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I want to preach Christ. And I want to do it from everwhere. Jesus says he’s everywhere in the Bible, so when I preach, I want to find him, and make him clear to people. 

Sometimes, this is easy. Turn to Mark, and it’s fairly easy to see Jesus. Turn to Esther, and it’s not so easy (whoaoh there cowboys! Don’t rush ahead to the comment bit yet…).

Or in Job. This Easter I thought I’d be a smarty pants. Job 19 -  ”I know that my Redeemer lives”. Piece of cake, thought I. Jesus = The Redeemer, He lives. Easy. 

Until I started working on it. Who was this Job? Job in the opening chapter, we’re told, is a good God fearer - makes sacrifices for his family and has lots of cows. Sounds like Abraham, probably one of his contemporaries. Which means he’s proper early in the Bible story. Pre-exodus, and importantly, pre-law of Moses. That’s important because it’s from the Law that we get all our understanding of the Redeemer that Jesus ultimately fulfills. So the question I started asking (and am still asking) is ‘what did Job mean when he said ‘Redeemer’?’ And as much as I tried, I couldn’t answer with ‘the same as us’. 

See, I know that Jesus is our kinsman redeemer because a redeemer had to be like the one that he was taking the place of, or avenging. As Jesus came in the likeness of sinful flesh to redeem us from the curse of the law, he was like us, and did for us what we couldn’t do. I see how Jesus fulfills the Redeemer thing. But if Israel was not going to have any idea about what a Redeemer was meant to do for another few hundred years what did Job mean… and don’t even get me started on Job not even being an Israelite…

Two things over-ride my thinking. First is this ‘progressive revelation’ thing (a posh way of of saying that as the Bible story developed, people learnt more about Jesus). I think it’s real. To me, it makes perfect sense that Adam knew less than us, Abraham knew less than us, Moses knew less than us… Isaiah knew more, but still less than us. Now, as Jesus goes ‘no one gets to the Father except through me’ it’s clear that they were all saved by Jesus. But whether they knew that as we do? I seriously doubt. 

Which brings me back to Job. It’s clear that he trusted God. It’s clear that he was vindicated by God. and that he spoke to God. And all of this, looking back, I am convinced is Jesus. Lookinh via the cross, I know that Job 19 is about Jesus. I just don’t have a clue whether he knew this at the time.

The other factor is that I want to be true to the text. I don’t want to go all Spurgeon on anyone. I know “he was greatly used by God” and that I should pray for a bit of what he was given… but he’s no model for explaining the text  is he? (Except for the Treasury of David for some reason…). 

But maybe I’ve gone too far over to the dry side. All word and no spirit, that’s what they call it. The more I tried to find Jesus legitimately in Job, whilst fighting my temptation to see him as I see him, before seeing him as Job saw him… the less I could see anything. Are you confused? Good. So was I.  

In the end, I cut my loses. And went after Romans 1 instead.      
 

We’re not talking languages in the international spoken sense here, (personally, I wish everyone spoke one language - English - blast those Babel guys!) what we’re talking about here is the languages used in the Bible, Greek and Hebrew. So why is it important that we know them? And I’ll offer a few tips on how can we know them. So if you don’t know your theos from your huios, then either you have bad Christology or you should read on!

I’m going to give one simple reason why it’s important that we know Greek and Hebrew, and that is that we can go deeper into God’s Word. Knowing the languages helps a person see the reasons for differences between translations, they help a person see patterns and structures to different passages and authors, they help a person engage with more technical commentaries, they enable a person to see emphases that an English translation may not highlight and they slow down a person’s reading so that you spend more time thinking about it. So the one reason, that you go deeper into a text, actually has a lot of sub-reasons. If you want somewhat more detail on reasons for knowing the Biblical languages, look here, here and here for some good ones!

Now I know that not everyone is a languages person. I know that because I certainly am not a languages person. I do like to play with language (so long as it’s English) but I’m not the sort of person who understands grammar (apart from intuitively) or who picks up foreign languages easily. So I’m not going to say that everyone should kill themselves trying to be fluent in both Greek and Hebrew. But for a minister, it is an incredibly useful tool to have, even if it’s a fairly basic grasp. And because not every minister is a languages person, if you are a languages person and not a minister, then why not pick up these languages so you can be a tool for your minister. That way whenever they come to a complicated text, they can come to you for an explanation.

