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πράσσω (Prassō): What You Practice Defines You · Reformed Thinking

• 0:00
  You know, you break your arm, the X-ray shows that jagged
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  white line, and the Doctor just points at the film and says,
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  well, there it is. Right, it is totally binary.
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  Yep, the bone is broken or it's whole.
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  You expect that kind of, I mean clinical precision in medicine
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  or engineering, sure. But then you step into the world
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  of ancient linguistics and suddenly that clean, objective
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  X-ray machine just shatters. It really does.
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  It gets incredibly messy. You are looking at this
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  linguistic landscape that is murky, shifting, and so tied to
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  the psychology of the people actually speaking the word.
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  Yes, the psychology is everything.
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  Welcome to Reformed thinking. This is a deep dive into a
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  single, seemingly ordinary ancient Greek word.
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  And it is a fascinating 1. It really is.
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  The word is prasa and we're going to look at its entire
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  family of related term. Which is quite a large family.
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  Oh yeah, and the hook for our analysis today is just wild to
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  me. If you trace this single verb
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  back to ancient epic poetry, it means to cross the sea.
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  Yes, it is a word of heroic adventure.
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  Right. But centuries later, by the time
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  the biblical authors pick it up, it morphs into the technical
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  term for bureaucratic extortion. And dark magical arts.
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  Yeah, and the aimless, rotting swamp of human sin.
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  So how does a word devolve from a heroic ocean voyage to a tax
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  audit and, well, spiritual death?
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  Well, to wrap our heads around that shift, we kind of have to
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  look at the mechanics of human behavior, because language is
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  really just a mirror of how we think.
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  Makes sense? The root of precious is
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  incredibly ancient. If you dig into the etymology,
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  it traces back to the Indo European root per.
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  OK, per. Right.
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  And from there it moved through the word para, which means
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  beyond. Oh, OK.
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  Like going beyond a boundary. Precisely, and eventually it
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  evolved into the Ionic Greek form preyesh and the Attic form
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  A2. So built into the very DNA of
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  this word is the concept of motion.
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  Yes, physical strenuous movement from one location to another.
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  So if you read Homer, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, this word just
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  leaps off the page, right? It comes with salt spray and
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  sweat. Oh, absolutely.
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  In Homer, it means to get beyond, to press on through, or
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  to traverse a physical space. When Homer uses it, he is
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  picturing an ancient ship crashing through waves.
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  Pressing on through a violent storm, Yeah.
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  To reach a far shore, leaving a wake behind you.
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  But The thing is, the Greeks did not leave it on the water.
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  They brought it on to land. They did.
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  As their civilization developed and became more complicated, the
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  physical voyage metaphor shifted into something abstract.
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  Like what? Well, by the time you read
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  writers like Pindar or the philosopher Plato, the physical
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  seafaring context is totally gone.
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  Just erased. Pretty much it becomes a word
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  describing total consuming action.
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  It meant to busy oneself with a matter.
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  So if I am an ancient Greek citizen in Athens, instead of
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  traversing an ocean, I'm traversing like a relentless To
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  Do List. That is the perfect way to look.
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  Look at it. It became the primary word for
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  prosecuting a complicated legal case.
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  Oh wow. It became the word for managing
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  state affairs, politics, or the word scholars used for studying
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  and analyzing complex dramas. So it is all this heavy mental
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  or bureaucratic lifting. Yeah, Plato even uses it for
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  minding 1's own business or prosecuting a matter in the
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  interests of someone else. But there is a subtle change in
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  focus here, isn't there? There is a massive shift.
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  When Homer used it, the focus was on the destination, the far
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  shore. Right, you are crossing the sea
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  to actually get somewhere. But over time, the destination
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  fades. The focus shifts entirely to the
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  intensity of the occupation. The friction.
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  Yes, the daily grind of the crossing itself.
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  I see where this is heading. When a word focuses on the grind
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  rather than the goal, it naturally attaches itself to end
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  endless grinding tasks. It is inevitable.
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  Let's make an analogy for you listening.
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  It is the difference between building a house and waiting
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  through city permit paperwork. Oh, that is a great comparison.
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  Right, because building the house is actual creation.
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  You have walls in a roof where they used to just be dirt.
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  You have a result. Exactly.
