I was thinking about what Jesus said the greatest commandment was: to love the Lord your God with everything you are… and what does that mean?
Here’s the text from which it’s drawn:
34 But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. 35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Now, this is simple text, right? It has some axiomatic concepts that are pretty obvious:
The Lord exists. (Otherwise, what is to be loved?)
You exist. (Otherwise, what is performing the act of dedication?)
The Lord is supreme. (Otherwise, this is not a “command,” but a… simple aphorism, I suppose.)
You are to commit yourself wholly to the Lord.
There are some others that are also implied, but in my experience they’re rarely discussed.
The commandment is one of total dedication to the Lord. There’s nothing wrong with that; many, however, take it to mean that you subvert everything you are, in order to experience that dedication.
Yet… is that what God wants from us? To become mindless shells?
The sages – and the second greatest commandment – say “no.”
We are to “love our neighbors as we love ourselves,” paraphrased. The key phrase, the empowering phrase, is “… as we love ourselves.” How can we love others if we subjugate who we are? How can we love God if we are not as He made us to be?
To be a certain way – regardless of what that “way” might be – we must first be.
We are to love; we are to respect ourselves such that we can respect others; we must own who we are, or else the offering to God (of our souls, minds, and strength, in the “greatest commandment”) is worthless.
I was reading Romans 7 today, after one of our pastors did a study on Romans 6 last night, and something stood out.
In Romans 6:15-23, Paul is talking about being slaves to righteousness; no longer are we slaves to sin, but we are slaves to righteousness, to which we are indebted and from which we derive obedience.
15 What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!
(Romans 6:15 ESV)
Yet the law has not passed away, because it is the baseline from which we can determine righteousness, even though we’re not justified by the law. It serves to condemn us (Romans 1) and inform us (Romans 7:7).
And there we proceed to Romans 7:
7:1 Or do you not know, brothers — for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives? 2 For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage. 3 Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress.
4 Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. 5 For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. 6 But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.
(Romans 7:1-6 ESV)
Okay… whoa. The thing that stuck out to me was the freedom from law because we have died to it.
I’ve mentioned before the whole concept of freedom in Christ, and here we have it yet again, expressed as freedom from the law as opposed to “freedom in Christ.”
It’s a little more forceful here, though.
Yet the law still has meaning to us, does it not? Or does it? I say it does, because, again, it’s the measure for proper behavior and feeling. (If one has no desire to murder, or steal, or covet, this is good…)
Paul, however, is still thinking like a Hebrew and writing for a Greek audience, using the polemic invective of the day. He is overemphasizing his point, to “scare them straight.”
Scaring Them Straight
“Scaring them straight” is what the anti-drug commercials of Reagan’s presidency were trying to do; overemphasize a point, in the hopes that some of the point remains.
The logic seems to be something like this:
If, for example, someone retains only 10% of a message, we can help them retain 100% of the message is we emphasize it ten times.
This ignores diminishing returns, but it seems to fit the mindset.
Where is Sparta?
Sparta is in Greece, of course. But the declaration – from Zach Snyder’s “300” – of “This! Is! Sparta!” was so … comical that it seemed to fit.
The thing about Paul’s declaration of death to the law – such that we’re free from it – is based on context.
Paul is writing to the Romans; he is explaining the theology to people who may or may not be theologically sound – as shown by his constant references to those who know the law, as a subgroup of the Roman church.
That means that he has two missions for his invective.
One is to connect to those who study the law, who expect the invective and passion. (If you’re not willing to fight for it, you must not believe it very much.)
The other is to overemphasize his point through passion, so that some retention was achieved.
Yet the law does not pass away; we still consider the law the metric for sin.
The key is to remember that Paul’s statement of death to the law is not a final word. It exists in context; it co-exists with everything else said about the Law, which is that it’s the standard by which we are able to judge behavior, and that it communicates to us part of God’s Will.
When I mentioned Philippians 4:19, I mentioned having done a word study, my first word study focused on the Greek language.
What’s the value of a word study? Should it be how people study Scripture?
Well… my thought is that word studies are a useful tool, but that this tool should be one among many. You shouldn’t feel you have to rely on word studies to learn God’s Will.
In fact, I’ll go one further: if a word study is required to understand a passage, then you’re being informed incorrectly.
It’s one thing to do a word study and add to your enlightenment regarding a passage in the Bible – it’s another thing altogether to do a word study and use that as your sole source of enlightenment.
Different translations have their strengths and weaknesses, to be sure, but nearly every translation in general availability is clear enough to be used for evangelical purposes. (I’m not suggesting that books like the Book of Moron – I mean, Mormon – and other such works are canonical, mind. The Bible says that it’s not to be added to.)
By this I mean that if you’re reading the NIV, you’re not getting a fundamentally different gospel message than if you read the ESV or the KJV. There are certainly differences, primarily in the source texts used, and some use these differences to claim that one translation or another is a false Bible, but I find this spurious.
A minor side point about translations
The NIV, especially, gets blamed as a “devil’s Bible” because it’s “missing verses.” For example, Acts 8:37 is claimed to be “missing” in the NIV… and I find that it’s not quite accurate, for a few reasons.
Consider: the NIV translators acknowledge that it’s there, even if the translation doesn’t include the verse inline – because 8:38 is the same no matter what translation you use. So the verse gets a “placeholder” at the very least.
Also consider: I don’t have a single NIV that doesn’t contain the verse! Admittedly, the “main NIV” I have – not my “go-to Bible,” which is an NASV translation – has a footnote that includes the verse as a whole, and a footnote isn’t the same as an inline verse – but it’s still there.
