Okay, keep up with the following statements if you can.
--The other day I saw a bat flying through the air.
--I always love talking about the fall.
--I can't bear to see a bare bear.
What do all these statements have in common? They have words that have multiple meanings. In the first one, am I talking about a baseball bat flying through the air, or a rodent out hunting insects? Talking about the fall, is it the kind of fall like when someone falls down (or the fall into sin), or a season of the year? And in the last one, we get not only the same word with two different meanings, but another word that sounds the same!
Now, just imagine that you were reading a poem or a story about bats at a baseball game, and you didn't know if the writer was talking about the wooden bats or the living bats. How would you be able to tell which one he was talking about? What if he was intentionally trying to make it confusing by not making it clear either way? Do you think that you might end up a bit frustrated as you tried to figure it out?
I bring this up because this kind of thing actually happens fairly often in the Bible. Large sections of the Bible are poetic, and one of the things poetry often tries to do is play on words with different meanings, even if they happen to be the same word. So sometimes, as we read sections of the Bible, we find that the meaning of the particular section isn't as clear as we would hope.
So what do we do when we find ourselves wondering what the author meant? Well, sometimes, we admit that there may be a reason for it. The author may have been doing a word play in the original language of the Bible, and we have a tough time 1) figuring out what he means and 2) deciding how to best convey the sense of that in another language (English).
I mention this because it's worth us struggling with the text of the Bible to figure out what it's saying. It just seems as though God knows that we're going to get more out of it if we have to struggle to figure it out than if He just simply said, "Here's what I have to say." Sure, He does that at times, too, but since we've been talking about learning, it really does seem that we learn more when we have to work with the words and struggle with the words, and maybe that's part of what God is trying to communicate to us, as well.
--The other day I saw a bat flying through the air.
--I always love talking about the fall.
--I can't bear to see a bare bear.
What do all these statements have in common? They have words that have multiple meanings. In the first one, am I talking about a baseball bat flying through the air, or a rodent out hunting insects? Talking about the fall, is it the kind of fall like when someone falls down (or the fall into sin), or a season of the year? And in the last one, we get not only the same word with two different meanings, but another word that sounds the same!
Now, just imagine that you were reading a poem or a story about bats at a baseball game, and you didn't know if the writer was talking about the wooden bats or the living bats. How would you be able to tell which one he was talking about? What if he was intentionally trying to make it confusing by not making it clear either way? Do you think that you might end up a bit frustrated as you tried to figure it out?
I bring this up because this kind of thing actually happens fairly often in the Bible. Large sections of the Bible are poetic, and one of the things poetry often tries to do is play on words with different meanings, even if they happen to be the same word. So sometimes, as we read sections of the Bible, we find that the meaning of the particular section isn't as clear as we would hope.
So what do we do when we find ourselves wondering what the author meant? Well, sometimes, we admit that there may be a reason for it. The author may have been doing a word play in the original language of the Bible, and we have a tough time 1) figuring out what he means and 2) deciding how to best convey the sense of that in another language (English).
I mention this because it's worth us struggling with the text of the Bible to figure out what it's saying. It just seems as though God knows that we're going to get more out of it if we have to struggle to figure it out than if He just simply said, "Here's what I have to say." Sure, He does that at times, too, but since we've been talking about learning, it really does seem that we learn more when we have to work with the words and struggle with the words, and maybe that's part of what God is trying to communicate to us, as well.
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