NO. 651 MAKE IT YOUR OWN

“Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” (2 Tim 2:15)

Whatever you hear on Television or Radio; whatever you read in newspapers or books regardless of from whence and from whom it came, it is not yours. If it is from a presenter, speaker, writer, preacher, evangelist, politician, catechism or whatever, even if it appeals to you, it is not yours. No matter how much it may appeal take it under advisement, do not accept it – yet. Do your own carefully organized, in fact scientific investigation until you are thoroughly convinced it is the truth. Only then, consider it a valid theory that you might accept, though it requires further study. Do not be like sheep following a leader right off the cliff – “Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die.” After you discover the truth, make it your own.

Study the scriptures

“All Scripture, divinely inspired, is indeed profitable for Teaching, for Conviction, for Correction, for that Discipline which is in Righteousness; so that the MAN of God may be complete, thoroughly fitted for Every good Work.” (2 Tim 3:16,17 Diaglott)

Read these verses in the KJV and other translations to compare. Check Comments and at least one of the exhaustive or analytical concord­ances. Remember the Scriptures in your language are not the Holy Scriptures but a translation, and it may contain errors which the Lord God has permitted, so only the truly committed FIND THE TRUTH and make it their own.

“Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.” (Gen. 5:2) The family head was the male.

Adam created from the substance of the earth

“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” (Gen. 2:7)

He did not say that man came forth as had other living creatures and vegetation of the earth. This shows that man was a special and direct crea­tion of the “LORD God.” The Creator did not install within Adam an Immortal Soul in this text or in any other of the Holy Scriptures. Adam “became” a living soul. The word in Hebrew is Nephesh (mean­ing a breathing creature) derived from naphash meaning to breath. When life goes out of a person, the soul dies and the body decays back to the substance from which it was made. The Creator loses nothing. HE still has the dust from which man was created and the power, wisdom, justice and love to recreate him.

“God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them”. (Gen. 1:27)

Eve was created from the substance of Adam (his rib Gen 2:22) to be his companion and the two combined were “The Adam.”

“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” (Gen. 1:28) The English word replenish, which means “to re-fill”, is translated from the Hebrew word mawlay, which means “fill.” God made man the ruler of the earth, one of the aspects of man’s image of his Maker.

Notice that Adam and Eve did not conceive children until after they had received the death sentence from the Creator for disobedience to God’s Law. So Adam’s offspring inherited the dying, thou

shalt die sentence imposed upon him and all of us – his progeny. This death sentence was rendered upon Adam for his disobedience to the one law God gave him. “...in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” (Gen 2:17) Surely die? No mention of eternal torment here or anywhere else in the Holy Scriptures.

The single law given to Adam was simple and entirely possible for the inexperienced first man to understand and obey and it had a very clear penalty.

more thoughts on beliefs

The atheist exhibits an amazingly enormous credulity in his belief that there is no God; the uni­verse created itself and the subsequent appearance of intelligent life was simply a biological accident. My how they do light up the sky with their so-called “science”!

Albert Einstein, perhaps the greatest scientist of the 20th century, named “person of the century” by Time Magazine said, “My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.” Imagine if this man had devoted his wondrous mind to discovering the truth about God and his plan for mankind?

The United   States is said by some to be the most religious nation in the world, but the most ignorant concerning its beliefs – A slam to religious orthodoxy?

Christopher Hitchens, the famous British auth­or, critic and commen­tator, now a resident of USA, wrote the book God Is Not Great. It was near the top of best sellers’ lists for a number of weeks. We have not read it since assuredly the god he is writing about is the god of “orthodox” religions.

