Right Divider
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Mr. PeacefulMeansToxic has declared it... it must be true!
ECT The Broken Record of MAD
- Thread starter Interplanner
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Jerry Shugart
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You are the one who is out of your mind if you think that this verse is speaking about a "covenant" and not a "last will and testament":
"For where a testament is, there must also of necessity be the death of the testator. For a testament is of force after men are dead: otherwise it is of no strength at all while the testator liveth" (Heb.9:16-17).
It is a last will and testament which is not in force until the death of a testator.
A covenant is in force while the testator lives.
You only prove that you are willing to say anything, no matter how ridiculous, in order to defend your blunders.
Interplanner
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Gotcha. What if the testator has an indestructible life? do you know Hebrews at all?
Right Divider
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:juggle:
What if the juggler is in town for a convention and peaceful means toxic?
Interplanner
Well-known member
Christ is both--a testator who died and who lives. Simple as that. The passage does not contrast testament and covenant. 'diatheke' is used through the whole for both.
Speaking of getting used to words as they used them:
No desert shepherder wants their animals to drink stagnant water. When people do grammatical work in Hebrew, they always want to consult the actual physical situation that was described. Go talk to some desert shepherds. Hebrew also does not have precise prepositions. Past and beside are easily interchanged. You have to check the actual physical situation. The expression means to protect them by moving them past it, which is a beautiful spiritual lesson: God protects us from things that are unhealthy for us.
Speaking of getting used to words as they used them:
No desert shepherder wants their animals to drink stagnant water. When people do grammatical work in Hebrew, they always want to consult the actual physical situation that was described. Go talk to some desert shepherds. Hebrew also does not have precise prepositions. Past and beside are easily interchanged. You have to check the actual physical situation. The expression means to protect them by moving them past it, which is a beautiful spiritual lesson: God protects us from things that are unhealthy for us.
SaulToPaul 2
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Right Divider
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Science fiction.
Jerry Shugart
Well-known member
You must be unaware that the Lord Jesus died on the Cross.
In his commentary on Hebrews 9:15-22 Matthew Henry wrote that "In these verses the apostle considers the gospel under the notion of a will or testament, the new or last will and testament of Christ..." (Matthew Henry, Commentary on Hebrews 9:15-22)
John Frahm wrote that "the use of the word 'testament' confesses more fully the Gospel promises and cross-focused content of Christ's person and work that is distributed Sunday after Sunday in the Divine Service" [emphasis added] (Frahm, The Lord's Supper as Christ's Last Will and Testament).
That is the reason why "testament" is the correct translation in the verse we are discussing:
"Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life" (2 Cor.3:6; KJV).
It is the gospel which comes in the power of the Holy Spirit which gives life to all who believe.
It is easy to understand how Christians can be ministers of the gospel, but tell us how you minister the New Covenant.
The word 'diatheke' is a Greek word and not a Hebrew one.
Hi and I just give my input here on the Greek word DIATHEKE that is a Translitered word that has many meaning , LIKE :
covenant
testament
WILL
COMPACT
New Covenant
And the way is to translate it and call it THE New Arrangement as the New Covenant is not yet in PLAY !!
dan p
Right Divider
Body part
This shows your COMPLETE inability to understand the scripture.
When the sheep lie down, it will NOT be in this present corrupt world. You frequently mention the NHNE, and yet you don't believe it.
Read Ezekiel 34 someday and learn about God's flock.
You FORCE the mistranslation of a word to FIT your bogus story. Shameful.
P.S. And you complain what WE are "literalists". :rotfl:
Yep :thumb:
Jerry Shugart
Well-known member
Here is a more detailed explanation of the meaning of diatheke:
In order to understand the Body of Christ's relationship to the New Covenant promises to Israel it is necessary to understand the meaning of the Greek word diatheke which is translated "covenant" in the following verse:
"For finding fault with them, he saith, Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant (diatheke) with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah" (Heb.8:8; KJV).
Now let us look at this verse where the word diatheke is used as a promise which God made to Abraham:
"That we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hand of all that hate us; To perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant (diatheke); The oath which he sware to our father Abraham" (Lk.1:71-73).
Geerhardus Vos wrote "in the Gospel i. 72 the 'diatheke' is equivalent to the promise given to the fathers; the parallelism in which it stands with the 'oath' of God proves this: 'to remember his holy 'diatheke,' the oath which He swore unto Abraham, our father'" [emphasis added] (Geerhardus Vos, "Hebrews, the Epistle of the Diatheke," The Princeton Theological Review, Vol. 13, No.4, 1915, 613 ).
Therefore, we can understand that the Greek word diatheke can mean a "promise."
In the first century no one would have understood the word diatheke to mean "covenant."
