ChristsWords.com       The original Greek words and sysmbols

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To listen to an  example of this work, click here. Longer Essays Hidden Themes in the Gospels The Spirit-to-Spirit Cycle The Divine Breath Satan, Demons, and Life's Adversities The Loaf, the Cup, and the Cloak The End of the World? The "Problem" of Evil The Three Temptations of Christ The Lord's Prayer The Beatitudes Conceptions of Evil and Good Heaven as the Universal Rule Burdens and Blessings The Pivotal Person Connections between heaven and earth Did Christ teach in Greek as well as Aramaic? Biblical Research Like the printing press made the Bible in translation available to everyone, the Internet makes biblical research available to everyone.  For our research, we use: The Blue Letter Bible The Perseus Project Song of the Lamb New Testament Greek Online Greek-Language.com The Author Gary Gagliardi is the award-winning author of a dozen books on strategy who has trained the world's leading organizations in strategic thinking.  His hobby is ancient languages.

Burdens and Blessings The word usually translated as "evil" in the NT is poneros  which means "burdened with toil."  The opposite of burdens in Christ's teaching is "blessings" which is makarios, which means "happy" or "fortunate."  The major blessings are listed in the Beatitudes. The Bigger Picture Christ divides the world into physical, social, and spiritual (interior, personal). This division describe the way humans perceive their world and perceive God in the world. God created the natural physical world. Christ comes to reform the social world, created by man, with the Kingdom of Heaven (universal rule). The Spirit, through the universal rule, privately moves the inner, personal world of individuals. Using this logic, the Trinity is not a division in God, but simply a division in how we perceive God acting in the world. In this division of the world, our burdens and blessings don't come from the natural, social, or spiritual world, but from the way we choose to interact with it. On an individual level, these three realms translate into our physical needs, intellectual needs, and spiritual needs. All of these needs can be either a source of blessings or burdens. Christ (unlike John the Baptist) seldom speaks against our physical needs. Indeed, he teaches that these physical needs only become a burden when people make them more important than they are, either by   denying them or by getting lost in them. Since Christ's focus is social, he often speaks against our "intellectual" needs to be accepted by society. This is clearly the biggest burden in society. His teaching was meant to relieve us of this burden. On the spiritual level, Christ always talks about spirit in terms of emotions, here, the emotion of love. These emotions also can be a burden or a blessing. Here, love can take us toward God and is be a blessing. However, if we let our caring for our families become more important than what is good, that same caring becomes burden.

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