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Friday, August 29, 2025

Today's Passage : Today's Passage:Discipline and Love [2] Expanded Understanding from the Verbatim Bible

BibleVerse:1 Thessalonians 5:14-15

"And we urge you, do not be hesitant to chide the undisciplined and lazy (but always out of love). Encourage the faint of heart, help the weak, and with everyone, be patient. Verbatim Bible 14 And we exhort you, brothers, chide the undisciplined [n]Or the idle (see 2 Thess 3:6-13), poss. the disorderly; likely, the term is meant to include those who engage in theological speculation. , encourage the faint-hearted [o]Compound derived from roots meaning small-souled or small-in-life. , help the weak, be patient with everyone. Footnotes v. 14 – [n] or the idle (see 2 Thess.), possibly the disorderly; likely, the term is meant to include those who engage in theological speculation. [o] compound derived from roots meaning, literally, small-souled or small-in-life."

Message: I thought it would be interesting to look at this short passage again, looking at a peculiar issue: For all the work that goes into translating Paul’s epistles directly from the Greek, what do we gain? First off, we gain a test for the basic meaning of a passage. Often enough — and I am sure it is as hard for you to believe as it was for me, before I studied Greek and saw the evidence with my own eyes — the translations in print are simply wrong. (The doughty New American Standard Bible is almost always accurate, but even it misses the mark on occasion.) There is also a second advantage, however, that is quite common: we can see dimensions of meaning in the Greek that do not come through in even good translations; we can develop a richness of textual understanding that is impossible to convey otherwise. Christian healing hand The Greek term that our DP Bible translates “faint of heart” literally means “small of life” or “small-souled.” It has two primary idiomatic meanings: “shy” is the primary meaning, but it can also mean “discouraged”. Which class of people do we want to bolster up? Well, both of them, don’t we? And no doubt this is what Paul meant to convey. First, it is important in our worship that we be attentive to people who do not draw attention to themselves. Let us never take for granted that everybody sitting in Christian meeting is as strong in their faith as we; we must speak our convictions, in simple bold terms, for the benefit and encouragement of all. And it can be very helpful to a shy person if we seek to draw them out during a discussion. But second, we also should be on the look-out for people who are longtime Christians, but who have become stale or discouraged in their faith. It can happen at either of two extremes. A person who has gotten into a spiritual routine may become bored, stale, or dissatisfied. Or at the opposite, a great tragedy in one’s life, such as the death of a child or a spouse, can shake his or her faith. Another complex set of meaning attaches to the word telling us what kind of people we should “chide.” Paul tells us that some people need a loving reprimand, but who? Roughly half of the Bibles in print say that brethren who are “lazy” or “idle” should be spoken-to; the other half say “disruptive” or “unruly”. Does Paul mean to refer to people who are actively stirring up trouble, or rather, people who are simply lazy and not pulling their weight? Probably both! Current scholarship (with a lot of good reasons) tells us that where the Bible is ambiguous, the ambiguity should generally be taken as intentional and the phrase given multiple meanings. (Personally, I think both readings are very helpful.) Early Bible illustration of
Paul driving Gnosticism from the church. Paul driving Gnosticism from the church. The word originally referred to a soldier who was out-of-step; and since Paul is not averse to individualism in matters outside dogma—and he even leaves a lot of slack for individual belief and practice in Christian dogma. E.g. Romans 14:5-6—it doesn’t seem he would rebuke anyone for personal peculiarities. Where Christianity had (and has had ever since) its biggest struggle with independence is with people who make up doctrine, i.e. people who espouse aberrant theology or who speculate about God, and this passage likely speaks to heresy rather than indolence. Paul advised against “meddling” earlier in this section (1 Thessalonians 4:11) and he was not talking just about over-the-back-fence gossip. In classical Greek, “meddler” was a pejorative term for philosophers: Paul uses it to characterize people who meddle in the affairs of God. Philosophy has as its basic tenet that one can arrive at truth by logic and observation; Christianity rejects the notion, replacing logic with listening and obedience. So at least one type of conduct Paul discourages — and urges the reader to discourage by chiding those who practice it — is theological speculation. He will make a powerful statement on the issue in a later epistle, 1 Corinthians 1. (We will get to it in due course, but I would encourage anybody to read it time and again, until the meaning comes clear — for it is unfortunately a difficult passage.)