What if you were responsible for translating God's Word into a language that never had a Bible before? Can you imagine the burden you would feel to do a good job?
God takes His Word pretty seriously, and you would certainly do everything in your power to make sure that you were not putting words into God's mouth, but that you were providing a text that clearly communicated God's Word as closely to the original as possible.
This challenge to understand the heart of the original Scriptures, in order to put the original text into a new language, was the impetus for the United Bible Societies to create handbooks for Bible translators working on this very thing. The United Bible Societies' Handbook Series is a comprehensive verse-by-verse guide to understanding exactly what is being communicated by the author in the original Scriptures.
“The phrase living hope is a way of describing hope which is characterized by firmness, by certainty, by an expectancy which is surely grounded in God himself and in his promises, a hope which is able to survive the various trials which Christians, especially Peter’s readers, experience. Other ways of expressing the same idea are ‘full of hope’ (Phps); ‘sure hope’ (JB).” (Page 16)
“Because of his great mercy. Mercy here is not simply ‘pity,’ but ‘compassion’, love which is both undeserved by the recipient and which is given expecting nothing in return. In other words, what God does for people is not due to the fact that they deserve to be loved or that they can repay God for his love; it is due to God’s kindness, his care, his compassionate love.” (Page 14)
“It is worth noting that the same term used for Jews is now used to refer to Christians, which means that God has chosen the Christians individually and the church collectively as the new Israel, that is, the new people of God. This is made much clearer in chapter 2, especially verses 9, 10.” (Page 8)
“God has made himself known primarily through Jesus Christ, and the Christian cannot think of God apart from his Son” (Page 14)
“But the two verbs together denote complete control of oneself, resulting in calmness, sobriety, self-control, sensibleness, steadiness.” (Page 138)