Drawing meaning from reverend fun
Came across these really quite funny and also in some way thought-provoking simple cartoons, and just thought I'd share them with you--along with a few random thoughts.
"Good thing I found you Gideon... it seems that someone has been hiding all your bibles in hotel rooms."
The motion to place free bibles in hotel/motel rooms, as well as in other places such as hospitals and prisons in the United States was mooted and passed in a Gideons convention in Louisville, Kentucky in 1908. It has been almost a hundred years since then, and more than a hundred since three traveling salesmen founded The Gideons International in 1899, and this Bible-distributing misssionary arm of the Christian church has indeed sown millions of seeds in many lands. The impact of the Gideons' work is hard, even impossible, to measure definitively, but one thing is sure: God's word is able to illumine and convict the searching heart, and we are commanded as Christians to "sow the word" (Mark 4:14) that those who will hear, and heed, shall be saved. I'm reminded of a middle-aged Chinese lady who being interviewed in a documentary "The Cross: Jesus in China" said concerning her first encounter with the Bible in the form of an old and worn copy of The Gospel of Matthew: "Who wrote this book? How can it possibly speak to my heart in this way?" (a rough translation from the Chinese)
The first Bible I owned was in fact a Gideons Bible given to every student in the mission school in Singapore I attended as a teenager.
***
"During an early misunderstanding, Joseph was given a goat of many colours."
Thank God we do not have such gross misunderstandings in the Bible we now possess. The Bible is the one ancient text that has most numerically numerous manuscript support (compare some 24,000 manuscript evidences /scrap/scrolls we now have of the New Testament with the approximately 5,000 that the second most attested text--that of Homer's--has). Not only is this the case, these manuscripts show an extraordinarily high level of agreement, with only less than 5% of it qualifying as discrepancies. Even then, these so-called discrepancies mostly fall into categories of identifiable scribal errors (e.g. jumping from one sentence to another with a similar word) and of discrepancies that do not substantially affect meaning. It has been a few years since I last read Josh McDowell's Evidence That Demands A Verdict, and I only wish I remembered more of it than I do. It remains in my view one of the best books on the topic of the reliability of the Bible, and an instructive treatise on the methods by which we can judge the reliability of any text.
***
"Yes, we like the Israelitzes, we let them go... no! ... we hates them, we make them make brickzeses." :) A Gollumish (oblique) commentary on the way a long-standing and persistent disobedience to God can harden and utterly corrupt the heart/mind?
"Good thing I found you Gideon... it seems that someone has been hiding all your bibles in hotel rooms."
The motion to place free bibles in hotel/motel rooms, as well as in other places such as hospitals and prisons in the United States was mooted and passed in a Gideons convention in Louisville, Kentucky in 1908. It has been almost a hundred years since then, and more than a hundred since three traveling salesmen founded The Gideons International in 1899, and this Bible-distributing misssionary arm of the Christian church has indeed sown millions of seeds in many lands. The impact of the Gideons' work is hard, even impossible, to measure definitively, but one thing is sure: God's word is able to illumine and convict the searching heart, and we are commanded as Christians to "sow the word" (Mark 4:14) that those who will hear, and heed, shall be saved. I'm reminded of a middle-aged Chinese lady who being interviewed in a documentary "The Cross: Jesus in China" said concerning her first encounter with the Bible in the form of an old and worn copy of The Gospel of Matthew: "Who wrote this book? How can it possibly speak to my heart in this way?" (a rough translation from the Chinese)
The first Bible I owned was in fact a Gideons Bible given to every student in the mission school in Singapore I attended as a teenager.
***
"During an early misunderstanding, Joseph was given a goat of many colours."
Thank God we do not have such gross misunderstandings in the Bible we now possess. The Bible is the one ancient text that has most numerically numerous manuscript support (compare some 24,000 manuscript evidences /scrap/scrolls we now have of the New Testament with the approximately 5,000 that the second most attested text--that of Homer's--has). Not only is this the case, these manuscripts show an extraordinarily high level of agreement, with only less than 5% of it qualifying as discrepancies. Even then, these so-called discrepancies mostly fall into categories of identifiable scribal errors (e.g. jumping from one sentence to another with a similar word) and of discrepancies that do not substantially affect meaning. It has been a few years since I last read Josh McDowell's Evidence That Demands A Verdict, and I only wish I remembered more of it than I do. It remains in my view one of the best books on the topic of the reliability of the Bible, and an instructive treatise on the methods by which we can judge the reliability of any text.
***
"Yes, we like the Israelitzes, we let them go... no! ... we hates them, we make them make brickzeses." :) A Gollumish (oblique) commentary on the way a long-standing and persistent disobedience to God can harden and utterly corrupt the heart/mind?
posted by E Loy at 5:35 PM |
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