My church is doing a summer Bible study on the Minor Prophets of the Old Testament. If you want a brief introduction to the Book of Hosea, with some helpful visual illustrations, it is worth watching this 7-minute video by the “Bible Project.”
Does the Prophet Amos Predict a Literal Rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem?
When Donald Trump was running for the office of President of the United States, one of his campaign promises was to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Such a symbolic act would have huge geopolitical ramifications, but why? It all boils down to how you read the Bible.
Look at the prophet Amos. The Book of Amos is mostly a rather devastating prophetic critique of the ancient, northern kingdom of Israel. After discussing all of the problems with Israel’s neighbors, Amos launches into a scathing attack on Israel, and how they are in many ways worse than their neighbors. God pronounces judgment, showing how God’s people do not pass the standard set by God’s plumb line (Acts 7:7-8), and the prophecy came true when Israel was conquered by the Assyrians. It is a rather sober message for a disobedient people.
But at the very end of the book, Amos gives the people a message of hope:
- “‘In that day I will raise up
the booth of David that is fallen
and repair its breaches,
and raise up its ruins
and rebuild it as in the days of old,
that they may possess the remnant of Edom
and all the nations who are called by my name,’
declares the Lord who does this.“(Amos 9:11-12 ESV)
Many Jews and Christians today understand “the booth of David” to be a reference to the temple in Jerusalem. The temple was the center of worship for the Jews, and with the destruction of the first temple, built by King David’s son, Solomon, not many years after this prophecy was made, it gave hope to the Israelites that God would one day restore God’s people to the land, along with a rebuilt temple. A second temple was eventually built but subsequently destroyed in 70 C.E. With the reconstitution of modern Israel, partially centered around Jerusalem, there are many who still hope for the rebuilding of yet a third temple, and the full restoration of Israel promised by Amos.
President Trump’s campaign pledge would imply a type of endorsement to this hope. Yet setting aside the geopolitical issues, there is a major question as to how we are to read the Bible on this point: Is this really how we should read the prophecy of Amos today, regarding a future rebuilt temple in Jerusalem? Continue reading
The Book of Amos: In Seven Minutes
My church is doing a summer Bible study on the Minor Prophets of the Old Testament. If you want a brief introduction to the Book of Amos, with some helpful visual illustrations, you can not do much better than this 7-minute video by the “Bible Project.”
The Elusive Quest for the “Best” Bible Translation
I ran across this comic today, posted in an excellent piece by Andy Naselli, a New Testament instructor at Bethlehem College & Seminary, founded by Minneapolis pastor, John Piper. Naselli’s argument is that while many Christians tend to argue that their favorite Bible translation is the best, and every other translation is inferior, it would greatly help if we had some humility here.
Evangelical Christians can get pretty picky when it comes to Bible translations that they implicitly trust. But one of my pet peeves is when people, who have absolutely no background in biblical scholarship, tend to think they know better than people who have been studying the Scriptures in-depth for decades.
The latest brouhaha is over a new Bible translation, the Christian Standard Bible, which is a revision of the Holman Christian Standard Bible. The Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB) was completed in 2004, by a team of scholars, sponsored by the Southern Baptist Convention. The new Christian Standard Bible (CSB) is a modern revision of the HCSB.
Critics have charged that the Christian Standard Bible, produced by conservative evangelical scholars, have nevertheless “changed” the Bible to make it “gender inclusive,” thus hiding a liberal agenda. But as I wrote a few years ago, in one of Veracity’s most widely read posts, the issue of “gender accuracy” between the ESV and NIV 2011 translations, two of the most popular translations read by Christians today, tends to vary from passage to passage. In other words, sometimes the ESV is more “gender accurate” than the NIV 2011, but in other cases, the NIV 2011 is more “gender accurate” than the ESV. I tend to prefer the ESV, but I see a number of strengths in other translations, such as the NIV 2011, and the new CSB.
It is true that no scholar, even conservative evangelical scholars, operates without a personal bias. Even the best scholars can be wrong at times. Therefore, one should not take the message of the comic to mean that the average person, without a PhD, should never be able to make their own informed decisions, when reading the biblical text, in order to understand its meaning.
All I am saying is that we all need a little dose of humility, and not quickly dismiss a Bible translation, simply because one or two passages in a different translation do not conform to our own presuppositions. My suggestion would be to visit BibleGateway.com, and pick some passages in your favorite Bible translation, and then compare them to something like the new Christian Standard Bible. Who knows? Perhaps reading something in a different translation may give you greater insight into the Bible.
Here is an interview with Trevin Wax, publisher of the CSB, about the new Bible, and with Tom Schreiner, one of the lead translators, and then a brief comparison review at BibleGateway.com, with other translations.
“Loving Day” and the Sin of Previous Generations
Virginia judge Leon Bazille’s handwritten theological justification for banning interracial marriage. He ends by saying, “The fact that [God] separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” What Bible was he reading from?
What makes this so tragic for the Gospel is that a racist ideology had for centuries been falsely linked with the Bible. The biblical teaching that prohibited Jews from marrying people outside of the Mosaic covenant had been twisted to say that people of different skin-color, irrespective of God’s covenantal purposes, should not be allowed to marry.
Folks, unless you have not figured it out before by reading this blog, Bible interpretation matters.
In addition to what I wrote in reviewing Loving, a 2016 film of the story behind the Loving vs. Virginia case, I believe the legacy stemming from Christian rejection of interracial marriage is a good example of what is meant by this difficult passage of the Bible:
- “The Lord…[forgives] iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation” (Exodus 34:6-7)
One application of this passage is that sin has its way of being repeated generation after generation, unless it is properly addressed, through confession and repentance. In recent decades, most Christians have thought that interracial marriage is not forbidden by the Bible, but over the past fifty years, this has not always been the case.
I have had more than one conversation in some thirty years, where a believer simply assumed that the Bible really did forbid interracial marriage. In every case where I challenged the believer to give me a prooftext, the answer every time was something like, “Well, someone told me it was in the Bible. I just do not know where it is.”
Mmmmpph.
Why would anyone go around saying “the Bible says,” when in fact, they have no clue as to what the Bible says?
At best, that is merely uninformed, or just plain, lazy-thinking Christianity. At worst, it is a subtle way of justifying sin. Furthermore, the fact that it took a secular court to force Christians to rethink how they were misinterpreting the Bible is a scandal in and of itself.
We should therefore not be surprised when so many in our society today apply the same logic about interracial marriage to same-sex marriage. As the thinking goes, “Christians were wrong to condemn interracial marriage some fifty years ago, so why should Christians be condemning same-sex marriage today? Marriage is about people loving one another and being happy as individuals making their own decisions. What does race and gender have anything to do with it?”
I can easily sympathize with what drives the argument, based on how poorly Christians in past eras misinterpreted the Bible. However, unlike the falsehood of racial ideology, the Bible does understand God’s purpose in marriage to have gender as an essential component to it. But how many Christians today think theologically about marriage?
- “So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27)
Here Genesis sees human gender as a primary way of reflecting God’s character, demonstrating to the world around us, the nature of the God of the Bible. But how many of us think of God’s purpose for marriage in this way, as a means of displaying the attributes of God? The God of the Bible is Triune, the Father and Son in union through the bond of the Spirit, distinct persons yet in fundamental unity with one another.
Surely, those Christians from earlier eras who opposed interracial marriage were not theologically sound when they were thinking about marriage. Could it be that Christians today still need to learn more of thinking theologically about marriage? Could it be that we have some more confession and repentance to do today?
HT: The Gospel Coalition has a helpful article summarizing the significance behind Loving vs. Virginia.
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