What does this mean? Has the NIV taken away something from the Bible, or added it? Many are anti-NIV because it leaves verses out (of the inline text, I suppose) – but they’re not thinking of why.
I’m not an NIV apologist, per se (okay, maybe I am, since I’m defending it here) but the verses excluded from the mainline content are excluded because there’s some question about which source texts contained what. In general, from what I’ve seen, the older manuscripts contained less than the later manuscripts used to translate the King James Version, and the NIV uses those older manuscripts.
If the Bible is not to be added to, then, I’d suggest that the older manuscripts might even be more authoritative than the newer manuscripts.
The only shift is in conservative preservation of the value reportedly possessed by the KJV. If it’s your reference point as far as what verses contain what, then the Bibles that use older manuscripts would be invalid – because it uses verses added later (because they’re not present in the older manuscripts we have).
But if we’re picking on Bible translations, I’d say the later manuscripts have a weaker position than the older ones.
The key for me is this: does the NIV contain the gospel? Does it contain the gospel in such a way that the whole message is not changed?
The answers are yes, and yes: it contains the gospel, and it does not change the message. At no point does it say specifically something that counteracts the gospel, although there are points of emphasis the later manuscripts contain that can add clarity (Acts 8:37 being a good example of this.)
Back to word studies…
Word studies can provide insight into the further meaning contained in the original texts. For example, Philippians 4:19 uses the word “wealth” (or “riches,” depending on your translation), and I was wondering what it actually meant by the word outside of the context of the verse, so I did a quick word study into it.
The context of the verse doesn’t change through the word study; I didn’t find new meaning in the word study. I established further meaning and clarification of the word, and added just a tiny bit of Greek knowledge, but the word study didn’t do more than glorify God.
Word studies could instruct, I suppose. If you don’t understand a passage at all, a word study could give you the insight you need as a lever to expose for what something was meant.
But in my humble opinion, a word study should enhance, not serve as an underpinning of knowledge; relying on it for primary sources of knowledge yields an interpretation that the Bible is a mystery, that you have to have special knowledge and understanding (and interest) to read it, and that serves as a barrier between you and God.
Further, emphasizing word studies can serve as a barrier between others and God. For example, I rather enjoy word studies when I do them. (Well, when I do them with Hebrew – I dislike Greek!) But I try to be careful when referring to them when I talk to people, because I don’t want to send the impression that someone who’s not done a word study is “less prepared” than I am.
That’s not the case, after all – a believer has the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is no respecter of persons. My approach is not better than or more holy than yours, no matter what your approach is, or what my approach is.
And making it seem as if that’s not the case – e.g., that my way is better – is wrong, and harmful to others.
As I’ve mentioned before, I recently held the rather weak conviction that Jonah might have been allegorical rather than historical. That weak conviction has been altered; I’m now weakly convicted that it is historical and not allegorical.
One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about it is the choice of Jonah in the first place.
Jonah is a book about God’s acceptance and desire for piety from all people; Jonah, the eponymous prophet of the book, is an ardent nationalist who has no problems with Noachides but rejects God’s call to carry His message to the Assyrians, who – despite their cruelty and opposition to Israel – are still valuable to Him.
After God calls Jonah, Jonah runs directly away from God’s will (he’s called to go northeast, so Jonah runs directly west) and into the belly of a “great fish” (דג גדול), which deposits him back on dry land after three days. Jonah then goes to Nineveh, “that great city,” and tells the Assyrians that they have forty days – and they repent. Jonah then pouts, and despairs that a plant that gave him shelter was withered by a worm – and God scolds him, saying “You cared about this plant, which you had nothing to do with, but did not care about those people that I created.”
So my thought was: why couldn’t God just look at Jonah running away, and choose someone else to be blessed to be His prophet? Why reward Jonah – if it’s a reward to be known as Jonah is known – when Jonah chose to oppose God?
To me, God chose Jonah the way He did because if He didn’t, the message would have been much weaker. The illustration offered by Jonah’s journey wouldn’t be as powerful if God hadn’t committed to using Jonah to put into motion His will for Nineveh (which, incidentally, got absolutely crushed by Babylon years later… to the point where its mere location was in question.)
God wasn’t just speaking to the Assyrians, the way I understand it; God was speaking to us. If God chose a more convenient route (“Oh, Jonah went thataway when I wanted him to go thisaway, I’ll just choose someone else or abandon the Assyrians”) then we wouldn’t have had the illustration of God showing how He values everyone.
And God does value everyone. Remember, He called Jonah to call to the Assryians, who were the ones who crushed Israel out of existence (and Judah survived only as a vassal nation.) These were enemies of the chosen nation (and enemies of pretty much everyone, really.) Jonah was being told to help the enemies of the entire free world, because God valued them.
So why historical and not allegorical?
It’s not a simple question to answer, sadly. I think it has more to do with the history of Israel, intertwined with what we know of Assyria. I guess it has to do with how I see God looking at Israel – the northern kingdom, not necessarily the modern nation – and how God saw their evil ways and loved them enough to let them wander and return, wander and return.
I see a parallel in Jonah for the Assyrians: God values them and calls to them as well. The parallels are very strong, although not perfect – the lack of perfection is a hint of authenticity.
I don’t know that I can say for sure that I think it’s historical. I don’t see why it could not be – if God is omnipotent, then there’s nothing preventing it from being historical whatsoever. And there are enough references in it to God’s mercy and love for all mankind that make me think that maybe there’s more to it than useful myth.