Around twenty-five years or so a Bible professor and church pastor named Eugene Peterson wrote a new version of the Bible using modern language, called The Message. It’s not a word for word translation, rather it’s described as a thought by thought translation.
I enjoy reading The Message to get a fresh look at a familiar passage. When I read things over and over in the Bible, they become too familiar. I will read the words, but because I have read them so many times before, I just skim across the words without letting them sink into my soul and heart.
Since it’s a late evening, I am cutting this entry short to share my favorite passage from The Message, Romans 8.
8 1-2 With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.
3-4 God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.
The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.
There’s more, but I will save it for another time.
Journey with Monica 