Peter SmytheA Different Kind of Word Preacher

Make a stand for Christ.

We ask you for transformed lives.

God, we ask that you touch our brother.

God wants to make you a success.

Significant people for significant impact.

When I first began practicing law, I found myself caught up in the form and fashion of it all. Every morning I’d put on my expensive suit, hip tie, wingtip shoes (way overdressed for a guy my age) and head out the door as a member of the exclusive club who could “practice law.” At the start, there was always that rush of adrenaline of appearing before a “well-respected” judge to argue my client’s case against one of the better-known and better-connected big firm lawyers who literally did have someone carrying his briefcase. Over the course of time, though, many of my courtroom adventures became more and more like Twilight Zone episodes. Simple fact scenarios would be conflated into epic dramas involving the Constitution, Magna Carta, or Justice Scalia’s latest misgivings about Sandra Day O’Connor’s sanity. Words actually didn’t mean what they said, the statute’s intent was actually the opposite of what the it read, or “we all know that it doesn’t work that way.” Sometimes I went home thinking that Orwell with his double-speak “Freedom is slavery” and “Ignorance is strength” was actually a law reporter in disguise.

When I cruise through the various theological blogs and books to find out if I’m somehow preaching “a different gospel” as some would suggest, I find an Orwellian world in hyperdrive - nothing is what it is and everything means nothing. Above I’ve listed various phrases that I came across in the past week while going through my studies in the Word, attending church, or what have you. These aren’t throwaway phrases. Each of them constitutes the acme statement of the prayer or sermon spoken or written by some prominent preacher or theologian (yes, even some “Word” preachers). The most stupefying thing about them isn’t just that they can’t be found anywhere in the New Testament, but that they don’t mean a thing. “God wants to make me a success?” - what does that mean? “God touch him” - what could be more baffling than that?

The beauty of the Word is its clarity of thought, its raw diction, and its gritty realness. Thankfully, the Lord didn’t leave His Word in the hands of professional Hellenists who would have taken it into a backroom only to later announce to the world an oh-so-tweedle-dee Orwellian double-speak gospel for only the elite to handle (remember the pigs - “more equal than others”?). No, He wrote it in Koine Greek - street Greek - through the mouths and hands of rugged fishermen, camel-kneed pray-ers, and executioners, so brutally unfettered that we run to the hills for our Elizabethan translations to escape its vulgarity.

In 1 Corinthians 6.17, 18, we read:

What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh. But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit. (KJV)

Don’t you know that the one having glued himself to the whore one body is? “For to be” - he says - “the two into one flesh.” And the one having joined to the Lord in spirit is [one]. (1 Corinthians 6.17, 18, Smythean Greek Version)

Who besides God Almighty would have analogized the Christian’s union with Jesus Christ to a man sexualizing a whore? (sexualizing isn’t an English word, but it gets the Greek across pretty well)

In Philippians 3.8, it says:

More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ. (Philippians 3.8, NASB) (emphasis supplied)

In this verse, the NASB, NRSV, Weymouth, RSV, and ESV have all neutered the force of Paul’s vocabulary with “rubbish” or “refuse.” In the Greek, the word is skubalon which doesn’t have any polite English equivalent. The best (and most literal) rendering is “[I] count them crap so that I may gain Christ.” Truly, the Word’s unvarnished frankness is more along the lines of Keifer Sutherland’s “24” than what we see on Christian television.

God didn’t mumbo-jumbo His Gospel with empty emotive jingles such as “touch our brother” or “show him your love” or theological double-speak, e.g., possession doesn’t mean possession. No, He dressed it down with indelible absolutes etched in concrete spiritual reality - “you must be born-again” - “you are of your father the devil” - “if he has not the spirit of Christ, he is none of His!” As we continue in this series, we’ll see that the moniker “sinner saved by grace” is really just a piece of theological Orwellian flotsam that has nothing to do with the real identity of a son of God.

[Note: Moulton and Milligan’s Vocabulary of the Greek New Testament says this about skubalon: “Dung,” the prevailing sense of this word … “dung” is probably what Paul meant in Phil. 3.8, the only occurrence of the word in the N.T.]