What do the following people have in common?

• Jean-Luc Picard
• Yahya Sinwar
• Don Giovanni
• Jannik Sinner
• Ivan the Terrible
• The Jonas Brothers
• Evan Wyant from middle school

Answer? They all have the same name.

Look again. They all bear variations of the Hebrew name יוֹחָנָן‎ (yochanan)—in English, our common “John.”

Multiple times in my life, I have suddenly realized that a foreign name with which I was familiar was actually just their version of John. Yochanan in Hebrew ultimately became Juan in Spanish, Ian in Scottish, and João in Portuguese.¹

To make matters more complicated and therefore more fun, some versions of John became so common in given places that they spilled over into nearby languages thatalready had their own version of John. Shane is an Anglicized version of the Irish Sean, which is their version of John.²

In the original Hebrew, yochanan meant “God has been gracious.” The name of the female character Hannah, the mother of Samuel, is still baked into the Hebrew name for John. You just tack a version of Yahweh on the front of Hannah, and you get John (not so incidentally, that stray H in there, a letter we don’t pronounce, is left over from the Hebrew like a vestigial organ).

The closest any modern language gets to yochanan is German—presumably following an earlier Latin form—with its Johannes. It is from this form that Hans is derived.³

Should James be Jacob?

This linguistic situation is utterly fascinating to me.

And totally unacceptable to a lot of people. I don’t mean they refuse to call people John or any of its equivalents. No, they don’t know or care about John. He can take a hike from Lithuania to Wales, for all they care.

What gets their linguistic dander up is James. They say—they insist—that James should be Jacob. This is because (and this is true) the English name James began its life as the Hebrew word יַעֲקֹב (yaaqov), what we know as Jacob. This name is introduced to us as some kind of pun in Genesis 25:26. Jacob was named after the “heel” (Hebrew עָקֵב) of Esau that he grabbed onto on his way into this world. To call James “James” is to obscure his all-important connection to the patriarch, many now say.

In my experience, most of those pushing for the book of James to be the book of Jacob in our New Testaments are not careful to articulate a consistent rationale for their preference for Hebrew forms over English ones. These folks are also often shrill, I must say, and conspiratorial.

But I did find one biblical scholar who argued that using James obscures a connection between the Old and New Testaments and diminishes the Jewishness of the latter. Those seem to me arguments worth considering.

I have buried the lede under multiple languages here, but I’ve done it for a good purpose. I’m trying to get past some pretty watchful dragons. I’m trying to make a point I don’t see anyone else making. It’s this: Pushing the way Christians talk and write back towards Hebrew is as linguistically impossible as it is theologically undesirable.

Linguistically impossible

You simply cannot be consistent with retrieving Hebrew sounds and forms, for several reasons.

1. You will fail

One is that you’ll never get it right. Your ancient Hebrew accent is horrible, you American. And our knowledge of how ancient Hebrew was pronounced is fragmentary. Surely there were regional dialects in which their version of Jacob was pronounced at least a little differently. (Today, John sounds a bit different depending on whether it is spoken in Michigan, Minnesota, or Manchester.) And don’t forget the Old Testament story in which dialectal variation led to the death of forty-two thousand Ephraimites (Judg 12:1–7)—and to our English word shibboleth, which we (ironically!) have our own way of pronouncing!

2. You will not satisfy the ones who care

Another reason is that you’ll never translate/transliterate often enough to satisfy some people. What is the logical end of insisting that James is really Jacob, that Jesus is really Yeshua, that the LORD is really Yahweh, that peace is really shalom, that Sabbath is really Shabbat, that slander is really lashon hara? It’s just going all the way and speaking biblical Hebrew instead of English. But if we’re allowed to say any religious words in good auld English, why not all of them?

James is the product of exactly the kind of linguistic evolution we see with John. Language changes over time, and in the mealy mouths of the medieval French, the -cob- in the middle of Latin Iacobus ended up becoming the letter M.⁴ Then the French conquered England (which this Anglophile would rather not talk about), and now we English speakers say, “James.” A combination of human physiology and historical contingency gave us the linguistic situation we have—just like it did with literally all of our words and all of our grammar. Nobody speaks proto-Indo European anymore.

Admittedly, the patriarch Jacob is still “Jacob” in English, not “James”—but this, too, is just the way the baguette crumbles. Spanish, too, has multiple versions of this name: from Iago (and Santiago, “Saint James”) to Diego to Jaime and Jacobo. Going around telling native speakers U R SAYING IT WRONG is generally not considered polite. A footnote and an occasional preaching point may be all we need.

Study Scripture in its original languages with your free trial of Logos

3. You won’t promote biblical understanding or unity

And efforts to move wholesale from “James” to “Jacob” won’t be effective, or so I believe.⁵ You’ll get a tiny tribe of people to agree with you, and to start a thousand unnecessary fights online with other bemused or bewildered Christians. A certain cast of mind loves to find out hidden truths others don’t know, especially if shady, malign forces can be blamed (antisemitism! Tradition!) for the truths’ hiddenness. But you won’t alter the course of the massive USS English Language, let alone the HMS and Kenyan and Australian versions of the same basic ship.

The New Testament authors had the definitive chance to show the Greeks the right way to pronounce the true names of God, or of Jesus, or of James.⁶ Instead, the NT writers used the forms available to them in Koine Greek, and they incorporated the natural sound changes that have ultimately put a -zuh- and not a -shwuh- in the middle of the English name of Jesus. Standard Koine Greek didn’t have a zh- or sh- letter like Hebrew, so it used its closest equivalent, basically our letter S. This is what all languages do: They Anglicize, Gallicize, Russianize, Turkify, Urdunate.⁷ And somehow, people from all these nations manage to worship the one true God, and his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. They’re not all saying it wrong.

A few months ago, I got one intelligent answer to my basic argument here: “Well,” said a YouTube commenter, “The New Testament authors were constrained by their audience, which expected forms akin to that of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.”

Here’s my reply: This attributes complex motives to the New Testament authors that we cannot verify. And aren’t we in a similar situation? “Jesus” is very well established in contemporary English. “James” is, too. As is “the LORD” and “Sabbath” and countless other standard transliterations/translations of Hebrew words. Why can’t we do what the NT authors did and use the language around us as it currently stands?

Theologically undesirable

I hate antisemitism, I do. My wife is part Jewish. Recovering the Jewishness of Jesus and Paul—and the neat connection between James the New Testament writer and Jacob the patriarch—is a good thing and not a bad thing. But I don’t think making people talk differently is the way to execute this recovery. I think insisting on replacing English words/names with Hebrew ones actually cheapens that effort by reaching for a theologically undesirable expedient.

Many Christians have tried to baptize or sacralize a particular language as the truly righteous or divine one, the tongue of Adam or of angels. This appears to be a natural human tendency. Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and English have all been candidates over the centuries. Literally yesterday, someone insisted to me that God inspired the Elizabethan English of the King James Bible because he knew that English would become the lingua franca of the modern world. But the mere fact that our term for “widely used interlanguage” once meant “language of the French”⁸ ought to remind us that languages rise and fall with the empires to which they’re attached. Latin had a huge influence because the Roman empire was so powerful—but even Rome did not remain top canus. God doesn’t have a favorite language. He didn’t pick one to be the one tongue to rule them all.

One of the reasons God chose Abraham in the first place was so that he might bless “all the families of the earth” (Gen 12:3). If he has a favorite family, and for his own loving reasons he does (Deut 7:6–8), it’s the Jews. But even that fact doesn’t cause their language to be holy. The Lord didn’t chide the Jews for losing Hebrew as their daily language while they were exiles in Babylon. He didn’t ask Nehemiah or Ezra to re-establish Hebrew upon their return to the land. He didn’t inspire the New Testament writers to write Hebrew. The Bible is multilingual, and so is God. More than anyone else in the history of the universe.

God can speak your language. However you say James or Jesus or Jehovah in your language, keep on truckin’. God hears and understands.

I’m not tossing charges of racism around here: I’m not saying that defenders of Hebrew are philosemitic to some kind of ultranationalist degree. That’s not the feel I get. (I’ll say the same of defenders of Latin and Greek.) It’s a religious thing: It’s the impulse that led one old immigrant to argue that her Swedish Baptist church in the US should not move to English. She objected: “You never heard of anyone being converted in English!” Or maybe it’s the magical/superstitious view that to have the “real name” of something is to have some kind of control over or access to it.

I am not unwilling to learn a religious patois, if that’s what God demands. I am a native speaker of American evangelical Protestant lingo. But aside possibly from some technical terms like “church” and “elder,” which gain their meaning from the nexus of meaning created by Christ when he founded the church, God has not asked us to learn a special religious way of talking. And Tyndale’s plowboy lives at the center of my heart. If he comes into our assemblies and hears weirdo language, he’s going to think we’re crazy (1 Cor 14:23–25).

I admit that I wouldn’t complain too much if “Jacob” ultimately replaced “James.” That’s not the point for me. And I acknowledge that some amount of usage policing seems to be a natural part of the way humans interact with language. I’m doing it myself in this piece, even by defending the English status quo. But there is a fine line between advocating for a linguistic standard and engaging in ideological language engineering. I fear the latter—though from good-hearted people!—is driving the Hebraization campaign I see slowly growing in force online.

Take it from Teacher Marcus Meadow Guard Youth.

Related content

• How to Use Linguistics to Understand the Bible
• Original Language Research: What to Do, What Not to Do
• Pastor, Are You Making These Common Lexical Mistakes?
• What Are the Best Hebrew & Aramaic Lexicons? Your Ultimate Guide
• Why Was “Saul” Changed to “Paul”?

Mark Ward’s suggested resources for further study

Exegetical Fallacies, 2nd ed.

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Biblical Words and Their Meaning, 2nd ed.

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Semantics of Biblical Language

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Linguistics & Biblical Exegesis (Lexham Methods Series)

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What is God’s name? God answers in Isaiah 42:8:

I am the LORD; that is my name;
my glory I give to no other;
nor my praise to carved idols.

But what kind of name is “the LORD,” and why do most modern English Bible spell it in all caps?

The answer is, like many important things in Scripture, complex but worth knowing (though not worth obsessing over.) We’ll travel through biblical Hebrew and back again to find answers. We’ll encounter both sensitive controversies and fundamental mysteries.

We’ll also meet some other “names of God” that don’t perhaps rise to the level of “the LORD.”

Let me propose three questions that will structure our inquiry here:

1. What is the meaning & significance of the Tetragrammaton, YHWH?
2. What are the names of God & their meanings?
3. So what?

1. What is the meaning & significance of the Tetragrammaton, YHWH?

Very simply: “the LORD” (all caps) is a translation of the Hebrew word יהוה (Yahweh). This is distinguished from “the Lord” (without small caps), which translates a different Hebrew word: אָדוֹן (adonai), meaning “lord” or “master.”

Most people today, for reasons I will explain, pronounce Yahweh as “YAH-way.” But the structure of Hebrew makes it possible to write the language without vowels, and the only letters we are certain of in the word are actually the four consonants: YHWH. So we don’t actually know how it was originally pronounced.

This four-consonant spelling of the name of God is called the Tetragrammaton, which means “four letters” (Greek tetra-, “four”; grammaton, “letter”). The Tetragrammaton does appear in some manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible.

Words mean what native speakers use them to mean. And Yahweh is no exception. Were you to use the Logos Bible Word Study to survey all the places in the Hebrew Bible where this word occurs, it would take you some time to work through them, as it appears nearly seven thousand times. But you would find that Yahweh is simply the name for God.

Names have etymological meanings, so we might wonder what Yahweh means. But when does your name ever mean its etymological roots? My name is Mark. It technically means (meant?) “warlike” and is connected to Mars, the Roman god of war, but I have never heard any native speaker of English use my name to communicate anything about war or warlikeness.

When people use our names, what they mean is us. No deeper meaning need be sought. Similarly, in most instances it appears, I think Yahweh is just God’s name. It doesn’t bear any deeper meaning.

Choosing at random, here’s a verse from the Hebrew Bible that uses the word Yahweh:

Jethro, the priest of Midian, Moses’ father-in-law, heard of all that God had done for Moses and for Israel his people, how the LORD had brought Israel out of Egypt. (Exod 18:1)

What I find interesting about this verse is that “God” (אֱלֹהִים, elohim) and “the LORD” are used interchangeably—in almost poetic parallelism. Both are used to point to the same referent, the same “object”: the deity of eternal power who created the world, chose Abraham, and made Israel his spouse.

Most of the time, Yahweh simply points to the one true God.

Humor me a little. Read a few other uses of Yahweh (“LORD”) in the Old Testament:

“Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good!” (Ps 34:8)

“Trust in the LORD with all your heart.” (Prov 3:5)

“They who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength.” (Isa 40:31)

“The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer; my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge.” (Ps 18:2)

It’s reading these descriptions of him, along with manifold others in Scripture, that ought to tell you who he is—what Yahweh means. The meaning of the word itself is comparatively less important.

“I am who I am”

But not exactly unimportant. Because the LORD is, by (the Bible’s) definition, a unique being who chose his own name. And his name, the word itself, does reveal something about him.

Our only evidence of the meaning of Yahweh is a key conversation God has with Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3. There God says this, in words you may know (and I’ll bold all words related to YHWH):

Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”

God said to Moses, “I am who I am.”

And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I am has sent me to you.’”

God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.” (Exod 3:13–15 ESV)

The first three instances of “I am” in this passage are forms of the Hebrew word “to be.” Technically, they are “Qal imperfects,” but even if you have no idea what that means, you can run a search in Logos for this precise form of the verb, and you’ll see how it is usually translated. I’ll bold it again:

“I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak.” (Exod 4:12 ESV)

And the Lord commissioned Joshua the son of Nun and said, “Be strong and courageous, for you shall bring the people of Israel into the land that I swore to give them. I will be with you.” (Deut 31:23 ESV)

And the Lord said to him, “But I will be with you, and you shall strike the Midianites as one man.” (Judg 6:16 ESV)

Normally, then, this verb form used in God’s famous “I am who I am” statement to Moses is translated in first-person future tense as “I will be.”⁹

The final bolded words in that Exodus 3 passage above—“the LORD”—translate a proper noun that is clearly based on the Hebrew word for “to be.” Exodus 3 is the key passage telling us what Yahweh means.

