NL-Day207 Jeremiah 11-12; Psalm 143; John 21

JEREMIAH 11-12:
Yesterday we heard important verses in chapter 9:23-24, verses that Paul quotes more than once:

 “Don’t let the wise boast in their wisdom,
or the powerful boast in their power,
or the rich boast in their riches.
But those who wish to boast
should boast in this alone:
that they truly know me and understand that I am the LORD …

PSALM 143:
It seems that prayer is very neglected these days. Oh yes, we might hear something vague about praying for victims right after some tragedy strikes. But it seems that every church has trouble keeping a prayer meeting going. I myself have trouble keeping my prayer life going. David shows in this psalm that he has learned secrets of effective prayer. Note how his prayer is very like how Jeremiah felt in the two chapters we just read.

JOHN 21:
This is one of my favorite chapters. John again tells us important information not given in the other gospels. Note that there is a famous exegetical fallacy here. John does use two different words for ‘love’ in the dialog between Jesus and Peter. But this should NOT be taken— as has been so frequently taught, as showing a play on words, or that John was intending different shades of meaning. Instead the use of synonyms is just a feature of John’s style in writing. John does this for poetic variation, like the parallelism in Hebrew poetry. Another example of this in this same passage is the variation of ‘little lambs’ and ‘sheep’.

NLT Translation notes:
John 21:7 Then [I—//0] the disciple Jesus loved said to Peter, “It’s the Lord!” When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on his tunic (for he had stripped for work), jumped into the water, and headed to shore.
[Although John has thinly concealed his identity since chapter 1, it becomes clear in this chapter that he wants to make it clear that the eyewitness he has referred to as ‘the disciple Jesus loved’ was himself. (John did not want to boast of having been a disciple of Jesus, yet at the same time he wanted to show that this book is an eyewitness account.) Using this literary device is odd enough in English. In some languages of the world, translating this device literally would be so confusing that it is better to rephrase these passages so that John speaks in the first person. Translators who do this will add a footnote explaining why John used the third person instead of the first person. In my opinion, for a podcast like this, it will be much clearer for listeners to use the same technique, and this is my footnote explaining my changes to the NLT text.]

 

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.