He will not have written about the God of the prophets of the Old Testament nor the God of Jesus and his apostles of the New Testament. These testify to The Heavenly Father’s main characteristics – Power, Wisdom, Justice and Love. We know he didn't write about this God, because he doesn't know anything about him. He has never made a “scientific” study of HIS inspired Books. The god he writes about is not great because he is the god of this present evil world (Gal 1:4) and is designated “...the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.” (Eph 2:2)

v24“God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is LORD of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands.

v25Neither is worshiped with men’s hands, as though he needed anything, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; v26And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; v27That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us

 v28“For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are his offspring. v29Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device. V30And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent: v31Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he had ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead. v32And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked: and others said, We will hear thee again of this matter.” (Acts 17:24-32)

 “All scripture divinely inspired, is indeed profitable for teaching, for conviction, for correction, for that discipline which is in righteousness: so that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly fitted for every good work.”  (2 Tim. 3:16-17, Diaglott)

“For I would not, brethren, [Spiritual Israel] that ye should be ignorant of this mystery,[Secret] lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, [temporary blindness] until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in.” (Rom 11:25)

“Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God [Ignorance alienates from God] through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart:” (Eph 4:18)

WHEN GOD WAS ALONE!

“Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.” (Psa. 90:2)

 “I am the LORD: [personal name of the Almighty GOD] that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another, [The Son never sought and never will seek to be equal to the Father’s Glory, but always to add to it.]  neither my praise to graven images.” (Isa. 42:8)

“But to us there is but one God, the Father, [Not three] of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.” (1 Cor. 8:6)

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD.” (Deut. 6:4)

These and other Scriptures tell us of a personal God, the Father or Life-Giver of all, the Great One who inhabiteth Eternity. St. Paul declares that to the heathen “there be gods many, and lords many, but to us there is but one God, the Father,” (1Cor 8:5,6) and one appointed Agent of His in dealing with humanity one Lord Jesus Christ. “And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Phil 2:11)

The Scriptures tell us of “the beginning of the creation of God.” Hence there was a time before that beginning of creation when The Almighty God was alone— “He that inhabiteth Eternity.” Not even the great Michael was with Him, the great Messiah, whom God has so highly honored and whom He declares He will still further honor throughout a glorious eternity. He was not with the Father before the beginning of creation; for He Himself was “the Beginning of the creation of God”— “the First-born of every creature.” (Rev. 3:14; Col. 1:15) He was the first expression or manifestation of the Divine attributes (John 1:18).

DIVINE ATTRIBUTES GLORIOUS

This Almighty God, self-centered, self-contain­ed, is ours; the same yesterday, today and forever, HE changes not. Every attribute of the Divine character is the same today as it was millions of years ago but then that same character was unrevealed.

Every step of creation has tended to display the Divine character more and more, and each successive step and development of creation has brought forth new creatures capable of compre­hending the Eternal One. We deem it not unreas­onable to assume that The Lord God’s creative power will continue to be exercised throughout all the unlimited time to come.

Astronomical photography now reveals nearly 125,000,000 suns, around which circle systems such as the one which circles around our sun, and of which our earth is a part. We deem it not un­reas­onable to assume, from the Scriptures, that the great work of ordering all those hundreds of millions of planets stretches forward into eternity. That the work of Divine grace, begun on the planet “Earth,” will be continued throughout the Universe, not only in conjunction with the planetary systems we can discern, but probably with millions of planetary systems too far removed from us to be discerned.

THE PERMISSION OF EVIL

Doubtless Divine methods in connection with other worlds and other inhabitants will display the manifold wisdom of God. For instance, we under­stand the Bible to indicate that while the permission of evil in the earth was wise, it will not necessarily be wise or expedient for any reason to permit a similar reign of Sin and Death in any other of the millions of worlds. That is with their ordering or development and their peopling with glorious crea­tures that will show forth the praises of the great Creator without their passing through experiences with sin and death such as have been permitted in connection with the humanity of earth.

Can we not see a broad reason for the permission of evil on the earth. for the permission of the reign of Sin and Death, which for six thousand years has apparently disgraced the Creator, degraded humanity, astonished the angels and constituted our race a groaning creation? Only when we discern that Messiah’s Kingdom will surely bring order out of this confusion, do we begin to get the proper focus upon our subject and realize something of the greatness of our God.

