This Lord's Day I will begin preaching
through Romans 14, but this is not the first time I have tackled this text as a
preacher. I first preached on Romans 14 around 1999 or 2000, and I have taught
the text in sermons or Bible classes probably around a dozen times since then.
You might assume I know this passage so well that there is little new for me to
discover. But this week I found something new in the very first verse.
I had never studied Greek
or Hebrew when I entered full-time ministry in 1998. My ability with the
biblical languages was limited to Strong’s Concordance and a Vine’s or Thayer’s
Lexicon. I did the best I knew to do at the time (that’s all I am doing now, I
just have a few more tools and a lot more experience), but of course, I made a
lot of mistakes. For example, I taught for years that the definite article (the) was absent in the Greek text of
Romans 14:1 in describing faith. This
was not a big deal since the presence or absence of the article is not
conclusive in Greek (as it can be in English). In fact, I (correctly) taught
that the passage was referring to a man weak in his understanding of the faith, specifically the
extent of liberty in Christ. But imagine my surprise while reading Romans 14:1
in Greek when I stumbled upon a little word: th| (the)
faith. It was there all along (often untranslated), so why hadn’t I noticed?
The reason I never noticed that
little article is that I had never carefully read the verse in Greek. Even once
I learned how, I did not always go back to re-read, re-study, and re-vise my
understanding of Bible verses in light of what additional study might uncover.
I heard (and read) preachers and commentators confidently affirm that the
article was absent in Greek, and I didn’t know any better at the time. My mistake was not in what I did not know; my
mistake was repeating and taking for granted something someone else said,
something I could not verify and yet confidently affirmed as if I could.
The moral of this little
story is: always check what the text says, and always be willing to re-read,
re-study, and re-vise your understanding of Scripture upon further, careful
examination. Don’t assume that what you’ve been taught or assumed is accurate.
In this case, the error I made was relatively minor. But all of us are susceptible
to making much greater mistakes, assuming things a pastor or teacher told us is
true, without ever doing the careful work of Bible study for ourselves. –JME
