Keep your Philosophy, Latin and Greek
—I have a Person’s face to seek
——To know the micro expression thoughts
———And the innermost melodies of His heart
———They play in every word well sung
——Read by those seeking truth and love
—His gaze, His lips, His gentle breathing
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Who dares to finish it?
Written on January 19, 2022
Following Jesus Christ is only accomplished in practice and exercise internally and externally but it can be supplemented and aided by books. My own collections began with my Dad who had lost a list of books given to him by a friend, but he recalled as many as he could and shared them with me. This is a snapshot of where my shelf is now. I am hopeful that I may grow and refine this shelf over a lifetime.
My Disciple-shelf
First let me explain the analogies. I was given a short black wooden bookshelf with three shelves, and I divided each shelves into two halves.
Rainbow of Discipleship
Christianity is Spiritual, Intellectual, Personal, Social, Financial, Career-related, Familial, and Physical. And for my walk, it has been rooted in Faithful Devoted Translation of His Word. This breaks the white light of the Revelation of Jesus into a spectrum of Color.
Collection 1: Deep Personal Intimacy with God
Collection 2: Biblical Theology Worldview
Collection 3: Outworking of Faith
Collection 4: The Church’s Journey
Collection 5: Translation in Biblical Languages
Collection 6: Sound Biblical Interpretation
These six collections provide an ability to inform much of the whole spectrum of God’s revelation in Christ. This way, a disciple of Jesus will not be color-blind.
The Missile-ple-ship
The Three Shelves have three central features and with one stabilizing feature for each level like a Missile.
The Top Shelf: The central feature is Deep Personal Intimacy with God. This is the Payload: the truly explosive and powerful part of any believer’s life: the revelation of Jesus Christ. The companion stabilizing feature is the Biblical Theology Worldview Heart Perspective. These are like the guidance computer and the nose cone: which keep the missile piercing the air upwards toward heaven, and keeps the whole life on target.
The Middle Shelf: The central feature is the outworking of faith in all areas of life: physical, financial, familial, career-wise, service, and fellowship. This represents the fuel, the relationships that keep moving with the whole body as we work and stay on mission together. The stabilizing feature of this level is the Church’s Journey to familiarize a believer with how the church has walked in history and how the church today has its various streams in various countries and cultures.
The Lower Shelf: The central feature is the Translation of the Scriptures in the Biblical Languages. This oddly enough has been a tremendous propulsion system in my own life. The Word of God itself is a wonderful fire of God’s holiness to sustain the flight of the Christian forever. The stabilizing feature of this level is Sound Biblical Interpretation, which keeps the propulsion straight and upright. The Work of Translating the scriptures as an interpreter is very much like a Nozzle where people can feel the heat of the fire of the Word of God.
Are all of them necessary?
All of these components are necessary to make the missile work, launch, fly, find it’s mark, and deliver a payload of explosive power! To have all but the 6th collection (Sound Biblical interpretation) the disciple is at risk of launching a warhead into the air with no stability to keep it from coming back down on his own head in destruction. To have all but the 5th collection is to have no propulsion and no truly spiritual power from the ministry of the Word, or at best it must be outsourced to others which often has much sparks and fire but no internally true launching power. To have all but the 4th Collection is to potentially get side-swiped part of the way through the journey by people hijacking or pushing your mission off target to fit into the flightpath of other missiles on other missions. To neglect the 3rd Collection is to be practically ill equipped for your ministry in impacting the world physically, financially, intellectually etc. To neglect the 2nd Collection is to have a lot of knowledge about God even intimately, but to get lost in appropriating scripture, ministry, and revelation in ways that are overly subjective, without an objective standard of Biblical Theology. To neglect the 1st Collection, is to have a small to non-existent payload, and have nothing impactful of Christ Jesus to reveal in your life; in essence to be a dud.
What order should I read them in?
If I had to recommend a place to start, I would definitely start with the first ministry of knowing Him (Collection 1) but I would be quick to stabilize it with some work from Collection 2. I would get started on Collection 5 (Translation) after having some work in correct interpretation (Collection 6) as soon as possible. As I grew in secret, I would want to find out more about how to take this and practically use it, (Collection 4), and finally see what the church has thought historically and today. (Collection 5) Still, in growing with the Lord, there will be much back and forth between all of these collections, and may He lead you into what area He wishes for you to explore next.
A Seventh Collection
There is a seventh area of the discipleship books which I recommend highly, is the collection that you write yourself: note taking, journaling, bible-marking, correspondence. Jesus never may have written anything down, but praise the Lord for the people who did. My father told me, if you look for a common denominator of all those who were greatly used by God, they kept a journal/wrote things down. There are probably exceptions to this rule, but in my own life, this has become a tremendous exercise for chronicling my own journey with the Lord, and recording His faithfulness as another track record for how real He is. My journals are my testimony. Furthermore, it has helped me sort through the jumbling of my own thoughts and God’s thoughts, and evil thoughts, and let me work them out like a work-bench for the things that are in my heart. Through it God has shaped me and entrusted me with the treasure of ripening fruit. Now I have a place to keep them until they are ripe.