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  But the permit paperwork, that is just the grinding machinery
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  of bureaucracy. Yes, you are pressing through
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  the system, but you are not actually making anything.
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  And that explains the financial twist that shows up in the
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  historical sources. Yes, it shows up heavily in
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  ancient commerce and government. It becomes the verb for
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  demanding and collecting public taxes or tribute or interest.
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  And because it's all about the mechanical pressure of the
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  process, it kind of carries an aroma of extortion, doesn't it?
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  Very much so unlawful coercion, Thucydides, the Greek historian,
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  writes about a king pressing a population for tribute.
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  Squeezing them for resources. Right.
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  And he uses this specific word pressu.
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  Because the king is not creating wealth, he is just frantically
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  working the system to extract it.
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  He is just turning the gears. We take noble concepts and
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  reduce them to our daily grind. The tax collector, the
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  bureaucrat, the politician, they're intensely busy.
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  They are pressing through their ledgers and their backroom
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  negotiations. But the outcome is often just
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  more paperwork, more demands, more friction.
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  But this raises a massive question.
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  If this word describes all this intense human busyness, how did
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  the ancient Greeks talk about the actions of their gods?
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  That is a great question. Because the gods of Olympus are
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  supposedly doing things constantly in the myths.
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  Right, they're always active. Throwing lightning bolts,
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  turning people into animals, fighting wars?
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  Did they use Prashia for Zeus? This is one of the most
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  startling negative conclusions from the secular Greek sources.
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  Really. Yeah, in ancient literature,
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  Prashia was almost entirely absent when describing the acts
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  of the cods. Wow, so they threw a linguistic
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  fence around this word. They kept the divine out
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  completely. Wait, but if the gods are
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  constantly interfering in human affairs, why guard this specific
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  verb so closely? Because the Greeks had a
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  philosophical intuition about the difference between humans
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  driving and divine sovereignty. OK, unpack that.
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  Let's look at Plato's vocabulary to see the contrast.
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  When Plato describes the gods fashioning the cosmos in his
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  famous dialogue the Timaeus, he needs verbs for action.
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  Sure, because they are building the universe.
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  Right, but he chooses words is like Poyon which means making or
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  creating he uses or Gaza tie which is working or platin which
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  is fashioning. So very constructive words.
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  Very out of hundreds and hundreds of uses of action verbs
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  in his writings, Plato only assigns Prossu to the gods three
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  times. Three times out of an entire
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  philosophical corpus analyzing the nature of reality.
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  Just three, and if you look closely at those 3 exceptions
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  they prove the rule. Hi, so he only uses it when he
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  is making weak hypothetical comparisons to human action.
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  Like what kind of comparison? For instance, he writes that a
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  citizen should not say bad things about the gods because it
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  might give the gods an excuse if they happen to do such things.
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  Ah. So this it's a hypothetical
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  scenario projecting human flaws onto the divine.
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  Spot on. Or he describes A festive
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  mythological dance of the gods where each deity is minding his
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  own business. Minding his own business, right,
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  Which is that political bureaucratic usage we talked
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  about? Right, he never uses it for
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  their actual divine creative universe sustaining work.
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  Is this just a crook of Plato's writing style though?
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  What about the other Greek historians and poets?
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  The pattern holds across the board.
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  Xenophon, another major philosopher and historian, only
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  uses it once for a divine act. Just once.
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  Yeah, and he uses it as a completely colorless, neutral
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  term for the unseen God's rule. Meaning what?
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  Well, he argues that the supreme God who is behind all other gods
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  does the greatest things but remains invisible to us.
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  Older poets like Homer and Aeschylus occasionally use it to
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  describe divine over ruling, but always in a neutral way that
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  avoids any ethical judgement. But by and large, the gods do
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  not process. No, they do not.
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  It is like the ancient mind instinctively knew that humans
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  strive and sweat while the divine realm simply commands and
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  completes. That is a brilliant way to
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  phrase it. The gods create and effect
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  successful outcomes. Humans, on the other hand, are
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  just busy. They are just spinning their
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  wheels. Which brings us to a fascinating
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  synonym overlap we need to break down.
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  Let's hear it. The distinction between process
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  and that other word I mentioned, poyen.
