Benjamin and Lauren Turner
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Greek Thinking, Hebrew Thinking

12/3/2014

 
In my last blog, I wrote about how God is unchanging and how that has led us into the belief that his instructions for living are not cancelled but still valid.

I think God's unchanging nature is really the core question to grapple with in coming to this decision, but I recognize there are some obvious objections. How could Ben and I have arrived at such a different determination than what the New Testament seems to so adamantly say?

We actually didn't arrive here by studying different languages. That came much later. What came first was the concept of God not changing, followed by the question "Did Jesus really come to preach a NEW religion?"

As Christians, we state with unshakable confidence that we are under a New Covenant, a totally different Covenant than the one God made with his people at Mount Sinai. That is why most Christians are either ignorant of God's Laws or treat them as relics. I heard one man say recently that if we keep any part of God's laws, we are turning our backs on the gift of salvation through grace and are therefore condemned to eternal death. I was shocked because I've heard plenty of people give reasons why we don't have to pay attention to God's Instructions...but saying we'll be blotted out of God's Book of Life for not murdering someone? How can the New Covenant be so completely different from the Old? Where is the dividing line? How do we know what changed?

Are we followers of a totally new religion; and if we are, is that really what Jesus came to bring about? What does a "New Covenant" truly mean when the New Testament writers refer to it? Does the New Covenant differ so completely from the old that it is an insult to God to pay attention to his commandments?

I want to stress something very important here: I do not want to cast doubt on the Bible in any way. The Bible should be read with the confidence that if there's a question about a point, it can be truthfully answered with the Bible itself. I do not think you have to have any special knowledge of languages or histories or anything complicated to do this. The Bible is all about God and God doesn't contradict himself. As Jesus put it, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." 

Our Bibles might have translation issues here and there, but the real barrier to knowing God's truth tends to be our own assumptions. When we think we know something, we're often blind to any other thought or point of view. In seeking to know God better all the time, we have to begin testing our assumptions, especially those that seem contradictory to God's own words. Paul advises, "Do not despise prophecies, but test everything and hold fast to what is good." (1 Thess 5:20-21) 

It's easy to overlook contradictions and stay with our traditional understanding of things God says, but if there was one thing Jesus taught over and over, it was to rightly follow God and ignore those commands of men that get in the way. Like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, we are learning to say, "no matter what the consequences, we have to follow God rather than men." We want to leave behind the traditions of men and learn to truly know God so we can love him with all our hearts and souls and strength. We want to think his thoughts and do his actions, just as our Teacher and Savior Jesus did.

Building on the understanding of God's unchanging nature, we've begun to notice God's way of thought and action is unfamiliar to our way of thought. God's mind is not like man's anyway, but our culture has even drifted away from God's general pattern and Ben and I are no different. We think like Greeks, not like Hebrews. Greek thinking is linear. Hebrew thinking is circular or cyclical. And it is God's ways that formed the basis for the Hebrew understanding of the world represented in our Bible. We've been discovering that many difficulties that show up in understanding exactly what the Bible says comes from trying to read a Hebrew-style thought from a Greek-style viewpoint.

Greek thinking is the philosophical basis for much of our modern Western way of seeing things. It is founded in the idea that we are always moving forward and changing into something we have never been before. It says every day is a "new" day, and by "new", it means "completely different". We fervently believe in the philosophy of "all new!": a better, made-from-scratch, reinventing-the-wheel-every-time-we-build-a-wagon kind of "new". Every situation is it's own, every event floats in space as an isolated unit, and we are always inventing things that have never been seen before (we think). Everything has infinite possibility to morph into something completely different that bears little or no resemblance to it's former self. Ultimately, we believe in evolution: a cell can turn into a fish, which can turn into a monkey, which can turn into a human and humanity is always advancing, leaving our old outdated ways behind never to be seen or heard from again. As Christians, we believe we've completely evolved out of the old Jewish ways and moved on to the improved Christian ways - that is how we interpret the change from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant.

But this isn't the way God thinks. It isn't the way our universe works. It isn't the foundation for how the Bible came to be written. Solomon summed up the real state of the world in Ecclesiastes: "I discovered there is nothing new under the sun. What has been will be again, what is now has been before." (Ecc 1:9-10)

Take the example just of our weather: the seasons are always changing, but they are always changing into something they have been before. Spring to Summer to Fall to Winter, seedtime and harvest, rainy seasons and dry seasons. They are always new but have always been before pretty much the same way they are this year.

