Bible translations

I read a book recently called Love Walked Among Us. It was pretty good, but there was something that just kept on coming back to bother me: the Bible translation he used.

When I first became a Christian, pretty much every Christian I knew was reading the New International Version. I always wanted an NIV but they were a bit more expensive so for my first self-bought Bible I got myself the New Living Translation. It’s not a word-for-word translation, but it reads easily, so I became a fan.

Bibles are pretty much sorted into word-for-word translations and thought-for-thought translations. The thought-for-thought ones (like the NLT) are great for reading every day but aren’t so good when it comes to studying because, simply enough, the words aren’t the same!

John 2:4

This is the standard example, where Jesus addresses his mother Mary as ‘Dear woman’. I’ve actually heard this preached on where the preacher has delivered as one of his points that Jesus is gently when rebuking his mum – he said, ‘Can you imagine how rude this would have sounded if Jesus hadn’t said “dear” before “woman”?’

In the original Greek text, Jesus is recording as having said: ‘Woman, what does this have to do with me?’ Sounds quite abrupt, doesn’t it? Obviously the translators of the NIV have added in the word ‘dear’ to help modern-day English readers understand that this actually wasn’t considered rude at the time, yet what it has meant is that modern-day English preachers (like the one quoted above) have no idea what Jesus actually said.

There are plenty more examples like this one, where the translators have changed what’s written in an attempt to best convey the tone of what’s being said (rather than the simple words).

Here’s my thought. Thought-for-thought translations (NIV, NLT, Good News Bible, etc) are fine when it comes to a casual read, but using them for any level of serious study is a dead-end. It’s like doing word studies on a translated poem and coming to the conclusions that foreigners don’t know how to rhyme. Preachers and authors, even if they use the NIV or whatever to quote from because they prefer the sound, should always study using a good word-for-word translation.

And just so you know, my favourite would be the ESV (English Standard Version), but I’ve heard great stuff about the NASB so will give that a nod here too.

The biggest concern when preaching

Image via Wikipedia

I had the privilege of preaching at my local church last Sunday on Hosea and Gomer – the recording is here if you’re interested.

But in preparation for preaching I encountered the biggest challenge that I face every time I preach; I’ve spent hours and hours digging around, researching the passage and history and everything, then have to choose what to leave out.

So, I thought I’d just throw down here some of the bits I originally included, but then missed out from the preach itself.

Old Testament use of the word ‘whore’

The Hebrew word for whore is zanuwn – it’s used four times in the opening phrase of Hosea and over 100 times throughout the Old Testament…this word is important for our understanding of the Christian faith!

Jesus’ heritage

Rahab was a prostitute mentioned in Jesus’ family tree.

Reformed porn star

There’s a lady out there called Kim, but most people would recognise her as Houston – she once won an award for the best selling video of all time as she broke the record for having sex with more people in one day than anyone in recorded history, but is now a Christian.

Unfaithful wife

A Christian lady had cheated on her husband during their engagement, she eventually confessed and the husband bought her a new, clean, white nightgown. He dressed her in it and said, ‘I choose to see you as Jesus does’.

Grace a second time (3:1)

‘If you have had grace once the Lord has more for you. Did you have happy times when old Dr. So-and-so was your pastor? Well, the doctor is dead, but God is not. Were you very much delighted when you used to sit in such-and-such a church, in years gone by, and have you moved into the country now? Yes, but God has not moved. He is in the country as well as in the town. You tell me you had such happy times when you were young. Yes, but God is neither younger nor older. Go to him, for he is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.’ - Charles Spurgeon

God’s forgiveness, and forgetting

‘Suppose that someone had grievously offended any one of you, and that he asked your forgiveness, do you not think that you would probably say to him, ‘Well, yes, I forgive you; but I – I – I – cannot forget it’? Ah! dear friends, that is a sort of forgiveness with one leg chopped off, it is a lame forgiveness, and is not worth much.’ - Charles Spurgeon

Final chapter

‘This is a wonderful chapter to be at the end of such a book. I had never expected from such a prickly shrub to gather so fair a flower, so sweet a fruit; but so it is: where sin abounded, grace doth much more abound. No chapter in the Bible can be more rich in mercy than this last of Hosea; and yet no chapter in the Bible might, in the natural order of things, have been more terrible in judgment. Where we looked for the blackness of darkness, behold a noontide of light!’ - Charles Spurgeon

Why does God only save some?

‘God is a lover and a husband. He is not a rapist, he will not force his love. He will woo, draw by attraction, but not force.’ - Monsignor Charles Pope

You are sicker than you think

Isaiah 64:6 tells us that our finest efforts are a polluted garment – what is it like when we make no effort?