Our good English translations are very good (into this category I would include the ESV, NASB, NIV and the many others) so we can have a good and clear understanding of the original text. With the use of commentaries and reliance upon scholars and their language tools this is brought deeper and richer, but with the use of our own original languages it is brought even deeper and richer still.

So if I’ve convinced you to at least have a stab or a dabble at the originals, i guess there are three main ways you can start learning. First is take a Bible college course/module either by distance learning or by actually attending. I guess this is the most interactive and personal option but is also the most expensive at upwards of £367 per module at WEST. Another option is to buy a book. This would take some motivation and means you can’t ask further questions when you find topics to be quite difficult. I bought a book to help with my Hebrew recently that cost me £15.82 at the Book Depository. And the final option which is by far the cheapest option, since it is free, is by learning through the Information Superhighway that is the World Wide Web, A.K.A. t’internet.

First if you’re looking to learn Greek (which I’m sure is the easier one of the two), then there’s the online animated lessons by Ted Hildebrandt at Gordon College. I can’t work out whether his voice is computer generated or not, but in 28 lessons you can learn all you need to get the basics of the language down. You get to watch this funny little computer animated bloke dancing around the page pointing at bits and pieces and at the end of each lesson there’s a vocab. section. I’ve only watched one lesson in full which lasted around an hour, so you should be able to go through all the lessons in little over a day, (though I’d recommend spacing the lessons out so that you’ve got time to learn paradigms and vocab.) Click on the image to see a screen shot.

Then, for Hebrew, there’s a brilliant series of animated lessons by Charles Grebe at Animated Hebrew. Charles takes you through 40 lessons, working through Introducing Biblical Hebrew by Allen P. Ross (though it’s not essential to have the book). Each lesson lasts anything from 15mins to 1hr 35mins (though on average they’re about an hour) with a grand total of 35hrs 7mins. Again I’d recommend you space your learning out, (I tried doing four lessons a day and my brain refused to take anything in for a few days!) Charles draws most things out to engage your mind in ways that are a real help for people like me who learn visually. He’s got this neat little program as well that’s such a great tool for his lectures (you really need to see them just to see how cool this program is!) He also has a fantastic vocab. flash card program that fits his lessons (and Ross’ book). Click the image for a screen shot.

So have a go, even if you can spare just an hour a week, it may well pay richly in years to come, or you might get nothing more than a basic understanding of the principles of the original languages, but hey, at least you can say you’ve tried!

I have to be straight up front here, I’m not a fan of Good Charlotte. I’ve never got over their 2002 album The Young and the Hopeless with songs on there such as Lifestyles of the Rich and the famous, Girls and Boys and Anthem. Being the hardcore punker that I was when that album came out, I couldn’t stand their pop lyrics and tunes mixed in with what appeared to be an “I want to be a punk rocker” image, which especially annoyed me when they played up to their mixing with the likes of Rancid (hardcore punk band), and so I put them in the same bracket as Busted, the type of band who pretend to be punk because it was cool at the time but really they’re just pop. I have been assured that this album was a low-pop-point for the band and that their other albums are more punk!

Their latest album, Good Morning Revival, was released in March this year and has already had the single, Keep Your Hands Off My Girl, released from it. The album itself is full of songs that are sprinkled with despair. The song, Misery, is rife with it, with lines such as “Yeah I heard, that misery was looking for me; Happiness is a face that don’t look good on me”. Then there’s A Beautiful Place with lines such as “Father, can we start over?…I wanna feel the way I did back then; Before my heart grew cold.” And there’s Something Else with the lines “We all want something; We all want something we can’t have.”

In the midst of the sprinkled despair comes the song The River, (out today) a song of despair that is also reaching out in hope. I was working away a few weeks ago in front of the TV with MTV2 on and on came this single, and it really caught my attention. Have a look at this live version below: