Day 13 - Our Mission

Getting closer to being caught up in my journal entries!  Today is actually day 17.  I haven't done the reading yet, but I will tonight.  And here I am writing my journal for Day 13.  Just a little behind, so lets get started.

The Letter Kills?
In 2 Cor chapter 3, Paul talks about living by the Spirit and not by the letter.  I understood "letter" to mean the law that they have been following for so long, which was impossible for us mere humans to follow.  I underlined this part of verse 6:

"...for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life."

I underlined this part of the verse to remind myself to go back and research this to see if I was interpreting it correctly.  What I found is that I was right in my interpretation, but that also, sometimes people interpret "the letter" to mean the literal meaning of scripture in it's entirety.  The author of the site I read this from believes that this is the incorrect, but that "the letter" is referring to the Old Testament law.

http://www.bible-truths-revealed.com/2Corinthians.html

Our Mission
"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God." 2 Cor 5:17-20

I really enjoy the verses that give us explicit instructions on how to behave as well as what we are supposed to do while we're here on earth.  This one spoke to me as our Mission Statement.  Our ministry is to be ambassadors of Christs message of reconciliation to help people become reconciled to God.

Unbelievers
I big topic for me is what do we, as Christians, do with/for unbelievers.  This topic is addressed in 2 Cor 6:14-16:

^"14 Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?¹⁵ What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? Or what does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? ¹⁶ What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said:

       "I will live with them
       and walk among them,
       and I will be their God,
       and they will be my people."

I looked at how other versions of the Bible worded verse 14.  Some examples are to not be "bound", not "become partners with", "you are not the same as" and not to "team up with" unbelievers.  Still, most say to not be "unequally yoked" with unbelievers (and I found one that said to "stay away from unbelievers").

Surprisingly, I found an article that deeply investigates these verses.  In the article, the author describes how the term "unequally yoked" has been known to referred to mating different breeds of animals.  So some scholars think Paul is talking about marriage in these verses; that believers should not marry unbelievers.  Others believe that the qualifier "unequal" leads the verse to be interpreted that some form of association with believers is OK as long as it is not deemed "unequally yoked".  Still other believe that these verse simply mean to not associate with nonbelievers at all, which I find kind of hard to believe.  How else would be spread the good news?

http://www.inplainsite.org/html/unequally_yoked.html

Gossip

When reading 2 Cor 10:1, I couldn't help but wonder if the words "timid" and "bold" were used by someone in Corinth behind Paul's back, or possibly in a letter to him.  The words are in quotes in verse 1, as if he is saying that these were words someone used to described him, maybe while gossipping/complaining about Paul.

I found a lengthy article (actually, it looks like a college course guide) that goes through all of 2 Cor.  It talks about the tone in Paul's 2nd letter to the Corinthians changing starting with 10:1 because Paul "defends himself against criticism" from the "super-apostles", as the introduction to 2 Corinthians puts it in the Today's New International Version that I am reading.

http://www.abu.nb.ca/courses/NTIntro/PDF/18_2Cor.pdf

Another article I found on-line puts it like this:

"He had learned that he was under relentless and merciless attack there by false teachers who were wanting to ruin his reputation and ministry and destroy the people's confidence in him."

http://www.lakelandbiblechurch.org/Sermons/2Corinthians/WagingWarfare.htm

So I wasn't too far off.  It was more slander than gossip.

Day 13 Journal... Finis
That's it for 2 Corinthians.  Not as short as I had anticipated, but I hit all of the notes that I made in my Bible.  Next up... Galatians!!