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What Is Biblical Literacy?
We complain about it, write about it, claim it’s important or even critical, design programs to create it, but what is it? I don’t mean that none of us know what we mean when we say “biblically literate” or “biblically illiterate,” but do we all mean the same thing? I don’t think we do, and…
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Fences: Mending or Rending
The following is a sermon I presented at the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Pensacola on September 11,2005 and originally posted here on September 13, 2005. I’m reposting it because when I went to look for it, I found that the original post had somehow been truncated, and also because there is a one word at a…
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Experiencing the (Baptism of the) Holy Spirit
This is a topic where I tend to make just about everyone uncomfortable. Long time readers may recall a previous discussion of speaking in tongues, and my own experience of it. Those who expect me to be intellectually oriented and rational are uncomfortable with mystical experiences, and many who are comfortable with the mystical experiences…
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Psalm 119:40 – Grant Me Life
I long for your precepts.By your righteousness give me life. I spent a good deal of time thinking about the phrase “by your righteousness.” It could be understood in a number of different ways. Two of these would be “in your righteousness” and “with your righteousness.” The second of these might lead Christians into a…
Psalm 119:39 – Taunts and Shame
Turn away from me my reproachwhich I fearfor your judgments are good. You’ll find lots of translations for the word I’ve translated as “reproach” if you compare a few versions. That’s because it’s a word with a good range of meanings and the verse doesn’t help a great deal with the context. For example, is…
Psalm 119:38 – Raise Up Your Word
Carry out your word to your servant,the one who fears you. The Hebrew word I translate “carry out” carries a variety of freight in a variety of uses. One option is simply to build and establish. I might loosely render it as “Make your word real.” As I study and meditate on scripture, I find…
Psalm 119:37 – Futility!
Turn my eyes away from looking at what is futile;Give me life in your pathway. This one seems pretty obvious. Recently we looked at Isaiah 55:2 – “Why spend your money on what is not food, and your labor for what doesn’t satisfy.” The question becomes exactly what is vain? What is futile? There are…
Psalm 119:36 – What’s Your Inclination
Turn my mind to your testimonies,And not to ill-gotten gain. How about some alternatives. Hearten my mind to your testimoniesand not to extortion. Bob MacDonald, Seeing the Psalter, 382 Dispose my heart towards your instruction,not towards love of gain. Psalm 119:36 (REB) Christians frequently speak of the Hebrew scriptures (the Old Testament) as a book…
Psalm 119:35 – Make Me Do What I Want To
Make me walk in the path of your commands,For in it I take delight. On first read, this verse can sound very strange. Some translations and some interpreters tend to take a less forceful reading of the first verb, the one I translate “make me walk.” We sometimes think that we do what we want…
Psalm 119:34 – I Will Guard It with My Whole Mind
Give me understanding, and I will keep your Instruction (Torah).I will guard it with my entire mind. The heart, in ancient Israel, represented the mind or intellect. I have translated this as “mind.” This goes with the beginning of the verse, “Give me understanding.” There’s a basic principle here that I find repeatedly in scripture:…
Psalm 119:33 – You Teach Me
Teach me, LORD, the path of your statutes,and I will keep them to the end. Once when I was scheduled to teach on prayer at a conference, I had prepared an hour long talk, but as the time approached, I kept hearing in my head, “Let the Holy Spirit do the teaching.” In my mental…
Psalm 119:32 – Enlargement
The way of your commands I will run,As you broaden my understanding. A young man once commented to me that he thought that perhaps we were trespassing on God’s sphere with scientific discoveries, that we were approaching knowledge that God had kept to himself alone. I asked him this: Do you believe that God is…
Psalm 119:31 – Holding God’s Testimonies
I have held tightly to your testimonies;Don’t let me be put to shame. It’s quite possible to translate the second half of this verse as “don’t put me to shame.” Have you ever felt that God was calling on you to take a certain stand, or act in a certain way, and you hope you’re…
Psalm 119:30 – I Have Chosen
