Yesterday’s blog caused some consternation among those who read it. I would like to say that I write some incomprehensible lines sometime just to see if there is anyone out there reading. That would not be true yesterday. Evidently there are a few of you out there reading because I received many questions as to what the heck was going on. It was a bit confusing and part of the problem was – I was in a hurry and tried to grind out a blog without really reading what I was writing. I even took to using the dictation feature on my phone and any one familiar with auto correct knows what can happen if you do not proof read. Any way, I am sorry and please go back and read yesterdays blog in the non – maniac form.
Because of the way that blog developed I realized the old statement that things can “lose something in the translation in very true” . It would have taken a lot of translating to make out some of the things that I said, even though I knew what I meant.
Preachers in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod are required to spent a lot of time with Greek and Hebrew and to be fairly proficient at reading those languages. There is a reason for that. There is a rich and amazing treasure in the original languages that cannot always be translated in todays Bibles. They would have to be huge if we got to everything that the words contain and why they are important. Here is an example of what can be lost in a translation.
Read the English translation of Philippians 1;12 in the graphic above. Focus on the word “advance”. We have an inward understanding and our mind flashes all kinds of images of what it means to advance. We may thing of military images or job openings, of a hurricane coming in our direction or a loan given to us before we get settled in a job.
Here would be a fulsome translation of what Paul says – “I want you to understand and be personally apprised and cognizant so that you are thoroughly connected with me in knowledge brothers, that all the stuff that happened to me because I am in prison; all the people that I have met and how my friends have responded; has worked like an corp of engineers that goes before a might army to clear the brush and cut down the obstacles so that the army can do what it is meant to do, and that is to remove the enemy and crush the foe and rescue the oppressed. It moves forward as the grand great news that it is and the obstruction and obfuscations of men and the devil cannot stand up against it.”
The grand good news of the Gospel is still speeding on and prospering. It is here for a while and then moves on. This is another subject because once it moves on it may not come back again. It moves because of unthankfulness.