Continue on to Part 2 for the current list of books in each collection.
Someone on Facebook asked the question: “What made Jesus compelling to you?” My answer was, “His Face.” He said that he was “interested to hear more!” I asked him if I could give him a long answer as to why. This is my long answer as to why I find His face compelling.
How do I know Jesus’ face? I’ve been collecting a kind of mosaic.
So, I know His face by pure heart, clear conscience, and sincere faith in His Word, by His Spirit, with love, throughout creation, from his revelations, and as worship. And it is beyond compelling. It is beyond compare. It is . . . altogether lovely.
The Bible is a rare book which embraces its reader’s heart with love. It knows its reader and it receives its reader with the same knowing love Jesus had when he spoke in parables. Our heart’s deepest questions are not just answered, but they are loving accepted and left unanswered until our fears are laid to rest by the testimony of God’s faithfulness, and then we find that the answer isn’t just in the Bible, but the answer is out there seeking the questioner. The book is like its author: loving, truthful, humble, and wise. Through the book, the reader comes to know what the Author knows about the reader, and then invites and excites gratitude to the Author for how well the Author understands, searches out, and resolutely stretches out its arms and his hands to bring the willing heart into right relationship with Himself. When reading it, one wonders, is it a book or is it a person? The Bible is obviously a book of books, but the Author’s love and truth so saturate every page that the Word– the message, the thought, the meaning– of the book come alive in the heart– as alive in the heart as the Author of both the heart of the reader and of life itself. O that every student of the Bible would learn the Bible’s ways of embracing the heart of the reader with all its questions, doubts, and fears, and of showing them knowing love that invites them to be saved!
As I watched a video on the Bible being historically accurate, I creatively learned this diagram to make sense of these three descriptors, and why they are important.
As a way to show it to people, the explanation of the “Snowman” diagram starts at the bottom with just the word “Narrative” in its spot at the start. Each word is put in quotes, it is filled into the diagram.
The Bible is “Narrative” which means it is “Story.” And what does a story have? It has “characters,” it has a “plot,” and it has “meaning.” That part of the story that really gets us. And a story is crafted by the imagination of a man, yes?
Now a lot of people are content to accept the Bible as a wonderful collection of stories for the most part, but the debate will really start to come into the next level up. Because the Bible isn’t just Narrative. It is
“Historical” Narrative. When I say Historical it means that the things in this story, “Really happened.” And in history we don’t have just any characters or plots, or meaning, we have real “People,” “Events” of history, and as we look at history we start recognizing patterns in history. Case in point: Roman Empire’s rise and Fall. This pattern of rising and falling has prevailed throughout history.
A lot of educated people will debate if the things in the Bible really happened, but evidence supports the Bible’s historical account, just like the Senacherib’s Prism. Some people who don’t accept the Bible as God’s word will say, “It is Man’s recording, and Man’s crafting of the story.” The debate may convince them that there is historical evidence, for the story, but the final part of the Bible’s descriptors, is the part that people who are not Christians will not accept at a heart level. Because the Bible isn’t just Historical Narrative. It is
“Theological” Historical Narrative. That means it reveals things about “What is really going on. The Bible gives voice to the part of us that knows this world is more than the world we can see, taste, smell, and hear. There is an unseen “God” and there are unseen “Spiritual realities” which are moving in the world: Angels, demons, blessings, curses, and at this level we actually get to the “Truth.” Now while The Story is Man Crafted, and History is Man recorded, Theological means it is “God revealed.”
The Bible is all three levels, and in order to understand the Bible, you have to accept it at all three of these levels. It is Theological, Historical Narrative. Because The Historical Level is written at the level of “Earth”: The events that concretely happened in time and space here on this planet. But the Bible also accounts for and describes the real of “Heaven.” And because it is story it also speaks at the level of the “Heart.”
Please get this: God has revealed something to Man about Heaven and Earth which He had Man record and craft so that it could reach your heart. This is why the Bible is the best and most all encompassing book ever written. It is Heaven and Earth, and the Human heart all wrapped into one Volume, and it sets all of them back into right relationship with God.
So yeah! The Bible is Theological, Historical Narrative. Isn’t that awesome?!
Hebrews 11:3~ “By faith we understand that the ages of time were created by the proclamation of God, so that, from what was not visible, things that are seen came to be.” (Translation mine)
Faith accounts for the unseen reality which is the basis for the seen reality. Faith does not just think there is something to the Unseen, it simply understands that the Unseen is real. We have already discussed this, and now let us look at the nature of faith.