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  OK, the word for creating. Yes, Xenophon gives us the
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  Rosetta Stone for understanding the difference between these two
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  concepts. What does he say?
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  He uses a specific phrase, iron on point that translates to to
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  make peace OK. When he uses poyen, it points to
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  a successful outcome. The peace is achieved, the
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  treaty is signed, the war is over.
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  So it is a done deal. Yes, but then in another context
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  he uses the phrase Perry Irony's protein.
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  And what does that mean? That means to exert oneself to
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  make peace. So the outcome is entirely
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  irrelevant in the second phrase. Completely irrelevant.
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  It refers solely to the frantic effort, regardless of whether
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  peace is actually achieved. Precisely.
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  Poyen guarantees the result. Prasha only guarantees the
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  sweat. That is wild.
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  Think about an artist in a studio.
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  Poyen is the artist stepping back to look at a finished,
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  beautiful painting hanging on the wall.
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  The art exists. Prasha is the artist frantically
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  mixing paints on the palette, washing brushes in dirty water,
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  sweating over the canvas, just trying to force the image into
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  reality. Yes, one is the accomplished
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  result, the other is the continuous, messy, unresolved
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  activity. And we see this dynamic played
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  out beautifully in the philosophy of Socrates, don't
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  we? Oh absolutely.
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  When Plato is detailing the final hours of Socrates life in
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  the dialogue called the Phaido, Socrates tells his friends about
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  a recurring dream. What happens in the dream?
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  In the dream, he is commanded to create musical art.
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  Create right, and the Greek word used for that divine command is
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  pae, a mandate to bring a finished product into existence.
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  But Socrates responds differently, doesn't he?
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  He does. He responds by explaining that
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  philosophy is something he was already engaged in.
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  Let me guess, yeah. For his own human action, he
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  uses a praton, the past tense of prasso.
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  So philosophy for Socrates was a continuous process of inquiry.
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  An ongoing grinding activity without a neat finished product.
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  He recognized he was only mixing the paints.
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  He knew he was just in the process.
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  So Prasso becomes the perfect analytical tool for philosophers
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  examining the mechanics and motives of human behavior.
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  Completely apart from any final product, it puts the magnifying
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  glass entirely on the process of human striving.
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  And the Stoic philosophers took this concept and build a whole
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  world view around. They really did.
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  If you read Epictetus, you see that for the Stoics, the
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  ultimate goal of the wise man is to align his thought, his will,
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  and his action. And the action here is Prasa.
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  Exactly. They believed that human action,
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  this continuous grind, should take place for the sake of the
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  good. But the Stoics have a very
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  optimistic view of the human engine.
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  Don't. Extremely optimistic.
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  They assume the engine can be fixed if you just read the
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  manual. That is the fatal flaw in their
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  system, which the biblical writers will dismantle later.
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  Because for Stoics, there's no real problem of a broken will.
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  Right, the gap between knowing what is good and actually doing
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  it is just a lack of education to them.
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  If you teach a man the right way to think, his will and his
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  prasso will naturally align. Sin or defective action is not a
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  structural failure of the human soul to to a stoic it is just a
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  lack of knowledge. I want you to hold that Stoic
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  optimism in your mind, because when we cross into the theology
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  of the New Testament, that idea is going to hit a brick wall.
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  A massive brick wall. But before we open the Bible, we
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  need to trace the shadow side of this word.
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  It gets pretty dark. Because if human striving is
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  just endless friction without a guaranteed result, it starts to
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  take a very dark turn in the historical sources.
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  The descent of this word is grim.
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  In the hands of historians like Thucydides and Polybius, prostu
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  becomes the explicit term for treasonable proceedings.
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  Treason. Treason and secret betrayals.
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  When Thucydides describes political factions trying to
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  betray a city from the inside, plotting in the shadows, he
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  calls the traitors those who are practicing.
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  Those who are practicing treason, they are working the
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  system for their own game. And the sources show it gets
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  even darker. How so?
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  In the ancient magical papyri, the actual documents detailing
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  how to past hexes and manipulate spirits.
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  Oh wow. Yeah, process is the technical
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  term for performing a dark, magical act.
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  So when you are standing in a graveyard trying to manipulate
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  the spiritual realm to curse your neighbor, you are engaging
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  in process. You are practicing, so look at
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  the baggage this word has accumulated over the century.
