Thinking about God, Jesus and The Big Questions

I was reading in the news media about someone who had betrayed someone else. If I had been the victim, I confess I would have had difficulty with keeping my focus on the main thing (God and Jesus). It would have been all too easy to fall into the trap of bitterness and misery in that situation.  Even if I make a conscious effort to rise above the bitterness and misery to keep my focus on God and Jesus, I would still have not liked the person and would have avoided them. Which is OK! Christianity says you should forgive the person, but you need not continue any relationship with them (I talk more about that here ). Your forgiveness is in your heart, between you and God. There is no requirement for you to see the person again or for them to know of your forgiveness. You can cut off contact with them for the sake of your future physical and/or mental health, even if you have forgiven them. Forgiving someone for a specific past event does not equate to you needing to place any trust in...

I'm in the middle of reading the New Testament, and in the past I had never bothered to consider word choice. But this time around, I posed the question: Why did Jesus use the phrasings that He used? To get His meaning across in anything He said, He could have chosen between different phrasings. Yet He phrased it a certain way.  Of course, we should be cautious how much importance we put into this. After all, the Bible was written in Hebrew and Greek. It was not written in English, so what I am reading in English is a translation. Inevitably, something winds up having to be approximated in a translation. Also, certain translations of the Bible are more focused on word for word while others are more focused on meaning for meaning.  If you are wondering about phrasing, then use a word for word translation (e.g. Good News Translation), since a meaning for meaning translation might wander further from the original words used. Nonetheless, it's still a fascinating exercise to ask w...