This key paragraph in Exodus 3 has occasioned much discussion, of course, but one view on the interplay of these YHWH words is reaching consensus. Let me share a quote on the view before I tell you who said it:

God in his conversation with Moses in Exodus 3 speaks the way he does—“I AM WHO I AM”—in order to attributes divine glory to himself alone. This odd choice of words tells us that God is self-existent and therefore eternal. He is the one who (alone!) gives being and existence to every other creature who has those things. And when he describes himself to Moses, he speaks of himself in ways no one else can share. He claims an eternality that is his alone, in order that he may be honored according to his dignity.

And therefore, immediately after his startling self-description in Exodus 3:13–14, and contrary to Hebrew grammatical usage, he uses in 3:15 the same verb in the first person—but this time as a substantive, a noun: Yahweh, “the LORD.” And he attaches to this noun a verb in the third person: “The LORD … has sent me to you.”

I expanded and clarified and modernized a bit, but these are essentially the words of Reformation-era exegetical superhero John Calvin in his excellent commentaries.¹⁰ This consensus view of the meaning of Yahweh, then, is at least five centuries old. And if you didn’t quite follow all that Calvin said, I urge you to go back through it. Then pick up a good study Bible like the ESV Study Bible or the NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible or—a personal favorite—the NET Bible, and read carefully the notes on Exodus 3:13–15. Then graduate to more commentaries. Then perhaps pick up some systematic theologies that employ Exodus 3 in their discussions of the doctrine of God.

I was able to piece most of this together before I knew any Hebrew. God is clear even in translation that there is a purposeful relationship of meaning between “I AM” and “the LORD.” So though “LORD” mainly refers, it also reminds. Every so often, when you see “the LORD” referring to—naming—the one true God in Scripture, you should remember Exodus 3 and the claim within God’s name to eternal independent self-existence.

Israel in the old covenant and the church in the new is wedded to, chosen by, loved and saved by, a God who does not need us—but who “will be” with us as our God (Jer 11:4; Matt 28:20; Rev 21:3). There is tantalizing mystery and profound truth in the name Yahweh.¹¹

Different Bible translations & YHWH

An academic note, and then a warning: A few Bible translations do transliterate the Tetragrammaton rather than translate it. They mimic the sounds of Hebrew using English letters, using “Yahweh” rather than “the LORD.” The recent Legacy Standard Bible does this, as did the Holman Christian Standard Bible. Here’s a random example from the LSB:

Now it will be that in the last days
The mountain of the house of Yahweh
Will be established as the head of the mountains,
And will be lifted up above the hills,
And the peoples will stream to it. (Mic 4:1)

I like this, but I don’t love it. I respect it, but I don’t prefer it. And here’s my warning: Don’t fall prey to any party spirit (or marketing copy) that says, We have lost the divine name, and the only way to restore it is to use it, both in Bible translation and in our worship—like our group does. We have rescued God’s name from obscurity, and we pity the benighted Christians who have not yet been enlightened by our insight.

I have what I believe to be a nice, knock-down argument against this way of thinking: Jesus could have used the word Yahweh himself, but did not. In the New Testament, he and the apostles consistently translated Yahweh when they quoted the Old Testament rather than transliterating it. They weren’t fussy about its use. Yahweh occurs never in the pages of the Greek New Testament. Instead, we find consistently the word κύριος (kurios), the Greek for “Lord.” If Jesus used “Lord” to speak and refer to his Father, surely it is no sin for us to follow suit.

Jehovah & superstitious treatment of the divine name

And now a bonus warning.

Hebrew experts with a far better feel for the language than my own don’t seem to agree unanimously on which vowels ought to go inside the Tetragrammaton. Yahweh is, again, the most popular educated guess, and it has effectively become an English word among educated Christians. But God let the correct/original/preferred pronunciation of his name be lost to history—so maybe we don’t need to be fussy about it. We certainly don’t need to be superstitious or fractious or bumptious about it.

Bonus bonus warning: Jehovah is a colossal, unrepealable European mistake. It apparently arose when medieval readers (?) of the Hebrew Bible misunderstood the Jewish scribes’ scrupulous custom of interpolating the vowels of adonai into the consonants of yhwh. “Jehovah” has since become, by common usage, one of the ways to pronounce “Yahweh,” so I don’t mind singing at church, “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah.” Let’s not get fussy about something God chose not to reveal with full clarity. But I certainly wouldn’t make “recovery” of this title the linchpin of an Arian revival movement (let the reader understand).

2. What are the names of God & their meanings?

Compared with Yahweh, the other “names” of God in the Bible are less like names and more like titles.

Here are the top ten alternative “names”—or titles, or name-like descriptions—of the God of Scripture, with brief and introductory comments regarding each.

1. God gets used as a name and a title in both testaments. “God” is the most common way the New Testament refers to the one “with whom we have to do” (Heb 4:13 KJV). The word “God” in Hebrew is, fascinatingly, grammatically plural—though it occurs with singular verbs. Anyone working through the study of God’s names has to face the question of whether and how this grammatical oddity might be significant. I have argued that this oddity is not significant, but you may do your own study and choose to differ.
2. Lord God (יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים, Yahweh Elohim) is a way of combining the cosmic and generic creator “God” with the covenantal and personal Yahweh.
3. Likewise, Lord God—this time rendering the Hebrew אֲדֹנָי יְהוִה (Adonai Yahweh)—combines the generic “God” with the recognition of God’s authority in adonai, meaning “lord” or “master.”
4. Lord of Hosts is an archaic way of saying what the Hebrew Yahweh sabaoth really means: “Lord of Armies.” And he is that. He’s Lord of armies of angels, at least. And the “hosts of heaven” we call the stars also fight for Yahweh (see Judg 5:20).
5. The simple word Lord, in Hebrew adonai (which has itself become an English word among Christians who know the praise songs that use it), uses a common title ancient peoples gave to their earthly authorities to ascribe authority to God. Adonai is not used only of God in the Old Testament, but also of mere humans (Gen 42:10).
6. Lord God of Israel links the creator God to a very specific people in real history (Exod 32:37) without limiting his divine authority to that particular group (Gen 12:3).
7. Most High makes clear what any reader of the Bible knows from the very first page (Gen 14:18).
8. Almighty (אֵל שַׁדַּי, El Shaddai; Gen 17:1 and many other passages) is a theological claim if there ever was one, a boast that is not a boast only because it is perfectly true.
9. Holy One of Israel (2 Kgs 19:22 and many other passages) again ties the transcendent God to the very immanent people of God.
10. Master (δεσπότης) is a New Testament way of referring to the divine with a common earthly title, one used for divine (Luke 2:29) and earthly (1 Tim 6:1) holders of it.

I could make this list longer. There are also names specific to the Father, Son, and Spirit (indeed, “Father” and “Son” and “Spirit” are the most important). I will now present a few for the Son and Spirit.

See Logos’s Names of God interactive for a list of names and a bunch of convenient links to more information. Start a free trial!

Names for the Son

• The Son calls himself Son of Man, which, like the next name, is a reference to the Son as incarnated, living in human flesh as true man (see Matt 9:6).
• The Son is Emmanuel, which is actually called a “name” in Matthew 1:23. This is one of the relatively few words in Scripture whose meaning comes straight from its etymology: It is a combination of the Hebrew words for the “with-us-God” (im–manu–el).¹²
• The Son is Christ (John 4:25) or Messiah (John 1:41). Christ is simply the Greek translation of the word מָשִׁיחַ (mashiach) in Hebrew, from which we get messiah: both mean “the anointed one.” Christ’s anointing makes him fit to inherit the throne of his father David and to sit on David’s throne forever, in fulfillment of the Davidic covenant of 2 Samuel 7.
• The Son, indeed, is Son of David a messianic title used especially by Jews who cry out to Jesus in praise or supplication in the Gospel of Matthew.¹³
• People who knew Jesus on earth called him Master (2 Pet 2:1) or Teacher (Matt 8:19) or Rabbi (John 3:2)—or, indeed, Lord (too many passages to list—but see figure below).

Names for the Spirit

• The Spirit is called a helper or advocate. In Greek, this is παράκλητος (John 14:16; 15:26; 16:7), and this has become a rare but known English word, Paraclete. This word calls up the Spirit’s role in comforting and coming alongside believers in Christ.
• The Spirit is called the Spirit of God (Gen 1:2; 1 Cor 7:20), the Spirit of holiness (Rom 1:4), and even the Spirit of Christ (Rom 8:9; 1 Pet 1:11).

Each of these “names” functions less like a name than like something else. Indeed it is difficult to call these “names.” Titles, maybe? Descriptive titles? Or we can sound fancy and call them “appellations.”

Descriptive “names” of God

There are also creative or descriptive “names” of God—and most people searching for “the names of God” on the internet probably expect to hear about these. These, too, are more descriptions than they are names.

• God of seeing translates אֵל רֳאִי (El-Roi)—in fact, the Common English Bible uses “El-Roi” where most other translations use “God of seeing” (Gen 16:13). Hagar names God this when God sees her need in a time of distress.
• God of providing translates the very similar יְהוָה יִרְאֶה (Yaweh-jireh) in Genesis 22:14, from a passage in which Abraham “names” God as provider for providing a sacrificial ram at the dramatic sacrifice of Isaac.
• Everlasting God is a title/name that appears three times in Scripture, twice in the Old Testament and once in the New (Gen 21:33; Isa 40:28; Rom 16:26). Its meaning is self-evident.
• The living God appears about thirty times in Scripture. As the UBS Handbook on Deuteronomy says, “This title contrasts Yahweh with the gods of other peoples, gods who were powerless, dead, lifeless idols. A translation may bring this out by translating ‘The only living God.’ This contrasts well with human ‘flesh,’ mortal humankind.”¹⁴ Much as calling Lebron James “the King” not-so-subtly demotes all other basketball players to his vassals, so “the living God” is an insult to all other very-lower-case-g “gods.”

3. So what?

Why does knowing the meaning of YHWH and the other names of God—Father, Son, and Spirit—matter for Christians today?

I wish it weren’t so, but some knowledge of the basics of God’s names in Hebrew and Greek seem to be as helpful for inoculating Bible readers against error as it is for teaching them truth. That is, countless believers throughout time have spoken to God and about God with no knowledge of the original languages of Scripture, and therefore no knowledge of the Hebrew word Yahweh or the Greek word kurios. And the Bible itself, specifically Jesus and the apostles in the New Testament, do not seem to be fussy about what name is used for God—but instead are insistent mainly on his character, plan, and mighty acts. His names are entries on a list, mere bones, without the flesh of the narrative(s) of Scripture.

Knowing God’s names in Hebrew and Greek probably won’t deepen your personal worship and prayer life, because you’ll probably keep referring to him with the words your language uses—Lord, Señor, l’Éternel, Bog, etc.—even after learning that his “real name” is Yahweh. And I see nothing wrong with that. The Holy One of Israel told Israel’s (Jacob’s) grandfather that he wanted to bless all the families of the earth through the holy Abrahamic seed. And he gave no instructions to make sure that Yahweh remained his name among all those families. We don’t even know how to spell it.

I see two primary theological values in knowing the basics about God’s name:

1. Knowing the meaning of God’s name means getting all-important revelation in the realm of what systematic theologians call “theology proper,” the theology of God himself. Concretely: God is self-existent and eternal,¹⁵ and he reveals these facts in the midst of a very much in-time and over-time relationship with his chosen people. But let me try briefly to restate my concerns from earlier: If you could have only the meaning of God’s name or the descriptions of his mighty acts in Scripture, I think you should choose the latter. To have only the former is to have a philological puzzle and a few bullet points in a systematic theology textbook. To have the latter is to know God.¹⁶
2. A important as it is to connect the sacrificial lambs of the Old Testament economy to the once-for-all sacrificial Lamb of the New Testament, it is important to know that Jesus allows himself to be referred to as “the LORD,” identifying himself with the God of the Old Testament. When John comes to prepare the way for Jesus, he prepares “the way of the Lord”—κύριος in Greek (Matt 3:3), quoting Yahweh in Hebrew (Isa 40:3). The most fundamental Christian confession, “Christ is Lord” (Phil 2:11), is a rich theological claim that Jesus is not merely the fulfillment of the promises of the first three quarters of the Bible, but is himself the creator God.

Get those two points, and I think you get the most important contribution that understanding the name of God will give you. Of course, however, neat bullet points made about eternal self-existent beings threaten to be too tidy. The category “names of God” bleeds over into “biblical descriptions of God.” There is surely more to discover in studying these divine names, therefore. And I encourage you to try.

Resources for exploring the names of God

All the Divine Names and Titles in the Bible

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The Unfolding Mystery of the Divine Name: The God of Sinai in Our Midst

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What’s the key to effectively teaching the Bible to others, whether in a Bible study, a sermon, or a Facebook conversation?

Love your audience as yourself.

Loving God is most important, of course, but it’s possible to love God supremely and yet fail in your efforts at communicating the truths of Scripture to others. If you love your audience as yourself, the next Bible study you lead, the next sermon you preach, the next blog post you write, is much more likely to hit home.

Let’s consider five reasons why this is so, although I have a feeling we could keep going for a long time.

1. Love will keep you from assuming knowledge they don’t have

If you love the rambunctious kids in front of you, you’ll naturally begin to consider what they know and don’t know before you start teaching them a Bible story or a doctrine like the Trinity. You won’t be so focused on your nervousness or your limited preparation time—or even their rambunctiousness—that you forget your audience’s level. The only way you can lead people is by helping them take a step from where they are to where they ought to be.

If you don’t love those kids, or those addicts, or the others in your small group, you’re a lot more likely to bore them, to focus your teaching efforts on the pleasures of listening to yourself talk and getting to the end of your allotted time without tanking. You’re a lot more likely to confuse them, misshaping their understanding of whatever it is you’re teaching. You’re more likely to offend them when you didn’t intend to, and less likely to offend them when the Bible is trying to do just that.

Because Jesus loved his neighbors as himself, he spoke within the social and material circumstances of his day. So should we. Those of us who have never seen a mustard tree or even sowed seed in a field don’t always connect immediately with Jesus’ wording because he aimed it so squarely at his original hearers. Sounds like a good model for us.

2. Love will keep you from using words not in their vocabulary

Even when Jesus’ parables were told precisely to hide truth from people (Matt. 13:10–17), their difficulty lay not in their vocabulary but in their ideas.

I’ve heard it too many times—educated people who don’t stop to consider how often their verbiage leaves their hearers in the dust. I’ve heard PhDs speak to the functionally illiterate and use words they should have known were ten grade levels too demanding. (I’ve also heard preachers who don’t stop to consider how often they’re arrogantly presuming to speak to matters their audience knows more about than the preachers do. But that’s probably not your problem. A little humility can help you reach down or reach up.)

I’ve always admired writers such as John Frame and C.S. Lewis, whose prose is at times surprisingly simple. Master communicators who really know their material can use simple words to get it across. I don’t know for sure whether Frame and Lewis loved their neighbors, though reading personal correspondence from both of them suggests strongly that they did (and do, in the case of Frame), but as a reader I feel loved when an author makes it easy for me to follow.

I’m not saying that flowery or demanding speech is never appropriate, only that it had better serve the goal of loving your neighbor.

3. Love will help you work at finding the best ways to help them take the next step

Maybe a word that is not in your hearers’ or students’ vocabulary is one that needs to be in there. If they have no idea what “propitiation” is, it may be your divine calling next Wednesday night to remedy that problem: otherwise they won’t understand some of the most precious and theologically important sentences in the Bible, Romans 3:21–31.

A Bible teacher who loves his or her audience will work hard at finding the best way to move someone from ignorance to knowledge.

Jesus, again, is a model here. In my own Sunday School class I’ve thoroughly enjoyed teaching through Jesus’ parables (I love the work on the parables done by Snodgrass, Blomberg, and Doriani). As Bryan Chapell has said, it’s a denial of God-given human nature to refuse to use illustrations. They are often precisely the right tool for leading people to take the next step in knowledge or spiritual growth.

Finding good illustrations is the most difficult and time-consuming—and most rewarding and enjoyable—part of my Bible-teaching. When I began to realize that I was gifted and called to teach the Bible to others, I became an illustration squirrel, faithfully hiding away for the winter every good story or quote or image I thought might be useful for my work. In fact, one of Chapell’s wonderful illustrations—an illustration about the power of illustrations in a book on Using Illustrations to Preach with Power—has stuck with me for more than a decade both because it’s such a great story and because I knew I’d need to use it to help others. That illustration is worth the price of the book, and you should buy it or I would tell it to you; it helped me take the next step in my growth as a Bible teacher.

Try Logos’s Sermon Builder with Sermon Assistant to help brainstorm outlines, illustrations, applications, and questions.

4. Love will give you the energy you need to push them forward

I haven’t always had the energy to answer the barrage of questions my kids have thrown at me over the years. That’s true even when I, the theologian-Dad, faced softball theological questions like, “Dad, why do parents have children when they’re so bad all the time?” “Dad, why did God create the world if he knew Adam was going to fall into sin?” “Dad, isn’t it Adam’s fault that I hit [my sister], not mine?”

These are actual questions my kids have asked me over the years, and they’re hard enough to answer for adults, let alone for literal-minded young children who always seem to change the subject (“Look what I made!”) before you can complete your answer. It could take a silent prayer, a deep breath, and real physical energy try to respond. But I love my kids—I really love them—so I would.

It’s tempting to outsource the exhausting work of forming your kids’ minds and moral compasses to Sunday School (or the Disney channel). The love it takes to find out where they are and then work to push them ahead—that’s a tough love to muster even for our own kids, let alone for others.

You feel that love and that energy in the apostle Paul—a man who could wish himself accursed for his countrymen (Rom. 9:3), a man who said to a church and meant it, “I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you” (Gal. 4:19). And he told Christians, under inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that they were supposed to follow his example (2 Thess. 3:7; 1 Cor. 4:16; 11:1; Phil. 3:17; 4:9; 2 Tim. 11:13; cf. 1 Thess. 1:6; 2 Tim. 3:10; 1 Thess. 2:14).

Could God push people forward on his own, without your help? Sure. He does it every day. He does it for you. But he’s giving you the opportunity to get involved in his work in others.

5. Love will alleviate improper pressure on you to please others

Tim Keller, an acknowledged expert on preaching, has said that one subtext of every sermon by a preacher under 30 is, “Do you like me?” Everyone who speaks in front of others, even in the coziest and least threatening of settings, feels some pressure to be thought well of. Nobody wants to be a bore or a dud or a verbal klutz.

I will never forget the time I emceed an event and literally no one laughed at my carefully prepared dry humor. I have never been more embarrassed (it helped a little that a sympathetic friend later told me she tried to laugh but somehow couldn’t because no one else was laughing). The fear of that terrible situation is powerful.

So love for your neighbor had better exceed it. If your goal is someone else’s good, if what you count as your good is helping others, then you won’t be tempted to alter God’s message to please them. You won’t be so focused on yourself that you forget the (second most important) thing you’re there for: others.

It will also keep you from showing off if you really are that good. One famous and gifted preacher I know of says he purposefully moderates his personality, particularly his humor, during preaching so as not to place the focus on himself.

The Bible speaks of people who “loved praise from men more than praise from God” (John 12:43). Ironically, it’s a true Christian love for your neighbors—one subsumed under love for God (Matt 22:37–39)—that will keep you from loving them in the wrong way, from loving their praise instead of loving them. Beware “when all people speak well of you” (Luke 6:26).

Love gets creative

When I have experienced what I believe to be genuine love for people, I am more likely to get through to them. Love for neighbor, in my experience, is the only thing that really crosses the sometimes deep and fraught cultural gaps between us and the people whom God has called us to serve.

Love gets creative when people are weak. It gives them a leg up. It remembers a YouTube video that would be perfect for explaining “propitiation” to fifth-grade boys. It won’t let those boys walk away without light dawning on their faces—it won’t let you and me ramble on without checking to see if they understand.

Love your audience as yourself.

Resources to improve your teaching

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John 1:18 is one of the few verses in the New Testament which contains both (1) an all-important theological statement about Christ and (2) a puzzling Greek textual problem. In addition, (3) the Greek wording adopted by most modern version is difficult to translate.

One theologically significant verse, three separate challenges for the Bible interpreter.

Surveying the exegetical landscape in Logos

If I were to study this verse in Logos, I might start with the Text Comparison tool. I have mine loaded up with twenty-five biblical texts, including translations and Greek New Testaments.

I’m going to highlight what I think you would notice if you were to use this tool. Below I’ve marked the relevant phrase in each text. The eight texts that rely on the same Greek wording (μονογενὴς υἱός) are boxed in orange. The rest rely on the other Greek wording (μονογενὴς θεός).

Try the Text Comparison tool for yourself. Explore variations of the text and translation of John 1:18.

The sheer profusion of options—all chosen by intelligent Christians dedicated to the study of Scripture—is an indication of the difficulty here.

In the original Greek, there are two options. Once these two are translated into English, I count at least nine significant possibilities:

1. “The only God”
2. “The only begotten God”
3. “The only Son”
4. “The only begotten Son”
5. “God’s only Son”
6. “God the only Son”
7. “The one and only Son”
8. “The one and only Son, who is himself God”
9. “The only one, himself God”

What can we make of this?

Interpretive presuppositions and methodology

I want, in a way, to skip to the end and tell you what I think you should expect when you see the translations all over the map like this. Simply put, you should not expect to solve this set of interpretation problems once for all. If you do, you will have no way of knowing with certainty that you did, and you will have no way of demonstrating to other Christians that your solution is the right one. God in his providence has given us a set of difficulties in John 1:18 that interpreters must interpret, preachers must preach, and translators must translate—but he hasn’t given us footnotes or a commentary providing us authoritative guidance.

The closest we have is what some call the rule of faith, the core teaching of all of Scripture. Indeed, at this point, many people in my experience reach for theology to solve given interpretive difficulties. And this is not wrong. I believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible, and I therefore expect by faith that the messages of the various scriptural writers will cohere and agree. The Spirit is their author, after all (2 Pet 1:20–21).

But if we let theology smooth over every interpretive difficulty, we erase anything unique the Spirit wishes to say to us. We’ve got to perform a close reading and use all the literary and interpretive tools we have at our disposal before we gain the right to an opinion on the meaning of this text.

I don’t think theology solves the problems presented by John 1:18 because every major interpretive or translational option can be—and has been—read through the lens of an orthodox Christology. Put another way, effectively all the biblical scholars who produced the readings in the Logos Text Comparison tool above share the same (Nicene) view of Christ as fully divine and fully human, and they obviously view their translational choices as consistent with that view.

I think it’s safe to assume that you will do the same—so some of the pressure is off here. It is certainly not true that we have an Arian reading vs. an orthodox one, or a theologically accurate translation vs. a theologically aberrant one. Bring your faith self-consciously to your reading, but do your best to let your reading educate your faith.

The textual history of the verse

I don’t believe there is a “proper” order for exegesis. The reading of texts is a very human activity, an art. Also, no matter where you start, you’ve already started. You do not and cannot come to any text as a blank slate. You will have ideas about Christ, about Scripture, and even about reading before you ever hear of John 1:18.

Nonetheless, there is something of a logical or temporal order I loosely follow when engaged in the “science” aspects of exegesis, and that order starts with establishing the text upon which my interpretation will be based. This is called “textual criticism.”

I regularly turn to the Logos Exegetical Guide to give me quick links to my text-critical resources, such as the standard A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament by Bruce Metzger. This guide also links me to critical apparatuses, ancient manuscripts, online manuscripts, and other resources.

Use Logos’s Exegetical Guide to get relevant exegetical resources on John 1:18 in seconds.

If you are more advanced in your knowledge of New Testament textual criticism, you hardly need my input here—John 1:18 is a known question in the field.¹⁷ If you’re more of a beginner, you may find help from the Lexham Textual Notes on the Bible, which says this:

Several early manuscripts, including two very early papyrus manuscripts, have “the one and only, God,” which may also be translated as “the only begotten God.” Other early manuscripts and related later witnesses have “the only begotten Son.” The difference is in referent, God or Son. Many textual critics (Metzger, Comfort, Omanson) consider “only begotten Son” as assimilation with similar language elsewhere in John (e.g., John 3:16, 18).¹⁸

This is the main issue presented by the textual history of the verse: Some very early handwritten copies of the Greek New Testament say μονογενὴς θεός (“the only begotten God”; or “the one and only God”—we’ll get to that translation difficulty later); other early and late copies say μονογενὴς υἱός (“the only begotten Son”).

This is our puzzling textual problem. Today’s Bible scholars tend to want to go with very early readings when they can—but what in the world is an “only begotten God“?

Choose your own adventure

This brings us to translation. And here you may choose your own adventure.

Option 1: the only begotten Son

The majority—technically, the Majority—of Greek New Testament manuscripts read “the only begotten Son” at John 1:18. The Textus Receptus tradition of Greek New Testament editions reads this way because it tracks fairly closely (though not exclusively) with the Majority. Translations based on the Textus Receptus therefore say, “the only begotten Son.” This would include the following translations:

• The Tyndale New Testament
• The Geneva Bible
• The King James Version
• The New King James Version
• The Modern English Version

I believe most¹⁹ Reformation-era Bible translations will have this reading.

And this Greek wording—μονογενὴς υἱός, “only begotten Son”—is easy to harmonize with an orthodox Christology. Christ is nothing if not “the only begotten Son.” That is what he is literally called in the Nicene Creed, though with a slightly different word order: τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ τὸν Μονογενῆ, usually translated into English as “the only begotten Son of God.”

This is a viable option. Most Christians between the Reformation and 1900 read this in their Bibles. They were not misled—theologically, at least. Christ is indeed the only begotten Son.

Option 2: the only begotten God

But most biblical scholars, evangelical and otherwise, adopt the harder and (apparently) older reading here: “the only begotten God” (μονογενὴς θεός). In general, most people who believe the Bible is God’s Word, who believe Christ is God’s (only begotten) Son and the Savior of the world, and who read New Testament Greek tend to want to adopt older and “harder” readings when Greek manuscripts differ. In general, it makes sense that older readings are closer to the time of the originals. In general, we observe that scribes seem to smooth out the text rather than make it more difficult—so harder readings are more likely to be what the New Testament writers wrote.

And in this case, one can readily imagine a scribe coming along and seeing a phrase that doesn’t appear anywhere else in the New Testament, “the only begotten God,” and assuming that the copy in front of him was wrong. Scribes were known to assimilate language from other passages, especially in the Gospels, which often contain parallel wording. In this case, as a Logos Bible Word Study (see image below) will quickly show, “only begotten Son” does occur elsewhere in the New Testament, especially in John’s writings.

But if instead John wrote the Greek phrase μονογενὴς θεός, then the Spirit said something unique through him at this point. And that leaves us with some translation challenges.

I listed nine options for translation above; a full seven of them were actually translations of μονογενὴς θεός. (This kind of variety is, to say the least, uncommon, especially in a theologically significant passage.) The options, however, come in mainly two categories:

1. Those seeing this phrase as communicating Christ’s onliness and divinity
2. Those seeing the phrase as communicating Christ’s sonship and divinity.

Lee Irons has famously argued (in his chapter in Retrieving Eternal Generation and in other writings) that μονογενὴς (monogenes) does not derive from γένος (“kind”) but from γεννάω (“begetting”). He carefully acknowledges that etymology does not determine meaning, but he just as carefully shows from actual Greek usage of the time that μονογενὴς didn’t just mean “only.” It is used in the New Testament to name the “only son” (Luke 7:12) and “only daughter” (Luke 8:42) of regular humans, but in Greek, μονογενὴς was used—so argues Irons—only to modify nouns that are “begotten”; namely, children.

I’m not certain Irons is right here. The Logos Bible Word Study pointed me to several places in 1 Clement and the Septuagint which seem to me to use μονογενὴς to mean only “only” (Ps 24:16 LXX, which speaks of the psalmist’s soul being “alone”; 1 Clem 25:2, which speaks of the Phoenix being the “only one of its kind”).

But Irons also appears to me to be right enough to make his point: μονογενὴς does, in my study as in Irons’, refer to sons and daughters who lack siblings much more often than not. A μονογενὴς is (usually?) an only child.

Somehow, then, the concepts of onliness and sonship probably need to be reflected in any given translation. “The only God” (ESV) and “the only one, himself God” (NET; cf. NLT) and “the unique One, who is himself God” (NLT) are probably not right to leave out the concept of sonship or begottenness. Serious people had serious and cogent reasons for making those choices, but there are good reasons why the 2025 ESV has reincorporated the “sonship” component in their revision of this phrase. The ESV now reads,

No one has ever seen God; God the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.

When I first saw it, I wondered briefly if the ESV translators were suddenly choosing at this one place to go with the other major Greek reading. But the more I looked, the more I began to realize that, although they were still assuming μονογενὴς θεός, they were picking up the “Son” component of meaning from the –genes portion of the first word of the phrase at issue.²⁰

My judgment is confirmed by what Crossway announced about John 1:18 alongside their 2025 update:

This translation incorporates the concept of descent (which is an implication of monogenēs in context) and maintains concordance with the other occurrences of monogenēs in the New Testament. The idea of sonship is evoked by monogenēs in the context of “Father” in John 1:18 and 1:14.

This, in my judgment, is a sensible and defensible approach (that brings the ESV in line with the NRSV, at it happens) to translating a difficult phrase. It uses all the major components of meaning that I believe are present in the Greek.

John 1:18 and the eternal generation of the Son

Except one—or so say the theologians. This already difficult phrase in John 1:18 is made more difficult by the connection the verse bears (or may bear?) to some hot debates within Christian theology. The EFS debate that overtook nerdy portions of evangelicalism starting in 2016 persuaded most evangelicals—here comes my oversimplified hot take—that claiming that the Son was eternally functionally subordinate to the Father (rather than only temporally subordinate during the incarnation, e.g., John 5:19 and other passages) endangers the full equality of the Son with the Father, chips away at divine simplicity,²¹ and therefore undermines the doctrine of the Trinity.

That, quite obviously, is a big deal, and not just to nerds.

In contrast, the “classical theists” who gained public cachet by winning the EFS debate, tend to want to see John 1:18 as an important testimony to the orthodox view, EGS: the eternal generation of the Son. This is the idea that the Son is eternally “begotten” of the Father. They also tend to view classic creedal language as all-important—and they therefore want to see the technical term “begotten” in the English Bible translation of John 1:18.

Here I balk. I oppose EFS; the classical theists got me this far. But my instincts lie in philology—in Greek and in English. And I don’t think “begotten” is a real English word anymore, not when used to refer to children. At best, it’s literary or archaic. More accurately, it’s a technical term in Christian theology. I think the concepts of onliness and sonship (and divinity) need to be present in any faithful translation of John 1:18, but “begotten” I can take or leave. It’s probably good that some translations retain it (NKJV, NASB, LSB); it’s probably good that most don’t.

As D. A. Carson observed in the same volume in which Irons’ paper appeared,

even if someone holds that, on balance of probabilities, μονογενής in John means “only begotten,” one must recognize that the expression itself is an exceedingly weak reed to support the eternal generation of the Son. It needs the support of John 5:26 and other passages.²²

The doctrine of eternal generation does not stand or fall on one Greek word, nor certainly on one English translation of one Greek word. Carson adds, “If it were decided that μονογενής in its Johannine occurrences is best rendered by ‘one and only’ or the like, it would not rule out the generation of the Son.”²³

And then Carson quotes a line from Daniel Treier which contains tons of wisdom for my readers who have gotten this far in this intense article: “It is fundamentally misguided to move from isolated exegetical discoveries, such as monogenēs in texts like John 1:18 not necessarily denoting ‘begotten,’ toward denying eternal generation.”²⁴ And this truth has to go back the other direction: You can translate this verse without the word “begotten” and not be guilty of denying or even undermining the eternal generation of the Son.

Observe that, although the rendering “only begotten Son” predominates in the West, presumably because of the Latin Vulgate’s unigenitus filius, it is not the only translation of this passage to go back deep into Christian history. And not only does the Reformation-era French Bible have Le seur filz de dieu, “the only Son of God,” but multiple ancient translations render μονογενὴς as “only” in John 1:18 (and other passages) and do not include the specific idea of “begottenness.” See, in Logos if you can, at John 1:14, 18, and 3:16 the Sahidic Coptic, the Bohairic Coptic, the Syriac, the Ethiopic, and the Old Latin. Unless multiple apparently orthodox people over the course of the history of the church were secretly engaged in a plot to undermine the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son, perhaps we can remain content that there are multiple philologically sound and orthodox ways to solve the textual and translational difficulties posed by John 1:18.

Blessed are the peacemakers

Though the KJV and Latin Vulgate loom large in our minds because of our specific cultural heritage, it is very rare that one translation comes to dominate and sideline all others, magnifying the power of its errors. No, we have multiple translations in the evangelical church—and we have tons of theologians and exegetes who aren’t beholden to the translations anyway, who instead take discussions of the Trinity to the final court of appeal, the Hebrew and Greek. And there’s a footnote in the ESV pointing the good readers who can process such things to additional sources on the controversy! I stand here at the Logos Word by Word blog pleading for peace.

At minimum, John 1:18 teaches precious truths about Jesus that we do know from other passages: He is the one and only Son of the Father, and he is himself divine. At maximum, this phrase may actually use a very arresting and utterly unique description of Christ as (see NASB) “the only begotten God.” Orthodoxy is not threatened at all by the minimal or, certainly, the maximal views. Jesus was with God and Jesus was God, as John 1 has already told us. Jesus is with God and Jesus is God, as we know from the rest of the New Testament. Jesus is worthy of the worship Christians have always accorded him. He reveals the Father to us. He is the means to the Father. He is equal with the Father.

The major application of John 1:18: Bend the knee.

Recommended resources for textual study

A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Second Edition

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A Textual Guide to the Greek New Testament

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Lexham Textual Notes on the Bible

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The NET Bible: Full Notes Edition (2nd ed.)

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Suggested resources on Trinitarian theology

Mobile Ed: TH361 Perspectives on the Trinity: Eternal Generation and Subordination in Tension (4 hour course)

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Retrieving Eternal Generation

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On Classical Trinitarianism: Retrieving the Nicene Doctrine of the Triune God

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The Biblical Trinity: Encountering the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in Scripture

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The Trinity and the Bible: On Theological Interpretation

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The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything, 2nd ed.

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Father, Son and Spirit: The Trinity and John’s Gospel (New Studies in Biblical Theology, vol. 24 | NSBT)

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• What Is Christology & Why Should We Care?
• 3 Terms about the Trinity You Should Know & How We Got Them

My wife recently determined that Costco was, for us, a better deal than Walmart Plus. She saw firsthand that it is economically efficient to buy in bulk.

This is true of groceries. It’s also true of paper books—but only on those very rare occasions when you can buy a big chunk of someone else’s existing library. And usually that means a retiring pastor whose books all come from a previous era.

The only place I know of where you can buy new books in bulk—specifically, Bible study books you actually want to have—with bulk pricing is Logos.

I’m going to list a few collections of Logos books that I’ve noticed recently—some of which I own, some I don’t—that could help you take advantage of bulk pricing.

Original languages

New International Dictionary of Theology and Exegesis: Old and New Testament | NIDOTTE/NIDNTTE | (10 vols.)

This is the most recent purchase I myself have made. I’ve wanted the NIDNTTE, in particular, for years, because my hero Moisés Silva edited it.

I cite Moisés Silva constantly. I did it quite recently at a pastors conference. He’s one of the few people I trust to do lexicography—the study of the meaning of Hebrew and Greek words—with an eye both to serving the church and to honoring the way God made language to function.

And NIDOTTE is a modern classic set. I’m glad to have this now.

Brill Greek Reference Collection (5 vols.)

I have not personally used these volumes, but countless times I have seen BDAG (the major Greek-English lexicon) mention DELG, a French etymological dictionary of Greek. And at least once, I had to go unearth DELG and do some research in it.

I’m well aware that appealing to etymology can be, and often is, an exegetical fallacy (see references to Silva above). But etymology can be a helpful tool in the hands of the discerning. The Brill Greek Reference Collection is one I want in my tool belt.

Lexham Press Original Languages Suite (25 vols.)

Lexham Press has produced numerous valuable volumes on original language study. There are riches here that I have sampled and to which many friends of mine have contributed, from the Lexham Theological Wordbook to the various (phenomenally beautiful) Hebrew and Greek textbooks to The Greek Verb Revisited and the helpful essays on exegesis and textual criticism in the Lexham Methods series.

In my experience, most people regard these matters as boring until someone who’s done the work can start answering the questions they didn’t know they had. Then they literally—I have seen this with my own two eyes, even recently—lean in closer.

Mobile Ed: GK101 Introduction to Biblical Greek (15 hour course)

You have to start somewhere with learning biblical Greek. I own this course from my time at Logos, and I trust my friend John Schwandt to teach carefully and well.

There is a wide variety of methods available to learn the Greek of the New Testament. I’m not going to say this is the best one for you; that’s a complicated question. But actually getting a course is better than not getting started at all—that I do know.

New International Dictionary of Theology and Exegesis: Old and New Testament | NIDOTTE/NIDNTTE | (10 vols.)

Regular price: $358.99

Add to cart

Brill Greek Reference Collection (5 vols.)

Regular price: $670.99

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Lexham Press Original Languages Suite (25 vols.)

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Add to cart

Mobile Ed: GK101 Introduction to Biblical Greek (15 hour course)

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Systematic theology

Reformed Systematic Theology (4 vols.)

I’ve had my eye on this set. Joel Beeke and Paul M. Smalley have done really incredible work for the church in multiple projects over the years, and in this work they take the head-heart-hands synthesis—the intellectual, devotional, and practical powers—of the Puritans and others in the Reformed tradition and turn it into a lay-accessible systematic theology. One of the only Reformed systematics to have possibly exceeded this one in mentions-per-blog-post is Bavinck.

Reformed Dogmatics (4 vols.)

Speaking of Bavinck, interest in Herman Bavinck has had a major resurgence in the last ten years. I will be frank: I have made more than one attempt to read this major work of his, and I have so far failed. One of the reasons is that my lifestyle (I blame the children) makes it difficult for me to find time for paper books, but I get to read electronic ones when everyone else is asleep. And when I read something as rich as Bavinck, I want my highlights to be saved.

Bavinck is irenic and careful. He is an exegete as well as a systematic and historical theologian. He writes from a clear place in the Reformed tradition but with humility toward other Christian viewpoints. He has Barth’s proverbial newspaper in one hand and Bible in the other.

Zondervan Counterpoints Series (43 vols.)

Speaking of application to current issues: When I want to make sure to cover all the main views on a given theological issue, I turn to a series like Counterpoints.

It is a matter of charity to represent someone else’s viewpoints in terms that someone will acknowledge and own. It is simple love—it’s the way I’d want to be treated—to look for the most responsible, influential, and careful proponents of any view and let them be its representatives. That is what the Counterpoints series has sought to do for a long time now. Sometimes the array of views on a topic can be bewildering. Welcome to the real world.

Reformed Systematic Theology (4 vols.)

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Reformed Dogmatics (4 vols.)

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Zondervan Counterpoints Series (43 vols.)

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Homiletics

Charles Spurgeon Collection (149 vols.)

My most important mentor was a great lover of Spurgeon. A pastor/evangelist in my book club is. A member of my little Textual Confidence Collective crew is, too. I’ve heard similar advice drop from such Spurgeon afficionados: Just pick up a page and see what Spurgeon does for you.

Florid nineteenth-century oratory tends to grate on modern ears: not so Spurgeon’s. He had a wit and a heart that make him a perennial favorite. He’s the kind of guy whose collected works you should have in your Logos library.

Charles Spurgeon Collection (149 vols.)

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Church history

Christian History Magazine (issues 1–140)

I read a fair number of articles from this magazine when I worked at a research center in my university library. It gained my trust with its themed issues and quality articles.

Puritan Ultimate Collection (188 resources)

One of the purposes of having a library, and certainly of having a Logos library, is simply having available for reading and citation whatever random John Flavel or Richard Sibbes sermon someone happens to reference favorably. Many times I have been glad to have The Complete Works of Historical Figure X, including some of the very sub-collections in this large collection. John Owen, Thomas Boston, Thomas Watson, John Bunyan—these are resources worth owning.

Christian History Magazine, Issues 1-140

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Puritan Ultimate Collection (188 Resources)

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Hermeneutics & exegesis

Commentary on the New Testament from the Talmud and Midrash (3 vols.)

I heard often in graduate school of the famous Strack-Billerbeck. But I confess to doing far better at reading a commentary on the New Testament than a Kommentar zum Neuen Testament—even if it is very interesting to me that this Kommentar is aus Talmud und Midrash. My respected friend Jacob N. Cerone, now a resident of Germany, was the general editor of these volumes, and I’m excited to own them.

Mobile Ed: Studies in Biblical Interpretation Bundle, M (4 courses)

I read once that hermeneutical method is the Protestant’s pope. In the absence of a final earthly arbiter for Bible interpretation, we refine our methods for that interpretation. I see real wisdom in this comment, and Keener, Brown, Walton, and Klein are recognized teachers of the hermeneutical art.

I don’t share John Walton’s perspective on the lost world of Genesis, but I find his thoughts on hermeneutics to be challenging and stimulating. Jeannine Brown is on the NIV committee. Craig Keener is one of the most prolific biblical commentators to ever live, with more published words than seems humanly possible (one wonders if he discovered AI before anyone else and kept it secret). You will never learn Bible interpretation without at least implicitly entering into conversation with figures like these.

Handbooks for Exegesis: Old Testament and New Testament (HOTE/HNTE) (10 vols.)

I have Vogt (Interpreting the Pentateuch) in this series—and I have my eye on Futato (Interpreting the Psalms). These are relatively brief volumes that take the reader seriously but give that reader very practical advice for going from zero to sixty in interpreting biblical genres. I remember when a volume like this (in another series, I confess: Tom Schreiner’s Interpreting the Pauline Epistles) had a massively positive impact on my Bible interpretation.

