The motive for new translations is seldom about updating the language of the message to those that are reading it. The motive is to produce a translation that fits the doctrinal idolatry of a neo-theology.
For example, one “scholar” suffering from severe intellectual dishonesty defines “ekklesia” as “a word that came to mean the [fill in the blank with anything and its wrong].”
How about we apply that grand flat tire to all Bible words. “Grace, a word that came to mean…” Oh, wait! We did that very thing, and we ended up with a horrifying Platonic “unmerited favor” definition from a galaxy far, far away.
This conclusion is a picture of how the translations fit the ideology of people instead of the intentions of Holy Spirit.
Judging and Loving
So, we started down this American path of updating the Bible to fit the 1960s and started looking for a way to make Jesus say, “Don’t judge.” We can only do this by ignoring the passage in context, the remainder of the words of Jesus, the instructions of Paul, and the behavior of all apostles and kingdom leaders in the new covenant portion, and the principle, processes, and protocols of kingdom culture.
Try reading Jude without judging. You end with “hello folks” and “good-bye folks.”
Let’s work on Paul’s lousy attitude immediately. Naming names, hoping God sends some enemies to get what they deserve, and telling entire Ecclesiae they are immature, divided, cheap, dishonoring, carnal, and full of pride about sexual perversion. That’s just two of his books.
Judging has received the same incredibly false translation problems that church and grace suffered when someone says, “Give me a translation that fits my doctrine.”
Take the whole “a believer cannot have a demon” or “a Christian cannot be a demon-possessed” thing for another example. Even though believers had demons cast out of them, that we have no record of a person’s deliverance being separated from their salvation process, and plenty of Scriptures about getting the work of demons out of believers, the insistence that the moment a person is born anew his demons drop-dead persists.
The translation “demon-possessed” or “possessed of a demon” continues as a poor way of saying what the Bible reveals about “how things work in the spirit.”
The weakest translation of “born anew” or “born from above” is “born again.” Translators grab onto the words of Nicodemus to arrive at this idea, not the words of Jesus. Nicodemus cannot comprehend the “you must be” part, so he asks a rhetorical question that reveals his ignorance about spiritual birth. While “born again” isn’t bad, it is a response to the thinking of Nicodemus, who doesn’t understand the mentality of God, instead of a response to Jesus.
Why? Because it fits something that currently dominated the thinking of prevailing spiritual conditions and doctrinal systems.
We know that King James told the translators to use the word “church” in his “authorized version. The king who wrote books on witchcraft and started the Masonic mess becomes the determiner of the translation of one of the Bible’s most important words. He wanted to leave the impression that the church is a building so he would have power over churches greater than the bishop.
The word ekklesia lost the meaning that comes out of the mind of Jesus, and what good is any other meaning?
Judging
Anyway, back to the judge not so you can avoid being judged idea.
Jesus reaches a very different conclusion about the proper purpose of judgment. Building an entire system upon the phrase you cut from a paragraph and paste into a previous conclusion is intellectually dishonest and parked on the street called “blasphemy.”
We cannot start with experience and human thinking to arrive at the mind of God and His presuppositions in Sacred Scriptures!
Jesus never thinks, “Do not judge.” He judges. He tells us to judge righteously. He resets the kingdom of God so His ekklesia can judge. He prepares that kingdom culture, so His representatives will be trained for future judgments of angels and the cosmic order that opposes His purposes on Earth.
Remember that “judge” is not the same as “punish” even though it means “condemn.” You are not judging the person by discernment but behavior. You are not judging the person by behavior but the behavior of the person.
It is what people do and say that condemns. While God can work on the hidden, and discernment operates to reveal what is behind behavior and speech, we judge the behavior because we lead a kingdom culture.
It is impossible to have a kingdom culture without judgment. It is impossible to have the ekklesia Jesus builds without displacing the influence of His enemies and establishing what God wants with the kingdom keys of spiritual authority. Those keys judge “what is” in enforcing and establishing what He wants.
Love, not War
In modern times, the rejection of war for perceived purposes of stopping the march of tyranny and the weakness of a generation consumed by hedonism and eastern mysticism, believers sought a way to work this systematic thinking into the Bible.
Moderns perceive any form of accountability as an overreach of masculine aggression with a mind to bring others into servitude to a conqueror. And, they reject this! Of course, this is a good definition of the kingdom of God from the Bible, so they reject Jesus as King at the same time. They wish to redesign and redefine Him and His kingdom to fit their own visions.
They started saying Jesus hates war and punishment as if the Bible could exist as It is without His instructions for the nations and culture. These instructions include war and punishment just as His kingdom includes justice in the form of war and punishment. It is not possible to enforce a judgment as discipline alone even though the first order of judgment is discipline.
(The first impression of natural reality is that it is under punishment from judgment. That is why Jesus said He didn’t arrive to condemn the world. It is already condemned. Every person born into the world is condemned. All is under condemnation for eternal destruction.)
They started saying that the way forward for peace was love. Of course, “love” must avoid all judgment, so it is only about making yourself happy and avoiding making someone else unhappy. That always works out well – not! All that does is continually blame “them” for the fact that this is impossible as a basis for any life or culture, contrary to natural law and kingdom culture.
Not having a good insight into authentic agape, they just to the conclusions that “lust is love” and “God loves lust.” They purchased segments of positivism and the Renaissance to uproot proper thinking about God’s Sovereignty and Providence.
Translations followed.
Now, we have a neo-evangelicalism that promotes all sorts of newly-designed doctrines that force-feed Gnosticism, existentialism, hedonism, and previously dismissed aspects of Roman Catholic syncretism into the mainstream and tap water of church-growthism.
So, we redefine grace to fit Greek philosophy and then take it on thousands of miles journey from Jerusalem to Berkley. We redefine ekklesia to fit a “the word came to mean” mystique, and then take it on a missiological-myth, magic carpet ride to “whatever you want ‘church’ to mean as long as you are sincere about it.”
The discovery of the meaning of God’s Word is essential, but we do not redefine God and redesign the kingdom at will! The translation is necessary, and new translations might help if they have nothing but the presuppositions of God in mind. We should expect the translation to be free of bias and inspired by the highest surrender to the breath of God.
Having someone who does not speak in tongues translate is as silly as having someone who is prophetic tell you what the Revelation of Jesus Christ says.