Shocking statistic

80% of married women admit to having frequent sexual fantasies about men who they are not married to. 98% of men do.

The nature of sin

‘It is not the importance of the thing, but the majesty of the Lawgiver, that is to be the standard of obedience…[The question] is really this: Is the Lord to be obeyed in all things whatsoever he commands?’ – Andrew Bonar

The effects of prayer in a scientific study

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Tom is an atheist who visits and comments on this blog from time to time. Earlier this week he posted a link to this study – this is basically it (and I quote):

Patients at 6 US hospitals were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 groups: 604 received intercessory prayer after being informed that they may or may not receive prayer; 597 did not receive intercessory prayer also after being informed that they may or may not receive prayer; and 601 received intercessory prayer after being informed they would receive prayer. Intercessory prayer was provided for 14 days, starting the night before CABG. The primary outcome was presence of any complication within 30 days of CABG. Secondary outcomes were any major event and mortality.

RESULTS: In the 2 groups uncertain about receiving intercessory prayer, complications occurred in 52% (315/604) of patients who received intercessory prayer versus 51% (304/597) of those who did not (relative risk 1.02, 95% CI 0.92-1.15). Complications occurred in 59% (352/601) of patients certain of receiving intercessory prayer compared with the 52% (315/604) of those uncertain of receiving intercessory prayer (relative risk 1.14, 95% CI 1.02-1.28). Major events and 30-day mortality were similar across the 3 groups.

CONCLUSIONS: Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.

Here are my thoughts. The higher rate of complications in those who had been told they would receive prayer doesn’t have any bearing on the truth of whether prayer works or not, so I’m going to ignore that for today. I already know that atheists will write off my thoughts as excuses, but that’s the game we play I suppose!

Assumptions

I think the biggest question here is around what assumptions have been made. If the God being prayed to (and therefore tested in this study) is the God of the Bible, then we must start with the assumption that the Bible is true in its representation of God and His response to us. Knowing that the Bible commands us never to place God under test conditions (Deuteronomy 6:16, Matthew 4:7, Luke 4:12) the expected result proving His existence would be that prayer would appear, under these circumstances, not to make much difference.

It would be like me declaring that I am invisible until observed. No-one has any evidence to disprove my statement because any evidence would only serve as evidence in favour of it. In effect, the results of this test provenothing.

Nature of the test

I don’t know the entire Bible off by heart, but I don’t remember there being a single reference to anyone in there praying successfully for a doctor’s operation to not experience any complications. If there was, this would appear to be a legitimate experiment. As it is, even if there was an overwhelming protection against complications it would be hard to argue that this actually proved that the God of the Bible was answering the prayers, as it never suggests this will be the case.

Which God

Specifically, however, the test doesn’t specify which God is being prayed to – if the participants were praying to someone or something other than the God of Christianity, it doesn’t surprise me in the least that prayer seemed to have little to no effect.

Success

The definition of success according to this test was ‘no complications in surgery’, however this is nowhere presented as a ‘successful’ answer to prayer according to the Bible. Again, the results present no surprise to a Bible-believing Christian.

Of course, the answer to this would be that the people praying were praying for no complications, so a positive answer would have been exactly that. However the Bible’s promise is that God will grant the desires of your heart to people who delight themselves in the LORD, rather than those who delight themselves in scientific study (Psalm 37:4).

Conclusions

So, bearing all the above in mind it’s hardly surprising that the intercessory prayer used in this test appeared to have no immediate effect on the surgery. Certain details have been missed out of these studies (it would be interesting, for example, to see the statistics showing percentage of complications based on location, surgeon, surgeon’s faith etc).

Clearly, the only way to properly test prayer would be to compare two situations side-by-side experienced in real life, one by a Bible-believing Christian and one by a non-Christian. And the results of this can be seen. Ask me, or any other Bible-believing Christian, if we believe prayer to work – the answer will always be yes. Here are just two examples of when I have personally experienced prayer working.

1. I prayed for a lady’s ovary to be healed; it was – the doctor couldn’t understand what had happened.

2. A friend’s hip had been causing him pain for a couple of weeks – I prayed for it to be healed; it was.

So here are my conclusions:

If knowing that you are being prayed for hinders the healing process, the chance that these individuals would have been healed would have been astronomically low.

The situations were that we were just sitting around praying – the chances of someone being healed of these issues out of nowhere is surely virtually nothing, so the fact that they were healed should stand a million miles out of the crowd.

Based on my experience prayer works. It would be selfish of me not to pray, and not to encourage others to pray. So here’s my encouragement: pray!

