“Your heart Will Thank You”

Meditate upon these things; give thyself wholly to them; that thy profiting may appear to all. – 1Tim 4:15.

Have you ever thought about we English language users and our obsession with Bible translations? It will interest you to know that there’re at least FOUR HUNDRED different English translations of the Bible (up to 900 if you loosen your definition of “translation”). No other language in the world comes even close to that amount. Apparently, there’re 400 different ways for English speakers to say “theos agape estin” (“God is love”, 1Jhn 4:8).

One of the demerits of this glut of “modern” translations that we have is that they give a false sense of simplicity to the words of scripture that are sometimes absent in the original documents. For example, the 1st century Believers would have required a little more than an average knowledge of Greek to understand Luke’s words in Luke and Acts; but such a difficulty is hardly noticeable to the modern English reader.

This super simplification and easy-reading smoothness that has crept into the reading of God’s word has given us the impression that we KNOW what the writer is saying by just browsing through the text like a news article. We expect the translators to have done the hard work of EXEGESIS for us.

And to make it worse, some of us depend primarily on the so-called “Amplified” and “Expanded” versions to get our Bible truths; forgetting the fact that the amplifications and expansions are additions made by mortal, fallible persons like us.

Is it any wonder then that the regular believer today struggles with dogma, doctrine and truth?

The job of a Bible translation is to tell us, in our language, what the original human writers said in theirs. Getting the life-saving truths of those words engrafted into our hearts, however, requires a deliberate application of the mind to the text at hand, along with the help of the Holy Spirit (the Inspiration of the Bible writers, – 2Tim 3:16).

Yes, it sounds like hard work, but if you do it, you’ll be better off spiritually for it. Or, as a popular cooking oil ad here in Nigeria would say, “YOUR HEART WILL THANK YOU”.

AMEN.

More Blessings await you today; you’ll not miss them in Jesus’ Name.

GREG ELKAN