The Lamb's Bride Project
Lost Bible Promises Capture
now
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blessings
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Bible
promises
WHAT IF a promise from God has a condition to it? A lot of the ones we depend on do have conditions to be met. ("If my people pray... then I will deliver....") And what if the condition is pluralistic? What if the promise depends upon God's people doing something together or with each other? What if we are blind to that requirement? Such blindness can come from two things. First, our English translations of the Bible might obscure the condition that is clear in the original Greek text. Second, we cannot see pluralistic conditions because we have such individualistic worldviews and values. Dick Wulf, director of The Lamb's Bride Project, has attended several annual conventions of the Christian Booksellers Association and kept track of how many eagles are shown in pictures associated with Isaiah 40:31 ("Those who wait for the Lord will . . . mount up with wings like eagles . . .). Over 95 percent of the art shows just one eagle in the sky. And yet the verse is clearly plural in the English and was spoken to the nation of Israel. Our culture has blinded us to many of these promises with plural conditions -- so much so that we never think about what it means to wait (KJV) or hope (NIV) together on the Lord, as the verse says is necessary. Think of Matthew 6:33. While the King James Version makes the meaning clear, the NIV reads simply: "But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well." Unlike Isaiah 40:31 where the meaning is clear in English but hidden by cultural influence, the true meaning of Matthew 6:33 is hidden in most modern translations of the Bible. The discovery that Matthew 6:33 refers to seeking the kingdom together and seeking God's righteousness together is made even more difficult by cultural blindness. The Western response to the King James Bible's plural "Seek ye first . . ." is to say that this verse means "all you individual Christians individually seek first the kingdom. . . ." Such a meaning is ridiculous to anyone who has studied the Mediterranean culture of Jesus' day. That culture did not elevate the individual; it elevated the group. There was an absolute "unwillingness to leave alone the lives of others or to have others leave alone one's own life" for the sake of the group (see Biblical Social Values and Their Meaning by John J. Pilch and Bruce J. Malina, Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody, MA, 1993). And, were it not for our culture, such an interpretation would also seem ridiculous to anyone who has read the Bible with all its instructions for how Christians are to behave when with one another. Doesn't it seem absurd even to conceive of seeking a kingdom alone? A kingdom implies both a King and the people of the kingdom. Since a kingdom is a society, how on earth can a person seek the kingdom of God privately?
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