Theme for 2008: Inspired Living

Pre-Service Meditation:  8:40 a.m.
Sunday Service & Junior Church: 9:00 a.m.

CDs OF OUR SERVICES are now available. $5. (If you'd be available to make copies of the CDs when Julia isn't able to be here, please let Julia know.)

From Sunday January 6th service: 7 keys to Bible interpretation that Barbara discussed.  Here they are in brief... 

1.       Language.  The spoken language of the east for 1000 years was Aramaic.  Aramaic was spoken by “the people”, most were uneducated but had a deep sense of morality and responsibility to each other. Hebrew was the scholarly language and most of the writing was done by translating Aramaic stories into Hebrew. Aramaic was an interesting language, words were created in a formula of sorts: the 1^st letter of the word was a symbol for God, the 2^nd letter was a symbol for family or home and the 3^rd letter was a symbol for food.

2.       Idioms or figures of speech.  I talked about using the word “cool” as a description for something you like.   2000 years from now someone could read a transcript of a conversation where the word “cool” is used as a descriptor, for instance in describing our church they would think you meant that we had a cold church.  And they might then leap to the conclusion that either we didn’t have heat, or we worshipped the snow god.  

3.       Mysticism, or knowledge brought about by transpersonal or transcendental realization.  Scholars believe that 40% of the bible is dreams and visions.  They also had a different definition of the word dream. The Aramaic translation of the word dream means “to make whole, or to heal”.  It did not mean a fantasy like it does now.

4.       Culture: respect and understanding of cultural differences is extremely important.

5.       Psychology, or specifically the psychology of the near east. This idea of psychology is how another culture views the world.

6.        Symbolism.  There is incredible symbolism in the stories and, just like using the word “cool”, you would have to understand the symbolism to really understand what someone is talking about.  Stories were used to teach, they were called parables.  This is a language thing again: for instance, bears and lions were used to describe strong nations or tribes while lambs and ewes were used to describe weak ones.  Prophets were not people who could see in to the future, they were people who told the truth to kings.  

7.         Amplification!  Making a story larger to make it more interesting.  Who wants to hear boring campfire stories?