From the standpoint of the completion of the Divine purposes in connection with humanity, and from that standpoint alone, can we see illustrated Divine Wisdom, Justice, Love and Power. The primary lesson was Justice, which sin brings suffering and eventually death. The second lesson was that of Divine compassion, sympathy-Love. This lesson was mani­fested in the sending of the Redeemer and His subsequent reward of exaltation, and His gathering of an “elect” Church to be His associates in glory and in the blessing of the redeemed race. The Reign of Glory, the Reign of Messiah, soon to be introduced, will lift up poor humanity from sin and sorrow, from degra­dation and death, and give to each and all the fullest opportunity to return to human perfection and to Divine favor and everlasting life. In that work of human resti­tution, which will include the awakening of mankind from the sleep of death, the one great lesson will be the greatness of the Divine Power. It will be exercised through Messiah, the God-like One, the Prince of Life, “the Prince of Glory,” the Redeemer, the Regenerator of Adam and the whole race of mankind, His posterity, who have shared his death sentence.

And finally, from the standpoint of the completion of The Lord God’s great purposes, His dealings with man, will stand revealed the Fore­knowledge and Wisdom of God, who knew the end from the beginning. He foresaw how even the permission of a reign of Sin and Death could be made eventually to work out to His own glory and to the blessing and instruction of His creatures on both the human and the angelic planes. Then will be revealed to all, the glorious character of their Creator, and the necessity for His requirement of absolute righteousness and perfection.

Surely, the result eventually will be as the Scriptures declare, that all shall learn righteousness, and hate iniquity; and that every creature in Heaven and in earth and under the earth shall acclaim both Jehovah, who sitteth upon the Throne of the Universe, and the Lamb, the Redeemer, forever (Rev. 5:13,14).

If we allow ourselves to speculate respecting the future regarding the Divine purposes in relation to the millions of worlds around us, our speculations would run thus: those instructed and used of Yahweh, The Almighty God, in the initial devel­opment of the Divine Plan in the earth, will thereby be fitted and prepared to be the Divine Agents to other worlds. The Great Redeemer and His “elect” associates, after dealing with humanity for their uplift out of sin and death conditions, will surely be qualified for further service in other worlds, to “show forth the praises of Him who called them out of darkness into His marvelous light.” (1 Peter 2:9)

And what shall we say of humanity when perfected at the end of Messiah’s glorious Reign? Will not all be well prepared, not only to approve righteousness in themselves, but to tell it in other worlds, to other races. The story of the fall and of the reign of Sin and Death resulting; and of the redemption accomplished by God’s love; of the great restitution and of the lessons learned?

THE UNCHANGEABLE ONE

The qualities of the Divine character which we have just considered—Wisdom, Justice, Love and Power—belonged to our Creator in the great eternity preceding creation. But there was no one at that time to appreciate God. It requires a full view of the perfected Plan of the Ages to make known to any and to all the glory of the Lord. As we have just seen, thus far the secret of the Lord and the glories of His character are known only to His “sons,” begotten of His Holy Spirit. But the time nears when “the whole earth shall be full of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the great deep.” He and His glorious government will then be “the desire of all nations”; “The glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.” (Hag. 2:7; Isa. 40:5)

St. Paul assures us that every feature of the Divine Plan which we see in process of execution was known to The Lord God from before the foundation of the world. He declares that these things God purposed in Himself before the found­ation of the world. The creative processes, which have been operating for thousands of years, were all surely elaborated in the mind of Jehovah before the creative work began. In that purpose angels had a part —of how many grades we may not surely know, but they are variously designated in the Holy Scriptures as “angels, principalities and pow­ers.” Later came the creation of man, “a little lower than the angels” and crowned with earthly honor, dignity and power, in the image and likeness of his glorious Creator.

These creations varied not in degrees of perfection and imperfection. Each was perfect on its own plane. Each intelligent creature was a free, moral agent, and hence, whether on the angelic or human plane, was created in the likeness of God, unblemished, but with different capacities and abil­ities. Almighty God, infinite in Wisdom, Justice, Love and Power, purposed the orderly exercise of His infinite powers, as a great Father, desirous of giving life and happiness to His creatures.

These intelligent ones were designated “Sons of God” so long as they maintained their attitude of perfect loyalty to Him, their Creator and Father. Not only was it the Divine purpose thus to give pleasure to millions of creatures to be created, but it was also the Divine will to manifest to His creatures His own greatness and the perfection of His own goodness that they might enjoy Him and He enjoy them ever­lastingly.

