We've spent a lot of time establishing that the phrase, the Kingdom of God, is at the core of the Christianity. But what did Jesus mean by that phrase? Sometimes we kind of have the idea that Jesus didn't want his listeners to understand him, that he was speaking in some kind of secret, coded language. Well his language may be secret and coded to us but it wasn't to the people he was teaching and preaching to. If we want to understand what he was saying we need to learn to understand his words the way the people he was speaking understood them.
In this program I’m explaining Hebrew parallelisms, which are a very common feature of Hebrew writing. You can find parallelisms in every Psalm and every section of the book of Proverbs. A parallelism is where the same idea is repeated in a passage in different ways, using different words. For example:
Joshua 1:8
This book of the law
shall not depart out of thy mouth;
but thou shalt meditate therein day and night,
that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein:
for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and
then thou shalt have good success.
This passage of scripture contains two examples of parallelisms. The second one is the easier one to see: "thou shalt make thy way prosperous" and "thou shalt have good success" obviously mean the same thing. They are parallel to each other. The second phrase repeats the idea of the first.
The other example demonstrates how we can use Hebrew parallelisms to understand the words of Jesus. The first phrase says: "shall not depart out of thy mouth" the second says, "shalt mediate therein." On first glance we might think he is telling us to do two different things here: keep the word in our mouth and meditate in it. But once we learn to recognize Hebrew parallelisims we see that he is just repeating the same idea in two different ways and this helps us better understand what he is saying. In our American mindset we tend to think of meditation as something we do in our mind, as synonymous with thinking about something. If we look at this phrase with Hebrew parallelisms in mind we see that "meditate" is parallel to "not depart out of thy mouth" Because they are parallel they mean essentially the same thing. So what we discover is that by "meditate" the author means to constantly keep the word of God in your mouth, to always be speaking it, or muttering it, or mumbling it.
Can you see how understanding parallelisms can help us to better understand the Bible? Now we want to use that understanding to learn what Jesus meant by the phrase, "the Kingdom of God."
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