We kick off 6 weeks worth of Daily Reflections from Dave Duinker. Every Saturday we will meet for breakfast at Highland Park at 9am. Here we will discuss and share our thoughts on the week’s reflections. Please let us know if you plan to come! Click the button to sign up: Week 1 Breakfast Signup
IN CHRIST or “Jesus, what have You done?”
A six week biblical study by Dave Duinker covering 30 meditations focusing mainly on the prepositional phrase, “in Christ”.
INTRODUCTION
Had I the discipline, I would have been a linguist. I love words, on their own and in their loosely ordered interplay, making up the English language. I also love the Bible. In this study called “In Christ”, I hope to stir you, reader, and bolster your understanding of the eternal extent your Father went to in sending Himself to bring you to Himself. In other words, “Jesus, what have You done?”
I am not a student of the original Biblical languages – although I have dabbled some in Hebrew, which I prefer to Greek – but it seems to me that the New Testament, being written in Greek, is polluted with prepositional phrases. Prepositions are those little words that signal position. Prepositional phrases are groups of words consisting of a preposition and its object plus other related words: e.g. in the house, over that bridge, at school, under his hat, in Christ. Through the following 30 meditations, I want to explore a specific kind of Biblical prepositional phrase: PP’s with Jesus as the object, which I will shorten to JPP. We cannot cover all of them in 30 meds, as “in Christ” occurs almost 90 times in the NT, and “in Him” 100 times.
So, get your Bibles, turn to Ephesians 1, and let us discover together what God has done in Christ in order to make us His own.
Meditation #1: There is meat in the greeting.
Ephesians 1:1 & 2 (NASB) Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints who are at Ephesus and who are faithful in Christ Jesus; grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
How many pp’s (prepositional phrases)_ did you catch in this 2 verse intro? I count 7, including 2 JPP’s, which will form the basis for this first med (med is meditation but could also mean medication, you choose). The first is ‘in Christ Jesus’, which is a pp acting as an adverb modifying the word ‘faithful’. Now, I approach the Bible in 2 ways: dissection and big picture. The former is a study of details which are ascertained through dissection; the latter is a stepping back to see the big picture, the broad themes and ideas. The first involves single verses, phrases and words; while the second involves paragraphs, chapters and entire letters. I prefer the first, if you hadn’t noticed, but both are equally valid and one should not trump the other. So, as we study these JPP’s, we will see that they have both powerful import on their own but certainly cannot be removed from the surrounding ideas and the bigger picture.
Thus, let us see the details and the big picture in ‘faithful in Christ Jesus’. Here are some questions for consideration and eventual discussion.
1) What does the tiny word ‘in’ mean?
2) Who are the faithful?
3) What is the difference between faith and faithfulness?
The second JPP is ‘from..the Lord Jesus Christ’.
1) What does ‘from the Lord Jesus Christ’ modify?
2) Why from God and Jesus?
3) When letter writing was a thing, is this how you might open a letter?
This first entry was a bit wordy – too many PP’s . I promise to shorten them for future posts.