I have a lot of imaginary friends

I’ve realised that 22 Words is pretty much my favourite blog right now, so I’m sorry if you feel like this is just a copy of that…but I do think it’s all worth sharing:

Love Wins

Image by Keegan Jones via Flickr

I’m sure some readers are aware that Rob Bell has recently published a book called Love Wins. In this book Bell argues that salvation is only through Jesus Christ, but that eventually (whether in this life or the next) everyone will submit to that greater love, and that hell is therefore more of a ‘purifying fire’ preparing every soul for an eternity with Jesus.

I have issues with the book. I’m not a massive ‘turn or burn’ guy but I do believe the Bible is true:

1. In Mark 14:21 Jesus says that it would have been better for Judas Iscariot if he had never been born. If he was destined (eventually) for an eternity in the perfection of heaven on earth this would seem not to be true, so Rob Bell seems to be suggesting that Jesus is a liar.

2. In Revelation 14:11 we’re told that the smoke of the torment of those in the lake of fire will go up ‘forever and ever’. This doesn’t seem to suggest that it will be cut short when they all leave and go into the presence of Jesus.

3. If what Rob Bell says is true, then creation is a waste of time. God has introduced a world in which suffering exists just for the sake of it – why would he not simply create eternal perfection and drop us all in? That’s how we’re going to end up anyway.

4. If what Rob Bell says is true, then Christians have no need to tell anyone else about Jesus, because they’re all going to believe in him anyway. That means that the apostle Paul’s comment that he preaches nothing but Christ crucified (1 Corinthians 1:23) is just a little bit silly.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not claiming to know what happens after death, which is exactly what Rob Bell is saying (we don’t know what happens after death, therefore we must conclude that love wins), but saying that we have to bypass biblical statements to reach his conclusion just because he doesn’t like the idea of hell seems not to be the best route to me.

Unnecessarily offensive…but genius

Found here via here.

God is not great

Cover via Amazon

A recent blog made me chuckle a bit, it’s a Roman Catholic’s response to Christopher Hitchen’s book God is Not Great. It’s a tad sarcastic so probably won’t appeal to everyone, and uses a lot of long words…but it is good:

To appreciate the true spirit of the New Atheism, however, and to take proper measure of its intellectual depth, one really has to turn to Christopher Hitchens. Admittedly, he is the most egregiously slapdash of the New Atheists, as well as (not coincidentally) the most entertaining, but I take this as proof that he is also the least self-deluding. His God Is Not Great shows no sign whatsoever that he ever intended anything other than a rollicking burlesque, without so much as a pretense of logical order or scholarly rigor. His sporadic forays into philosophical argument suggest not only that he has sailed into unfamiliar waters, but also that he is simply not very interested in any of it. His occasional observations on Hume and Kant make it obvious that he has not really read either very closely. He apparently believes that Nietzsche, in announcing the death of God, literally meant to suggest that the supreme being named God had somehow met his demise. The title of one of the chapters in God Is Not Great is “The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False,” but nowhere in that chapter does Hitchens actually say what those claims or their flaws are.

On matters of simple historical and textual fact, moreover, Hitchens’ book is so extraordinarily crowded with errors that one soon gives up counting them. Just to skim a few off the surface: He speaks of the ethos of Dietrich Bonhoeffer as “an admirable but nebulous humanism,” which is roughly on a par with saying that Gandhi was an apostle of the ruthless conquest and spoliation of weaker peoples. He conflates the histories of the first and fourth crusades. He repeats as fact the long discredited myth that Christians destroyed the works of Aristotle and Lucretius, or systematically burned the books of pagan antiquity, which is the very opposite of what did happen. He speaks of the traditional hostility of “religion” (whatever that may be) to medicine, despite the monastic origins of the modern hospital and the involvement of Christian missions in medical research and medical care from the fourth century to the present. He tells us that countless lives were lost in the early centuries of the Church over disputes regarding which gospels were legitimate (the actual number of lives lost is zero). He asserts that Myles Coverdale and John Wycliffe were burned alive at the stake, although both men died of natural causes. He knows that the last twelve verses of Mark 16 are a late addition to the text, but he imagines this means that the entire account of the Resurrection is as well. He informs us that it is well known that Augustine was fond of the myth of the Wandering Jew, though Augustine died eight centuries before the legend was invented. And so on and so on (and so on).

In the end, though, all of this might be tolerated if Hitchens’ book exhibited some rough semblance of a rational argument. After all, there really is a great deal to despise in the history of religion, even if Hitchens gets almost all the particular details extravagantly wrong. To be perfectly honest, however, I cannot tell what Hitchens’ central argument is. It is not even clear what he understands religion to be. For instance, he denounces female circumcision, commendably enough, but what—pray tell—has that got to do with religion? Clitoridectomy is a widespread cultural tradition of sub-Saharan Africa, but it belongs to no particular creed. Even more oddly, he takes indignant note of the plight of young Indian brides brutalized and occasionally murdered on account of insufficient dowries. We all, no doubt, share his horror, but what the hell is his point?

