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Matthew 22:14, many are called, but few are chosen, but after what you have just seen, those two Greek words do not mean what you thought they meant and the difference between them is something no English translation has ever shown you. Kletoi, from kaleo, to call, to summon, to invite, it names...

Then Matthew 22:13 escalates further, the king tells his attendants, bind him hand and foot, the word for bind is desantes from deo and deo carries enormous weight across the New Testament, it is the same verb Jesus uses in Matthew 16:19, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven. Same...

Matthew 22:12, now the text gives the man’s reaction and he was speechless, but the Greek verb behind speechless is not silence, it is not embarrassment, it is not the loss of words, it is something far more violent. The English language says speechless, the Greek word Matthew chose is the same...

Matthew 22:12, now the king speaks, hetaire, how did you get in here without a wedding garment? The English language says friend, the Greek says something profoundly different, hetaire is not philon, philon is the warm word for a beloved friend. Jesus uses philon in John 15:13, when he tells his...

Matthew 22:11, evil people feast, the garment-less man does not, the filter is not morality, it is what you are wearing. You know the difference between being picked for a team and being ready to play, one is external and completely out of your hands, the other is a state you carry in your body...

Matthew 22:11, the evil feast, the good feast, everyone feasts, which means the man who gets thrown out is not removed for wickedness, he is removed for something else entirely, something that has nothing to do with how good or bad he is, Matthew 22:14, this is where the most quoted line in the...

Matthew 22:5-9, the feast is ready, the sacrifice is finished, nobody has to earn a seat and the people who already said yes are about to do something, the Greek calls “amelesantes,” it does not mean they refused, it means something worse. And went away, one to his field, one to his business...

Matthew 22:1-2, a king prepares a wedding feast for his son. Wedding feast, the Greek word is “gamous,” it appears sixteen times in the entire New Testament, eight of those sixteen are concentrated in this one parable, that is the densest use of gamous in all of Scripture. Gamous does not just...

Luke 18:1-8, in quickness, the word Greek is “en tachei” and it can mean either quickly or suddenly. Some scholars argue that suddenly is actually closer to the point, because the way God’s vindication tends to work in scripture is not that it arrives on your preferred timetable, it arrives at a...

Luke 18:1-8, the antidikou “adversary” has a case, the accusations are real, the verdict, if rendered by the evidence alone, would not go in your favor, but, at the center of the Christian story is a moment where the judge steps down from the bench, walks across the courtroom and takes the...

Luke 18:1-8, there is a Greek word worth naming, the word the widow uses when she says, avenge me of my adversary. The word adversary is antidikou, it is a legal term, it means opponent in a lawsuit, your rival in court, the one suing you or being sued by you, but that same word, antidikou...

Luke 18:1-8, a judge who does not care. A widow who will not quit, a Greek word that carries the force of a punch and a contrast, not a comparison, between the worst human imaginable and the God who hears, that is where you are. The parable is not about getting God to move, it is about staying...

Luke 18:6-8, Jesus is not teaching you that prayer is a way of pressuring God, he is teaching you that God is nothing like this judge, the widow’s persistence is not leverage over heaven, it is the shape of faith in a world where justice has not yet arrived. That reframes everything and that...

Luke 18:4-5, this is where the Greek gets sharp, that word “weary” is “hypopiaze,” it is the exact same verb used for a boxer landing a punch under his opponent’s eye. The judge is not complaining about being bothered, he is imagining his face, his public face, the one the whole town sees and he...

Luke 18:3, when Jewish society worked the way God had designed it, widows were meant to be at the front of the line, not at the back, the courtroom was supposed to bend toward the defenseless, not away from them, that was the design, but when that system broke down, widows were the first to feel...

Luke 18:1-8, hypopiazo, a Greek word meaning to strike under the eye and it is a boxing term. Hypopiazo literally means to strike someone under the eye, to give them a black eye, to land a punch on a face, it is the same word Paul reaches for in 1 Corinthians 9:27 when he says, I discipline my...

Matthew 25:14-30, the reward the master offers, deserves more attention than it usually gets, enter into the joy of your master. The key word is the Greek preposition, “eis,” into, not toward, the joy is not handed to the servant like a bonus, the servant is invited to step inside it. The joy...

Matthew 25:14-30, not talent versus no talent, not productivity versus laziness, trust versus suspicion, the first two servants looked at what the master gave them and saw an invitation, the third servant looked at the same master and saw a threat. Same master, same generosity, opposite...

Matthew 25:14-30, verses 24-25, that is the master, this servant claims to serve and look at the specific accusation, reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you did not scatter seed, the servant is saying that the master profits from labor, he did not perform, he takes the harvest...

Matthew 25:14-30, five talents earned, two talents earned, same words from the master’s mouth, the metric was not volume, it was trust, that reframes everything about the third servant. The third servant goes and digs a hole in ground and buries the talent, in the ancient world, burying...