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  Is a lot. We have a word that means
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  frantic busyness, bureaucratic tax collection, political
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  treason and dark magic. You can totally see why the
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  Jewish scholars who translated the Hebrew Old Testament into
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  Greek were incredibly cautious with it.
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  The. Septuagint restraint is
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  striking. The Septuagint being the Greek
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  translation of the Old Testament.
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  Right. It was a massive undertaking,
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  requiring thousands of verbs, yet the sources note that out of
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  the entire Greek Old Testament, prossu is only used 38 times. 38
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  times in the whole Old Testament.
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  That is a statistical anomaly. It is incredibly rare compared
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  to the hundreds of uses for other verbs of action.
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  When the Jewish translators needed to translate Hebrew words
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  like assa, meaning to do or make, or halaq, meaning to walk
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  or behave, they actively avoided prosecute.
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  They avoided it because they understood the mechanics of the
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  word. They likely felt it's abstract
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  sense of process was far too weak to describe the
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  authoritative creative work of the God of Israel.
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  Furthermore, the word was stained.
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  It had the stench of shady business, extortion and Pagan
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  magic clinging to it. You do not use the vocabulary of
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  a corrupt tax collector to describe Yahweh dividing the Red
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  Sea. No, you definitely do not.
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  So when the Septuagint finally holds its nose and uses the
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  word, it drips with condemnation.
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  Almost entirely. You find it mostly concentrated
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  in the wisdom literature, where the authors are dissecting the
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  folly of humanity. What kind of folly?
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  It describes acting foolishly. It describes the horrific
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  practice of infanticide occurring during Pagan mystical
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  ravings. In the Book of Wisdom and in
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  Proverbs 30 verse 20, it is used as a euphemism for the trade of
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  the adulteress. Why does a word that simply
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  means process or activity become the go to word for sin, betrayal
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  and prostitution? It is a fascinating downward
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  spiral. Does continuous human activity,
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  when left to its own devices, naturally trend downward toward
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  deception? The linguistic evidence suggests
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  yes, When human action is disconnected from a divine
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  creative purpose, when it is just the relentless friction of
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  human whales competing against each other in a closed system,
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  it devolves. It becomes manipulation.
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  It becomes the backroom political deal, the secret
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  betrayal, the frantic casting of a spell to force the universe to
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  give you what you want. Philo, the Jewish philosopher
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  who lived in Alexandria, draws a razor sharp line here, doesn't
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  he? He does.
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  He states that God's purposeful creation of the universe in the
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  past is point. The creating word.
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  Right, but his continuous, purposeless sustaining work in
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  the present is Prasa. Wait, Philo calls God sustaining
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  work purposeless. How does a Jewish philosopher
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  justify that? You have to view it through the
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  lens of Hellenistic thought, which heavily influenced Philo.
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  He viewed the initial creation of matter as the grand,
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  purposeful design, the poem. The masterpiece.
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  Right, but the ongoing mechanical turning of the
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  universe, the daily rising and setting of the sun, the turning
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  of the seasons, he viewed as mere operational process.
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  Prasa. The fact that Philo applies this
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  word to the mechanical turning of the cosmos shows how so tied
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  the word had become to mundane, endless process rather than
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  glorious creation. Exactly.
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  It is just the turning of the gears.
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  Which brings us to the New Testament, where the linguistic
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  line in the sand is drawn in permanent ink.
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  Permanent ink. The authors of the New Testament
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  look at this word, with all its baggage of extortion, magic and
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  aimless striving, and they make a staggering theological
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  declaration. A.
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  Huge one. In the New Testament, God never
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  acts using the word process. Not a single time.
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  Wow. Out of 39 occurrences in the New
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  Testament texts, the word is exclusively universally reserved
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  for human action. The word is stripped entirely
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  from the divine vocabulary. And the statistical weight of
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  how it is used for humans is heavy.
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  Over 2/3 of those 39 uses carry a severe negative judgement.
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  So it is almost always bad news. Positive or neutral uses are
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  exceedingly rare. You have Acts 2620 where Paul
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  talks about doing deeds consistent with repentance.
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  OK. That is positive.
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  Or First Thessalonians 411 where he tells the church to mind
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  their own business. But those are the rare
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  exceptions. The primary usage is dark, and
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  nowhere is this clearer than in the writings of the Apostle
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  John. John loves his contrast, right?