Adolf Deissmann wrote that "There is ample material to back me in the statement that no one in the Mediterranean world in the first century A.D. would have thought of finding in the word 'diatheke' the idea of covenant. St. Paul would not, and in fact did not. To St. Paul the word meant what it meant in the Greek Old Testament, 'unilateral enactment,' in particular a 'will or testament' " (Adolf Deissmann, Light From the Ancient East, translated by Lionel R.M. Strachan [London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1927], 337-338).
Next, let us look at the following translation of Jeremiah 31:31 to see that the the Hebrew word translated "covenant" at Jeremiah 31:31 is berith:
"Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant (berith) with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah" (Jer.31:31).
Louis Berkhof wrote that "In the Septuagint the word 'berith' is rendered 'diatheke' in every passage where it occurs with the exception of Deut. 9:15 ('marturion') and I Kings 11:11 ('entole'). The word 'diatheke' is confined to this usage, except in four passages. This use of the word seems rather peculiar in view of the fact that it is not the usual Greek word for covenant, but really denotes a disposition, and consequently also a testament. The ordinary word for covenant is 'suntheke'" [emphasis added] (Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology [Grand Rapids, 1949], 262-263).
According to Berkhof the Greek word diatheke denotes a "disposition" as well as a "testament." In the The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament we read that the word diatheke "is properly 'dispositio,' an 'arrangement' made by one party with plenary power, which the other party may accept or reject, but cannot alter" (J.H. Molton and G. Milligan, The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1930], 148).
Here we see that the translators of the Greek Old Testament (LXX) used the Greek word diatheke to translate the Hebrew word berith:
"Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant (diatheke) with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah" (Jer.31:31; LXX).
Vos also wrote that the Greek word diatheke can mean "disposition," writing that "all that they (the translators of the Greek New Testament) wanted out of 'diatheke' was the emphasis which the word enabled them to throw upon the one-sided initiative and the unimpaired sovereignty of God in originating the order of redemption...Their procedure appears intelligent only on the supposition that they believed 'diatheke' capable of retaining or reacquiring the sense of 'disposition'" [emphasis mine] (Geerhardus Vos, "Hebrews, the Epistle of the Diatheke," 604-605 ).
Now let us look at the following verse:
"That at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants (diatheke) of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world" (Eph.2:12).
In his commentary on this verse Vos says that "in Eph. ii. 12 the phrase 'covenants of the promise,' in which the genitive is epexegetical, yields positive proof that Paul regards the 'diatheke' as so many successive promissory dispositions of God, not as a series of mutual agreements between God and the people" [emphasis added] (Ibid., p.609).
The word diatheke does not carry with it the sense of a compact or of a mutual agreement between two parties, which is the normal understanding of a covenant. Albert Barnes wrote that (Barn"the writers of the New Testament never meant to represent the transactions between God and man as a 'compact or covenant' properly so called. They have studiously avoided it...The word which they employ - 'diatheke' - never means a compact or agreement as between equals" (Barnes' Notes on the Bible, Commentary at Hebrews 8:8).
Even though Robert Saucy recognizes that the New Diatheke is essentially a "promise," writing that "because of its gracious promissory nature, the new covenant is frequently identified with the covenants of promise" [emphasis added] (Saucy, The Case for Progressive Dispensationalism [Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1993], p.121).
J. H. Moulton and G. Milligan say that diatheke "is properly 'dispositio,' an 'arrangement' made by one party with plenary power, which the other party may accept or reject, but cannot alter. A 'will' is simply the most conspicuous example of such an instrument, which ultimately monopolized the word just because it suited its differentia so completely" [emphasis added] (J.H. Molton and G. Milligan, The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1930], 148).
So we can see that the Greek word diatheke can mean a "Promissory Disposition" and it can also mean a "Last will and Testament."
Hi and we see that many here do not see that there are Greek words that are TRANSLITERATIONS in there bible and many say that BAPTIZO only means IMMERSION which is not true and also the Greek word GRACE / CHARIS !!
Like they say , lead them to water , BUT they will not Drink !!
dan p
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Great post, Jerry :thumb:
And you relied on writers from within different schools.
Schools not Mid-Acts Dispensational.
Just goes to show the importance of the Mid-Acts Perspective in helping to guide one to see where another school might be sound on one thing, but not on another.
With it, books "about" end up over relied on to one's spiritual folly.
Sort of like Kay Arthur's actually very decent book on how to study the Bible (of Precept Upon Precept Ministries).
Read it in light of the Mid-Acts Perspective and it becomes a rather really good book on basic Bible study principles.
Without the Mid-Acts Perspective, one ends up forever stuck in the likes of Interplanner's ever endless "books based."
Again, great post Jerry!
Doesn't mean I won't challenge you on one thing or another, every now and then, Jer; but I expect and welcome the same in return, bro
