I've Been Thinking About This…

I was caught by the exquisite imagery that the NEB offers for this verse – ‘girdled the ocean with the horizon’. Anybody who’s been at sea or just stood on the shore can appreciate it – there is a line far out there where the sea just … stops. After that is sky.

It all reminds me of the Psalm:

Which is quoted 25 seconds into this otherwise missable clip from the movie Mrs. Miniver by Henry Travers (the next section is much more pleasant after the first minute, so go watch that too!):

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I’ve completed the next step on the votd Twitterbot list – the ability to retweet verses to others. Now when you Twitter

@votd John 3:16 esv > @tom, @dick, @harry

votd will look up the verse, send the original back to you, and retweet it on to the addresses you listed.

See the help page here.

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It’s been a while since I last blogged, because I’ve been building a free Twitterbot to serve the text of Scripture verses over Twitter – something I’ve wanted to do for nearly a year. It’s finished now; I’ll get into the technical aspects in another post, perhaps, but for this post I want to tell about how to use it. The basic idea is simple – send a Twitter message containing the reference to the ‘bot (whose name is ‘votd’) and it will reply with the text.

Step 1 is being on Twitter. If you’re not a Twitterer yet, this step is fairly easy…go to http://Twitter.com and sign up. That’s all.

Step 2 is to type in the reference like this:

@votd john 11:35

After a while votd will wake up (it does this once a minute), see your message, interpret it, reply to it, and you’ll see this come back on your Twitter client:

John 11:35 - Jesus wept. (KJV)

In its basic form, it’s really that simple.

Verses that are longer than 140 characters (Twitter’s message limit) are wrapped into 2 (or 3, 4, 5 or even 6) messages.

By connecting to the Blue Letter Bible’s site and using the interface they provide to other sites, their translations are also available. If you want to read your verse in Latin, try

@votd john 11:35 vul

And it will come back with the Vulgate translation – BLB has 14 versions that they make available this way (besides the KJV which I have on my own site).

If you want to set a different version to be your default translation, type this:

@votd pref rsv

… then when you send in a verse request without a version, votd will use the RSV.

You can also subscribe to the automatic transmission of the verse of the day (that’s why it’s called ‘votd’, after all!) this way:

@votd pref votd=on

And, starting that night after midnight EST, votd will Twitter you the verse of the day, each day, until you unsubscribe.

Finally, if you’re not sure of your settings, or you want more detailed help, send this:

@votd ?

And votd will tell you what your defaults are and where the help page is.

Pretty nifty, no?

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There are two interesting verses in Luke that seem to be in complete contradiction to each other. One is:

This is Jesus speaking. He’s just cast out a demon and some of the bystanders had accused Him of having this power from the prince of demons; other wanted Him to do signs (as if casting out demons wasn’t enough!). He responds by speaking of Satan as a strong man, but of Himself as the stronger, who takes from Satan all his armor and spoil (v. 21-22). Then comes verse 23, “Whoever is not with me is against me”. Two chapters earlier the context, interestingly enough, is also the casting out of demons – the disciples saw someone else doing the exorcism, someone they didn’t recognize – and they tried to stop him. Jesus’ response is listed in verse 50:

In both verses, Jesus identifies a three-state environment – (1) the ‘withs’, (2) the ‘againsts’, and (3) the unknowns. And it seems as if in chapter 11 He says the unknowns are to be thought of as in the ‘against’ group, while in chapter 9 He says the unknown are among the ‘withs’. It seems contradictory, but here’s the key: who is it that these people are ‘with’ or ‘against’? In chapter 11 Luke is talking about Jesus on a war footing. The Son of God has no problem determining what side the unknown person is on – He knows exactly what is in each heart – their allegiance is only unknown to us. Chapter 9 speaks of the disciples in a ministry setting. They cannot be so insightful, so as a result they are to be more liberal in their estimation. If they see others appearing to do God’s work, and there is no basis for believing these others to be against God, they should let them get on with it.

These thoughts resurfaced recently when a friend showed me a site that seemed to illustrate perfectly this issue of chapter 9. It was a purportedly Christian site raging against the work others are doing in the name of Christ. It saddened me to see so much effort wasted by Christians in hating other Christians – effort that could be wonderfully effective if it were only rechanneled constructively. It connects so well to chapter 11, too – it gave me a real sense that Satan was the strong man guarding his house.

More thoughts to come…

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I got all excited about 3 months ago and decided to write a verse-of-the-day Twitter-bot. I had just bumped into Twitter a few days earlier (we don’t have a lot of this techy-stuff out here in New England), and I thought ‘just the thing’. Then the trouble started.

(more…)

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