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  Light and dark. Yes, and the Johannian contrast
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  between Prasha and Poyan is absolute.
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  If you look at John 320 and John 529.
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  John creates a severe dichotomy. What does he say?
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  He writes that people practice evil, and the Greek phrase he
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  chooses is fala prashan. Right is evil.
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  But when he talks about righteousness, he says that
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  people do the truth. Poyen, Alephian.
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  He intentionally forces 2 completely different verbs into
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  the text to separate evil and truth.
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  He really does. Let's go back to our artist
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  analogy. It is the difference between an
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  artist forging A masterpiece, bringing truth and beauty into
• 17:55
  reality, and a criminal cranking out cheap counterfeits in a
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  sweatshop. That is a great image.
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  The sweatshop worker is busy, the machinery is loud, the brush
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  is intense, but nothing of actual value is being created.
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  Just noise and friction. Why does John refuse to give
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  evil the dignity of the word poyen?
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  Because in the biblical framework, evil does not create
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  anything. It has no ontological substance
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  of its own. It is a parasite, yes.
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  It is a sterile, repetitive, aimless activity that only
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  consumes what is already good. Wow.
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  Truth, however, has a divine origin.
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  Truth creates A lasting, eternal result.
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  Doing the truth, Poyen is participating in the creative
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  reality of God. While practicing evil Prossu is
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  just the empty grinding friction of human rebellion.
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  It produces nothing but weariness.
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  Which brings us to the Apostle Paul and the theological climax
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  of this entire linguistic study. Paul's use of these words is
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  brilliant. His precision with these two
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  verbs in the book of Romans is breathtaking.
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  He wields these words like a surgeon using a scalpel to
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  dissect the human condition. We really need to do a close
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  reading of Romans chapters 1-2 and seven.
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  Let's do it, because the progression of Paul's grammar
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  tells the entire story of human depravity.
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  The art know was chapter 1. In Romans 132, Paul is
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  describing the mass of Pagan humanity.
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  He paints A terrifying picture of a society rotting in a
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  general swamp, of vices given over to their own desires.
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  And the word he uses for their activity is prasantes.
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  They're just wallowing in the swamp.
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  It is the unthinking, blind condition of a fallen humanity.
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  They are incredibly busy inventing new ways to sin, but
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  their busyness is just the automatic grinding mechanism of
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  their corruption. They are slaves to the process.
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  And Paul pivots in Romans too. Right.
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  He turns his attention. In the first 3 verses of chapter
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  2, he turns his attention away from the Pagan swamp and points
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  his finger at those who possess the law of God and judge others.
• 19:52
  The religious elite. The Moralists.
• 19:55
  And the moment he addresses the moralist, he switches verbs.
• 19:58
  He drops Pressy. He uses point to describe their
• 20:01
  sin. Let's pause here, because this
• 20:03
  is crucial. If point usually means creation
• 20:06
  or bringing about a definitive result, why does Paul use it for
• 20:09
  the sin of the religious moralists?
• 20:12
  Because the encounter with the divine law changes the very
• 20:15
  nature of the human action. How so?
• 20:17
  The general unthinking Pagan condition is proxy.
• 20:20
  It is blind, flailing in the dark right?
• 20:23
  But when you possess the law, when you know the specific
• 20:26
  demands of God's holiness, and you actively choose to judge
• 20:30
  others while doing the very same things yourself, your sin is no
• 20:33
  longer blind. It becomes deliberate, knowing
• 20:36
  rebellion. You are actively constructing an
• 20:39
  offence against the Creator. The law gives sin a sharp edge.
• 20:43
  Exactly. The moralist is taking the raw
• 20:45
  material of their depravity and intentionally forging a weapon
• 20:49
  with it. That terrifying reality sets up
• 20:52
  the agonizing internal war of Romans Chapter 7.
• 20:55
  It really does this. Is one of the most famous
• 20:57
  visceral passages in all of ancient literature.
• 21:00
  Paul writes in Romans 7:15 and 7:19 about a brutal
• 21:04
  psychological and spiritual struggle.
