Beloved Bridegroom, Spiritual Dynamite

 

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I just finished this book my friend Parker gave me.  It is an easy yet beautiful read and full of many gems! Written by an LDS scholar.  I would highly suggest this to anyone who wants to learn more about the Messiah through ancient Jewish marriage and family customs. ]By better understanding the cultural context of marriage in Judaism my adoration for Christ the Bridegroom has deepened.  

 

For many years I have been seeking to better understand the Holy Ghost and Jesus Christ's roles as the first and second Comforters.  I found this insight from the book very enlightening.  

The Holy Spirit is the person through whom there comes to us the strength and grace of God to enable us to cope with life.  Certainly, part of this work is to comfort, but only part.  To call the Holy Spirit the Comforter, and to stop there, is to have a limited and rather sentimental view of the Spirit, whereas in the Greek the word is full of power and of the promise of the God-given ability to face and to master any situation in life. 

How then did this word Comforter get into the English translation of the Bible?  It came in with Wycliffe about 1386, and it has stayed ever since.  But in the days of Wycliffe it was a perfect translation.  The word “comfort” is derived from the Latin word “fortis”, which means “brave”, and orginally the word meant someone who puts courage into you.  Let us take two other examples of it in Wycliffe.  Wycliffe translates Ephesians 6:10 as “be ye comforted in the Lord.”  And he translates 1 Timothy 1:12, “I do thanksgiving to him who comforted me.”  In both cases the word in the Greek is “endunamoun”, whose root is “dunams”, power, from which the word dynamite comes.  In Wycliffe’s day to comfort a person was to fill that person with a power like spiritual dynamite.  The Holy Spirit does not simply come and wipe our tears away; he gives us a dynamic power to cope with life.