Read more
The focus of the New Testament is the new identity which God says He has given us in Christ, by sheer gift. It is the identity for which each was created and about which all of us have dreamed. But, if we do not know this, the Bible just becomes a book of rules for getting to Heaven.
First Century Church leaders taught about this new identity. They taught how humans are designed to work and what causes people to be dysfunctional. As time progressed, believers lost touch with that knowledge and increasingly struggled to remember what God had accomplished in Christ. The grace of the original Greek text was lost as it was translated into Latin, the language of the warlike, Roman legal system, which became the standard for over 1,000 years. In the first centuries, as Church teaching changed, so too did the life of believers. Many have wondered what happened to the power so evident in the first believers. Some people have devised all sorts of explanations, but most are not true. Eventually, the lives of early believers became only a distant memory, akin to a myth.
About the author
I began writing this book about 25 years ago. At the time, I had begun to acquire an attitude of disdain for the King James translators and those who have come since. As God began to unveil His heart and mind to me, I became angry at both Him, the Church, and translators. Why had they hidden such simple and easy knowledge? My family laughed saying God hadn't hidden anything but had been working to cause us to see it. Of course, they hadn't seen what God had begun to show me either, but neither did they feel slighted by Him. They just watched in amazement as my life began to change, usually for good, but occasionally not so good. Yet, even the bad times always turned out to be good. Later, my oldest son joined me in writing Unseen and began to undo some of the attitude it conveyed. In the last few years, my thoughts have changed dramatically. I now stand in awe of all the translators I so disliked. What the KJV translators comprehended as well as many who are alive today is now utterly amazing to me. In Unseen we explain many places where they display a misunderstanding of what God said, as well as how and why it was missed, but just because translators have misinterpreted something doesn't mean that their interpretations are not true statements. It is just that often, God's words tell us far more than we have realized. Unseen seeks to help believers understand more of what God means while not rejecting any truth they have learned from the interpretations of others. Just because something is a mistranslation does not mean it isn't true. For instance, the phrase by Peter, Casting all of your cares or anxieties upon Him, is not a translation but an interpretation of the result of what Peter was explaining. This rendering fails to give us important information if we are to experience what Peter was writing about. Embedded in the original Greek is the understanding of why we have anxieties and exactly what we are casting on the Lord, as well as how to do it. How in the world can you cast your feelings on the Lord if you don't know exactly what is causing them? Without greater understanding, it is very difficult to know how to accomplish what Peter is interpreted to be saying.
