Omri, Zimri and the Knives of Brexit Politics

I guess as Brits we pride ourselves on not being a country racked with warfare - we're a tolerant, laid-back and peaceable people, we like to think - but British politics has got very ugly recently.

I was wondering why David Cameron was keeping quiet for so long.  It appears he's been in his garden shed writing his memoirs.  And now the knives are out, for Boris Johnson and Michael Gove in particular.  Maybe his comments are fair.  But it's sad to see a former PM feel he needs to assassinate the character of the current PM - and both from the same party.

The Bible give us a worldview.  It helps us to deal with the grief of seeing those in government fight bitterly with one another.  And I have been helped by going back to a very grisly episode in the OT when there was a succession of leaders of the northern kingdom of Israel.

Of course, Cameron hasn't been brandishing a pistol or a knife, but words can devastate.  Only the Pharisee limits the sixth commandment to the actual shedding of blood.

So, here's my precis of 1 Kings 16: it all begins with a chap called 'Basher', whose name kind of sets the tone for the chapter.
Baasha's son Elah - while he was getting drunk - was struck down and killed by General Zimri, who took over in what we would call a military coup.

Then Israel declared 'Field Marshal' Omri king and he marched to Tirzah and surrounded the city- at which point Zimri committed suicide.

But that didn't settle matters.  v21: "At that time the people of Israel were divided" (ring any Brexit bells?)- half followed Tibni and half followed Omri.

Those who must have been crying out for 'stability' and 'unity' got it for the 12 years that Omni reigned.  But if he provided a measure of stability, he also promoted sin.  He was an evil king.  His son Ahab continued in his idolatrous ways.  He is justly infamous, and why? Because this truly tragic narrative now moves into more encouraging material as the historian reveals that there was at least a faithful remnant preaching the true and living God.  We remember Ahab because...well, Enter Elijah...and let's turn from the BBC headlines, get down on our knees and pray for Elijahs who call our nation back to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who offers grace and peace to all who come not brandishing the knife of character assassination but beating their own breasts and saying 'God be merciful to me, a sinner' (Luke 18:13)

Clearing the Stones

This week I had a reminder of how church-planters are often called to endure the less than glamorous.

One worker famously said he wasn't planting, he wasn't sowing...he was busy clearing stones.

I felt like that as I prepared a message on Wine and the Gospel.  I wanted to refer to the promises of the Messianic age (hills dripping with new wine etc).  But when I looked up that word 'Messianic' in the Kurdish Wiktionary it said 'Mesîhî', which means 'Christian'.

I realised how the nuanced the English language is, such that we can draw from Greek and talk about the Christian age, and then from the Hebrew language to say the Messianic age.  In theory they might mean the same thing, but they don't in practice.

So I made an entry on Wiktionary to help others express this idea of the 'Messianic' age or Messianic kingdom: " the age of the Promised, Coming One of the Jews".

It's very wordy, but it's the best I can do to communicate with people who don't draw from a word-well filled with vocab that has been informed by rich knowledge of both Testaments.

https://ku.wiktionary.org/wiki/Messianic

Teaching Colossians in the Middle East

I am enjoying reading Doug Moo's commentary and listening to sermons by Alistair Begg and Kent Hughes.  But as so often, to teach Colossians to people with this faith-background means that the teaching comes out quite differently than it would if you are teaching it in the West.

If people know useful books, pdfs, sermons etc on Colossians, do share them by adding comments to this page.

How Can They Preach without a Lexicographer?

Dear Western Friends,

I wanted to share with you some jottings from this week; I have felt a burden to share with you what it’s really like to attempt expository preaching in an under-developed language.

In short: I fear that some Westerners misunderstand what is actually involved in introducing Bible teaching to nations where the language is still quite immature.

This week I got up to Matthew 7 in our studies in the Sermon on the Mount: “Do not judge, so that you will not be judged”.  And as I prepared, I realised it was a very taxing task to try to explain what that famous little aphorism means.

I read Lloyd-Jones’ sermon on that verse and found it was full of very precise delineations of what ‘judging others’ means and does not mean.

And so I tried to find Kurdish words to say things like:

• we must make astute judgments, but not be judgmental
• We must be discriminating, but not discriminatory
• constructive criticism is right, but a critical spirit is corrosive to a church’s health (some of these thoughts remained in my study rather than making it into my talk, but were part of my mental preparation)

And so I probably spent an hour or two of my preparation time just working on vocabulary, and improving the entries in the Kurdish Wiktionary for ‘nit-picking’, ‘judgmental’, ‘discerning’ and the like.

It would be wrong to say that Kurdish does not have words for these concepts.  Often there are words ‘out there’. But they are little-known and not in most people’s active vocabulary.  Why? Because the Spirit of God has not breathed out his words into many people’s minds yet. And so people are not used to testing their lives by the bar of Scripture.  That’s why they don’t have these words in their verbal armoury.

So, to put all this in perspective, my encouragement to many friends in Western churches is: yes, go on trying to promote expository preaching in the 6,000 language groups of the world.  But wise up to the challenge that faces those you send out to do this task: you cannot simply translate Western Christian books into minority languages. The translator very likely will not have words at his finger-tips to explain Piper, Packer or Stott’s thoughts.  And when you yourself prepare sermons in an underdeveloped language, you have to get inside the engine-room of language development. To switch metaphor slightly, you will have to chisel away at the coalface of the language, working with locals to find words that will explain and hammer home the message of the Bible.

As many of you know, my office work here has focussed for the last two years on developing the Kurdish wiki-dictionary.  We have surveyed and documented all the vocabulary of the NT and about half of the OT. But my work on Matthew 7 this week showed me that although Bible translation leads to massive growth in any language, Bible exposition seems to stretch a language even further.

PS The title of this blog post is a slightly provocative reworking of Romans 10:14-15 (KJV):

"How shall they hear without a preacher?

15 And how shall they preach, except they be sent?"

Of course, at one level I am guilty of over-emphasising the task I'm involved in (and fundraising for!), and adding it to Paul's list of what is necessary for people to be saved.  But I am trying to make the point that those in developed language groups tend to overlook the need for general language development in order that the richness and complexity of Scripture can be explained.

It might be objected that dictionaries are more essential for foreigners like me and that once educated local people are in pulpits, they will not find dictionaries as essential to the task of preaching.  This is true to some extent, but I have observed that even those who are very agile in their mother tongue do regularly use the Wiktionary to help them write well. This is inevitably the case when people simply have not been exposed to a highly-refined and standardised language being used in school textbooks, newspapers and books, and in general conversation.

More about my work: I have had the privilege of working alongside and equipping a select group of young Kurdish people to edit a collaborative dictionary that Kurds from Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran and the diaspora use: www.ku.wiktionary.org.  In total our team have made more than 40,000 edits to this dictionary.  It is a joy to me that we did not start this dictionary; we have rather jumped on a bandwagon which was set up by Kurds themselves and had already done impressive mileage.