Religious Thought for the 21st Century

Making Exegesis Upon Correct Translations   In the previous post,  The Conception of the Intelligence Designer is as Old as Genesis ,   we saw how the author of Genesis 1 conceived God as concerned with every detail of His Divine Creative act conforming to some design for the emergence of human life. We mentioned that verse 1:4 contains a rhetorical device, in particular an antiptosis: God saw the light, that it was good . By using this figure of speech as the first in a series of God saw that it was good , the author has his readers pay attention to God's expression of concern for the emergence of goodness as contrary to evil.  Recognizing this unusual construction and translating it properly is very important since the author uses it again in other parts of Genesis. i.e 6: 2  That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair ; 12: 4      So it was, when Abram came into Egypt, that the Egyptians saw the woman, that she...

Many English translations have in Genesis 1:4:    God saw that the light was  good;  and God  separated the light from the darkness. (NASB) This translation does not do justice to the figure of speech the author utilized to convey his idea. The best translation goes like this::   And God saw the light, that it was good:  and God divided the light from the darkness. This is an unusual order of speech for: God saw that the light was good . The author uses this construction in several other occasions:  (cf.   Genesis 6:2; Genesis 12:14; Genesis 13:10 ) The statement was written in this manner to serve a purpose.  Using this order converts the statement into an  antiptosis .   An antitopsis is a special case of a rhetorical device or, simply put, a figure of speech.  This figure of speech is considered a type of enallage in which one grammatical case is substituted for another.  Substituti...

"When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers … what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?" (Psalm 8:3-4). “God has no need for us to meet. No, he glorifies himself in meeting our needs.” John Piper Imagine, for one moment, an elder brother whom you love dearly. One day he comes to you and tells you that he loves you so much. Your smile from ear to ear. But then suddenly he tells you that he does not really need you, and that he could live perfectly well without you even having existed. How would you feel? Not very good right. Then how we can think that God loves us in any way, particularly more than our own parents, as Jesus teaches us in Matthew 7:11, if He does not needs us? After all, Paul the apostle that placed loved above any other gift of the spirit believed that God did not need us:  :  "The God who made the world and everything in it … is not served by human hands,  as if he needed anything ...