. There is no racism and no ethnic boundary! Chapter 12 concludes this section with wonderful praise to God and the call to proclaim his greatness to the nations.

With respect to the sign given to Ahaz in chapter 7, Immanuel (God With Us), I do see it as a judgment on Ahaz. Where it is picked up in Matthew 1 it is often seen without any sense of judgment. One writer has suggested Matthew uses Immanuel with the notion of judgment there too. It’s something I need to follow up on. I’m not sure yet.

Being more familiar with John’s Gospel, and the New Testament in general, I’m starting to see the thematic connections between Isaiah and those books much more intimately. I’m looking forward to tracing them out more fully!The above came more from my own study throughout the day rather than through the process of tweeting. But, the tweeting did help me solidify what I was learning by trying to decide how to present it on twitter and through the process of writing those things out. I think I will do something similar again but just not with so many tweets.

I had spent a couple weeks working on the sermon as I was able (hence why this blog space has been kind of quiet) but then I sensed that the sermon needed to go in a bit of a different direction on Friday afternoon so I wrote a new sermon (incorporating one previous section) on Friday/Saturday.

I have received feedback on the sermon (content/form) for which I’m thankful but I haven’t yet dialogued with anyone on the content.

My argument was that the Bible shows us that our greatest need is not money, pleasure, meaning in work, acceptance or love, etc., and in a certain sense not even in forgiveness of sins, but the presence of God.

I don’t mean to denigrate forgiveness of sins by any stretch of the imagination. It was sin that broke the relationship with God and so the sin issue has to be dealt with. And it was. Jesus paid for our sin on the cross. But, not just for sin’s sake. It was for the sake of bringing us back into relationship with God.

So, I started the sermon by raising the question of our greatest need and then went to the story of the golden calf in Exodus 32–34 to show God’s judgment, mercy and grace. The people deserved death for their wicked rebellion. God has mercy on them by forgiving them. But further, he has grace by giving them the gift of his presence. Moses knew that only this would sustain them (cf. Ex. 33 & 34).

I then took the entire Bible as my text to walk through a biblical theology of God’s dwelling with us to show how it occurs in the Bible. It began in the garden as a pure and whole relationship between God and his people. Sin broke that relationship. But God continued to act in history to provide us with what we most need, his presence. He did it through the tabernacle. This takes us from Sinai to Solomon. He then provides his presence on earth in the temple. This takes us from Solomon all the way to the 1st c. A.D. (with of course the proper noting of the 2nd Temple and all that). I noted along the way that there was still a sense that God had not fulfilled his promises to come back to dwell among his people at the temple, however. So there was a great expectation for its fulfillment.

Well, it comes. And it comes in the person of Jesus. He shows up at the Temple in John 2:19 and says, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” He was talking about his body. And John 1:14 says that the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. God dwelt with his people in the person of Jesus Christ. What grace!

Following Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension, the body of Christ, the church, becomes God’s presence on earth. 1 Cor. 3:16-17 talks about us being the temple of God. God’s Spirit dwells within us and we now mediate God to a broken and lost world.

Finally, all of this is heading somewhere. It will end the way it began: in the garden. But this garden is a restored garden and we will never go astray again. We will dwell in the holy of holies. Revelation 21 paints a beautiful picture of our forever being in the presence of our God. He will dwell among us and we will be his people! Revelation 22 depicts the restored garden. There are bookends to our Bible. We start in the garden and we finish in a garden, made possible by the Lamb (Jesus) dying for our sins. And again, not for sin in itself, but to bring us into relationship with God. To give us what we most need: his presence.

I may post the audio at a later time but I’m also working to expand it in written form.

The same holds true for me and I think that I’ve made progress in one area this summer. A contradiction used to exist in my thinking on the issue of stewardship of the environment.

On the one hand I believed that we should respect the earth. I knew that God had created this earth and even though it was corrupted by us, it was still something to not spit upon. After all, it was God’s and his commands in Scripture are to be good stewards, not corrupt it.

On the other hand I didn’t want to overreact to environmental causes that often idolize nature and put their cause above that of humans. But I also didn’t have it right. In the back of my mind I felt okay with being neutral with respect to the environment and nature. I didn’t have to go out of my way to pick up a piece of trash or minimize my use of paper towels and all the rest. I didn’t see any need to cut back on my water bottle consumption by obtaining a reusable drink container. These are some of my ‘environmental sins,’ as I’ll call them.

