gods, garbage, good gifts

Mrs Lloyd has been reading an extract about caffeine from The Revd Steve Hoppe's new book, Sipping Salt Water, on the Good Book Company blog. Hoppe says we can treat created things as gods, garbage or good gifts, and the schema seemed worth stealing to me. As we know, things make good servants and bad masters. They should be neither worshipped nor despised but received from God's hands as good gifts with gratitude and used for his glory and the good of ourselves and others.

Poetry not Systematic Theology

The Bible is not a Systematic Theology text book. Arguably, at least, the books of Proverbs and Psalms are particularly far from being so.

So for example, when Psalm 10:1 asks, "Why, O LORD, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?" we have a cry from the Psalmist's heart arising from his experience, although ultimately intended to be of benefit to believers in general.

We should not expect the rest of the Psalm to be a sustained, exhaustive, scientific account of all the possible reasons why God may be or seem aloof from any believer in any circumstances. The Psalms express a truth or truths but not necessarily the whole truth, and they express themselves in a poetic manner. As inspired Scripture, what the Psalm says is true but it might be true of some people in some circumstances from a certain point of view in a sense or manner of speaking and there might be many other things to say.

This is particularly obvious and important when it comes to reading the Psalms and the Proverbs, but actually, it is worth keeping in mind when reading the Epistles, which seem to be the Bible at its most doctrinal. God in his wisdom has given the catholic church occasional letters to specific churches which are meant to be significant for us all, though not necessarily quite in the same way that they applied to the 1st Century Corinthian church. Yes, go back to  Corinth but come back with rightly understood and applied goodies.

A poem what I wrote about English and Hebrew poems

I am currently preaching a little sermon series off and on in the Psalms and I am thinking of using the following at a forthcoming family service to illustrate a difference between English and Biblical Hebrew poetry and hopefully in the process to help people to read the Psalms. Probably there are rather better examples out there doing the same thing. Improvements or alternatives are of course welcome.

Update: over lunch today the kids revealed that the Reader had suggested to them another technique which began with a c or possibly a kicking k, which turned out to be a chiasm. So the very cleverest readers might be able to spot one of them too, though maybe sometimes they are imagined and made up!

A Poem what I wrote about English and Biblical Poems



Rhyme is a technique English poems often use.

It is a sign of our versing muse.



But Biblical Psalms often use parallelism.

They might repeat ideas.

They might say the same thing twice.

Or something similar - maybe adding something.

Or not - it might be a contrast.



Also,

Biblical poetry

Can be acrostic.

Do you see?

Scholars love to spot chiasms in the Bible.

Here one element matches another later on.

The middle term might be stressed.

And something corresponds to something earlier.

Some experts identify these chiasms often in Scripture.