• 21:06
  He says that he does the evil he hates, and he fails to perform
• 21:09
  the good he wills. And if you look at the Greek
• 21:12
  vocabulary Paul chooses to describe this agony, the depth
• 21:16
  of his despair becomes crystalline.
• 21:18
  Walk us through it. He says he does cross the evil
• 21:21
  he hates, but he fails to perform pointly the good he
• 21:24
  wills. Let's bring back the artist
• 21:26
  metaphor because it explains Paul's agony perfectly.
• 21:29
  OK, Paul has the image of the masterpiece in his head.
• 21:32
  The law of God has shown him what the beautiful finished
• 21:34
  painting of righteousness looks like.
• 21:36
  Right, he knows what it's supposed to be.
• 21:38
  He wants to paint it, He wills to point the good, but his hands
• 21:42
  are. Broken.
• 21:43
  Completely broken. When he steps up to the canvas,
• 21:46
  his hands frantically mix the wrong colors, wash the brushes
• 21:50
  in muddy water, and violently scrub dirt onto the canvas.
• 21:53
  He is trapped in the Prasho. He uses Prasho for the stupid
• 21:57
  enslaved doing of evil. Without any purposeful
• 22:00
  fulfillment, he cannot stop the grinding machinery of his flesh.
• 22:04
  But when he wants to accomplish actual lasting good, he uses the
• 22:08
  sharper word poyan and. Admits he utterly fails to
• 22:11
  achieve it. This is the definitive rebuttal
• 22:14
  to the Stoic philosophers we analyzed earlier.
• 22:17
  Oh, right, Epictetus. Remember, Epictetus and the
• 22:20
  Stoics claimed humans just needed better information.
• 22:24
  If you educate the mind, the will and the actions align.
• 22:27
  Sin is just a lack of data. Paul uses the exact same Greek
• 22:31
  vocabulary of the philosophers to argue the absolute opposite.
• 22:34
  Our will is entirely fractured from our actions.
• 22:36
  The autonomous human will is completely broken.
• 22:39
  Education is insufficient. Paul knows what is good.
• 22:43
  He has the ultimate education. He possesses the divine law.
• 22:46
  But his knowledge cannot produce the Poyane of the good.
• 22:50
  He is a slave to the proseus of the flesh.
• 22:53
  His actions are bound. The theological weight of that
• 22:56
  is staggering. It means humanity, left to its
• 22:59
  own devices, is trapped in an endless loop of aimless
• 23:02
  striving. We cannot create our own
• 23:04
  righteousness. We can only spin our wheels in
• 23:06
  the mud. And that spinning of wheels does
• 23:09
  not just stay in the realm of abstract theology.
• 23:12
  It manifests in very specific destructive ways in daily life.
• 23:16
  Tell me more about. That if we look at the noun and
• 23:18
  compound verb cognates of prossu in the New Testament, we see a
• 23:21
  whole family tree of manipulation and extortion.
• 23:25
  Let's walk through this family tree of busyness because the
• 23:27
  sources give us four major cognates to examine.
• 23:30
  The first is Pragma Tuami. Meaning what?
• 23:33
  This means doing business, trading, or trying to make a
• 23:36
  profit. Jesus uses it in the parable of
• 23:39
  the 10 minus in Luke 1913, where the nobleman hands out money and
• 23:44
  tells his servants to do business until he returns.
• 23:49
  Is the language of commerce and transaction.
• 23:51
  Then we have the noun Proctor. Proctor.
• 23:53
  This is the bailiff or the exactor in charge of the debtors
• 23:56
  prison. Oh, that sounds ominous.
• 23:58
  It is in Luke 1258. Jesus tells a sobering parable
• 24:02
  urging people to settle with their accusers on the way to
• 24:05
  court. Or else.
• 24:06
  Why? Because if you do not, you will
• 24:08
  be dragged to the judge, handed over to the Proctor, and thrown
• 24:11
  into prison until you pay the last penny.
• 24:14
  The practer is the mechanism of legal extortion.
• 24:17
  The third cognate is praxis. Like the word practice, right?
• 24:20
  We see this vividly in Acts 1918 during the burning of the magic
• 24:23
  books in Ephesus. People who had practiced magic
• 24:26
  arts. The ancient attempts to extort
• 24:28
  the spiritual realm. Right.
