Sunday School, Church and Discussion with Brent
The women's Sunday school went well, everyone participated and shared something. The few things that I said just triggered them and there was a nice exchange that happened. We ended up talking longer then an hour and were late getting into the service. I had a hard time dealing with the preaching at church today. One of the Ugandan's spoke. I know the guys wife, I have had some good fellowship with her, and Inell and Brent think a lot of them, they actually have a good marriage, which is hard to find out here. But his preaching... well I have to admit that I didn't listen too closely after the first few minutes when I noticed that he really wasn't going to use the text he was supposed to be talking about. Mark 6 the first few verses where Jesus marvels at the unbelief of the people in his own home and can't perform any great miracles there. The guy kind of rode on re telling what Brent said last week and so I kind of stopped paying attention. There was a strong evangelical thrust to the whole thing, focusing on getting people saved. Trying to convict people to not remain part of the crowed but to reach out to meet God in a personal relationship. Well, needless to say, not very compelling for me at this time. So I read a good portion of Deuteronomy and then finished the rest this afternoon. I also looked back at Acts, the Jerusalem Council, and then flipped over to Amos. I was starting to get frustrated with prophesy and so I asked Brent about the temple in Ezekial and the fulfilment of Christ ruling and the people coming to Jerusalem. This led to a discussion concerning pre, post, and a millenialism. Well, I really just listened and asked a few questions. He seems to think that there is more historical continuity for pre mill then I was led to believe and that a mill doesn't really leave you with a consistent hermeneutic. And he doesn't like post mill because, well his Baptist, and likes early church ecclesia and doesn't think the church should be more then what Jesus sets it up to be. Jesus speaks to the church and says that, they will hate you just as they have hated me. He doesn't say that it will reign on the earth.
We also briefly talked about interpretation of prophesy and some of the challenges involved in reading ancient Hebrew, especially some of the problems with trying to do a detailed study of prophesy from a translation. He said that Hebrew has very limited grammar. It has moods and some tenses but very few verbs. So you will get whole sentences made up of nouns. So one of the things that is really hard to construct is the timing for prophesies. He said that Hebrew is pictorial because it strings together word pictures to convey meaning, like using a bunch of descriptive words. Brent said that he sees the most important role of prophesy not to be connected to figuring out what will happen in the future but rather to determine how I should respond, how I should live in light of what is said. He also said that he things that we should read the Old Test prophesy looking for ways in which it connects with Jesus, note the verses about their being a vale over the eyes of people who read without doing this. But he seems concerned with not just spiritualizing everything, he doesn't like a-mill because it does that. He thinks there will be a literal 1000 year reign in which Jesus will sit in Jerusalem, all people will come there, all people will be forced to bow at the name, and there will probably be a temple, though he can't think why their would be sacrifices going on there. I don't remember what he said about the prince in Ezekial offering sacrifices, shoot... I don't think he totally dodged the question but maybe he did. He said that he didn't think that Jesus would allow the dome of the rock to remain and that he would build a temple, I don't remember if Brent thinks it will be a reminder or what. Anyway, interesting to listen to him talk on the subject. Especially on the construction of Hebrew.