The Internet really is great

Wow! The Internet is great, isn't it? You can see all the cat videos you want or waste your time on Facebook. Or, you can view some of the greatest manuscripts in the world. In fact, the Vatican just put one of the most important ones for the New Testament (and Septuagint) on line—named, appropriately enough, Vaticanus. Enjoy!

You can see another great manuscript, Sinaiticus, here.

Enjoy! Oh, and you can still watch those cat videos if you want. Me, I'd rather lose myself in a bit of wandering through the manuscripts...
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But in a variety of ways

All curses seek one goal: death. Even though the realization of this goal can be articulated in a wide variety of ways, the harm in a curse generally operates within a range of increasing effects. Thus, the scope of the injury can move seamlessly from a strenuous life, to a premature death, and finally to extinction. In a manner of speaking, all of this has to do with a degree of permanence.— Cursed Are You!, page 214

Little tidbits of information

It is worth noting that Luke himself does not employ κὐριος [lord] for any pagan divinity.—World Upside Down, page 237 n. 69

Not imitation

This transformation takes place, not by imitation, but by indwelling, being “in him.” for Paul this indwelling is not a one-way relationship but mutual: we in Christ, Christ in us; we in the Spirit, the Spirit in us (see, e.g., Rom 8:1–17). The new-covenant promise of interiority has been fulfilled but also altered, as in John, to become mutual indwelling.— The Death of the Messiah and the Birth of the New Covenant, page 61

In summary

The fundamental aim of the Sermon is to present Jesus and his kingdom vision for his kingdom people, and the only acceptable response to this Sermon is to embrace him, to accept the challenge; that means to do what he says.— Sermon on the Mount, page 276

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Boom! Too easy, isn't it? : )

Of course, you can only do it through the power of the Holy Spirit, but the good news is that that power is available...
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Monday's thought

The Bible was never given to be an end in itself. The Bible was given to be a path leading us to God; and when the Bible has led us to God, and we have experienced God in the crisis of encounter, the Bible has done its work. It is not enough that you should memorize Scripture. Some Christians memorize the Word of God but never meet the God who wrote the Word. They can quote whole chapters but have never been inspired by the same Holy Spirit that inspired the Word.—A.W. Tozer, Voice of a Prophet, pages 125–26

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Amen! Good preaching! I've run into this far too often. Too many people see the Bible as an end in itself—and consequently will fight to the death to defend it. But far too often they miss the point...Lord, deliver us!

As an aside, this is the reason Tozer is so fresh and inspiring; he met the God of the Bible, and being dead yet speaks (to paraphrase Hebrews).
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It's a blob

Since the notion of a point seems to preclude internal complexity, a more helpful metaphor would perhaps be to say that the perfective reduces a situation to a blob, rater than to a point: a blob is a three-dimensional object, and can therefore have internal complexity, although it is nonetheless a single object with clearly circumscribed limits.—Aspect, page 18

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You've got to love a linguistics book that calls the perfective aspect a blob!

And, actually, the book is very readable—and concise. It's not even 140 pages, just a bit longer than his book on Tense. Refreshing! Especially after struggling through almost 400 pages of a cognitive linguistics book that in the end could have been 150 pages...<sigh>
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Baby it's cold outside

We've reached our predicted high for the day...

I just looked again, and we're on the way down...

What/who got cursed?

Although Adam is culpable for eating the fruit of the tree, Yahweh does not curse him directly. Yahweh curses rather the soil with an unconditional malediction and simultaneously links the harm to Adam: 'Cursed is the earth because of you’. Basically, Adam’s hardship in life is a secondary consequence of the principal curse targeting the soil.— Cursed Are You!, page 202

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Yep. That's something I've been saying for years now. People are under the mistaken impression that God cursed Adam and therefore them. What that results in is a mad god who is out to get them if they don't do what he wants.

That is most assuredly not the God of the Bible! It is not the portrayal of Jesus that we see in the Gospels.

Now, don't go the opposite extreme and create a Santa Claus god. God is still righteous and holy, but he is first and foremost love. I like to tell people that the attributes of God include holiness and righteousness, but his essence is love.
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Nope, not that way. This way:

Thus the truth claim about Jesus’s Lordship does not lead in Acts to a narrative blueprint for the need to coerce others for their own good but to a form of mission that rejects violence as a way to ground peaceful community and instead witnesses to the Lord’s life of rejection and crucifixion by living it in publicly perceivable communities derisively called Christians.—World Upside Down, page 173

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Would that we would recover some of that! Even so, make it happen Lord Jesus!
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Read carefully

Notice carefully what Paul actually says here: not “so that we might know about the righteousness of God.” not “so that we might believe in the righteousness of God.” not “so that we might proclaim the righteousness of God.” not even “so that we might be justified by the righteousness of God.” rather, he says, “so that we might become the righteousness of God.” our commission from God is that we as a community are called to embody the righteousness of God in the world—to incarnate it, if you will—in such a way that the message of reconciliation is made visible in our midst. And of course reconciliation made visible is something that can appear only in practices that show unity, love, mercy, forgiveness and a self-giving grace that the world could not even dream of apart from Christ. Richard Hays, quoted in — The Death of the Messiah and the Birth of the New Covenant, pages 60-61

Saved, but what for?

