Word Pictures in the New Testament - David Cox

Word Pictures in the NT [Matthew: Chapter 6].
obey mammon while pretending to obey God. The United States has
had a terrible revelation of the power of the money-god in public
life in the Sinclair-Fall-Teapot-Air-Dome-Oil case. When the
guide is blind and leads the blind, both fall into the ditch. The
man who cannot tell road from ditch sees falsely as Ruskin shows
in _Modern Painters_. He will hold to one (\henos anthexetai\).
The word means to line up face to face (\anti\) with one man and
so against the other.
6:25 {Be not anxious for your life} (\m• merimnate t•i psuch•i
h–m•n\). This is as good a translation as the Authorized Version
was poor; "Take no thought for your life." The old English word
"thought" meant anxiety or worry as Shakespeare says:
"The native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale
cast of thought."
Vincent quotes Bacon (Henry VII): "Harris, an alderman of London,
was put in trouble and died with thought and anguish." But words
change with time and now this passage is actually quoted
(Lightfoot) "as an objection to the moral teaching of the Sermon
on the Mount, on the ground that it encouraged, nay, commanded, a
reckless neglect of the future." We have narrowed the word to
mere planning without any notion of anxiety which is in the Greek
word. The verb \merimna•\ is from \meris, meriz•\, because care
or anxiety distracts and divides. It occurs in Christ's rebuke to
Martha for her excessive solicitude about something to eat (Lu
10:41). The notion of proper care and forethought appears in
1Co 7:32; 12:25; Php 2:20. It is here the present imperative
with the negative, a command not to have the habit of petulant
worry about food and clothing, a source of anxiety to many
housewives, a word for women especially as the command not to
worship mammon may be called a word for men. The command can mean
that they must stop such worry if already indulging in it. In
verse 31 Jesus repeats the prohibition with the ingressive
aorist subjunctive: "Do not become anxious," "Do not grow
anxious." Here the direct question with the deliberative
subjunctive occurs with each verb (\phag•men, pi•men,
peribal•metha\). This deliberative subjunctive of the direct
question is retained in the indirect question employed in verse
25. A different verb for clothing occurs, both in the indirect
middle (\peribal•metha\, fling round ourselves in 31,
\endus•sthe\, put on yourselves in 25).
http://www.ccel.org/r/robertson_at/wordpictures/htm/MT6.RWP.html (7 of 9) [28/08/2004 09:03:00 a.m.]