We are not to understand that Almighty God was lonely in that great Eternity before creation began. On the contrary, human loneliness is largely because of human deficiency. What we lack we seek for in others. But the great Yahweh lacked nothing; He was complete in Himself; He needed not companionship to complete or to supplement His happiness. It was His pleasure to create, that His creatures might have joy by reflecting as a whole His Divine qualities implanted in them.

The wreck of the human race produced by sin He well foreknew. Nor did this wrecking of human hopes defeat, nor was it in danger of defeating, the Divine purpose. It merely demonstrates to angels and to men the graces of the Divine character and shows unto all more fully the qualities of God proper to be appreciated and copied by all His intelligent creatures.

THE SEVEN-SEALED SCROLL

Revelation Chapter 5

In which God illustrates to us His own great personality. When He would show to His creatures how He is working all things according to the counsel of His own will, which He pictured sym­bolically in the Book of Revelation. In that vision the Throne of the Eternal One is graphically por­trayed as the seat of Divine power and authority for the Universe, with angels as ministering spirits. Then is described a scroll, in the right hand of The Lord God, in Divine power and keeping. That scroll, written inside and outside, was “sealed with seven seals,” representing the complete secrecy of the Divine purposes related in that scroll. From before the foundation of the world it had been in the hand (in the power) of The Great Eternal. He had given hints respecting it and had caused it to be symbolized in the Law and to some extent to be described by the Prophets. But still it was a Hidden Mystery; for the Prophets understood not the things which they wrote; nor could any understand them until the Father’s “due time.” (1 Peter 1:10-12)

Not only was the Divine Program thus sealed and safely secreted, but it was the Divine determ­ination that it should be given only to the One who would demonstrate His worthiness to be Yahweh’s honored Agent for the carrying out of those pur­poses, predestinated before the world was. The honor of being the Agent, the Representative of The Great Yahweh, to carry out the Divine purposes, should be disclosed in advance only to the One who would demonstrate His worthiness to be the great Messiah, the great Deliverer, Prophet, Priest, Judge, King of Israel.

High as the Redeemer stood in the Divine counsels and fellowship before he came into the world to be man’s Redeemer, it was not then granted even to Him to know all the mysteries of the Divine Program. But by virtue of His high station, His perfection, His obedience, the privilege was given to Him first to become man’s Redeemer, at the cost of personal humiliation and death; and then, if faithful in this redemptive work, it should be His to be glor­ified, exalted to the Divine nature, and to execute the Divine Program to its completion. First, He must manifest His devotion and loyalty to the Father, before he could be trusted even with the knowledge of the Divine Program for blessing the whole world of mankind.

 “WORTHY IS THE LAMB”

All this is declared in the account. (Rev. 5) The proclamation was made, who is worthy to receive the scroll and to break its seals and to execute the wonderful purposes of God? None was found worthy! Finally, one demonstrated His worth­iness. He left the courts of glory; He humbled Himself, He “was made flesh.” More than this, being found in fashion as a man, He consecrated His all to the doing of the Father’s will, even unto death, the death of the cross. Wherefore, says the Apostle, “God also highly exalted Him” and gave Him a standing, a rank, a title above all others. (Phil. 2:7-9) He commissioned Him to execute all the Divine purposes; and to Him He handed over the Scroll with the privilege of opening its seals and compre­hending its message.

hope in this life

“If in this life only we have hope in Christ we are of all men most miserable.” (1Cor. 15:19)

In other words, if our hope in Christ is merely dependent upon the circumstances of this present life, we rob ourselves of what little enjoyment and advantage that might be gained here.

“But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that slept.” (1 Cor 15:20) The Emphatic Diaglott has it “But now Christ has been raised.”

It wasn’t God that had died here. The love of God was manifested toward us, because God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him (1 John 4:9).

Christ was dead, unconscious and not breathing for part of three days. “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.” (Eccl. 9:10)

“In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was with God and the Logos was a God.” (John 1:1, Diaglott)

In other words, Christ was the first in the beginning of God’s creation. He was the first-fruit of all creation.

the holy scriptures

“And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which  is in Christ Jesus.” (2 Tim 3:15)

The early settlers to North America sought religious freedom and some of the current immi­grants seek those same rights. The Constitution and Bill of Rights invoke the name “Almighty God” as does the preamble of nearly every state constitution. All the nation’s legal tender contains the words “In God We Trust.”