As best I can tell, Hitchens’ case against faith consists mostly in a series of anecdotal enthymemes—that is to say, syllogisms of which one premise has been suppressed. Unfortunately, in each case it turns out to be the major premise that is missing, so it is hard to guess what links the minor premise to the conclusion. One need only attempt to write out some of his arguments in traditional syllogistic style to see the difficulty:

Major Premise: [omitted]
Minor Premise: Evelyn Waugh was always something of a b******, and his Catholic chauvinism often made him even worse.
Conclusion: “Religion” is evil.

Or:

Major Premise: [omitted]
Minor Premise: There are many bad men who are Buddhists.
Conclusion: All religious claims are false.

Or:

Major Premise: [omitted]
Minor Premise: Timothy Dwight opposed smallpox vaccinations.
Conclusion: There is no God.

One could, I imagine, counter with a series of contrary enthymemes. Perhaps:

Major Premise: [omitted]
Minor Premise: Early Christians built hospitals.
Conclusion: “Religion” is a good thing.

Or:

Major Premise: [omitted]
Minor Premise: Medieval scriptoria saved much of the literature of classical antiquity from total eclipse.
Conclusion: All religious claims are true.

Or:

Major Premise: [omitted]
Minor Premise: George Bernard Shaw opposed smallpox vaccinations.
Conclusion: There is a God.

But this appears to get us nowhere. And, in the end, I doubt it matters.

‘Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes’ (Proverbs 26:5).

Soulprint by Mark Batterson

This book is essentially a plea from the author that we would fundamentally get to know, and be, our true selves found in Jesus Christ. Looking at various examples in the life of King David, Mark Batterson explains how God has designed each of us uniquely, which is a place of great privilege, yet great responsibility.

Listening to the opening chapters and blurb about this book I thought for a moment that this book was going to tell me to ‘be the best I could be’ by following another self-help book, but this is not that kind of book! Batterson’s idea is that each of us has a unique ‘soulprint’ in the same way that we have a unique fingerprint, and that we will experience fullness of life when we embrace that soulprint for what it is.

David’s life gives a great biblical example of a man who God used for a unique purpose regardless of what the world thought of him. I think Batterson does a great job of explaining occasions in David’s life using contemporary examples, and he really communicates the extent to which God loves to think about and plan for us, while at the same time underlining the phenomenal responsibility which comes with that.

The book is filled with personal stories from Mark’s life which really added a good depth to it, and it made it even more special that the audiobook was narrated by him – his voice isn’t the most natural narrator but for his own book it doesn’t make much difference, he’s easy to listen to and it’s always nice to hear the author’s own work.

I can’t imagine any Christian not being impacted by this book so I’m happy to give this a blank recommendation to you if you’re a Christian, I’m sure you’d enjoy, and be encouraged and challenged by it.

I got this audiobook for free from christianaudio.com. I’m not required to give a positive review.

 

Repentance and faith

Just a thought.

I’ve always been taught that becoming a Christian is about two things: (1) repentance, and (2) faith.

Repentance is us admitting that we have sinned and turning away from sin.

Faith is us resting our trust on Jesus, knowing that he never sinned and is our substitute.

I think this may be a bit controversial, but I wonder if we wouldn’t do better to reverse these – start with faith in the sure knowledge that repentance will follow. That doesn’t mean we never talk about sin and its consequences, it maybe just means that we stop telling non-Christians how sinful they are.

Just a thought.

 

Entropy, evolution and logic

Image by Dave Pearson via Flickr

I’ve been watching Wonders of the Universe, the new BBC series presented by Professor Brian Cox (who, of course, I know better from his days as the keyboard player in D:ream).

The first episode was about time, and our mate Brian explained to us the second law of thermodynamics – entropy. Cleverly using a pile of sand compared to a sandcastle, he showed that you could mess around with the pile without changing much, whereas messing with the sandcastle would turn it into the pile. Left to nature, everything moves from a state of order (the sandcastle – low entropy) to a state of chaos (the pile – high entropy). Using this law, astronomical physicists have predicted how the universe will go in future.

However, the second episode was about how stars created the elements and eventually us, how the chaos and simplicity of hydrogen on fire (in a star) become more and more ordered and complex until new stars and planets are born.

Now, I’m not being funny here, I’m genuinely interested in how these two go together! Are there any scientists out there who understand cosmic evolution and entropy enough to explain the matchup?

Thank you.