I Marvel

ετοιμάζω

My Bible college experience was a somewhat unique one.

My first year of my Bachelor of Theology degree was at Central Pentecostal College, in Saskatoon Saskatchewan. Among other things, I took first year koine Greek, biblical Greek.

  • The original text of the Bible was in three languages, Hebrew Aramaic, and Greek.

I didn’t know it at the time, but when I returned home after my first year of college, my life had been turned upside down through one act of disobedience that led to another. (I’ll get to that later.)

I entered into a marriage, one that was planned before I got to Bible college, blind. Spiritually blind. And like a blind man who was taken in and held captive through that blindness, I nevertheless was in a constant state of a sort of rebellion against my captivity. And it irritated my captor, until it last they got rid of me, they expelled me from their life. I might want to apologize for speaking so cryptically, but you can always click the exit at the top of your browser or fold this paper up that’s in front of you, and go someplace else, or you can listen, like I listened for 12 long years, and I don’t know if I even know how many years after that. My life was a cryptic mystery to me and perhaps I’m still coming out of that blindness. So I don’t mean to sound harsh. But I do know that if you were patient with me and listen to me as I tell my story, the way it needs to be told you won’t be disappointed.

During those years from when I was about 21 two around 40. I suppose, something would happen in my life, and a word would come to my mind, and it wasn’t an English word, it was one of my koine Greek vocabulary words, ετοιμάζω.

So all I have is excuses, but what you need to know is that those situations each and every one of them I was in a state of awe, I was marveling! So naturally when the Greek word ετοιμάζω came to mind, I didn’t bother looking it up, because I already knew what it meant!

At some point, my brother John,

Birth Order

  • Glenn
  • John
  • Andrew
  • Laurence
  • Diana

My brother John, and I began an email exchange. He was living two hours south of Winnipeg, and I was living on the West Coast. He took a position contrary to the traditional evangelical Christian world view. Again, I don’t wanna get into it, but I began the process of debating with my brother, where I took one side, and he took the other. It wasn’t so much as an argument as it was an exploration of what he was saying. He did indeed draw from folks who formed their theology, not just from the Bible, but from the Greek wisdom scholars. Indeed he was well read with many authors.

I should tell you that my brother John was a custodian in a high school in his town, and he studied his way up through the ranks to become head custodian. He had his boiler papers! He knew how to run the floor polishing machines! But he also had two masters degrees in biblical languages.

I certainly didn’t realize it at the time but those years were the completion of my Bible college training. John and I would exchange 20 to 30 page emails. And how they would work is he would send me an email, and I would copy that email and paste it into a reply, and I would insert my reply right below what I was replying to. My knowledge of the Bible was already present because of my Bible College, and my reading of the Bible, previous to this, but my use of the Bible in defending the gospel was honed in my own knowledge of the gospel was challenged and honed. (enough for now, will get to that later!)

One email in particular is why I have written this post. I was telling John about this wonderful experience of hearing a Greek word, instead of the English word. 

John wrote back to me, he said

Laurence, ετοιμάζω doesn’t mean “I Marvel”, it means “I Prepare”

θαυμάζω - thow-madzo I Marvel

As I read his words right from my very heart, I began to weep, as all of those events flooded past me, I guess it’s like those folks who say their life flashed before their eyes!

It happened like that for me. My marriage – when I entered into captivity, I’m not joking here – began with the book of 1 Peter as theme for that period of my life. And I remember expressing my confusion… but more on that later.