What God has done before he will do again because he sets patterns and maintains them. Everything in Nature testifies to this. Everything in history witnesses to it. While there are small changes, things are very much as they have always been. People are still people, recognizable in thought and action from the beginning of time until now. And God is still God. What he values now, he has always valued. What he has always hated, he still hates. The pattern of his actions is unchanging. The end of all things is mirrored in the beginning of all things. God's patterns are recorded in the Bible multiple times so we can understand them and be able to learn to view things the same way he does.

Against this backdrop, we have the enigma of God's Covenant with Man.

What was the Old Covenant? God summed it up this way: "For in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, I did not speak to your fathers or command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices. But this command I gave them: ‘Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people. And walk in all the way that I command you, that it may be well with you.’" (Jer 7:22-23)


"If you love me and obey me, I will be your God and you will be my people." 

What is the New Covenant? Jesus spoke the essence of it in John 14:20-21, though it's repeated other places: "In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him."


In other words, "If you love me and obey me, I will be your God and you will be my people."

That's it! That is the Covenant, old and new. The only difference between them is that one was sealed with the blood of animals and one was sealed far better by the blood of God's Son. Both of them were intended to cause God's ways to be written on our hearts. Both of them were intended to make it possible for man to walk with God again. Both of them were meant to bring us out of slavery to sin. Both were given as a great gift from God to his people.


God set a pattern and he returned to it. He is no different today than he was when he made Adam and Eve or spoke to Abraham or when he came down to Mount Sinai. What commandments was Jesus talking about? Was he coming to start a new religion totally separate from the one he was walking in every day? Or was he the living embodiment of the Word of the Unchanging God and his commandments for living a Godly life were therefore the same ones spoken to his people centuries before and recorded by Moses?


If you think like a Greek philosopher, you think Jesus was a new creation come to start a totally new religion completely different from the old. If you think like a Hebrew, you believe God always returns to the same patterns. Jesus is Adam as he was meant to be. What God wanted from man at Mount Sinai was what he wanted from man at Creation, what he wanted from man at Calvary, what he wants from man today and what he will want from man tomorrow.

And this is what God has always wanted from Man: children. He wants his Kingdom populated with offspring, loving children living the way he created us to live! And if we come to God in loving obedience, he will become our shield and shelter and provider and we will be his children, living in his household - also known as the Kingdom of God. He made us in his image and likeness on purpose. He wants us to fulfill that destiny and be imitators of him; and his Covenants - Old and New - were designed to make that possible.

In order to understand God better, we have to get rid of our Greek way of thinking, the way of thought that ultimately assumes God himself is evolving. God used to be harsh and unloving and saddled his beloved children with an evil set of rules designed only to torture them into realizing how much they needed a Savior, but now his only command is to 'love', our Greek-style minds think. We fail to notice the pattern of God's thought and behavior when we assume that "new" means "totally different" and that good instructions can become bad instructions or bad instructions can become good instructions.

If we want to know God better, we need to learn to change our mindset, to recognize the end in the beginning, to see the patterns of God's actions. It's time to stop thinking like Greeks and start being "imitators of God, therefore, like dearly beloved children" (Eph 5:1). 
Lauren Ball
12/14/2014 04:22:46 am

Hey old friend! Found your blog posts very interesting. Hope life is going well! Anyhow, 2 questions: what do you tell someone who says, "what must I do to be saved? And secondly, "who exactly is Jesus Christ?

Lauren
12/15/2014 05:14:34 am

Hello Lauren! I'm glad you've enjoyed the blog posts. Life is very good - I have a wonderful husband and two beautiful babies with every likelihood of more...'nuff said. ;-)

1.) What must I do to be saved?

Know God and love him because he is wonderful. Everything else will follow.

And how do you do that?

Now THAT'S the question of a lifetime.

I don't think there really is a short answer to this question, nor is there a stock one. So...why does the person want to be saved and from what? What do they know about God that makes them want to seek him? What don't they know that they need to know about him to answer their question?

Salvation is Eternal Life and Eternal Life is this: Jesus said to his Father in the presence of his disciples, "And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent."

In real life, how I can really answer this question depends on who's asking, their relationship to me, and what their history is.

When I read about Peter talking to his brothers on the day the Holy Spirit came on the disciples, it's a very long sermon in which he's telling people who are already essentially believers - they were religious Jews there from all countries to keep the day of Shavuot as they were commanded to - about how Jesus is the promised Messiah along with the proofs that those believers would already have been looking for in anyone who claimed that title. When they believed in those proofs and were cut to the heart - in other words, they felt the conviction of truth that Peter and the others were speaking the absolute truth and Messiah really had come - they begged, "Brothers, what should we do?"