The United States is considered to be the most religious of all nations of the world and this might well be true. The Harper San Francisco book catalog (May-August, 2007, Page 15) states that, the annual expenditure for Bibles in America is currently $425 million and the average American household con­tains four Bibles.

Until recent times, the Bible traditionally was used for teaching the basic standards of private and public moral conduct. It has been the “foundation” of our laws and judicial system, as well as the moral standard for federal and state governments.

Why the King james bible endures

By Charles McGrath – April 23, 2011 NY Times

The King James Bible, which was first pub­lished 400 years ago, may be the single best thing ever accomplished by a committee. The KJV translation of the Bible was the work of 54 scholars divided into six groups of nine member sub-committees each called “companies” meeting separately on equal portions of the 66 little books.

In a preface to the new Bible, Miles Smith, one of the translators and a man so impatient that he once walked out of a boring sermon and went to the pub, wrote that anything new inevitably “endured many a storm of gainsaying, or opposition.” So there must have been disputes, shouting, table pounding, high-ruffed, black-gowned clergymen folding their arms and stomping out of the room, but there is no record of that. And the finished text shows none of the PowerPoint insipidness we associate with committee-speak or with later group translations like the 1961 New English Bible, which T.S. Eliot said did not even rise to “dignified mediocrity.” Far from bland, the King James Bible is one of the great masterpieces of English prose.

The issue of how, or even whether, to translate sacred texts was a fraught one in those days, often with political as well as religious overtones, and it still is. The Roman Catholic Church, for instance, recently decided to retranslate the missal used at Mass to make it more formal and less conversa­tional. Critics have complained that the new text is awkward and archaic, while its defenders (some of whom probably still prefer the Mass in Latin) insist that’s just the point — that language a little out of the ordinary is more devotional and inspiring. No one would ever say that the King James Bible is an easy read. And yet its very oddness is part of its power.

From the start, the King James Bible was intended to be not a literary creation but rather a political and theological compromise between the established church and the growing Puritan move­ment. What the king cared about was clarity, simplicity, doctrinal orthodoxy. The translators worked hard on that, going back to the original Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic, and yet they also spent a lot of time tweaking the English text in the interest of euphony and musicality. Time and again the language seems to slip almost unconsciously into iambic pentameter. This was the age of Shakespeare, commentators are always reminding us, and right from the beginning the translators embraced the principles of repetition and the dramatic pause: “In the beginning God created the Heaven, and the Earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

The influence of the King James Bible is so great that the list of idioms from it that have slipped into everyday speech is practically endless, taking such deep root that we use them all the time without any awareness of their biblical origin: sour grapes; fatted calf; salt of the earth; drop in a bucket; skin of one’s teeth; apple of one’s eye; girded loins; feet of clay; whited sepulchers; filthy lucre; pearls before swine; fly in the ointment; fight the good fight; eat, drink and be merry.

But what we also love about this Bible is its strangeness; its weird punctuation, odd pronouns (as in “Our Father, which art in heaven”), all those verbs that end in “eth”: “In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.” As Robert Alter has demonstrated in his startling and revealing translations of the Psalms and the Pentateuch, the Hebrew Bible is even stranger, and in ways that the King James translators may not have entirely comprehended, and yet their text performs the great trick of being at once recognize-ably English and also a little bit foreign. You can hear its distinctive cadences in the speeches of Lincoln, the poetry of Whitman, the novels of Cormac McCarthy.

Even in its time, the King James Bible was deliberately archaic in grammar and phraseology: an expression like “yea, verily,” for example, had gone out of fashion some 50 years before. The translators didn’t want their Bible to sound contemporary, because they knew that contemporaneity quickly goes out of fashion. In his very useful guide, “God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible,” Adam Nicolson points out that when the Victorians came to revise the King James Bible in 1885, they embraced this principle wholeheartedly, and like those people who whack and scratch old furniture to make it look even more ancient, they threw in a lot of extra Jacobeanisms, like “howbeit,” “perad­ven­ture,” “holden” and “behooved.”