Principle: It sees the Visible in terms of the Invisible. How are we supposed to make sense of the world of time in which we live purely by observation of the visible world? Even if those who claimed to have done so actually could, they would negate so many concepts that are unseen yet obviously real: such as meaning, love, happiness, even words. There is an invisible dimension behind everything, and faith sees it.
The Bible teaches us how to see the Seen world in terms of the Unseen.
Faith recognizes the designer in the design, the creator in the creation, and his word behind the thing. It is easy to think of Words giving us access to understanding things: a bridge between us and the world around us. This is not untrue, but words can also give access to the Person behind the Words behind the thing referred to with the word that is formed in your mind and heart. As words give access to the Seen reality, so words also give us access to the Unseen reality. Just as Paul wrote in Romans 10:13 “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the proclamation of Christ.”
This is also why faith can be trained by learning the Words of God, which we have in the Bible. The Gospel of Christ is the power of God bringing us to Salvation, because the very Gospel of Christ is woven into the fabric of the way God made the world. Paul wrote also to the Romans 1:20 that, “since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.”
Faith gives a person the ability to see the world through God’s eyes.
Application:
My dear sister in Christ,
– – We all are fighting many battles. We each have many victories and many defeats of which we can boast. To aid you in your plight, I have some thoughts on Spiritual Disciplines that I hope may be useful to a practical person such as yourself. May you find the blessing of a loving brother reflecting the love of the Big brother too both of us: Jesus Christ.
– – It may not seem like it, but Jesus can really identify with everything that we go through. On the surface, it looks totally different: Jesus was not a wife and mother of two adorable yet sinful children. The reason he can is because all three temptations to which Eve and Adam fell, are the same three temptations with which Israel was tried in the wilderness for 40 years. and by which Jesus was tempted by the devil for 40 days. The three roots of all the sin in our lives can be boiled down to these:
Adam and Eve both fell to these three temptations in Eden, Israel fell to these in the Wilderness, but Jesus in the Wilderness did not. This stage of Jesus life comes after Jesus’ Baptism, and he enters by the holy Spirit’s leading into the desert and he beats Satan’s temptations and leaves with the Holy Spirit’s power, which he cultivated in three practical ways: Fasting, Prayer, and the Word of God. These three practices have a specific objective to teach a particular State of being, which can counteract the State of sin into which we are born. These three practices have the potential by the Spirit’s aid to strengthen the Christian for any struggle he or she faces: whether tangible or intangible, visible or invisible, emotional or rational, external or internal.
Preliminary caution: Nothing can be done except by the leading of the Holy Spirit. Make sure He’s even on board with you, or you are going nowhere like a boat with sail raised and no wind.
One final thought: Please do not pursue the practical at the expense of the personal. It may be my personality coming out here, but I believe there is a personal root to everything. I encourage you to follow these practical steps wherever you can, and do not forget that He’s right there personally available for all of it. Expect to fail and learn to depend on God even in your failures.
May God bless you, my sister, and I hope that we both may mutually grow into the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge. God’s peace be with your spirit.
The Bible is one of those rare books in which the heart of the reader is transformed while he reads.
The things the heart did not know are added into the mix
The things the heart thought it knew are shown to be multifaceted
The things that seemed complicated become more simple
The things that seemed simplistic become deeply rooted in deeper layers
And each layer of the Bible into which the heart breeches becomes at the same time a deeper layer of the heart of the reader.
So that whatever the Reader’s heart is searching for is found here in this book, and is found to lead to richer and more beautiful realities upon which all relaity is based.
The treasure of all treasures, the source of all meaning, the wisdom of eternity strung through time.
And all of this is brought forth from the mouth of One.
Who made Himself known to all the earth in Jesus Christ,
He is the Word, the Wisdom, the Way, the Wonderful.
And He is my Savior, my Lord, my friend, my beloved.
I am His and He is mine.
He is I am
יְהוָה Ἰησοῦς Χριστός.
Jesus Christ our Lord
Amen.
– – To read the Bible honestly in any language is to dig deeply into the soul of humanity; because of this, every person who considers the intent study of the Bible must be willing to be honest with the darkest parts of himself. And he must approach it with the reverent care-filled trepidation of a man who has unsteady hands performing surgery on his loved one; perhaps an even better illustration would be a regular patient frequently returning to the operating table with a weak, sick heart, trying not to Jerk around while the Doctor performs surgery on him.
– – In this humble posture, the empty hands are filled with the riches of God’s goodness, one little piece at a time. Each piece can enrapture the reader with the warmth of solidified volcanic rock fresh from the mantle. Over time even this rock cools and the heart cools in response; it must feel His fire again. It must grow with the heat of the All-Consuming fire of God’s holiness, which is the only fire hot enough to keep the chilly emptiness of the World’s vanity at bay.
