Musings of a Snickerdoodle

A Syntax Guide For Readers of the New Testament by Charles Lee Irons is a nice addition to one's NT Greek tools library.  It is not a stand-alone tool, but meant to be used with  other lexical aids.  Irons notes that,  "This Syntax Guide does not duplicate the help provided by such tools.  Rather, it picks up where these other tools leave off"  and  "presupposes their use…"    The introduction explains that in this guide, "select cases, glosses and parsing are not the focus".  Rather, in some places it gives specific explanations of "syntactical, clause-level features". There is a chapter for each book of the New Testament, and each book is divided into chapters and each chapter has a list of select verse references from that chapter and next to the reference there may be  a section of the Greek wording of the verse and some comments .   Some of the verses only have a brief...

The NLT GuysSlimline Holy Bible is nicely bound, very slim and lightweight. The cover has some of the 'leather-touch' material that feels very nice (not that boys will care that much), and the bright blue lines intermixed with the black should make it very easy to spot if misplaced and also catches the attention which would hopefully be a reminder for young guys to read it each day.   The letter font on the inside is small but not too small, I found it quite easy to read.  At the back of the book, Bible includes a dictionary/concordance, a list of suggested memory verses on various topics, a Bible reading plan and of course the usual maps of the Holy land and Europe. The translation itself is very readable, the translation notes say that they were trying for a mix of formal equivalence and dynamic, I think this translation leans a bit more to the latter, a 'thought for thought' type of translation which then necessarily has some heavily imposed biased interpreta...

I am disappointed with many of the 'study' Bibles of our day but the Apply the Word Study Bible is quite refreshing in its commitment to prompting one think to about the text one is studying.  he Bible has many "application notes" and also includes maps,  charts and little character profile boxes throughout.    It really is more of an application type of study Bible, not a linguistic study Bible but the application used seems to be mostly exegetically based.  I think that the application notes are quite good, none of them really seem forced onto any text they're commenting on, even the ones found throughout the books of the law, and prophets, are quite good and don't seem as though someone was grasping at straws (as some study Bibles seem to do) to find an application of those seemingly tedious parts of Scripture and so they come up with some  eisegetical way to get some personal-meaning out of them. For example, toward middle of Ezekiel one...

God commands His people to be happy and therefore being 'happy' is a matter of obedience for Christians. Such is the argument of Randy Alcorn's newest book "Happiness".   It seems that he has encountered a lot of Christians who seem to think, or imply, that happiness is sin and that God's purpose is for us to be holy, not happy.   He declares that the oft cited difference between happiness and joy is in reality a nonexistent difference, that the terms are so alike in meaning they are synonymous.   "The distinction between joy and happiness is not biblical ".      He critiques the view that 'joy' is more 'contentment' without reference to the emotions, while 'happiness' is primarily circumstantial and emotional.   He makes a case that the word "joy" is also emotional in meaning.   He also believes that "happy" is the better term to use in the case of many of the Greek and Hebrew words translated in many...