Many of us pastors have trouble staying out of the ditches and onto the road.
A scholar friend says, “Truth is a ridge on either side of which are vast chasms to be avoided at all cost.” One side is called liberalism, the other legalism. Rigid fundamentalism on the right, worldly compromise on the left. In between is the road. The way. It’s narrow.
Truth always is.
It’s one thing to love word-study and to delight in finding a particular word in Scripture that yields a well-spring of insights and applications, but a far different thing to fight over the meaning of some obscure Greek word.
Somewhere I encountered a translation of I Timothy 6:5 that warns God’s leaders about “word-wrangling.” This morning, looking that passage up in various translations and commentaries and other study helps, no one has it that way, but more as “constant striving” and “chronic disagreement.” (The Greek word—ahem, here we go now–is disparatribai, a double compound word which according to Thayer, means “constant contention, incessant wrangling or strife.”)
“Thayer” refers to a well-respected Greek-English lexicon used for generations. In the above quote, he used the word “wrangling”. Maybe I got it from him.
The image of wrangling suggests a cowboy roping a dogie, jumping off his horse, and wrestling the animal to the ground.
Some of us do that with words. We capture them, hogtie them, and put our own brand on them. The result may be to make the word mean something entirely different from the writer’s original intention.
And since our audiences–that would be the men and women of our congregations–are not knowledgeable about the Greek and Hebrew (most don’t have a clue what a lexicon is!), when we start parsing (ahem) these words in sermons, they either shift into neutral intending to catch up when we return to the main highway or they stand in awe, assured we must know what we’re talking about since we use phrases like “the original Greek says” and “my Hebrew professor used to say this word means.”
Why our people put up with this stuff is beyond me.
They shouldn’t.
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