• 24:30
  They brought their scrolls and burned them in public, ending
• 24:33
  the victory of Jesus's name over the ancient spiritual extortion
• 24:37
  of magic. Paul also uses praxis in Romans
• 24:40
  813 and Colossians 39 to describe the evil practices of
• 24:44
  the flesh that must be put to death.
• 24:46
  And finally we have pragma. Where does that show up?
• 24:50
  This is found in First Thessalonians 46, where Paul
• 24:53
  warns believers not to transgress and wrong a brother
• 24:56
  in this pragma. The context of this verse is
• 24:59
  debated by scholars, isn't it? It is, but the sources breakdown
• 25:02
  3 interpretive options. It could refer to business
• 25:05
  fraud, it could mean engaging in malicious lawsuits, or it could
• 25:10
  be a euphemism for sexual transgression.
• 25:14
  Sources show that the context of overstepping boundaries and
• 25:16
  taking advantage of a brother, combined with the surrounding
• 25:19
  verses about holiness points strongly to it being a euphemism
• 25:23
  for breaking the boundaries of a brother's marriage.
• 25:25
  If it's the pattern. So look at this family tree.
• 25:28
  What do a tax bailiff, an Ephesian sorcerer, and a
• 25:31
  fraudster have in common? They are all manipulating the
• 25:34
  system, the root concept we discussed at the very beginning.
• 25:38
  Pressing through or crossing a boundary perfectly links all of
• 25:41
  these destructive behaviors. Break that down.
• 25:43
  The Proctor is exacting a financial toll, throwing you in
• 25:47
  a cage until he squeezes every coin out of you.
• 25:50
  The sorcerer is engaged in praxis, attempting to cross a
• 25:54
  boundary to extort the spiritual realm, forcing unseen forces to
• 25:59
  do their bidding. And the person committing fraud
• 26:01
  or sexual transgression, the pragma is crossing moral and
• 26:05
  relational boundaries to take what does not belong to them.
• 26:08
  It is the ultimate expression of human striving, completely
• 26:11
  divorced from the creator's design.
• 26:13
  It is fallen humanity trying to force the universe to yield to
• 26:17
  its desires through extortion of magic and theft.
• 26:20
  We are trapped in the prasso trying to manipulate our way to
• 26:23
  fulfillment. Which brings us to the final
• 26:25
  brilliant contrast in the New New Testament usage of this
• 26:28
  word. Where do we see it?
• 26:29
  We see it deployed in the legal declarations of innocence for
• 26:32
  both the apostles and Christ himself.
• 26:34
  This is where the historical precision of Luke, the author of
• 26:37
  the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts truly shines.
• 26:40
  In the book of Acts, the Apostle Paul is on trial.
• 26:43
  He has been dragged through the mud, falsely accused by the
• 26:45
  religious leaders, beaten and hauled before Roman authorities.
• 26:49
  Finally, he stands before the Roman governor Festus and the
• 26:52
  Jewish king Agrippa. And Festus makes a formal legal
• 26:55
  declaration. He says in Acts 2631 that Paul
• 26:59
  has done Prasay nothing worthy of death or chains.
• 27:03
  Nothing worthy of death. Luke intentionally parallels
• 27:06
  this scene with the trial of Jesus.
• 27:08
  If you read Luke 23, Pilate is evaluating the accusations
• 27:12
  brought by the Sanhedrin against Jesus.
• 27:14
  And Pilate makes a nearly identical legal declaration to
• 27:17
  the crowds. He says he finds no guilt in him
• 27:20
  regarding the things they accuse him of.
• 27:21
  And that nothing worthy of death has been done per Pragmanon, the
• 27:25
  passive form of Prasay by him. Both the Roman state and the
• 27:28
  Jewish kings are evaluating the process of the accused.
• 27:32
  They're. Looking at the rap sheet, they
• 27:34
  are auditing the Ledger of their human actions.
• 27:36
  The divine irony here is thick. Look at the context.
• 27:39
  The authorities pilot Festus Agrippa, the high priests.
• 27:44
  They are frantically engaged in their legal machinations.
• 27:46
  They are drowning in their own political process.
• 27:49
  They are scheming, questioning witnesses, extorting the crowds,
• 27:53
  trying to find a human reason, a legal justification to execute
• 27:56
  these men. Yet amidst all of this corrupt,
• 27:59
  frantic human busyness, both Jesus and Paul are declared
• 28:03
  completely innocent of any capital process.
