Archived Daily Manna | Rejoice Fellowship | A mission to release people to rejoice in the world.

Message: We ended our last installment talking about prepositions — a riveting subject that never fails to set hearts a-flutter. But I hope you will bear with me for a few paragraphs. For I am going to explain why prepositions are partly responsible for the disunity of Christianity and the existence of as many as 45,000 different denominations that disagree with each other. Take this quote from Galatians 2: “For through the Law I died to the Law, so that I might live to God. . . . it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God . . . .” (Gal. 2:19-20, NASB) Most people reading this, I think, just throw up their hands and settle for some sort of general understanding that Paul is living a new Christ-centered life. Which really is a pretty good way to read it; but we are digging into Galatians today — getting granular — so we will try to tease out specific meanings. hearing the voice of God We are often forced to simply ignore a preposition and try to puzzle out the meaning of Paul’s writing from context and comparison to other passages. This leads to a tricky translation process. We don’t want to end up supplying the meaning we want a passage to have, rather than reading what Paul (and thus God!) actually meant to say. Fortunately, today’s Scripture gives us an easier example of how Paul used prepositions, to get us started. Gal. 1:16 tells us that Christ was revealed “in” Paul and “through” Paul “to” the Gentiles. 1) Christ was revealed “in” Paul. Paul himself was a living revelation of Christ, physical proof of the power of Christ to transform us. His sudden change from a Christian-hunting agent of the Sanhedrin to the exact opposite, the foremost proponent of Christianity, is so sudden, so unexpected, and so radical, that it is inexplicable without accepting the intervention of God. This Spirit who changed Paul is literally inside him; it proves itself by his words and deeds. 2) Christ was revealed “through” Paul. Here, we understand that Paul spoke (and wrote) as a conduit to God. Christ speaks through him in much the same way Yahweh spoke through the prophets. We say that an announcer speaks through a public address system, or the President speaks through his information officer. The analogies are not perfect, because Paul’s personality and voice remain his own; he does not become a God-puppet, but a God-inspired author. The words are his, but nevertheless, the message is God’s: utterly true, infallibly true, eternally true. 3) In the final phrase, “to the Gentiles,” the preposition is ambiguous but the ambiguity is harmless. The phrase can mean: “to” the Gentiles — identifying the audience of Paul’s gospel. “for” the Gentiles — identifying the beneficiaries of Paul’s conversion, or “among” the Gentiles — telling us where (and by implication, to whom) Paul will preach. The larger meaning is pretty much the same in all three cases, just with a tiny difference in emphasis. Theologically speaking, the ambiguity is harmonious. So why bother even mentioning it? We are warming up! People naturally despise ambiguity, and this goes double for the Bible, to which we look for clear guidance. And as a result, Biblical truth is often damaged by human attempts to give the public what it wants — clarity — when the Bible is actually a bit ambiguous. As is so often the case, however, the easy way out is the wrong way out: Paul has just told us that one who modifies the Gospel to please men is not a servant of Christ. (Gal. 1:10) Peace under God’s protection When Biblical language is ambiguous, we might infer — perhaps we must infer — that God means us to accept an ambiguity. But for certain, to attempt to correct the Bible by supplying a clear meaning where the Bible itself does not is at best suspect. (Gal. 1:6-9) The attempt to clarify a term that is ambiguous in the Bible is one of the roots of what is called “systematic” theology. The unspoken concept of systematic theology is that the human mind can understand God; that human logic is sufficient to understand God’s truth. Our minds want to fill in the blanks and that is what systematic theology does: it fills in the blanks using the mind of the theologian. Mr. X sees an ambiguity — for example, a preposition that can easily be translated in different ways — in a verse of the (Greek) New Testament. “It must mean this,” his decides, because one meaning makes more sense to his (or my) little brain. He therefore translates a half-truth and presents it as God’s Word. Buffing up an ambiguous phrase is useful in theology, because newcomers want to hear a clear meaning. But it gets very problematic when our Mr. X sees a verse later on that might seem to conflict with his first interpretation, and tries to reconcile the difference into a logical framework. The only way to accomplish this is to mischaracterize the Bible — and there lies the most basic fundamental flaw of systematic theology. The Bible cautions us about humans beings adding to it. (Proverbs 30:5-6) In the words of the KJV, God’s greatness is “unsearchable”. Or in the words of Paul, the Gospel “is foolish to the Greeks, who seek human wisdom.” (1 Cor. 1:22.) So, bottom line: do not argue, even internally, about Bible passages that can fairly be read in two ways. Just accept that there is an ambiguity and hold both meanings in your mind. In John 3:3, is Jesus telling us that we must we be “born again” or “born from above”? Both translations are 100% correct!