Verse of the Week - Colossians 3:8- Week of May 3, 2015

"Letting it all hang out" is easy to do. Being angry, wrathful, or deliberately hurtful requires no self-control. Self-control becomes involved when you and I begin trying to live as Jesus wants us too. Replacing, or putting off, the the behaviors listed in Colossians 3:8 isn't easy. However, it can be done if you have a genuine desire to follow in Jesus' footsteps. Most of the terms in this verse are familiar to me, but I decided to look up the definitions of malice and blasphemy to make sure I understood them correctly.

Malice is defined as - a desire to cause harm to another person. Ill will, vindictiveness and revenge are all synonyms for malice. Okay, I do know what malice is. Next, I looked up blasphemy in the dictionary and it was defined as:

Blasphemy- the act or offense of speaking sacrilegiously about God or sacred things; profane  

Original Greek  blasphémia (blas-fay-me'-ah)

After reading the short definition, I decided to look up the original Greek word using the "Interlinear English to Hebrew/Greek" tool at www.biblehub.com. Interestingly, the original Greek shows a different meaning for blasphemy than the one I am most familiar with.

NOTE: The bolded phrases are my addition to emphasize the information that was new to me.

HELPS Word-studies 

Cognate: 988 blasphēmía (from blax, "sluggish/slow," and 5345 /phḗmē, "reputation, fame") – blasphemy – literally, slow (sluggish) to call something good (that really is good) – and slow to identify what is truly bad (that really is evil).
Blasphemy (988 /blasphēmía) "switches" right for wrong (wrong for right), i.e. calls what God disapproves, "right" which "exchanges the truth of God for a lie" (Ro 1:25). 

Matthew Henry also considered blasphemy as not just speaking ill of God. Here is what he wrote in his commentary:

... as blasphemy, which seems there to mean, not so much speaking ill of God as speaking ill of men, giving ill language to them, or raising ill reports of them, and injuring their good name by any evil arts,—filthy communication, that is, all lewd and wanton discourse, which comes from a polluted mind in the speaker and propagates the same defilement in the hearers,

What do you think? I am going to think about this new information for awhile.