These handbooks are either beginner handbooks for (academic, evangelical) Bible study or expert cheatsheets for how to teach others to do such study. I’m teaching hermeneutics soon myself on the graduate level, so I’m suddenly more interested in these volumes than I knew before.

Commentary on the New Testament from the Talmud and Midrash (3 vols.)

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Mobile Ed: Studies in Biblical Interpretation Bundle, M (4 courses)

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Handbooks for Exegesis: Old Testament and New Testament | HOTE/HNTE (10 vols.)

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Commentary

Teaching the Bible Series (36 vols.)

We truly do have an embarrassment of riches in Bible study materials. No matter your level of knowledge and experience, there’s a resource for you. This series will help, say, a small group leader (as I myself am!) teach through various biblical books.

Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmud Collection (50 vols.)

The translator of these volumes, Jacob Neusner, is a huge name in Jewish studies. These are standard works in the field.

Teaching the Bible Series (36 vols.)

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Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmud Collection (50 vols.)

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Biblical theology

New Studies in Biblical Theology Series Collection (NSBT) (53 vols.)

I own this entire series. I bought it with my own money. I love especially two volumes: Dominion and Dynasty by Stephen Dempster and A Clear and Present Word by Mark D. Thompson. I also thoroughly profited from Paul and the Law by Brian Rosner. This set has many notable works in it: I’ve just offered the three that have meant the most to me.

New Studies in Biblical Theology Series Collection | NSBT (53 vols.)

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Bible reference

Biblical Reference Collection (20 vols.)

This is a hefty set. I already own almost all of it and have used these volumes for years. Especially valuable, you get all eight InterVarsity Press “black” dictionaries as well as the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary.

Zondervan Encyclopedia of the Bible (5 vols.)

Wikipedia and ChatGPT can now give us a lot of the most basic information we want, even about the topics traditionally covered by a Bible dictionary. But as of this writing, AI tools still “hallucinate” too often for me to really rely on them, and Wikipedia does not really have the “NPOV” (Neutral Point of View) that it seeks. I want evangelicals to write at least some of my reference works. In ZEB, they obliged.

Biblical Reference Collection (20 vols.)

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Zondervan Encyclopedia of the Bible (5 vols.)

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Humanities

Great Books of the Western World (60 vols.)

I have read or sampled a goodly number of these volumes—or at least watched the BBC version. Boswell’s Life of Johnson was remarkable; Dickens’ Little Dorrit is memorable; Gibbon writes phenomenal prose but pours acid on the Christian faith; Dostoevsky does profound philosophy and moral exploration via painful Russian stories.

What else can I say? I don’t do well with reading lists. I read by whim, as Alan Jacobs taught me. But I can’t help but measure myself against this list, and I can’t help but feel a little pleasure at how many of these volumes I’ve at least cracked open.

Great Books of the Western World (60 vols.)

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Piety & Christian growth

New Growth Press Minibook Collection (157 vols.)

I am not currently a pastor, so I don’t find myself reaching often for books like these. But if you are, this is a treasure trove. Think of it as the equivalent of Baxter’s Christian Directory, but divvied into catchy topics and written a bit more accessibly for the modern reader.

New Growth Press Minibook Collection (156 vols.)

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Take up & read

It’s still early enough in the year for your New Year’s Resolution to kick in. Most of us could do to read more and watch less. Maybe some of the resources above will bring you wisdom and truth and delight and help.

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• 5 Best Books on the Holy Spirit (A Doctor of Theology’s Picks)

The internet has questions about the creation mandate.

I have answers.

And when I don’t, I’ll tell you straightforwardly.

What is the creation mandate?

The creation mandate is God’s original marching orders to mankind. But it is also the original divine blessing that has brought us all of the amazing progress and beauty humans have produced through time. It is both a command and a gift.

Where is the creation mandate found in the Bible?

Look for both elements—command and gift—in the statement of the mandate in Scripture, which appears pretty much on page 1:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Gen 1:26–28 ESV)

The creation mandate proper is in the final paragraph above, which is verse 28. And in that all-important, foundational statement can be seen both the mandate and the blessing that makes it happen, both the command and the grace that gives what God commands.

It is important that the text says, “God blessed them, and God said to them …”²⁵ The mandate is a blessing. As Derek Kidner points out in his beautiful Genesis commentary in the Tyndale series, “to bless is to bestow not only a gift but a function.”²⁶ And Kidner shows this to be true within the context. He points to Genesis 1:22 and 2:3, both of which give a blessing to objects that can’t obey—or, rather, can’t disobey—a mandate.

And God blessed them [the fish and the birds], saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.”
…
So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation. (Gen 1:22; 2:3 ESV)

The point here is that fish and birds are going to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the waters and air, whether they choose to do so out of obedience to their Creator or not. The seventh day is going to be holy, whether upstart nineteenth-century Frenchmen declare a ten-day week or not.

And humans are going to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and have dominion over it, whether we do so out of love for our Creator and acknowledgment of his authority or not. The difference between us and the birds and fishes is that we are permitted to disobey—during this age, at least. We can live against the grain of the mandate. We’ll discuss some ways in which we are doing just that later in the article.

It’s when people choose to live in opposition to God’s blessing that its character as a mandate is displayed. When people refuse to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and have dominion over it, they start to bend and finally to break creation, something they must not do—for God has given a command.

How does the creation mandate differ from the dominion mandate?

Modern Westerners are immediately concerned, upon reading the 3,500-year old text of Genesis 1, about that word “dominion.” Dominion is generally considered a bad word. The Dominion was the shadowy, evil enemy in Star Trek: Deep Space 9. Few people call Virginia “The Old Dominion” anymore. I gather that Britons are somewhat embarrassed that they once had “dominions.” To have dominion is, in the Western mind, equivalent with domination, violation, and abuse. We are uncomfortable with the idea that anybody get permanent or absolute authority over anything.

This discomfort arises in part because of our addiction to expressive individualism. As a modern Westerner in my hearing recently said, “What’s wrong with an employee using crude language at work? He’s just expressing himself.” But our discomfort with “have dominion” also arises from the universal experience of witnessing fallen leadership, abused authority, and sinful uses of power.

But the creation mandate is nonetheless rightly called the dominion mandate, at times—and the cultural mandate, as we’ll see.²⁷ It could just as easily be called the “multiply mandate” or the “subduing mandate.” And, quite clearly, none of these blessings/mandates of God are inherently sinful. God issues the dominion mandate before the fall of man into sin. And the somewhat curious and apparently random comments about Jabal, Jubal, and Tubal-Cain in Genesis 4 are not the ancient Jewish version of the Just So Stories:

Adah bore Jabal; he was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock. His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe. Zillah also bore Tubal-cain; he was the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron.

No, these comments indicate that, despite the fall the dominion mandate still applies—and is indeed “exten[ded] … from animal husbandry (Gen. 4:20) to the arts (4:21) and sciences (4:22).”²⁸ Dominion—authority, power, subduing—is fundamentally a good thing, and its fundamental goodness is not lost in the fall.

And we know this. Great good has been done in the world precisely through our subduing its elements and having dominion over them. When we take our God-given authority over creation and use it to glorify God and love our neighbor, we end up with all kinds of useful discoveries for how creation can be made an even more fit place for human fruitfulness and filling.

One of the greatest modern exponents of a wholesome view of the creation/dominion/cultural mandate, Al Wolters, has written, “Creation is not something that, once made, remains a static quantity. There is, as it were, a growing up (though not in a biological sense), an unfolding of creation.”²⁹

Another writer in the line of Wolters is the insightful Andy Crouch—whose excellent book, Culture Making, is something of an exposition of the creation mandate—has an equally excellent sequel, Playing God, in which he says,

Thousands of years after Genesis was written, we can see in a way its first readers could never have imagined just how much capacity these human image bearers had to fill the earth—just how much power was ultimately available to them, coiled in the physical elements’ chemical and nuclear bonds, and emerging from the incredible complexity of the human mind and the fecundity of human culture.³⁰

Dominion can indeed be bad, abusive, destructive. “The rulers of the Gentiles,” Jesus said, like to “lord it over” other people (Matt 20:25). But good stewardship actually requires dominion, and good dominion is stewardship.

Use Logos’s AI-powered Smart Search to quickly find reliable answers to your Bible study questions.

How can Christians balance the dominion mandate with humility and service?

So there is no balance needed if dominion is understood properly. How does God dominate? With absolute power that—in a flagrant violation of Lord Acton’s famous dictum—most certainly does not corrupt absolutely. Quite the opposite: God’s power doesn’t corrupt God at all.

Combine power and love, and you have what makes the world go ’round. Dads who use their power to lift heavy objects use that power to provide for their families. Moms who use their power to turn plant leaves and seeds and livestock into tasty meals use that power to feed their families. All good teachers and construction workers and pharmacists and insurance agents (you can list here any legitimate vocation) are using their God-given power of dominion to make this world a better place for their neighbors.

I love the work of legal theorist Steven D. Smith, and he makes a simple point in his Fiction, Lies, and the Authority of Law that has really stuck with me as a Christian and as a father. If having and wielding authority is necessarily corrupting, necessarily the opposite of humility and service, then how do we account for the authority we all assume as parents? No one has more authority over a baby than its mother. She can—and I hate even to write these words—hurt and abuse the child, withholding from it the nourishment and nurture it absolutely must get from her. But does she? Only rarely.

No one performs more humble services for anyone else than do parents, who buy and change diapers, pick up after a child (never-endingly), and love the child even when it throws the most irrational and inconvenient fits for the umpteen-hundredth time (ask me how I know). Parenting is nothing if not humble service.

But it’s also the exertion of power for the good of another: power over screen time and bed time, power over how many snacks one may have in an afternoon, power over the very words a child is permitted to say. Love turns power into dominion rather than domination.

How does the creation mandate connect to the image of God?

And we all possess love, even the worst of us. We all love someone or something. We do so because we’re made in the image of a God, who is love (1 John 4:16).

Some interpreters of Genesis wish to argue that the creation mandate is sourced in the imagery that Moses uses (under divine inspiration). We are “images” of God in the same way that “images” of ancient rulers such as Caesar or Ozymandias acted like signs and even garrisons of their authority far from their physical locations. This view tends to make the creation mandate a natural outflow of God’s authority: It makes us not only images who are representing his authority, but vice-regents who are actually exercising that authority—obviously in a derivative and secondary way.

That interpretation of the image and its relation to the mandate is possible. And I’m still comfortable calling people vice-regents of God even if this guess about the meaning of “image” is inaccurate.³¹ And I have to say that I feel that it is. I’d need more contextual clues that this is what God had in mind.

Some interpreters see all of humanity as collectively imaging God. One important theologian who has made much of the creation mandate, Herman Bavinck, wrote that the image of God

can only be somewhat unfolded in its depth and riches in a humanity counting billions of members. Just as the traces of God (vestigia Dei) are spread over many, many works, in both space and time, so also the image of God can only be displayed in all its dimensions and characteristic features in a humanity whose members exist both successively one after the other and contemporaneously side by side.³²

If this is true, then the creation mandate blesses and spurs mankind to discover more and more—though still a tiny portion—of the truths God knows, the goodness God is, and the beauty God displays.

But the fact is that the precise nature of the image of God is an enduring mystery—and challenge. Its relationship to the creation mandate is therefore not clear.

What role does the creation mandate play across Scripture?

The Bible never abrogates or undercuts the creation mandate. It mostly assumes it and only occasionally—arguably—references it.

I see the mandate in two major places in Scripture, one at the beginning and one at the end. I also see it in certain themes that connect the whole Bible.

1. The Tower of Babel

Babel, perhaps, makes the clearest reference to the creation mandate. It does so by breaking it.

Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” (Gen 11:4 ESV)

So when man decides not to “fill the earth,” God forces him to do so (Gen 11:8–9). This happens in Genesis 11, at the beginning of the reboot of the narrative of human population, after the flood.

2. The New Jerusalem

One of the other testimonies to the importance of the creation mandate lies at the end of this narrative, in Revelation, when the story of the Bible finds its denouement. When God restores his complete rule over the world, thereby restoring our world to the way it was created to be, we don’t see a garden. The trajectory of Scripture does not run from garden to garden—but from garden to city (Rev 21–22).

To be sure, this city is not a city of man but the very city of God, the New Jerusalem that “com[es] down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev 21:2). So the eternal state is not an accomplishment of man but a gift of God. Nonetheless, the New Jerusalem represents the trajectory that the earth is supposed to be one, and it collects into it “the glory and honor of the nations” (Rev 21:26).

Incisive and wise writer Andy Crouch joins many other interpreters in seeing this glory and honor as including cultural goods.

What cultural goods represent the “glory and honor” of the many cultural traditions we know? … My own personal list of “the glory and honor of the nations” would surely include Bach’s B Minor Mass, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel; green-tea crème brûlée, fish tacos and bulgogi; Moby-Dick and the Odyssey; the iPod and the Mini Cooper. Of course I don’t expect any of them to appear without being suitably purified and redeemed, any more than I expect my own resurrected body to be just another unimproved version of my present one. But I will be very surprised if they are not carried in by one or another of the representatives of human culture, for they are part of the glorious best that human beings have made.³³

3. The kingdom

And perhaps this is a stretch, but I have always seen the kingdom of God itself as related to the “dominion” mandate.

Man was created to be God’s vice-regent in God’s kingdom. Adam, our representative, rebelled, so a Second Adam had to take up the dominion Adam failed to fulfill (Rom 5:12–21; 1 Cor 15:21–22, 45–49). “Your kingdom come” is, in part, a prayer that God’s rule would be restored—and humanity’s place in it (Matt 6:10).

4. The covenants

Many therefore see the creation mandate continuing into the biblical covenants. For instance, what was a command to Adam and Eve (something they were to fulfill) becomes a promise to Abram in Genesis 12. Some of the same language and themes—like “blessing” and multiplication—appear in the Abrahamic Covenant.

Arguably, connections back to the mandate continue into the subsequent covenants as Israel is made into a nation, subdues a “New Eden,” is given a line of Davidic kings who mediate God’s rule over them (a sort of microcosm of the imaging/mandate function; see Exod 19:5–6). The story climaxes in Christ as the type, the proto-kingdom, gives way to the antitype, the kingdom of Christ.

