Wednesday Bible Study: The deep dig

Sigh... I just typed this out, and Blogger ate it.  Let me try again...

This post will connect to the yet to be written Sunday Message, which hopefully I can write sometime today, Blogger...  and it gets us back on track in our 3:16s tour in Romans.  The point being, comments have mentioned amazement at the various versions of verses in Scripture, and as I intend to mention, these I think are there to get us to dig, and deepen our understanding.  God has a reason for EVERY word He uses... no matter which one He uses.  This is a study in that.  Another thing you will have gleaned from SM is that I have started to read through Psalms again, and thus it was no surprise when the verses THAT I HAD JUST READ in Psalms 14 this morning were quoted by Paul.

Rom 3:10  as it is written: "None is righteous, no, not one; 
Rom 3:11  no one understands; no one seeks for God. 
Rom 3:12  All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one." 

Paul then goes on to quotes a plethora of verses from both Psalms and Isaiah to continue his point:

Rom 3:13  "Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive." "The venom of asps is under their lips." 

Rom 3:14  "Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness." 

Rom 3:15  "Their feet are swift to shed blood; 

And then skips over our verse to continue:

Rom 3:17  and the way of peace they have not known." 

Rom 3:18  "There is no fear of God before their eyes." 

And in between, as I found researching all this, he puts one line that was NOT a quote from Scripture.  Everything else here I've taken from ESV, but I am switching here to MKJV so you can get the gist of the verse:

Rom 3:16  destruction and misery are in their way, 

So why throw a non-quote in the middle of this? First, let's get a little more context.  In this chapter, Paul is fighting a two-front battle: one against the Gentiles, who are using Greek logic to propose that if confession of sin brings grace, then let's sin more to get more grace.  The other side is the Jews who are saying, "You bozos, that's not how it works- let US show you."  So, he has to explain to the Gentiles that it is not a good thing to be a sinner before God; and to the Jews, they are no better off.  And to do that, he throws them a two word curve ball.

The word translated here "destruction" is suntrimma.  This word, when you break it down to the literal base, comes out to be something along the lines of completely turning into a gnawing wound, deeply rutted.  "Grinding into powder" came to my mind.  The word for which we get "misery" is talaipōria, and it also is a deep-dig word, made from two concepts:  to bear the weight of a test, and that test being one that pierces you clear through.  They are the strongest words Paul could find, and they are the ONLY TIMES these words are used in the NT.

So Paul put them here for a reason, to stress what he was getting at.  But why?

The JFB Commentary postulates that the line was "supplementary", connecting to the "feet" reference in v15, and "expresses the mischief and misery which men scatter in their path, instead of that peace which, as strangers to it themselves, they cannot diffuse." 

 But I think it more than that.  

Paul was first dealing with the self-righteousness of the Gentiles and their "logic"; and then dealing with the Jews and their self-righteousness over being the bearers of "the oracles of God" (v2).  The Gentiles could be reached through their logic, as Paul does; then he has to reach the Jews through Scriptures, as we have seen.  But in the midst of this, he had to set this verse- which would stand out as foreign in the midst of all the verses the Jews knew- to get them to pay attention to one simple fact.  They were liable to the same destruction as the Gentiles without Christ- and he used these words so that they understood this was no earthly destruction and misery that they had ever been through- or would be able to say, "Yeah, we've been through that" in, say, 2018.  This was destruction on a scale that could not be conceived as earthly.  And it was not reserved for the enemies of Israel.

And what does it mean to us?

1- God means to use EVERY word He uses.

2- God means to use EVERY version He uses.

3- We all have pre-conceived notions which we use like cookies on a webpage to help us just "skip past" certain things in this life- and God wants us to ABANDON them.

4- At least for me, without the differing versions, the curious words that make me dig deep, I'll never understand or see what those cookies are.  One thing I do know, this process is different than a computer, where I can "clear the cache" and get rid of all the cookies.  These have to be sought out and erased one by one.