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09
May
2022

Buying A Wife?

Buying A Wife

When a modern Westerner reads about an arranged marriage in the Bible it looks to us like a man was buying a wife. For example, consider the story in Genesis 24 where Abraham sent his servant to find a wife for his son Isaac. To us, this looks more like a business transaction than a proposal.

After Abraham’s servant encountered Rebekah at the well, her family welcomed him into their home. No doubt the golden jewelry he gave her helped pave the way for him (Gen 24:22, 47). Abraham’s servant then explained how his master had made him swear to go back to his homeland to find a wife for Isaac. After Rebekah’s family agreed for her to become Isaac’s bride, the servant gave gifts of gold and other costly items. These “presents” were given to Rebekah, her brother, and her mother (Gen 24:50-53).

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Posted by Eddie Lawrence in Ancient Customs, Genesis, Women
02
May
2022

What 1 Timothy 1 Tells Us About False Teachers

False Teachers

There is no shortage of false teachers. False teachers abound today just as they did in the earliest days of the church. They have sown chaos and led people astray for centuries and will continue to do so. 

The term “false teacher” often gets thrown around casually today. Some people will accuse a person of being a false teacher if he holds to some trivial matter which disagrees with local congregational consensus. The New Testament doesn’t use the term “false teacher” the way many people do today. How does the Bible define a false teacher? Let’s make a few observations from 1 Timothy 1 and notice some traits of real false teachers.

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Posted by Eddie Lawrence in 1 Timothy
25
Apr
2022

What 1 Timothy 1 Tells Us About False Teaching

False Teaching

False teaching always has consequences. We can’t be taught wrong and live right. False teaching was taking place in Ephesus resulting in extremely poor conduct in the Ephesian church. Paul wrote his first letter to Timothy to teach the Christians in Ephesus how they should conduct themselves as members of God’s family. 

Paul never details for us exactly what the false teachings in Ephesus were. Nevertheless, we can learn a few things about false teaching in general in the first chapter of 1 Timothy.

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Posted by Eddie Lawrence in 1 Timothy
18
Apr
2022

Paul Is Hard To Understand

Hard To Understand
Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay

…our dear brother Paul has written to you according to the wisdom given to him. He speaks about these things in all his letters. There are some things hard to understand in them…  (2 Pet. 3:15–16 CSB17)

As we noted in the overview of 1 Timothy, we have to read between the lines when studying this letter. We are, after all, reading someone else’s mail. When we have access to only one side of a conversation, we have to attempt to fill in the gaps. 

Some of these gaps come in the form of following Paul’s flow of thought from one paragraph to the next. There are a couple of times in the first chapter of 1 Timothy where it appears that Paul abruptly changes subjects. At first glance, it is not always obvious how the paragraphs relate to each other. 

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Posted by Eddie Lawrence in 1 Timothy, Hermeneutics
11
Apr
2022

What Is An Apostle?

Apostle

The word apostle is one of several words in the Bible that has not been translated from the original biblical language into English. Instead, the word apostle is a transliteration from Greek into English. Transliteration is the process of taking the letters of a word from one language and substituting them with the equivalent letters of a different language. Translation, on the other hand, is the process of choosing a word in the destination language that has the same meaning as the word in the source language. The word apostle came into the English language from the Greek word apostolos (ἀπόστολος). 

ἀπόστολος  →  apostolos  →  apostle 

As you can see, our English word apostle is composed by substituting the Greek letters with the equivalent English letters. The word hasn’t been translated at all, but is really just an approximation of the sound of the Greek word.

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Posted by Eddie Lawrence in Word Studies