This perspective on the story of Scripture, of course, roots the covenantal program further back then Genesis 12, into creation itself. Therefore covenantalists, in contrast to dispensationalists, often argue for something of a creation covenant. It also situates God’s program for Israel within these creation-wide concerns from the start, against those who make a sharper divide between God’s program for Israel and the nations (the church).

How does the creation mandate relate to the Great Commission?

Which brings us to the Great Commission (Matt 28:18–20). I follow other thinkers in the Dutch Reformed tradition in believing that, as one of that tradition’s modern exponents has said, “the great commission is the means by which the narrow image of God is restored to humanity, as sinners receive renewed knowledge, righteousness, and holiness.”³⁴

Some thinkers have gone so far as to say that the Great Commission is a “republication” of the creation mandate. I can’t go that far, because I don’t see Jesus or my New Testament explicitly reaffirming the mandate but rather assuming it.

When people are brought into God’s kingdom in this time before the time, they can start living out kingdom values—including, foundationally, being fruitful and multiplying and filling the earth and subduing it. But the whole earth will not be filled with the glory of the Lord unless humans repent and believe the gospel. So the Great Commission paves the way for self-consciously God-glorifying efforts to fulfill the creation mandate.

Also, salvation comes by union with Christ, the ultimate image of God, the Second Adam. And Paul speaks regularly about believers as a new man (or new humanity) that is being increasingly conformed into the “image” of Christ. These themes come up in Romans 6 and 8, Colossians 3, and Ephesians 2 and 4.

These passages, then, all connect salvation to God restoring humanity, and (implicitly) our pursuit of the creation mandate. We might say, then, that the renewal of creation simply has to include the renewal of this mandate.

What does the creation mandate mean for Christians today?

And that perspective on the Great Commission, in turn, leads us to Christians’ responsibility today with the creation mandate.

The creation/dominion/cultural mandate explains and justifies how most Christians spend most of their time. If this world doesn’t matter at all, if only the next matters, then our priorities are completely off. We should do whatever we can to evangelize as much as possible and to get money only to provide for the bare necessities. And, of course, I will not say it is wrong for some Christians to do this; and I will say that it’s wrong for Christians to aim at gaining wealth and yet never find time to give the gospel to anyone.

But the Protestant Reformation helped recover, in part through the creation mandate, a doctrine of “vocation.” Craig Bartholomew quotes Abraham Kuyper’s famous Lectures on Calvinism (which were not lectures on the five points but on Calvinism as a worldview, a life system):

The cultural mandate of Genesis 1 was rediscovered and with it a doctrine of vocation so that God is to be served in all areas of life. “To praise God in the church and serve him in the world became the inspiring impulse, and, in the church, strength was to be gathered by which to resist temptation and sin in the world.” It remained the distinctive characteristic of Calvinism that it positioned the believer coram deo, and not only in church but also in one’s personal, family, work, social, and political life.³⁵

The creation mandate is why it’s okay, and indeed right, for many readers of this article to be moms, pilots, physical therapists, real estate agents, data analysts, graphic designers, chemists, chefs, hairdressers, historians, lawyers, etc.

But I’d be remiss at this point if I failed to point out that the creation mandate doesn’t merely justify the patterns of life we naturally adopt: It corrects and challenges us.

There is one major way in which modern Westerners, including many Christians, are living against the grain of the blessing inherent in the creation mandate. It’s in our birthrate. Without saying to any individual married couple, “You ought to have more children,” which is something I can’t know, I can say to the whole developed world, “You ought to have more children.” The Population Bomb that Paul Ehrlich warned of in 1968 never exploded; the advent of the birth control pill and other cultural factors I won’t pretend to understand have pushed wealthy nations to have fewer children, not more.

The size of my own family—I have three children—was in part an attempt to live out the blessing of Genesis 1:28. We stopped at three for reasons that are private, but I do believe that there are many, many married couples who attend church regularly who need to repent and have kids. They’re refusing God’s first blessing.

How can churches teach about the creation mandate effectively?

Churches need to act as if the creation mandate is still a blessing—and still in force. To do so will rescue many of them from what Francis Schaeffer called “the Two-Story View,” in which churchy and religious things live in their own “upper story” and need not impact what goes on in real life, in the “lower story.”

Sometimes churches build cultures in which “full-time Christian service” is the real and highest calling of everyone, and those pilots, physical therapists, and real estate agents are second-class citizens. A developed understanding of the creation mandate will help the majority of the congregation, those in “secular” or “lower-story” jobs, to see that they, too, are called to full-time Christian service. It is honorable and right to use the skills God gives and the natural resources he provides to serve one’s neighbor in a legitimate vocation.

What are some resources that can be used to further study the creation mandate?

Some of the books that have helped me understand and apply the creation mandate to my life and Bible teaching—including one I wrote (along with a team of colleagues)—are listed here:

Biblical Worldview: Creation, Fall, Redemption

Regular price: $15.99

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Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview

Regular price: $18.99

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Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

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Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

Regular price: $5.99

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Strong and Weak: Embracing a Life of Love, Risk and True Flourishing

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The Doctrine of Creation: A Constructive Kuyperian Approach

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Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction

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Related articles

• Creation Care: Conserving a Groaning Creation
• Every Person an Icon: Why Creation Signifies Dignity for All
• Theology of Work: How and Why Our Work Matters to God
• Dividing to Multiply: God’s Pattern of Creation across the Canon
• What Are the Christian Views on Creation?

God himself is love (1 John 4:8). Love for God is the greatest commandment. Love for others is the second (Matt 22:34–40). Love is the greatest Christian virtue.

Questions about love

But what is love?

That is a rather important question. Similar questions come to mind:

• Is love a choice or a feeling—or both?
• Is my love under the power of my will?
• Is there such a thing as Christian love, a love only Christians can have?
• Can non-Christians really “love”?
• What is “agape love”?
• Should love be unconditional?

Many people do turn to do the dictionary to find out what love is. “Love” is one of the most-searched-for words at Merriam-Webster.com, I read once. There are many worse places to turn than the dictionary to study love, of course—pop music, for example, or the lengthy “Spouses” section on Hollywood stars’ Wikipedia pages. But Christians who want to know love ought to turn, ultimately, to Scripture.

In this post, I offer some Bible “data” for you (which is easy to gather using Logos; just click here). Fifty-eight passages about love are organized according to the subjects and objects of the love in each passage. That is a place to start. At the very least, soak yourself in what the Bible says about love, even if you can’t yet fully wrap your mind and heart around its teaching.

But if you do wish to do this, to wrap your mind around the Bible’s teaching on love, I’d like to offer you some help via the following video, which will show you—very practically—how to do an English Bible word study on “love” in the Logos Bible Study app.

You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

7. Exodus 34:6–7

The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

8. Deuteronomy 4:37–39

And because he loved your fathers and chose their offspring after them and brought you out of Egypt with his own presence, by his great power, driving out before you nations greater and mightier than you, to bring you in, to give you their land for an inheritance, as it is this day, know therefore today, and lay it to your heart, that the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other.

9. Deuteronomy 7:9

Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations.

10. Deuteronomy 10:18

He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing.

11. Nehemiah 9:17

They refused to obey and were not mindful of the wonders that you performed among them, but they stiffened their neck and appointed a leader to return to their slavery in Egypt. But you are a God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and did not forsake them.

12. Psalm 51:1

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.

13. Psalm 89:1–2

I will sing of the steadfast love of the Lord, forever; with my mouth I will make known your faithfulness to all generations. For I said, “Steadfast love will be built up forever; in the heavens you will establish your faithfulness.”

14. Psalm 103:11–13

For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.

15. Psalm 106:44–45

Nevertheless, he looked upon their distress, when he heard their cry. For their sake he remembered his covenant, and relented according to the abundance of his steadfast love.

16. Psalm 136:26

Give thanks to the God of heaven, for his steadfast love endures forever.

17. Isaiah 54:10

“For the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed,” says the Lord, who has compassion on you.

18. Isaiah 63:9

In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them; in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old.

19. Joel 2:12–13

“Yet even now,” declares the LORD, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.” Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster.”

20. Micah 7:20

You will show faithfulness to Jacob and steadfast love to Abraham, as you have sworn to our fathers from the days of old.

21. John 3:16

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

22. John 15:13

Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.

23. John 16:26–27

In that day you will ask in my name, and I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf; for the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.

24. Romans 5:5

Hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

25. Romans 5:8

God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

26. Romans 8:38–39

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

27. 2 Corinthians 13:11

Finally, brothers, rejoice. Aim for restoration, comfort one another, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you.

28. 2 Thessalonians 3:5

May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ.

29. Titus 3:4–5

But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit.

30. Hebrews 12:5–6

And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons? “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.”

31. 1 John 3:1

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.

32. 1 John 4:9–10

In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

33. 1 John 4:16

So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

34. Jude 1:20–21

But you, beloved, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life.

35. Revelation 1:4–5

John to the seven churches that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth. To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood.

Passages on our love for God

36. Deuteronomy 6:5

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

37. Deuteronomy 10:12–13

And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments and statutes of the Lord, which I am commanding you today for your good?

38. Deuteronomy 11:22–23

For if you will be careful to do all this commandment that I command you to do, loving the Lord your God, walking in all his ways, and holding fast to him, then the Lord will drive out all these nations before you, and you will dispossess nations greater and mightier than you.

39. Psalm 18:1

I love you, O Lord, my strength.

40. Psalm 91:14

Because he holds fast to me in love, I will deliver him; I will protect him, because he knows my name.

41. Luke 6:32

If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.

42. Romans 8:28

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

43. 1 Peter 1:8–9

Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, 9 obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

Passages about our love for others

44. Matthew 5:44–45

But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.

45. John 13:34–35

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

46. Romans 12:9–10

Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor.

47. Ephesians 5:1–2

Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

48. Colossians 3:12–14

Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

49. 1 Thessalonians 4:9

Now concerning brotherly love you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another,

50. 1 Peter 3:8

Finally, all of you, have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind.

51. 1 John 3:17

But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?

52. 1 John 4:7–8

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

53. 1 John 4:19

We love because he first loved us.

54. 1 John 4:20–21

If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.

Passages on the nature of love

55. Proverbs 10:12

Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offenses.

56. 1 Corinthians 13:4–7

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

57. 1 Corinthians 13:8–12

Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

58. 1 John 3:16

By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.

Wrap-up thoughts on love

As I mentioned in the training video at the top of the post, one of the simplest and best ways to study a verb in Scripture is to see what subjects perform that action and which objects receive it. The most important “lovers” in Scripture, the persons whose mutual love is more important than any other, are the three persons of the Trinity. All love ultimately derives from their love.

***

Learn more about the theology of God’s love in the D. A. Carson Love of God Collection (3 vols.)—his The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God and Love in Hard Places are particularly excellent; or explore God’s love with these books:

God’s Love: How the Infinite God Cares for His Children

Regular price: $11.99

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God Is the Gospel: Meditations on God’s Love as the Gift of Himself

Regular price: $13.99

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Classic Sermons on the Love of God

Regular price: $9.99

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Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

Regular price: $14.99

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For the Love of God, vol. 1: A Daily Companion for Discovering the Riches of God’s Word

Regular price: $9.99

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For the Love of God, vol. 2: A Daily Companion for Discovering the Treasures of God’s Word

Regular price: $13.99

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The Love of Loves in the Song of Songs

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What does the Bible say about money? Start a free trial and discover for yourself with Logos’s Smart Search in Bible

Logos is the only software tool I use to study the original languages of Scripture, and I use it practically every day. I use Logos because it is fast, reliable, and beautiful. And I use the original languages because in my (Protestant) view of Scripture, “in all controversies of religion, the Church is finally to appeal unto them” (WCF 8). It is the Hebrew and Greek that provide the ultimate lexical standard for doctrine.

Honestly, however, I’m not driven primarily by controversies of religion, though they have their important place in the development of doctrine. I just want to know what God said, and I stand with Erasmus, who said in the first-ever published edition of the Greek New Testament,

I perceived that that teaching which is our salvation was to be had in much purer and more lively form if sought at the fountain-head and drawn from the actual sources than from pools and streams.³⁶

What are the original languages of Scripture?

Let’s get some basics out of the way:

1. The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew over the course of approximately a thousand years.

Whether or not the Hebrew Bible reflects language change over that period is a difficult and disputed question.³⁷ We have access to very little biblical Hebrew outside the Old Testament. Mainly we have inscriptions, often biblical ones.

2. Certain portions of Daniel and Ezra are written in Aramaic.³⁸

3. The New Testament was originally written in Greek over a period of just a few decades within the first century (AD).

The language of the New Testament was the “common” (Greek, koine) Greek of the time. It was the lingua franca of the Roman world, including the Holy Land. Even a “Pharisee of the Pharisees,” the Apostle Paul, had excellent command of Greek. We have vast amounts of ancient Greek to use in our study of the language.

What is original language research?

Original language research—in the context of biblical studies—is digging beneath the English (or French or Russian or Urdu) translation of the Bible so that one may primarily read to discover what the biblical writers were originally inspired to write.

The goal is not to discover errors in our many excellent translations, though this may occasionally occur. The goal is to achieve the slightly greater level of clarity one can achieve by looking at the original instead of studying the photocopies.

Why is original language research important for Bible study?

Study of the Hebrew and Greek is important for a number of reasons.

1. Bible translations sometimes differ, and those in pursuit of truth need to know why.

Only by appeal to the originals can we discern why many English translations have Jesus using a spatial metaphor at Matthew 6:27 while others have him using a temporal metaphor. Without access to the Greek, this kind of discrepancy would be baffling—as indeed it is to the many people who ask me why a given translation differs from others at particular places.

2. The meanings of words change.

Another major reason careful Bible students dig down to the original language level is that looking up a particular English word—like “reconciliation” in Romans 5:11—in a contemporary English dictionary may or may not relay precisely the same information intended by the original language word it translates.

Countless words in any given language are built on top of metaphors from real-life experience. The Greek word underlying “reconciliation” (as it is used in most modern translations), for example, comes from a word meaning “exchange,” as in an exchange of money. It’s a fallacy to assume that a word’s history provides its real or true meaning—as if Christ’s reconciliation of the whole world to himself (2 Cor 5:19) is most fundamentally an exchange of divine currency. But the metaphor a Bible student discovers in a word’s history may still end up being useful for illustrating the meaning of that word. For example, a Bible teacher might point out—without mentioning that this comes from Greek—that reconciliation is a kind of exchanging of hostilities for peace.