– – Such began my own “addiction” to reading God’s Word. That is the word that first came to mind: “addiction.” but it’s probably more like drinking soda all your life, and then one day you try just plain water; and it supplies all your body’s needs for replenishment of oxygen and hydrogen through the digestive system, and all without a sugar coma, or the slavish cravings for more. Soda was the “addiction.” Water has offered the freedom from that addiction, and allows the drinker to enjoy all other beverages better. And in spite of every other option being open and enjoyable, water becomes my favorite drink for as long as I live. This is more like what God’s Word is to me, in contrast to the empty philosophies and ideologies of movies, books, and stories which today’s world commandeers to assuage our soul’s deep thirst for meaning, value, purpose and identity. God’s Word is the Water of the World, by which all who drink of it may live.
– – I live out in the country with my family in two houses and a mobile home, and we all use well water. My Grandmother’s house has a well that was dug to a dept of 100 feet, with a water softener. It’s alright, but this water tastes like a tad of sulfur, and this iron-nasal taste that when I was a kid always tasted to me like boogers. Then there’s my parent’s house where I live, the oldest of the houses. And this house, built in 1960 had a well dug in the back yard all the way down to about 200 feet. They didn’t usually drill that deep unless they had to, but I will tell you, as all others will say who have lived in my family, and as visitors with fresh taste buds attest to us: It is the best tasting, sweetest water around. No sulfur taste; no iron. Just good hard water.
– – You can gather by now one of my points: The deeper you go, the sweeter it gets. The same is true of the Bible. The English Bible translators have done a tremendous job at reconstructing the flow of meaning in another language. It is now possible to read all the way through from Genesis to Revelation the Gospel of God in a language easy to grasp! What a depth of gratitude we owe to those who have interpreted for us God’s Word. God’s blessing be upon them.
Continued in Part 3
My Dear Readers, known and unknown,
– – I hope all had a very Merry Christmas celebration. Jesus is the reason for all the seasons and family and friends are the most precious gifts. My most prized gift I received this year is a close but definitive race between my very own blue ceramic, 12-hole, song-bird, “Ocarina of Time.” (Zelda fans will understand my glee!) and my very own black, single-bound, silver-edged, double ribbon-ed Readers Greek and Hebrew Bible! The Bible won by two words.
– – I am a student in Seminary and have learned to read, translate and exegete Hebrew. it’s a slow process, but I am gradually getting more cozy with it. I also took Greek in Seminary, but I had been translating in Greek since my Junior year in High school when my Dad taught me. As a result of studying the languages, the Word of God has opened up to me, like petals of a rose to expose the aromatic bloom of Jesus’ radiance! As Jesus said to the Religious Leaders in John 5:39, “You search the Scriptures [Old Testament] Because you think that you have life in them, but it is these that testify of Me.”
– – Some of my friends, while they confess admiration for the scholarship, don’t see any reason or feel sufficient motivation to learn the original languages of the Bible. They have expressed to me different reasonings:
These among other reasons are not bad reasons at all. In fact, I’d agree with the first reason that some people are called specifically to areas that learning to read the Bible in the original voice would be a superfluous expenditure of energy. And as for the second reason, the same way two eyes see three-dimensionally, so two or more English versions add a depth to anyone’s reading of the text. And the third reason does not have anything inherently wrong with it. they are right: understanding God’s word in a language of the heart and mind is really all one needs to be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
So, then, why learn to read one even two old languages just to read a book that is much easier to read in English? If you are a person who holds to the first reason, then by all means remain in that condition as God has specifically equipped you. If you are of the other two reasons or another and you are not sure why you would want to learn Greek and (or) Hebrew, allow me to share what I have discovered from my own personal study of the holy written Word of God in Greek and Hebrew.
Continue to Part II (I broke it up into four posts because it was getting long when I wrote it in my journal last night.)
King David wrote how Yahweh is his shepherd. As I was studying the 23 Psalm, I recognized that David’s biblical understanding of who God is so tightly woven with his own personal experience as a shepherd that it bleeds into one another and makes something profound, poetic, personal, and powerful. This is my own “23’rd Psalm” of sorts. I didn’t find an English word for this, so I made up the word, “Wonderer”
Yahweh breathed a mist:
A seed of whispy thought heart-warmed.
The cavern of my inward parts surged with passion
While in still, dark quiet a song was born.
A phrase, a seed, a dewdrop falling—
Echoed against itself in this secret place
Ever expanding to fill the structured space
Of the created temple of God’s goodness
Blossoming in Glory of Christ
My Beloved has come nearer
Your grace has illumined Your image-bearer
Who rules and overflows his life with creativity
Which resembles Yours in a humble fashion
For all my little heart–the spark–is Yours.
O come, my One, remake the landscape
Make this heart burn hot to see Your kind face
For just as all light comes from Your own heart
Abba, Your spirit searches out my very soul.
Wondercano 