I referred to the Greek word plouton (or more accurately, ploutos, πλοῦτος, both translated typically as "riches" or "wealth"), and made an association to Pluto and Ploutos, the Roman and Greek gods of wealth.
The cultural shift in the reference to Pluto as an association to a Greek word - has been a gadfly for me.
Was I incorrect in making the association at all? Wouldn't Ploutos - the Greek reference, not the Roman - be the right reference to use?
(Cue all the pitchforks and torches, I suppose, since it's apparently a horrible thought to wonder about these things. Sorry, folks. I can't say I'm strongly convicted that something is true if I'm not, not if I'm being honest with you and myself.)
One of the reasons I've been thinking about it is the choice of Jonah in the first place.
What's the value of a word study? Should it be how people study Scripture?
Well... my thought is that word studies are a useful tool, but that this tool should be one among many. You shouldn't feel you have to rely on word studies to learn God's Will.
In fact, I'll go one further: if a word study is required to understand a passage, then you're being informed incorrectly.
This means that my walk among Christians as a Jew is ... challenging. Christians don't typically have the same ferocious dedication to understanding that Jews do; as a result, many things get expressed that simply don't hold up under the glare of history and understanding.
This is a struggle for me, because it's a constant prodding to correct and instruct and educate.
This correction and education is unfair and unnecessary; it's my struggle, not
The class focused on 4:19:
And my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus. (NIV)
The teacher asserted that this verse was used to justify a "prosperity gospel," in that people asserted that "all your needs" was the same as "all your wants." I never really thought of this verse in terms of a prosperity gospel, so I was arriving at it with what I thought were neutral biases - and wanted to find out more about what the words being used were, since translations seem odd to me when they're so easily misapplied.
Prayer is a call for a response from someone else. It's not just talking to God - it's a communication, normally involving a request, with someone else.
The colloquial usage of the word makes it a religious expression, but that's common usage and not necessarily the best way to think of prayer.
In one view, it's pretty easy to answer those questions, although the answers are a little too open-ended for my satisfaction: God tells us to test Him (1 John 4:1, for example). So it's okay to test.
When does that become sin? When questioning yields an answer that doesn't trust in His will, of course.
Pat answers, sure. Tried and true, you might say, and useless.
So when is it all right to question God? It's important to realize that
I've been studying Jonah in preparation for the men's core training, and it's been ... interesting, and something that really concerns me (and concerns me about a lot in Christian life.)
Jonah's been addressed by some of the greatest minds in Jewish culture - one being the Vilna Gaon, the "Genius of Vilna." He sees Jonah through the mists not only of history, but allegory:
Quick context: a men's class is studying the book of Jonah.
Our teacher has a really good way of throwing out questions that make us think, in combination with what he teaches.
On the second night, we covered the first three verses of Jonah, where it seems like relatively little happens, but those verses...
Here's what they contain: God speaks to Jonah, saying to go to Nineveh. Jonah says no, and heads off to Tarshish.
One of the followup questions was "What would you be willing to do to duck His plan for your life?"
This is something I wrote up to summarize four of the political groups that were in Judea at the time of Christ.
The Zadokim (Sadducees; Zadok was the high priest during the time of King David, and they traced their organization from that time, for a reason I will get to in a few paragraphs) were the priestly organization, made up primarily of Levites.
Their role in society was to maintain the Temple and sacrifices, those things required by Torah.
I've been thinking more about prayer since I wrote about it last ("Where two are gathered in My Name", 2011/Dec/22), largely because our church has really been zeroing in on prayer as a church.
My approach to prayer is not lax, really, but it's hard to identify. I see living life with God in mind as a sort of prayer on its own; explicit prayer is not something I really do all that often.
At least, not normally; I find that I, like so many others, pray explicitly when I, well, in the words of one of my pastors, want to "get stuff."
On Monday nights, my church has a men's core training class, where a set of men get together to study books of the Bible together. Last semester, we went through the book of James (which ended up with me starting this blog in an attempt to do more as part of a Christian life); this semester, we have the books of Jonah and Nahum as material.
I've been thinking about the book of Jonah, since it's what we're covering first. One thing jumps out at me: what did Jonah say to Nineveh?
Sometimes picking out something to write about is hard. It's not necessarily that there's nothing to write about - sometimes there's quite a lot. But sometimes you're just not inspired.
Or, at least, I am not inspired.
I find that the best way to kill off the drive I have to write about something is to talk about it before I write a draft. I don't know why; it's just a mental thing for me, I think.
I wish it wasn't this way, because I think topics would benefit from the refinement, from a sort of crowdsourcing.
The thought that started this topic was Philippians 4:8:
Some evil man yesterday asked me, quite offhand, if I thought that baptism was the "new circumcision," replacing circumcision as a sacrament.
At first, I said no, because I don't see circumcision or baptism as a sacrament, only to do some research on what exactly sacraments are. Then my answer was still no, because while I can accept that they're sacraments, I don't think one replaces or supercedes the other.
So: what is a sacrament?
They were pointing out, as an example, Hebrews 6:4-8, where Paul writes:
It's be easy to look at priests' abuse of children, and see those as mere aberrations - or things isolated from "our church," which is surely an excellent place with no such abuses.
But this view, an example of an external locus of control, is not always accurate.
One of the things that I like about the church that I currently attend is that it maintains a very tight focus on Jesus – but what does that mean?
Well, the church has two primary focuses, two goals.
One is to make the body larger, to bring people to Christ. The other is to strengthen the body, to make it stronger, to make the body more knowledgeable or more spiritual - to educate.
Orthodoxy is the state or quality of being orthodox; orthodox means "adhering to the accepted or traditional and established faith," as thefreedictionary.com defines it.
So why am I afraid of orthodoxy?
Because it's a division. Orthodoxy in itself is fine, I suppose; the quality of adherence to what is proper to believe is hard to dislike.
But orthodoxy is used as a club, and I don't like it.
Begging your indulgence, here's a story, one you're probably familiar with, and then a changed version to illustrate a point about trust.