3. Translation work can obscure contextual connections.

A third reason the original languages are helpful lies in minor but definite contextual connections that are necessarily obscured by translation.

In John 15, the Greek word often translated “abide” occurs multiple times in various forms. It usually doesn’t work in English translation to use the same English word to translate that Greek word for every occurrence. But you can use the Formatting tab in Logos to emphasize corresponding words at the original language level, even if you don’t know Greek.

If you do, you’ll find that the Greek word repeatedly translated as “remain” in the NIV in John 15 also appears in John 15:16 in the phrase “fruit that will last.” Perhaps there is a connection here worth exploring, perhaps not. Without access to the original languages, however, you’re less likely to raise that potentially fruitful question.

How does original language research improve our understanding of Scripture?

I’ve done some work so far to show the value of the study of Hebrew and Greek. I want to pause, however, to insist—along with a large number of highly trained biblical scholars—that the value of original language research is marginal compared to the value of studying the Bible in your heart language.

Now it just so happens that with a text as important as God’s Word, even marginal gains can be important, even essential. But English-speaking evangelical Protestants such as myself have historically agreed with the legendary KJV translators, who said in their profoundly beautiful and intelligent preface,

We do not deny, nay, we affirm and avow, that the very meanest translation of the Bible in English … containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God: as the King’s speech which he uttered in Parliament, being translated into French, Dutch, Italian and Latin, is still the King’s speech, though it be not interpreted by every translator with the like grace, nor peradventure so fitly for phrase, nor so expressly for sense, everywhere.³⁹

God’s Word is God’s Word in translation, not just in the originals. God can speak every language there is. Christians often enter original language research expecting to finally uncover the true meaning, the bedrock meaning, the (to change the metaphor) layer of pure gold underneath the ugly and malformed clay of translation. If you have this perspective, you will be disappointed. The Greek word for “sheep” means “sheep.” The Hebrew word for “love” means “love.” The ancient Jews and ancient Christians were people just like us who didn’t have special languages full of extra, glittering meaning. They just went around saying stuff about things the same way we do. And though their best narratives and epistles and poems—which we can read in our Bibles today—do rise to a literary level higher than that of normal speech, it doesn’t enter an ethereal realm of special Holy Spirit language.

Christians of one common persuasion may say (and I’ll borrow here from Moisés Silva, who is not endorsing this view) that “human language, being an imperfect medium, cannot convey a perfect divine message.”⁴⁰ Christians of the opposite persuasion may say that any language chosen by the Spirit of God must be charged with extra meaning, or certainly extra precision.⁴¹ Both approaches assume that divine language, to count as divine, must carry a measure of perfection that normal human language cannot. The liberal looks at the demonstrably human language of Scripture and concludes that it’s not fully divine; the conservative looks at the obviously divine language of Scripture and concludes that it’s not fully human.

Original language research does for us what meeting Jesus in the flesh would have done in the first century: It brings us face to face with something you and I would not have invented; namely, incarnation. Jesus was (and is) fully divine and fully human; Scripture, in an analogous way, is too. To study Hebrew and Greek is to be reminded both of the amazing, divine gift of language—which I often point out was not created by God; he had it before the foundation of the world (Gen 1:26, “Then God said …”)—and the frustrating imprecision⁴² and confoundings it can bring. Not infrequently, original language research does more to eliminate linguistically impossible interpretations than it does to establish the one right interpretation.

Another little note: There are earnest Christians out there who love the Bible dearly but who end up injecting some superstition into their viewpoints on it. Study of the original languages helps inoculate Bible readers against non-existent hermeneutical principles such as the “Law of First Mention,” in which (supposedly) the first mention of a given topic in Scripture contains in seed form all the rest of the Bible’s teaching on that topic. Someone who knows how to use Hebrew or Greek even a little will immediately smell a rat, and a desiccated one at that, because English words do not map one-to-one with Hebrew or Greek ones. How could the phrase “without form” in Genesis 1:2, for example, contain the Bible’s whole teaching on “form” (and what would that even mean?) when the Hebrew word there, תֹּהוּ, gets translated in around ten different ways in the KJV alone?

Again, knowledge of Hebrew and Greek improves our understanding of Scripture, often by giving us a filter to catch bad interpretations, not by reliably teaching us the one true and right interpretation.

How can one get started with original language research?

There’s nothing sacrosanct about going to school to learn something. It’s a matter of utilitarian practicality: Difficult and complicated things are hard to learn without some kind of structure, some kind of accountability, and some kind of personal model or influence. If you can go to school to learn Hebrew and Greek, my advice is to do it. Schools aren’t perfect, and it is often depressing for Hebrew and Greek teachers to hear what people do with their knowledge of the original languages. But I don’t know of a better way to learn Hebrew and Greek. The Logos Seminary Guide can point you toward a good school near you.

But if you can’t go to school, if you have a job and a spouse and three cute little matters of utilitarian practicality between the ages of four and ten, you’re not without hope. For one thing, I wrote a free Complete Beginner’s Guide to Biblical Greek that will help you set goals and find strategies to meet them.

And here’s another suggestion: Determine from the very beginning of whatever Hebrew and Greek study you undertake that you will be willing to go more slowly in order to incorporate some reading about language and exegesis. Let’s say you pick up the course “Learn to Use Biblical Greek and Hebrew in Logos” from Logos Mobile Ed (or Greek for the Rest of Us: Learn Greek to Study the New Testament with Interlinears and Bible Software by Bill Mounce, or even the workbooks I learned from⁴³). Along with these resources, I’d encourage you to listen avidly to courses on language from linguist John McWhorter, to read D. A. Carson’s Exegetical Fallacies, to absorb Moisés Silva’s Biblical Words and Their Meaning, to peruse my friends’ work Linguistics & Biblical Exegesis in the Lexham Methods series.

I have seen too many people stumble into interpretive silliness or arrogance through the study of Hebrew and Greek. I’m convinced that knowledge of language more generally is an essential corrective. Not only that, I think the combination of studying the languages and studying language will genuinely assist you in your Bible study.

How do interlinear Bibles work, and are these useful for original language research?

Interlinear Bibles are an intermediate tool, one that, truth be told, even the experts sometimes rely on. Interlinear Bibles place English glosses (and often other grammatical information) “between the lines”—interlinear—of Hebrew or Greek scriptural text.

I do not use interlinear Bibles in print. They are cumbersome—and they’re stuck. They’re stuck at a particular phase of Hebrew or Greek knowledge. They give me an English gloss (translational equivalent) for every single Hebrew or Greek word, which is what beginners need, not what I need.

I use interlinears in Logos because I can tell Logos not to give me glosses for words I ought already to know. I can also generate an interlinear—or a reverse interlinear, one that puts the Greek/Hebrew in between the English lines instead of the other way ’round—from effectively any Bible translation. Here’s the ESV with “interlinear” turned on in the View tab:

When Hebrew or Greek get tricky to parse out, even for experienced students, it’s often because the word order in the original language is so different from that of the English. It can be very helpful to have these aligned for you in advance by people who’ve already done all that parsing.

Sometimes, the struggle an English reader in particular may have with the Hebrew and Greek is the lack of what are called “copulas.” In the image above, notice the dot (•) underneath the word “are,” the second word in each Beatitude. That word is elided, that is, left out of the Greek, because it isn’t necessary in that language like it is in English. Even to know that there is no Greek word to look for to match up with the English is itself helpful.

What are some common challenges around original language research?

Original language research is an intimidating, bottomless well. There will always be someone who knows Hebrew or Greek better than you do—or at least who will claim to online! It can be hard to know when you’re done with your study of a given word or passage; there’s always more to read (especially with a large Logos library!).

There are also difficulties peculiar to Hebrew and Greek.

In Hebrew, the study of many rare words is made incredibly difficult by the mere fact that they occur only a few times—or even just once—in the Hebrew Bible, and nowhere else in the whole history of the world before or even around the time of the Hebrew Bible’s composition. The KJV translators were well aware of this. They said,

There be many words in the Scriptures which be never found there but once (having neither brother nor neighbour, as the Hebrews speak), so that we cannot be helped by conference of places.⁴⁴

Being “helped by conference of places” is the KJV translators’ way of saying that we know what words mean by listening carefully to how they’re used. And if a word (or phrase) is used rarely, we don’t get that help. Etymology can help us in that case, and so can checking ancient languages that were cognate to Hebrew, such as Akkadian and even Arabic. For this kind of study, invaluable but complex reference works, such as The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT), are essential tools.

In Greek, the difficulty is having too much extrabiblical literature to survey. Some of the literature that is arguably relevant to the study of Greek is written in classical Greek that Koine students find most difficult to read. Most students of the New Testament today are not equipped to read even Koine Greek from outside the New Testament. For this kind of work, invaluable but complex reference works, such as A Greek–English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (BDAG), are essential tools.

How do you conduct a word study using original language tools?

Most Hebrew and Greek words that are worth study are not so rare (Hebrew) or so complex (Greek) that study should be reserved for elite original language researchers. Genuine profit can be had by the average student who has put the time in to learn the proper methodologies.

I have written a workflow for Logos entitled “English Word Study.” It will take you step by step through a study of one biblical word of your choice in English. If you haven’t studied Hebrew or Greek, or not much, start there.

But there is also a workflow in Logos entitled “Word Study (Original Language),” and it will guide you through the use of Logos resources to study a Hebrew or Greek word of your choice. This would be the place to start if you are a beginning or intermediate student unsure of first steps.

Your basic goal in any word study, no matter your level, is to observe how a word is used to gain clues as to its meaning.

If the word is a verb, for example, you need to ask questions like the following:

• Who in Scripture performs this action?
• Who receives this action—what are its direct objects, if any?
• What are the indirect objects of this action?

You are hardwired by God himself to be capable of this work; it’s how you learned your mother tongue. You saw your mother use her tongue to form certain sounds, and you began to see a connection between those sounds and the actions she was performing or the objects she was holding. A word study workflow is a way of reminding you of the questions you were eager to ask as a baby but have forgotten to ask as an adult.

What are some common Greek and Hebrew words every Bible student should know?

I am convinced that Bible students don’t need to know any Hebrew or Greek words in order to know their Bibles well. None.*

But let me explain that asterisk. A certain set of Hebrew and Greek words have effectively become English ones through their use in the Christian community. Last night at my church’s worship music team practice, someone wondered out loud as to the proper pronunciation of the Hebrew word, found seventy-four times in the Psalms (I know this thanks to the Logos Bible Word Study!) but of uncertain meaning, selah.⁴⁵

Here’s a short glossary of other Hebrew and Greek words that, in my judgment, are common enough among Bible-loving Christians to count as English words—much as “beeves” is a bona fide English word, but only among cattle ranchers. (I’ll omit “hallelujah” and “amen” and “Messiah” and any other Hebrew or Greek words that are English words known outside of Christianity.⁴⁶) I won’t italicize these words, because they have become English words.

Hebrew words many English-speaking Christians know

• Yahweh: the covenant name of God, the Lord
• Immanuel: quite literally, “with us God”
• Elohim: the generic name for God (Gen 1:1) or even gods (Ps 86:8)
• Adonai: “master” or “lord”
• Hosanna: “save now,” which became an affirmation of praise (Ps 118:25)
• Selah: a term of unknown meaning, perhaps liturgical or musical
• Hesed: loyal love, covenant love (Ruth 1:8; 2:20; 3:10)
• Torah: “instruction” or “law,” now often a name for the Pentateuch

Greek words many English-speaking Christians know

• Logos: the “word” spoken of John 1; also well known as the name of some excellent Bible software that’s probably on sale now
• Agape: a word for love that I wish were not quite so well known, because what people know about it is usually wrong
• Ekklesia: “church” or “assembly”
• Koinonia: usually means “rich fellowship” among Christians
• Kenosis: “emptying”; the action of Christ described in Philippians
• Kyrie: “Lord”; still known for its appearance in Latin liturgical texts (as a holdover from the days when the liturgy was in Greek) and therefore for its frequent appearance in the Western choral tradition; part of the phrase kyrie eleison, or “Lord, have mercy”
• Kerygma: “preaching” or “message”; something of a technical term used in Anglophone theology to describe the message of Jesus or of Paul

Knowledge of these words may or may not help you understand Scripture, but they will help you understand the talk of the evangelical cognoscenti. One must definitely be careful to remember that what modern Christians mean by these words (because they have become essentially Christian technical terms) can easily stray from what the words meant to Moses and Paul.

How does original language research contribute to more accurate biblical exegesis?

No one answers this question better than Moisés Silva:

A measure of proficiency in the biblical languages provides the framework that promotes responsibility in the handling of the text. Continued exposure to the original text expands our horizon and furnishes us with a fresh and more authentic perspective than that which we bring from our modern, English-speaking situation.⁴⁷

I’ve pointed out before on this blog that these comments from Silva are rather vague—but I don’t blame him for that. Like so, so many valuable things in life, the benefits of knowing Greek can’t truly be understood from the outside, only from the inside. Who can know the delights of being able to play Bach beautifully on the piano? Not me. Who can know the pleasure of hitting a sprinting receiver in stride forty yards away, in the end zone, with a perfectly arcing ultimate frisbee pass? Actually, I can. It’s what keeps bringing me back to the sport every week. I don’t know anyone who has really put their hand to the Greek plow and regretted it. (If they do, they’re not fit for the kingdom of Logos.)

Let me try another tack: If you want to be persuasive for whatever you regard to be the truth among people who know what they’re talking about when it comes to the Bible, you will probably have to have some facility with Hebrew or Greek. I think accurate understanding of the Bible can be had without it, but only at—my mind searches for metaphors—a certain zoom level. The finest details, the ones most needed when Christians are trying to persuade other people, are in the original languages.

What resources are ideal for conducting original language research?

This is the Logos blog. Do you think I’m going to point you to another tool?

