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Responses to Difficult Questions for Exodus

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I’ve really enjoyed letting you into my study as I work through Exodus. I’ve focused on the main ideas of each passage, and I’m always trying to keep the big picture in front of me.

But there’s also a time for digging into the details and asking all the hard questions. Such as:

  • Why does God harden Pharaoh’s heart?
  • Why can we trust Exodus as history?
  • Did God expect Israel to obey all those laws?
  • What was manna?
  • Can we recognize any symbolism in the tabernacle?

The guys at the Bible Project do more than make really great videos. They also have a podcast where they expand on the stuff in their videos. They have two podcast episodes (also available as YouTube videos), where they answer difficult questions about the book of Exodus. They’re great students of the Bible. They observe, interpret, and apply with much skill. If you’d like to understand Exodus further, you would do well to listen to their discussion of it.

Check it out!

The Real Reason We Don’t Read Our Bibles

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I’ve heard many reasons why people struggle to read their Bibles. My co-blogger Ryan has written about many of them:

Of course, in our most lucid moments, we’ll acknowledge these reasons are lame. But they continue to ensnare us on almost a daily basis.

So I appreciated Brandon Smith’s recent article, “The Real Reason We Don’t Read Our Bibles.” Smith suggests that the underlying excuse behind all the other excuses is that we forget that God’s word is living and active. That the living God is still speaking to us today and meeting with us in the pages of his word.

Want to know what God thinks? Not just what he thought, but what he thinks? Open your Bible. The Spirit lives within you to help you understand God’s will and character, to help you taste and see something fresh and new that you’ve never seen before. A passage you read five years ago might speak to you differently today, because the living God speaks to you through his living Word, right here and right now.

If only this truth would get under our skin, the rest of our excuses might evaporate into the vaporous void of nothingness they are.

Smith gets this just right. Check it out!

Bible Study for Ordinary Canadians (And the Rest of Us)

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I recently had the opportunity to appear on Indoubt, a podcast for Back to the Bible Canada, where I spoke with host Isaac Dagneau about Bible study for ordinary people. We spoke about why believers study the Bible, how to do it, and what role the Holy Spirit plays in our Bible study. The 28-minute audio episode could serve as an introduction to the topic of Bible study for ordinary folks.

Check it out!

The Myth of Literal Bible Translations

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Because this blog is for ordinary people, who don’t typically know Greek or Hebrew, we don’t write much about translation issues. But once in a while there’s an opportunity to speak to an issue that impacts ordinary Bible readers broadly. One such issue is the popular, yet misleading, assumption that some English Bible translations are more literal than others.

Bill Mounce, Greek scholar and author of one of the best-selling Biblical Greek textbooks, wrote recently about translation philosophies, and the popular misconceptions of what they mean. Mounce has served on translation committees for both the ESV and the NIV, so he’s well qualified to comment on a variety of philosophies.

Speaking about the two main categories, he writes:

Most people say there are two translation camps, formal equivalent [word-for-word] and functional equivalent (or dynamic equivalent) [thought-for-thought]. The longer I am in translation work, the more I see how simplistic this division is.

There actually are five methods on translation with three sub-categories for the handling of gender language. Translations are all on a continuum, overlapping one another, and hence it is misleading to picture them as different points on a line. I am guessing, but for example, about eighty percent of the ESV and the NIV are the same, once you account for different translations of individual words.

Mounce goes on to explain that, except for a few interlinear Bibles (which aren’t really English translations), no English Bible is literal.

The word “literal” should never be used of any other form of translation since all of them, every single one, despite their marketing, rarely translate word-for-word. They will say they translate word-for-word unless it does not make sense or misinforms, but that is a red herring argument. They are never consistently word-for-word, unless you can find a translation that translates John 3:16 as, “in this way for loved the God the world so that the Son the only he gave in order that each the believing into him not perish but have life eternal.” No Bible on the market is “literal.”

Mounce goes on to describe more nuanced categories of translation, which should inform how we think about our English Bibles. In addition, he addresses the matter of gender language, arguing that there is no English translation in existence that is “gender neutral,” and we should not ignorantly use the term to describe any well-known, modern English Bible.

Mounce’s full article is useful and easy to read; it uses no Greek. Check it out!

When Being “Christ-Centered” Goes Too Far

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Writing for Logos Bible software, Mark Ward summarizes an article from a recent theological journal, explaining the unhelpful extreme side of “Christ-centeredness.”

I think the swing [away from Christ-less moralizing] has done great good: American Christianity has indeed suffered under man-centered readings of the Bible which offer all law and no gospel, all duty and no delight, all rules and no relationship. And yet the ease with which I just tossed off those three slogans points to the pendulum problem: any time a movement reaches the slogan-generating stage, people will go trampling over necessary nuances to grab their party’s banners and wave them at their enemies. Pretty soon the pendulum picks up so much speed that it whooshes way past plumb.

Ward then summarizes a theological journal article which analyzes Psalm 15 and shows us how to read it in its original context. There ought to be a category in our thinking for “meaningful if imperfect obedience,” as we see on the part of Noah, Simeon, and others. Being Christ-centered does not mean we speak only of our sins and failures.

Check it out!

Not By Sermons and Books Alone

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Following up on last week’s “check it out,” John Piper was asked if he plans to write a commentary on the Bible. After saying no, he elaborates:

I suppose there is a kind of commentary that would put the emphasis on helping people find the meaning themselves. That’s the kind I would want to write if I wrote a commentary, because there’s a deep conviction behind this; namely, that over the long haul, strong Christians are created not by sermons and by books alone, but by a personal encounter with the word of God, the Bible itself.

Piper goes on to explain what sort of questions he’d like to see commentaries (and the people who read them) ask.

It’s a great, short answer to an excellent question. Check it out!