Sermons

Yes or no? It’s sometimes a little hard to sort out Paul’s precise meaning in some of these passages. It’s maybe a bit ironic that part of what Paul says in this section is that he writes and speaks plainly, and at the same time he writes some things that are very hard for us to cleanly decipher. I always feel like when we have this sort of difficult passage there are two likely areas of difficulty. One is that we often don’t have a good understanding of the cultural context into which it was written and the other is that we often have translation questions. Word usage and meaning can change over time so Bible translation is never straightforward. With that in mind, we need to consider what Paul is saying here.