Peter said, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.”

Now, at that time religious Jews were very familiar with baptisms - they had to undergo baptism before entering the Temple for the purification of their bodies. The thing that was new here was the baptism of believing Jews for the forgiveness of sins in the name of Yeshua the Annointed of God and the exhortation to change their minds toward God to save themselves from "this crooked generation". It says that Peter and the others spoke to their listeners with many words, essentially saying that answering the question of "what must I do to be saved?" entails a long conversation.

The accounts of Paul answering this question multiple times are very similar, because it describes him teaching about God before answering the question; and in one case, first he tells a man (the head jailer) that he and his family must be baptized because the man is already convinced that Paul's God is real by the events he's witnessed...but then Paul spends all night teaching the man and his family what it even means to worship the God of Creation and what it means to have a Messiah.

2.) Who exactly is Jesus Christ?

He is the Son of our Creator, the living embodiment of everything God spoke, the only perfect man to ever live, the High Priest who actually stands in God's presence, God’s Anointed King who will reign forever and who's kingdom is coming soon, the only man who has been made immortal, the One who came from God to give those who put their trust in him the same eternal life he has and the ability to stand in God's presence as he does. He is the image of God, the path to God, the teacher of God’s ways, the rightful doer of God’s instructions, the example or First Fruits of what we hope to become.

But again...none of those things mean anything to someone who knows nothing about God. That is why the Bible is written from Genesis to Revelation, so that we can begin at the beginning and learn who God is, learn how he made things to be, come to want things to be how God made them to be, learn about Jesus in the context of the framework in which he fits, and put our trust in him as the Savior that God planned for and promised.

So the real answer to your question is…who is “Someone” and why are they asking?

Mary Kay
12/15/2014 12:29:03 pm

Remarkable answer.

Lauren B.
12/17/2014 10:43:22 am

Thank you for taking the time to respond!!! Do you believe Jesus is God?

Jay
12/20/2014 04:49:03 am

Lauren B: If you struggle with this let me recommend The Gospel According to Jesus by John MacArthur.
Jesus said: "Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me." (Jn 17:21) and "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
In a world where we are constantly pulled to rationalize and justify what we don't understand, our understanding of the mysteries of the Triune God begins first with a personal relationship with God the Father through God the Son. It is only by stepping out on faith, and submitting our lives to Him, that our heart will begin to understand more of these "mysteries."

Lauren
12/18/2014 03:05:26 am

Jesus is God, the supreme authority.

But he has been GRANTED that authority by the Father, who had the authority to give it.

Yeshua is He who comes in His Father's Name: and YHVH is the Father who created all things through Yeshua his Salvation, the Living Word.

John 20:26-29

Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” Thomas answered him, “MY LORD AND MY GOD!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Lauren B.
12/26/2014 06:32:31 am

Thanks you so much Jay! Actually I am a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ; I fully believe in the Trinity. John MacArthur is a great theologian and I appreciate his insight into Scripture!! Thank you so much for your recommendation! As I've read through Lauren Ts posts I've become concerned as so much of them focus on them following the Old Testamant law as a necessity for the believer. It made me think of when Paul states in Galatians 3, "O foolish Galatians who had bewitched you!!!" The purpose of the law is to be a schoolmaster, to make us realize what sinful wretches we are to point us ultimately to our need for a Savior!!! I love Ray Comfort's statement on this, "the Laws function is to bring death to the sinner in the same way civil law bring capital punishment to a guilty murderer. However, our offense was paid for by the Savior, leaving us free to receive the pardon of the Gospel. The Law has no demand on a Christian.

Lauren
12/26/2014 08:50:10 am

"My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments.

[So the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM.” - John 8:57]

Whoever says “I know him” but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected.

By this we may know that we are in him: whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.

[*Jesus speaking* “Don’t misunderstand why I have come. I did not come to abolish the law of Moses or the writings of the prophets. No, I came to accomplish their purpose. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not even the smallest detail of God’s law will disappear until its purpose is achieved. So if you ignore the least commandment and teach others to do the same, you will be called the least in the Kingdom of Heaven. But anyone who obeys God’s laws and teaches them will be called great in the Kingdom of Heaven." - Matthew 5:17-19]

Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word that you have heard. At the same time, it is a new commandment that I am writing to you, which is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining."

(1 John 2:1-9)

I'd like to put all of 1 John in here, but the comment field has a character limit...


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    Author: Lauren

    Wife of Benjamin and mother to two wonderful little girls who are getting bigger every day.  Enjoys writing down thoughts and discussions we are having within the family and sharing them with whoever is interested in reading.

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