This week marks the halfway point through the alphabet. After this post, I’ll give you a week off Jesus Slang so you can consolidate your vocabulary learning.

K: Kingdom

Christianity is not a democracy. It’s a monarchy with a King, namely God.

So if you flick open The Bible, you’ll read phrases like Kingdom of God, Kingdom of Heaven, Prince of Peace (referring to Jesus) and Kingdom of Priests (that’s Christians). The whole royalty thing is in The Bible pretty clearly.

Not surprisingly there is another Kingdom at war with the Kingdom of Heaven. This Kingdom is headed up by the devil, also known as ‘The prince of this world’: which is as about as politely as The Bible can put it.

Often these two kingdoms are portrayed as being complete opposites. One such example is ‘The Kingdom of Light’ and ‘The Kingdom of Darkness’. The devil is quite obviously the one in the kingdom in the darkness from the Bible’s perspective and the whole biblengod story is telling you to get away from its ruler.

L: Levite

Levite is a tribal name for the descendants of Levi (one of Jacob’s sons).

The Levites were a holy tribe because they were set apart for the particular purpose of being priests. The priests worked in the temple and the book of Leviticus gives a whole bunch of instructions as to what the priests were to do in their role. They also had special clothes they were supposed to wear on the job, effectively a uniform. This included a breast-piece, a robe, a woven tunic, turban and sash. As well as this they wore an ephod made out of linen, which looked like an apron but with serious bling.

Fair enough that they were wearing an apron too, as just like many other ancient religions, there were numerous animal sacrifices in the ancient Jewish temple. These animal sacrifices along with a whole bunch of other Old Testament laws are no longer a part of Christianity today.

M: Minister

This is definitely a word that gets bandied about in conversations surrounding both the Old and New Testaments. For example, you could say that the priests ministered in the temple. That would be more of an Old Testament chat. Alternatively you could talk about your local Church’s minister (aka reverend). That would be more of a New Testament style chat.

The word minister is obviously an English word but the biblical meaning for the term comes from a Greek word that means a servant (or even a slave). So that’s what your local reverend has signed themselves up for: being your servant.

However, it’s not just the local reverend who is a minister to the members of the Church. The members themselves are supposed to be ministers or servants of one another. The Church is supposed to be a place where everyone is seeing how they can be someone else’s servant (if we’re all doing it, it’ll be great, right?).

Quite obviously it is horrific when anyone in the Church stops slaving away to serve people and instead enslaves the people there with them, which can happen in a variety of ways. Evidently they need to read this A – Z of Jesus Slang post because they don’t understand the word yet.

But now you do.

Yours in your service,

Alison