I have chosen faithfulness as my path.I’m in place1 with your judgments. 1 There is considerable controversy about how this verb should be translated. A literal translation may make this clearer: Decided have I a way of faithwith your judgments I have agreed D. Robert MacDonald, Seeing the Psalter, p. 382 Let me commend again,…
Psalm 119:29 – Grace Me with Your Instruction
Deceitful ways turn aside from meand graciously give me your instruction [Torah]. It’s hard to read this verse when we use “law” as the English gloss for Torah. Graciously give me your rules? Graciously let me live in your rules? But that none of those are actually bad translations. Law or instruction, and the Torah…
Lazy Labeling
I frequently hear various people complain about labeling. We shouldn’t label people, they tell me. But labeling is essential. Language wouldn’t function without labels. For example, sitting right next to me as I write this is a cat. I label him “cat” and I tell you he’s a cat, and we communicated. Behold, the cat,…
Psalm 119:28 – Raise Me Up
My soul weeps from grief,Strengthen me according to your word. There are, as always, a number of directions I could go, and that I’d like to go, starting from this verse. I just want to mention one I’m not going to pursue. Recently I had occasion to discuss grief and suffering as discussed in the…
Psalm 119:27 – From Precepts to Wonders
Explain to me the way of your preceptsand I will tell of your wonderful acts. We tend to think of particular rules or principles for living as fairly boring, somewhat annoying, and often unreasonably restrictive. We seem to live in a debate between what we ought to do and what we actually do. Even the…
Psalm 119:26 – Just Talking
I tell you my stuff and you answer me.Teach me your statutes. I frequently comment that “always and everywhere there is stuff.” There is stuff to do, stuff not to do, stuff that I did, and stuff that I didn’t do. Not to mention the physical stuff to keep, stuff to get rid of, and…
Psalm 119:25 – In the Dust
My soul is down in the dust.Give me life according to your word. Psalm 119 is an interesting–and biblical–combination of human action and dependence on Divine action. Verse 25, the first verse of the third section, is on the dependence side of the scale. If you’re trying to formulate theology, the variety here might be…
Psalm 119:24
Your testimonies are also my delight,My counselors [the men of my counsel]. I like to say that we tend to go to the Bible for information, while God is there for conversation. I don’t mean that there is no information there. We tend to think in binary terms: Either the Bible is a source of…
Psalm 119:23 – What Others Think
Prince sit around and plot against me,Your servant meditates on your statutes. To be honest, my first reaction to this verse was a laugh. Yeah, right, I thought. He really can sit meditating on God’s statutes while he knows people are plotting against him. That thought isn’t entirely wrong. This really is a high-minded, and…
Psalm 119:22 – Reproach and Contempt
Remove from me reproach and contemptfor I have guarded your testimonies. Meditating on a single verse each day means I often get somewhat out of context. But while context is important, literature can easily suggest other lines of thinking. Folks in various classes I’ve taught have called me the king of the rabbit trail because…
Psalm 119:21 – Pride and Staggering
You rebuke the proud, accursed ones,Who stagger away from your commands. As with each verses, there are lots of directions my mind goes with this, for example, what it means to be “accursed” and what, in particular, one might be proud of. But the direction my mind went was simply this: Pride goes before destruction…
Psalm 119:20 – Languishing
I [my soul] languish for longingfor your judgments. What do you really want? What is your deepest desire? What is missing that makes you weary? As I write this, I’m very tired. I’ve been busy with many things and am only writing because I committed myself to write as a spiritual discipline. This is the…
Psalm 119:19 – An Alien
An alien am I on the earth.Don’t hide your commands from me. I frequently teach that there are two elements to the Christian life: Identity and Mission. It’s easy to go off the rails on the side of identity, trying to separate ourselves from the crowd. On the other hand, we can become so much…
Psalm 119:18
Open my eyes and I will seeWonderful things from your Torah. In my infographic on Seven Barriers to Hearing the Word the third barrier is making your Bible study a scholarly, rather than a spiritual pursuit. Now let me be clear that I’m not against scholarship. Reading biblical languages and understanding various scholarly areas of…