But these things ran contradictory to each other and I think that deep down I knew it but didn’t want to admit it.

Until now.

My eyes started to become open to this contradiction when I first started reading N.T. Wright a couple of months ago. He helped give me a greater appreciation of ‘creation theology’ and I started to think more deeply about God’s initial creation and his good purposes for it. The Fall occurs, yes. But by only thinking of the Bible’s story in terms of saved and lost (with respect to people) I was forgetting the larger storyline in which the saved/lost categories only make sense.

But my understanding and revelation fully hit home while sitting in an Old Testament theology class a couple weeks ago. We were talking through ‘creation theology’ from Genesis 1 and 2 primarily. God’s good purposes for the creation were hashed out and I really started to think about how we are to be image bearers of God. In the Ancient Near East, an image was a functional one. So, for example, in the Scriptures you will find Ba’al represented by a calf. That’s not because he looks like one or has some similar attributes but because the function of the calf represents what the Ba’al worshipers thought of Ba’al. He was an important provider in fertility and nutrition. They were wrong, but that’s besides the point.

So, us being made in the image of God means that we reflect his glory by acting as he does: filling the earth and having dominion over it as stewards. This separates us from all other creatures. It is not genes (we share an incredibly high percentage with apes! not to mention other species) and it is not language (ours may be considered advanced but it is not unique). Our function as human beings, made male and female, is to be image bearers of God. This ideal function didn’t change at the Fall. It got corrupted and so we seek to be restored. We are restored to fellowship with God and to be image bearers of him through Jesus’ death on the cross. I think this storyline needs to be kept in mind or else our evangelism and efforts in the world turn into the way I was approaching them: there are lost people that need saving from hell out there and that’s that. But that’s not that. It is part of a bigger creation/re-creation narrative.

Dare I now step on some toes (lightly though for today) and say that North American evangelicalism has bred this sort of thinking? That’s where I learned it. I learned that humans are sinful, we need a saviour for our sins, Jesus paid for our sins, we go to heaven. Not every ‘gospel presentation’ is so simple or so naive, but this captures something of it.

I think there are at least two big failures to highlight here: (1) failure to connect salvation to the larger storyline of the Bible, and (2) a wrong view of eschatology.

1) I hit on this one above and I don’t need to say too much more right now. But only thinking in the categories of saved/lost doesn’t appear to me to be as helpful as I once thought it to be. It meant that my motivations were slightly off and in the case of my environmental sins, as I’ve called them, it meant I had no way to properly understand how they went against God’s plan for us in the world. That made them easy to commit.

2) Eschatology, eschatology, eschatology. What has had the most influence on North American eschatology (the study of last things) in recent years? I would like to say the Bible but I think the “Left Behind” movie/book series has captured Americans’s imaginations more than the Bible. The “Left Behind” eschatology is essentially one of Christians being removed from the earth (often called the rapture) while tribulation occurs and chaos ensues, God destroys the earth and then we live forever with Jesus in heaven. It’s not the time to completely deal with the issue of the rapture (I don’t think it happens – I think many have misunderstood Paul in 1 Thessalonians) but this idea of removal and destruction, at least in my case, led me to think, “I doesn’t matter too much what I do with respect to the earth since God is going to destroy it soon anyway.” We may not all be that crass about it but I see it out there.

Rather, the earth in Scripture is groaning to be put back aright and God will one day remake the earth when he brings heaven and earth together. Creation theology helps us see that God is on a trajectory with his work. We messed it up but God is going to restore his beautiful work. The earth is heading toward that restoration. Therefore our work to act as image bearers of God now in the earth is honouring to God as we seek to fulfil, thanks to the death of our Lord Jesus, what we were first created for: bringing glory to God by bearing his image.

The last thing to say here is that I don’t want to limit the creation theology to how we deal with nature. The point of creation theology is to see that there is a hierarchy with people above nature but one of dominion and stewardship, not domination and destruction. It also means that social justice should be of grave concern to us as well. And all of this because the gospel restores broken humanity into relationship with God and the world.

Yes to evangelism for the sake of restoring the broken relationship with God. That’s huge. But yes also to social justice and environmental care.

So, I’m starting small. I’m looking for opportunities to use less paper towel, to run my car less constantly, to use reusable drinking containers rather than buying bottled water.

So, what do you think? Are we Western Christians doing a very good job with respect to the environment? Does it matter?