This is the opposite, of course, of the procedure followed by most new translations, starting with Good News for Modern Man, a paperback Bible published by the American Bible Society in 1966, whose goal was to reflect not the language of the Bible but its ideas, rendering them into current terms, so that Ezekiel 23:20, for example (“For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses”) becomes “She was filled with lust for oversexed men who had all the lustfulness of donkeys or stallions.”

There are countless new Bibles available now, many of them specialized: a Bible for couples, for gays and lesbians, for recovering addicts, for surfers, for skaters and skateboarders, not to mention a superheroes Bible for children. They are all “accessible,” but most are a little tone-deaf, lacking in grandeur and majesty, replacing “through a glass, darkly,” for instance, with something along the lines of “like a dim image in a mirror.” But what this modernizing ignores is that the most powerful religious language is often a little elevated and incantatory, even ambiguous or just plain hard to understand. The new Catholic missal, for instance, does not seem to fear the forbidding phrase, replacing the statement that Jesus is “one in being with the Father” with the more complicated idea that he is “consubstantial with the Father.”

Not everyone prefers a God who talks like a pal or a guidance counselor. Even some of us who are nonbelievers want a God who speaketh like — well, God. The great achievement of the King James translators is to have arrived at a language that is both ordinary and heightened, that rings in the ear and lingers in the mind. And that all 54 of them were able to agree on every phrase, every comma, without sounding as gassy and evasive as the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, is little short of amazing, in itself proof of something like divine inspiration.

Not the holy scriptures

Most English speaking Biblical scholars seem to prefer the King James version of the Holy Scriptures. However, it should be understood that all translations of the original languages from the various writers of the “little books” are, in fact, translations and are subject to the translator’s lifetime of learned beliefs and superstitions, no matter how conscientious this person might have been. So the King James version or any other translation is NOT “The Holy Scriptures.”

One of the chief tricks of the Prince of the Power of the Air in this Present Evil World is to create controversy. It gives the adversary better control. The Heavenly Father has permitted this to make it necessary to “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” (2 Tim. 2:15)

Also it should be noted that the Ancient Aramaic/Hebrew (Old Testament) and Ancient Greek (New Testament) like all languages changed down through the years. Aramaic is a Semitic language belonging to the Afroasiatic language family. The name of the language is based on the name of Aram, an ancient region in central Syria. Within this family, Aramaic belongs to the Semitic subfamily, and more specifically, is a part of the Northwest Semitic group of languages, which also includes Canaanite languages such as Hebrew and Phoenician. Aramaic script was widely adopted for other languages and is ancestral to both the Arabic and modern Hebrew alphabets.

During its 3,000-year written history, Aramaic has served variously as a language of administration of empires and as a language of divine worship. It was the day-to-day language of Israel in the Second Temple period (539 BCE – 70 CE), was the original language of large sections of the biblical books of Daniel and Ezra; was the language spoken by Jesus, and is the main language of the Talmud.

Ancient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning the Archaic (c. 9th–6th centuries BC), Classical (c. 5th–4th centuries BC), and Hellenistic (c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD) periods of ancient Greece and the ancient world. It is predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek. Its Hellenistic phase is known as Koine (“common”) or Biblical Greek, (New Testament) and its late period mutates imperceptibly into Medieval Greek. Koine is regarded as a separate historical stage of its own, although in its earlier form it closely resembles Classical Greek. Prior to the Koine period, Greek of the classic and earlier periods included several regional dialects.

Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of classical Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers. It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in Western educational institutions since the Renaissance. Latinized forms of Ancient Greek roots are used in many of the scientific names of species and in scientific terminology.

So, the problem of the Biblical translators of The Holy Scriptures becomes extremely apparent. To the unlearned in languages of the average want-to-be Bible Student, it is nearly impossible. But the Lord allowed this so that we must study to gain his approval.

Some people endeavor to read the entire Bible every year and there are a number of plans published to help the reader do this. Though reading the Script­ures is very ennobling; it is not studying to shew thyself approved.

Perhaps we Americans should donate one or two of our Bibles to needy families and get one of several Exhaustive Concordances to help us study.