Far too many think because they have “prayed to receive Christ,” they are safe and secure. I don’t want to dispute the all-sufficiency of Christ or the importance of faith and God’s grace, but far too many today are trusting in a onetime decision but with no marks of discipleship. Yes, some emphasize works so much one has to think they are saved by what they do. We are saved by Christ, but Christ saves us into discipleship.— Sermon on the Mount, pages 264-265

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Amen! Good preaching! Being afraid of works salvation (and desiring large numbers) has caused many to embrace an antinomian gospel (look it up!).

As Scot says, we are saved by grace, but we are saved in discipleship. Or, as Bonhoeffer said, "When Christ calls someone, he bids him come and die."

No cheap grace in the real gospel...
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Still lonely, 50 years later

Modern medicine and technology can help make people live longer but cannot make them live happier. Regardless of all the advancements in our society, the world is pretty much a lonely crowd. It is not the presence of others that cures loneliness; it is the presence of God.—A.W. Tozer, Voice of a Prophet, page 116

Take your pick; they're both wrong

The ketiv and the qere are “equal” insofar as 19:7c is incomprehensible by either variant.—HBCE Proverbs, page 272

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I laughed out loud when I read this...OK, after so many hours of proofing a text, anything can be funny... : )
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It's the journey that counts...

Most imprecations focus on the “how” of the injury rather than its final goal, which is generally presumed. This is the core of its power. Death inevitably comes to all things. But it is how this final aim is achieved outside of life’s natural course that makes curses truly terrifying. Accordingly, it is the barrage of ailments in the first curse that really matters. They overpower life. The disembowelment malediction is more then just the death of the vassals’ offspring. It also seeks to extinguish the family name and the demise of the underlings’ immortality. For the vassals, however, the injury is a slow, pitiable demise. Death, therefore, is the definitive goal of all curses against living beings. It is only the means of how it is to be achieved that differs.— Cursed Are You!, page 201

Inherently theological

Plainly said, all political thinking is inescapably theological. Our theological judgments may of course be hidden by a limited range of vocabulary that attempts to eliminate explicit theological terms from “pure” political discourse….”politics” cannot help but to take particular positions on the question of God, on God’s relevance to world mechanics, on human nature, on our place in the cosmos, on the significance of our existence, on the telos of human community and so on—in short, on the whole range of issues that must be engaged in order to think intelligently about life together.—World Upside Down, page 169

Vertical? Horizontal? Yes!

Paul assumes the inseparability of orthodoxy and orthopraxy, and he assumes the inseparability of the vertical and the horizontal in the atonement. some may be tempted to say, “Paul is talking about ethics, not atonement.” Therein lies the kind of problem that Paul addresses; ethics is not a separate category! ethics is atonement in action, not as a supplement, but as constitutive of atonement itself. The horizontal is not the result of atonement, it is one of the principal components of atonement.— The Death of the Messiah and the Birth of the New Covenant, page 55 (emphasis original)

What exactly is the Sermon on the Mount?

Jesus here isn’t calling someone merely to a better moral life. Rather, his own presence looms in the entire Sermon as the one through whom God speaks, through whom God redeems, and through whom God reigns.— Sermon on the Mount, page 263

The last one chosen

We are a tricky crowd, and if we can find anything human to lean on, we will lean on it. If we can find anybody to help us short of God, we will hunt everywhere else, and God is usually the last one asked.—A.W. Tozer, Voice of a Prophet, page 115

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When I read this I thought of a bunch of kids on the playground, choosing teams. You remember that, don't you? Always afraid that you would be the last one chosen—or worse yet, not chosen at all and just taken because you had to be...

Why do we treat God that way? As if he were the one you dreaded to have on your team because he's a loser. Rhetorical question in some ways, but still one worth pondering...
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By whose power?

As noted in ch. 3, the judgment of the governing deities looms large in the successful fulfillment of a curse. Certainly, the supernatural realm must weigh in first and determine the validity of the request before any curse can be executed. There is no need to suppose the process behind a malediction that depends on an agent operates any differently. Just as one presumes that Šamaš evaluated the petition before he dispatched Girra, so Yahweh must have ruled that Elisha’s request was pertinent. Subsequently, Yahweh sends forth the bears to execute the curse’s punishment. The idea that Elisha “performed” the malediction out of his own supernatural power without divine patronage is hardly supported by the text. If he harbored any such puissance, he would not have had to curse in Yahweh’s name. A direct command would have been all that was needed.— Cursed Are You!, page 191

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Ooohhh...that's good. It's mediated power, mediated faith—mediated by the power of YHWH. It's his divine prerogative to fulfill or not. And it still is. We don't have power in ourselves and we can't strong arm God into doing what we want—even if we say "in the name of Jesus." God is still bigger than we are—sure you know that in your head, but do you live that way?

Of course, there is the opposite extreme, which is just as bad: God is way off there and I'm responsible to live as best I can on my own power. Wrong!

It is the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit that enables us to live a holy life. Period. And we need to listen to him and live by him—theosis, adoption as joint-heirs with Christ...
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