• 28:06
  The human system audits them and finds the Ledger blank.
• 28:10
  But we have to make a crucial distinction even here, because
• 28:13
  Paul and Jesus are not the same, right?
• 28:15
  Paul freely admits his own past guilt.
• 28:17
  He stands before Gripa in Acts 26 nine and confesses that he
• 28:21
  used to do pratting many things against the name of Jesus of
• 28:25
  Nazareth. Paul knows he is a Sinner.
• 28:27
  He knows his own will was fractured and his hands were
• 28:29
  stained with the blood of the early church.
• 28:31
  His innocence before the Roman court regarding treason is
• 28:35
  entirely distinct from Jesus's absolute perfect innocence
• 28:38
  before heaven and earth. Absolutely.
• 28:40
  Why does Luke rely on corrupt witnesses like Pontius Pilate or
• 28:44
  Dying Thief on a Cross to declare this innocent?
• 28:47
  It is a deliberate choice, the. Thief on the cross next to Jesus
• 28:49
  says we are receiving what our deaves deserve, but this man has
• 28:53
  done nothing wrong. He uses a different Greek word
• 28:56
  for done, but the conceptual reality is identical.
• 29:00
  Why highlight these deeply flawed testimonies?
• 29:03
  Because it proves that human computation and human legal
• 29:06
  processes simply cannot handle the reality of what is happening
• 29:09
  on the cross. The human system oppressive the
• 29:12
  course, the evidence, the ledgers of right and wrong, is
• 29:15
  entirely inadequate to judge the divine reality standing before
• 29:19
  it. The innocent suffers for the
• 29:20
  guilty, dictated by a divine necessity that operates
• 29:23
  completely outside of human doing.
• 29:25
  God's redemptive work is not a product of human proxy.
• 29:28
  It's averted entirely. Human action demands that the
• 29:31
  guilty pay. Divine grace demands that the
• 29:33
  innocent substitute himself for the guilty.
• 29:36
  This has been a massive linguistic evolution.
• 29:38
  We started with ancient Greek sailors pressing through the
• 29:41
  waves, crossing a raging ocean to reach a far shore.
• 29:43
  We watched the word devolve over centuries, losing its
• 29:47
  destination and becoming obsessed with the intensity of
• 29:49
  the grind. We saw it morph into the
• 29:51
  technical term for tax collection, bureaucratic
• 29:54
  extortion and secret political treason.
• 29:57
  We saw how the ancient Greeks intuitively knew their gods did
• 30:00
  not engage in this kind of frantic busyness, guarding the
• 30:04
  word and reserving it only for humans.
• 30:06
  We saw the Jewish scholars who translated the Hebrew Scriptures
• 30:09
  recoil from it, using it almost exclusively to describe the
• 30:13
  foolish, the wicked, and the adulterous.
• 30:15
  We watched the Apostle John use it to describe the sterile,
• 30:19
  aimless practice of evil, contrasting it with the lasting
• 30:22
  divine creation of doing the truth.
• 30:24
  We felt the sheer agony of Paul in Romans 7, trapped in the
• 30:28
  mechanical process of his fallen flesh, desperately wanting to
• 30:31
  paint the masterpiece of the law, but unable to create the
• 30:34
  good he willed. And finally we saw the frantic,
• 30:37
  manipulating prasa of human courts utterly failed to compute
• 30:40
  the perfect, finished redemptive work of Christ.
• 30:44
  If the Greek text strictly reserves the purposeful,
• 30:47
  creative finishing work point for God and leaves humanity with
• 30:51
  Prasa are endless, restless, often misguided striving, how
• 30:55
  might you look at your own daily calendar differently?
• 30:57
  That is the real question, isn't it?
• 30:59
  When you look at your schedule tomorrow, are you exhausting
• 31:02
  yourself in the endless loop of Prasha frantically trying to
• 31:06
  extort value, meaning and righteousness out of a broken
• 31:09
  system? Or are you resting in the
• 31:11
  finished, purposeful work of the Creator who accomplishes what
• 31:14
  our fractured wheels never could?
• 31:16
  Thank you for joining us for this deep dive.