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January 2 - January 6, 2018
In the past few decades, we’ve been realizing that Jesus has been overly cast within Greco-Roman society to the neglect of his Jewish context.
What a thought—that as much of a hurdle as it seems to travel back in time to the Emmaus road, the gap between us and the biblical world is actually wider culturally than temporally.
“Come up to me on the mountain and be here.”
If a person exerts himself and ascends to the summit, it is possible to reach it, while not being there. He stands on the summit of the mountain, but his head is somewhere else.
In the biblical world, youth was seen as a disadvantage.
Daniel and his friends had become “fatter in flesh than all the youths who ate the king’s food” (emphasis added).
To search the Bible for secrets for slimming down is to read it upside down and backward of what it meant in its time.
In much of the world, it would be shocking that the farmer didn’t share his windfall with his community.
What defines you are your relationships, and what orders your life are your responsibilities to others, not your personal freedom to do what you like.
The act of anointing with sacred oil emphasized that it was God himself who had ordained a person and given him authority to lead his people and act as his representative.
In simple terms, we could say that “Jesus Christ” means, “Jesus, God’s chosen King.”
Christians can’t miss God’s remarkable words about him: “I will be his father, and he will be my son” (v. 13 NIV). This “Son of David” would be the Son of God!
When a new king was crowned, the euanggelion was the announcement that the monarch had taken the throne, that a new kingdom had taken power.
Strictly speaking, the gospel, the euanggelion, is simply that God had appointed Jesus as his chosen King. This was why Paul was utterly focused on preaching the “euanggelion of Christ” and spoke of himself as his “ambassador” to the Gentile world.
it simply isn’t possible to perfectly reproduce a painting with a different palette and different brushes.
Why Hebrew? Well, Hebrew is God’s heart language—the mother tongue of the Scriptures Jesus read.
Although the New Testament was written in Greek, it was composed almost entirely by Jews growing up in a Semitic-thinking culture. Often Hebrew’s deep, rich pigments diffuse through, showing evidence of the writer’s original “accent.”
Martin Luther shares a wise thought with us: If I were young, I would contrive a way and means for the perfect learning of the Hebrew tongue, which is both glorious and profitable, and without which the Holy Scriptures cannot rightly be understood; for although the New Testament be written in Greek, yet it is full of the Hebrew kind of speaking, from whence it is truly said, “The Hebrews drink out of the fountain, the Grecians out of the springs that flow from the fountain; the Latins out of the ponds.”6
In Hebraic thought, the “fear of the Lord” (yirat Adonai7) is better understood as an awe and reverence for God that causes us to want to do his will.
Over the ornate cabinets that hold the Torah scrolls is the phrase Know Before Whom You Stand.
Without having the word stingy, Hebrew speaks of being “tight-fisted” or of having a “bad eye”—being unable to see the needs of the person right in front of you.
To “remember their iniquity” is the same as to “punish their sin.”
the Hebraic idea of “remembering sins” really encompasses the idea of seeking revenge for sins, not just knowing about them.
Israel was not untouched by Hellenism, but the Judaism of Jesus’ day retained much of its traditional, Hebraic, Middle Eastern pattern of thought.
Our culture is a master of droning prose. We believe that religious speakers are effective when they can string out long arguments to defend their points, when they can persuade by the force of argument—this for us is theological sophistication. But this view betrays an important Western prejudice, that storytelling cultures are less sophisticated than prose cultures like our own. They are not!
Jesus, rather than Paul, was the major theologian of the New Testament.
“In the Middle East, from the beggar to the king, the primary method of creating meaning is through the creative use of metaphor and story,”
Throughout the Bible, “dust” signified insignificance or finiteness.
we often conduct our advanced discussions in the abstract rationalism of theology and don’t check to see if the Bible actually confirms our ideas.
The book of Acts, I’ve found, is a great place to ground speculation about how Jesus’ words were interpreted by his original disciples.
Jewish believers in Jesus were careful to observe the Torah, and were known for their avid observance (Acts 21:20, 25). They even asked Paul to sponsor a sacrifice in order to show his commitment to living by the law (v. 24).
Through God’s name he was proclaiming how he would reveal himself: “I will be known by what I do.”
The Shema, however, is a recollection of history, a reminder of the oath that established Israel’s relationship with God.
As important as creeds are, what brings us into relationship with God is not a creed but the covenant Christ enacted that night.
In many cultures in the world, a family line is essential to have any identity at all.
This family-centric logic is behind the importance of all the “begats” of the Bible.
First, we assume that the overall goal of marriage is to satisfy romantic longings, and the purpose of a marriage covenant is to legitimize a sexual relationship.
“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.” (Isa. 56:3–5)
But in God’s glorious kingdom, those who choose to serve him will receive an eternal legacy even more enduring than sons and daughters. He will graft them into his own family tree, and they will never be cut off.
Abraham is the “father of all who believe but have not been circumcised,” in the sense of being the archetype and prime example.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, and heirs according to the promise.
Paul’s focus was not on each person individually but rather on the body of believers as a whole.
When I allowed God to make this promise to the ancient people of Israel instead of to me, I got to see God’s tremendous, redemptive love.
But I keep one eye on the original listeners all the while, trying to think about them too.
Individualism is highly prized in Europe, and perhaps nowhere more so than in America; in Africa, it is synonymous with unhappiness, with being accursed. African tradition is collectivism for only in a harmonious group could one face the obstacles thrown up by nature.
There, the word shem is much more about one’s identity within a community than the verbal label that a person bears, like “George,” “Bill,” or “Mary,” even though the word shem does mean “name” in that sense too.
To speak “in the name” of someone is to speak by his or her authority.
Collectivist cultures that emphasize “honor” and “shame” are really thinking in terms of shem in the biblical sense.
This is why the word shem is sometimes translated as fame, renown, reputation, authority, or honor rather than name.
When the Scriptures talk about God giving a person a “new name,” it denotes that they are being given a new status in society.
