Bible Notes: Matter
Originally appeared on spirituality.com
Hebrew: Isaiah 45:18 For thus saith the LORD that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD; and there is none else.
Thinking about the spiritual meaning of Biblical texts from a linguistic basis, we have considered the LORD as a name that was defined in Ex. 3:11-15 I will translate to make the message clear: Ex. 3 (11) And Moses said to the God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?” (12) And He said, “Because I AM with you, and this shall be the sign to you that I have sent you. When you bring the people out of Egypt, they will worship the God on this mountain.” (13) And Moses said to the God, “Behold, I will go to the children of Israel, and I will say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you.’ And they will say to me, ‘What is his name?’ What shall I say to them?” And God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Thus shall you say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM sent me to you.’” And God spoke again to Moses, “Thus shall you say to the children of Israel, the LORD (Being who creates being) God of your fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob sent me to you. This is my name for eternity, and this is my memorial from generation to generation.” in association with the verb I Am, and taken the view that it is a third person causative form of to be, roughly Being who causes being. Isaiah here provides corroborating evidence that this ancient, Mosaic tradition led to the logical conclusion that the Being who causes being is the Creator of heaven and earth. Ancient Hebrew has no example of a causative form (hiphil) of to be in Scripture or any secular artifact, which argues against this interpretation. But in the surviving collection of holy scripture it would have been possible to reserve the causative form exclusively for the God of Israel, so that classical Hebrew itself had but one causal form of the verb to be. Thus we inherited a word reserved exclusively for God, the only Biblical concept, or word, that fits the description, “the ultimate and predicate of being." Mary Baker Eddy, Miscellaneous Writings, p. 103.
Even in the time of Jesus, ancient polytheism was cosmopolitan and tolerant of all gods unless refusal to give honor to a deity was viewed as treason. But in Isaiah, about five centuries before Christ, this paradigm had already shifted. Isaiah’s position is cosmopolitan in a new way—setting aside all of the deities of the nations in which Judeans were dispersed; he exalted the Being who causes being as the Creator of the world—the God of all.
Greek: Acts 17:29 Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device.
There is no disagreement among translators as to how this sentence is rendered, but a little tinkering does bring out a slightly different perspective. Uparxo (hoop-ar-kho) is an equivalent of eimi, I am or infinitive, to be, here in participle form. A participle can be translated as an “—ing” word, so being instead of are just captures where thinking originates. Then, to clarify KJV Godhead, the Greek word theios means related to God by having the divine nature or superlative virtue, pertaining to the divine nature, divine being, divinity. It had a long history in Greek polytheism, so it was a word the men of Athens could readily understand and then reapply to Christian ideas. An only slightly modified, but perhaps clarified translation can be offered:
Therefore, being children of God, we ought not to think that gold, silver, or stone, artfully graven, an idea of man, is what the divine nature is like.