Tie them to your hands and wear them on your foreheads as reminders.
-Deuteronomy 6:8
I have a loud mouth and I’m no good at filtering my words or hiding my feelings. I’m also a little obsessed with first principles and underlying motivations.
It’s a wild combination. I’m willing to say crazy shit as I experiment with possibilities.
Today I speculated that understanding Scripture might be a nearly impossible task. To speak too confidently about it is a mistake.
One example is where the Greek word “chlōros” is translated as “green” in other parts of Revelation, yet is translated as “ashen” or omitted entirely from Rev 6:8.
I don’t know what to make of that.
I also learned tonight that Daniel is written in two different languages. Hebrew for the first chapter and some of the second, then Aramaic for the rest. If the book has one author, presumably Daniel, why the sudden change? I haven’t dug into this at all, but these preculiarities are fodder for my overthinking brain.
None of this actually shakes my faith. I’m cool with God being a mystery. The concepts approaching God, such as omniscience, eternity, and perfection, seem impossible to comprehend. Why would I expect to grasp the confluence of every impossible idea?
We can’t fully understand ourselves or other humans, yet we have relationships with ourselves and others. We transcend the distance of comprehension with compassion and love. I experience my relationship with God through opening myself to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I don’t need to define each experience, but I do think of them in different ways. When I pray, I lean on the image of Jesus and communicate in a human way. When I look wide-eyed into the world to look for signposts, I think of the Father plotting out the road before me. The Holy Spirit is a force inside me, my conscience, instincts, and inspirations.
In today’s parlance, “It’s complicated.” Love simplifies everything, but I enjoy the maddening kaleidoscope that is the world of ideas. And I’m not going to be shy about it.
I was just chatting with someone about evolving language, specifically the current use of the phrase “in a minute” meaning a while/long time, and this went into translations and the bible. Anyway, I recalled a pastor from my teens saying that we needed to be careful with translations because we don’t know if the translator was taking the time period and culture into account when they did the translation. i.e. What my kid might mean when he says “I haven’t seen them in a minute” may not be the same as what I might have meant in my teens if I said the same or similar thing.