Have you ever wondered if knowing a thing or two about the Bible’s original languages would help aid your personal Bible study? Wish you knew more about them?
Well, this is how we aim to serve you with our new Biblical language series of blogs. So far, we have looked at the Hebrew in Psalm 23.
Starting next week, Justin Alfred will begin a new series relating to “emphatic negations” in the original languages. Justin will provide some introductory material that will be a bit more technical than the last series on Psalm 23. Those of you familiar with grammatical structures won’t have any problem. But if you are like me and struggle a bit with grammatical rules (I was sick the week they taught grammar in grade school :)), I would just exhort you to stick with it—even if it doesn’t make 100% sense at this point. The reason is that there will be a lot of very fruitful application when Justin gets into some of the examples. You might not remember all of the Greek particulars, but you will benefit greatly from the exegesis of the translated English text. As an example, in Romans 4:8 we see the following:
“Blessed is the man to whom the LORD shall not impute sin.” (NKJV – emphasis added)
The English-translated “not” is originally written in what is called the “emphatic negative.” This means that in the context of Romans 4, a person justified by faith in Christ, will NOT have sin imputed to them—ever, or as I like to put it “no no never ever, nuh uh uh!” Well, you can see why Justin is our language expert and not me!
So please join us starting next week to begin a journey of some of the more impactful emphatic negations in the Biblical text. We pray that it serves you well.