Elizabeth was six months pregnant when God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a city in Galilee. There, Gabriel appeared to a virgin named Mary. She was engaged to Joseph, descended from King David.

“Hello,” the angel said. “God is with you. And he has singled you out for a wonderful blessing.”

Mary thought that was an odd way to greet someone. She couldn’t figure out what he was talking about.

“Don’t be afraid, Mary,” the angel said. “God is delighted with you. Listen, you are going to get pregnant and give birth to a son. You are to call him Jesus…

As soon as she could, Mary got out of town. She took to the hills and went to a town in Judea. When she arrived at the home of Zechariah, Elizabeth welcomed her. At the mere sound of Mary’s greeting, Elizabeth’s child jumped inside of her, and the Holy Spirit filled her.

In a loud and happy voice Elizabeth sang out, “You are blessed more than any other woman. And the child inside you is blessed, as well. Think of it. The mother of my Lord has come to visit me. How could I be so fortunate? Look, when I heard nothing more than your greeting, the baby inside me jumped for joy. You are blessed indeed because you believed the Lord would do what he said he would do.” Luke 1:21-31; 30-45 Casual English Bible

“God has given a gift to everyone. He’s kind like that. Find your gift and use it to help others. Sharing your gift is a good use of God’s kindness” (1 Peter 4:10 Casual English Bible).

I GOT ANOTHER SURPRISE yesterday, while paraphrasing Revelation for the Casual English Bible.

Most Bibles say that the massive end-time army from somewhere east of what is now Israel will tally 200 million soldiers (Revelation 9:16).

These are the bad guys. Some Bible scholars call them a Demon Army (Revelation 9:17). Whatever they are, they seem to be playing on the same team as the ugly critters that some call the Demon Locusts, which swarm the planet and terrorize people (Revelation 9:3).

The original Greek language of Revelation doesn’t say “200 million” soldiers would come from the east.

It  sounds worse.

In the Greek original language, it’s literally: myrias dismyrias.

Myrias is where we get the English word “myriad,” meaning more than we can count.

In English, the number wouldn’t be a number. It would be “myriad times double myriad.”

Some put numbers to the innumerable: 10,000. So, they multiply 10,000 times 20,000. And they get an army of 200 million.

By the end of the first century, the Roman army under Emperor Trajan had almost 400,000 soldiers.

That would mean the demons outnumbered the Romans 500 to one.

That’s if there were only 200 million demon soldiers.

In the Casual English Bible, I’m thinking of paraphrasing Revelation 9:16 this way:

“I heard someone say how many mounted soldiers were in their army: uncountable times double uncountable.”

Then I’d add a footnote with the info I’ve put in this short blog.

What do you think?

I got to go because there’s a lightning storm, and it’s getting worse. Tornado watch, too. I want to watch it from the basement.

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IT SEEMS LIKE A CRAZY WAY to start telling the story of Jesus. John introduced him as “the living Word of God” (John 1:1 Casual English Bible).

What? Try picturing that in your head.

It’s so much easier to picture him as a baby in a feeding trough in Bethlehem.

But John is sounding more like a theologian than a historian. Theologians have strange ways of thinking. There’s something different going on inside their heads. Something that’s often deeper than we’re used to hearing. And something that often makes no sense, at least at first glance.

Doggone, they make us work.

Here’s a footnote to John 1:1 that tries to help explain why John described Jesus the way he did.

The original Greek word is Logos. Greek scholars such as Heraclitus said logos was the wisdom behind all of creation. This all-present wisdom created everything and it guided creation along the way.

For many Jewish scholars then and now, God’s Word pulled the trigger on Creation, whether or not that involved pulling the trigger on the Big Bang. “God said, ‘Lights.’ Lights came on…God said, ‘Land, grow a garden.’…The land grew a garden” (Genesis 1:3, 11-12).

John doesn’t identify Jesus as the Word until a few paragraphs later, gradually working up to it by describing the Word as the one who “came to this world that belonged to him. But most of the people—his people—wouldn’t have anything to do with him” (1:11).

Jesus came to earth as a living, breathing expression of God’s message to humanity, summed up in what is perhaps the most famous Bible verse, John 3:16.

If someone wants to get a message through my thick head and into my calloused heart…on the pain of refugees, for example…they might begin by putting it in writing: a news story for the Associated Press.

Better still, put it on TV. That way I can see the faces and feel the emotions.

Best, put a refugee in front of my face. Let him tell me his story. If he can convince me that he’s telling the truth, his story becomes my story. I wouldn’t be able to help it.

I know that to be true of myself because I’ve been put in similar situations on mission trips.

I don’t think I’m unique that way. Humans, by nature, are drawn toward honesty. It’s who we are in the depths of the heart.

We respond to a true Word, whether it’s written, filmed, or standing before us in the flesh. We always have. God knows that. So did John.

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The typical meal for Jewish folks in Roman times featured

• Bread
• olive oil
• dried figs
• and a mess of stew made from beans, lentils, and peas.

I wrote about that in a recent article: Ancient diet for a trim look.

Richer folks could add some wine and meat. But women “have no right to wine since the wives of the poor don’t drink wine.” That’s a quote from the Tosefta, a set of Jewish guidelines from at least the AD 100’s, and perhaps earlier.

Poorer folks were more likely to use wine to help purify the drinking water. It killed some of the bacteria from pollutants such as dead critters upstream, algae in the underground spring, and laundry day every day along the shore.

It seems that nearly everyone who could afford to grow some grapes did, which is why archaeologists have found so many ruins of wine and olive presses all over what is now Israel and Palestinian Territories.

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