But let me to return to my opening lines: I use Logos because it has proven to be the very best tool for the job of original language research. I recently did a deep dive into other Bible apps for the iPhone (forthcoming). I spent hours and hours looking at the major options in the space. There are some nice apps out there, though not as many as I thought there would be.⁴⁸ The Literal Word app is one I found to be rather elegant and useful. It even gives me some very basic access to the Hebrew and Greek. But when I want to do anything more than a quick search, I get frustrated if I don’t have access to Logos. I am a day-in, day-out biblical studies writer and exegete. I use the Bible Word Study and other Logos tools—especially original language texts and original language commentaries—non-stop. I really have tried everything else, and I won’t go back. Logos is the best.

Within Logos, here are my most-used tools for Hebrew and Greek exegesis:

• The Logos Bible Word Study, especially the translation tab (to see how a given Hebrew or Greek word gets translated in various translations)
• BDAG, an incredibly detailed and useful Greek–English lexicon
• HALOT, a challenging but authoritative Hebrew–English lexicon
• The SBLGNT (alternatively: THGNT, or NA28), a solid critical text of the Greek New Testament
• The Lexham Hebrew Bible (alternatively: Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia), a digitized “diplomatic text”⁴⁹ of the Hebrew Bible
• Numerous Bible translations in English and other languages

I’d be sad without the many nice commentaries I got with the Logos Platinum Library. I’d be a little frustrated without the powerful searching and highlighting tools in Logos. But I’d be lost without the tools I just listed.

I love original language research, because I love God’s Word and I want to understand and teach accurately what he inspired.

Resources mentioned in this article:

Mobile Ed: Learn to Use Biblical Greek and Hebrew in Logos (2 courses)

Regular price: $659.99

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Exegetical Fallacies, 2nd ed.

Regular price: $17.99

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Biblical Words and Their Meaning, 2nd ed.

Regular price: $19.99

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Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament | HALOT (5 vols.)

Regular price: $159.99

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A Greek–English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (BDAG)

Regular price: $164.99

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The Greek New Testament with Apparatus: SBL Edition (SBL)

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Lexham Hebrew Bible with Morphology (LHB)

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Related articles

• 5 More Reasons Bible Teachers Should Learn Greek & Hebrew
• 5 Reasons Studying the Original Languages Is Worth the Pain
• Exegetical Crises of Faith: 12 Tips for Struggling Students & Professors
• What Does the Greek Word “Logos” Mean?
• Tips for Students Preparing to Learn a Biblical Language

Why is Logos so expensive? People out there kind of mock us for it, and I’m here to admit that we feel a little sensitive on this point. Babylon Bee, for example, had a headline a few years back:

When this came out, my colleagues and I laughed one of those nervous laughs that you laugh when you’re the butt of the joke but find it socially awkward to display your true feelings.

Because there are answers to the question of why Logos costs so much.

Four answers.

Answer 1: It doesn’t

It actually doesn’t cost so much. The free edition of Logos is, well, free—and if you get on our various free monthly books email lists, you can build up a nice little library with zero financial outlay. The heart of people who work at Logos is to serve the church; I know that’s my heart. We also get millions of hits at app.logos.com, which is free, and doesn’t even require you to create an account.

Our brand-new subscription plans are also very reasonably priced (starting at $9.99). We know that not everyone needs a theological and biblical studies library the same size as their pastor’s.

Answer 2: Books are cheaper in Logos Libraries

Books make Logos Libraries more expensive, but Logos Libraries make books more affordable.

Logos helps you benefit from Costco-like economies of scale. Here’s how that works: many people buy Logos Libraries, and each library contains many books. That means that publishers such as Zondervan, Baker, and even our own Lexham Press can charge less for each book sold because they know they’ll sell more. We pass those savings on to our customers.

I don’t like saying that Logos books “cost pennies on the dollar,” because their cost depends on your needs and your usage of your library. Before I bought Logos, I made a literal list—a list I still have somewhere—of all the books in the Gold library I had my eyes on. I removed books I felt I wouldn’t use (which is why the value for me may be different from the value for you: you might use more or fewer books in a given library—or less or more expensive books), and then I laboriously checked the Amazon price of every single book that remained on my list. I don’t have the figures in front of me, but I recall that the contest wasn’t even close. Logos beats paper.

Answer 3: Reference works are more valuable in Logos

Logos destroys paper in another way. When in the course of my training it became necessary to get BDAG, the premier Greek-English lexicon for New Testament study, I asked my Greek professor whether I should go paper or digital. He said paper. He was wrong. I’m sorry, but paper proved so unwieldy that I quickly sold it and bought the digital version, which let me look up word entries with a simple search function. Even people with an express preference for a physical book in their hands will occasionally make an exception for reference works.

Paper BDAG is a beautiful book—but so is digital BDAG in Logos. Paper BDAG costs real money—so does digital BDAG. But I use it far more often in Logos than I would if I had the paper version. It is quite literally worth more to me in Logos than in paper.

Answer 4: The Logos ecosystem brings significant value to every book

And that brings me to my fifth and final answer: my books have more value to me as part of the Logos ecosystem.

Logos is a business, and it operates like one, not like a donor-based nonprofit. This business model is more effective at producing a high-quality product. The money that Bible students spend on Logos goes to producing specialized tools of all kinds that deliver lasting value to Bible students and scholars. I get frustrated when I can’t use the simple-but-powerful tools in Logos—like when I have to cite a book I have only in Kindle. Or when I have to type out by hand a footnote for a paper book. When that regrettable occurrence intrudes upon my digital life, I feel the same impatient, get-on-with-it feeling I feel when older generations give me directions instead of an address. Do you know how amazing it is for a writer/editor in an academicky space to have auto-generated footnotes?⁵⁰

Here’s another example of the value Logos adds. BibleWorks—Logos’s former competitor, and a piece of software I myself long loved—had a “Use” tab that was really quite handy. It basically searched the whole Bible for any given Greek or Hebrew word every time you hovered over that word in a Bible text. But it also gave me a bare list with no organization and only one kind of information. The Logos Bible Word Study, designed by our designers and developed by our developers, is one of the tools I turn to more frequently than any other. I’ve never gotten tired of how beautifully and usefully it presents word-usage information—plus basically all the other things I want to know about a given Bible word, all in one convenient and quick report.

I really could go on and on about what the interconnectedness and availability of Logos books does for my efficiency. The extensive tagging that makes my Bible texts, especially, so much more useful, is just huge to me. And time would fail me to tell of the value of having my library with me wherever I go on all my devices.

But, you know, this is the internet, so I’m not going to let time fail me; I’m going to fail it:

• Once, when I heard a preacher at a church I was visiting make a rather questionable use of Job 31:35–37, I was able to use Logos on my iPad to silently check multiple translations and commentaries during his message to prove to myself that I was not the crazy one.
• And in this remote-work world in which I do a lot of work from coffee shops—and even some on planes and in hotels—I never have to give a moment’s thought to whether or not I will have the books I need for any writing or teaching I have to do. Almost my entire theology and biblical studies library (I do still have some physical books!) goes with me everywhere I go in the world.

Conclusion

I work at Logos because I’m driven to help others interpret the Bible responsibly. And at the end of the day, I think the product is its own best argument. Several times I have purchased books in Logos that I either already owned in paper or had free access to online. The Works of Jonathan Edwards are a signal example: they’re all free at the Yale site (the fruit of the work of Ken Minkema and his amazing Jonathan Edwards Center, at which I took a class once). They’ve been free online for years. But the site is rather difficult to use,⁵¹ and I finally just bought the set in Logos so I could have it in a much more convenient format.

And with Logos Pro or Max, you can add your paper book library into the software so that you get search results from your paper books. And future releases of Logos promise more help for serious students of Scripture.

When I first began teaching others how to use Bible software in the early 2000s, I actually had a stock joke that Logos was building a sermon generator that would produce both exegesis and illustrations. It wasn’t a very funny joke then; now it’s not a joke at all. AI can do this.

But what does the advent of AI mean for the sacred task of preaching the Word? If indeed preaching is “truth through personality,” as Philips Brooks famously said, what role should Large Language Models (LLMs) play in the production of sermons, or in Bible study more generally?

Many Logos users have been asking us questions like this. Logos’s own Phil Gons is working on a technology theology/philosophy statement for us; I and Mark Barnes are writing more theological visions for the Christian use of AI. I, in particular, wish to add in some interaction with relevant thinkers. I’d like to describe what’s influenced our approach at Logos, and how we’re navigating this topic as a for-profit company that is dedicated to serving the church.

Hopeful entrepreneurial pragmatism

John Dyer has an Oxford title called People of the Screen: How Evangelicals Created the Digital Bible and How It Shapes Their Reading of Scripture.⁵² The book is recent, but it’s based on dissertation work from several years prior—and on interviews done several years before that. I’ve been at Logos for nine years, but Dyer’s interviews with Logos employees, as reported in the book, actually occurred before I arrived. So some of the sentiments attributed to Logos felt a little out of date.

But one catchy criticism Dyer issued toward the kind of people who work at Logos hit home. It was encapsulated in a phrase Dyer used to describe our (and other generally evangelical folks’) approach to technology: “Hopeful Entrepreneurial Pragmatism.” “HEP,” he called it.

Hopeful

Yeah—that’s kind of us. When American evangelicals (like those who tend to predominate at Logos) encounter new technologies, we have historically seen them as neato opportunities for gospel advance and not as threats to the natural order of things. My own father wrote a book for Baker called Air of Salvation: The Story of Christian Broadcasting which chronicled earlier evangelicals’ eager foray into the then-new technology of radio—a medium in which Christians still have a strong presence. Christians have adopted plenty of other technologies over time, from the codex to the printing press. Church historians have speculated that the difference between Luther’s success and that of Jan Hus was that the former came after Gutenberg.

Entrepreneurial

Evangelicals have also been entrepreneurial: major Christian media ministries have used all kinds of giveaways and promotions to keep donations coming in; and we at Logos have quite obviously built a business around the distribution of Christian ebooks (plus powerful tools to make them more useful to Bible students). Those who work here know that there is a widespread feeling that we’re performing an important mission, that money is just the grain that the oxen eat while we’re serving the church. Dyer sees some tension between the business and ministry aspects of our mission; he’s not wrong. But it works: our customers get excellent software and resources, and we get capital to build more of those things.

Pragmatism

“It works.” Does that mean that the Christians at Logos are also “pragmatists”? We’d be foolish not to acknowledge the possibility. Indeed, did I do wrong to “cherry pick” references to ἀγάπη (agape), a major subject of my dissertation, from the easily searchable resources in my Logos library rather than reading carefully through all those books in order to discover those references? Have digital Bible students like me, as Dyer alleges, let the pragmatic ease of digital encounters with Scripture color our interpretation of God’s Word?

This third word in Dyer’s acronym seems to be where the rub is. Are evangelicals hopping blithely into Whatever Works without stopping to think deeply about the long-term ramifications of our chosen tools? Which brings me back to my stated theme: Does pragmatic, immediate adoption of AI have hidden dangers that ought to diminish our (evangelicals’ and Logos’s) hopefulness and entrepreneurialism?

The story of God

I want to lay some theological groundwork for answering this question. Simply put: because the Bible’s story starts with a very good creation and not with a fall, I expect all technologies to be fundamentally good before they’re bad, or good “underneath their bad.” Unavoidably, I will get specific here in ways that not even all Logos employees will agree with. But considering that I’m about to cite a centrist evangelical Wesleyan who fishes in Calvinistic streams, I hope I have at least my evangelical Protestant bases covered.

Indeed, Andy Crouch—and the Kuyperian/Bavinckian/Dutch Reformed tradition that Crouch, a Wesleyan, has helped popularize—has had particular influence on me. His main trilogy of books includes Culture Making: Recovering our Creative Calling; Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power; and Strong and Weak: Embracing a Life of Love, Risk and True Flourishing. And in those books he repeatedly mines the biblical story of creation, fall, and redemption for insight into our lives as culture makers.

Creation

All Crouch’s books present a biblical vision of a world that God created to be very good, and of a cultural mandate (Gen 1:26–28) that blessed humans to make something of that very good world. Even non-Christians are constantly (though not universally) multiplying and filling the earth; they’re subduing it and having dominion over it in often good ways. It’s not only Christians that have harnessed the God-given power of the sun, or of electricity; it’s not only Christians who have built beautiful buildings and laid pipes to silently carry in water and carry out waste. When we use our God-given gifts—our powers of reason and our physical strength, even the raw materials of this world and the laws of nature that govern them—to make something of our world out of love for God and neighbor, we are using power in the way God designed. We are promoting what is now often called “human flourishing.” When we use our strengths at Logos to take risks for the good of others, like building a new sermon-preparation tool and bringing it to market (even though we sometimes fail), we are promoting that same flourishing. That’s the Christian doctrine of creation.

Fall

The fall, of course, is equally necessary to the metanarrative to which biblical Christians are necessarily committed. The fall has given our work frustrating thorns and thistles—at Logos, we call them “software bugs.” It has also made it possible for the power of Logos to be used for plagiarism, or for yanking Bible verses out of their contexts, or for citing “the Greek” when actually a given preacher is just putting forth his own ideas. The fall makes us all at Logos less than perfectly ideal colleagues; it makes money a danger; it makes it possible for us to be pragmatic in ways that are unwise or even sinful. The fall of man all those millennia ago is the reason we can’t just say, “If AI exists, it must be good.”

Redemption

But the biblical metanarrative is not a tragedy but what the ancients called a “comedy”: it has a happy ending. The power of God’s redemption enters the Genesis story immediately in the protoevangelium (Gen 3:15), and it culminates in Jesus’s death and resurrection for human sin. Those who live in the fallen flesh cannot please God (Rom 8:8); but it is possible, through the risen Christ, to do true good again. And Christ the King will not only redeem and restore the individual human soul; he promises that our redemption will mean the freedom of creation from its “slavery to corruption” (Rom 8:21). Crouch points out in Culture Making that the narrative of Scripture moves from garden to city: the kinds of development we tend to call “technological” will not be undone but instead restored, even redeemed, in the New Heaven and New Earth.

Crouch is careful to warn that the fall means that we cannot, as mere humans, expect our good works to last, or to have only good effects. Only Jesus can have those expectations (Logos is, no doubt, used by some false teachers). But we are, nonetheless, called to make something of our world, to make more artifacts of human culture,⁵³ to uncover the potentialities God “programmed” into creation.

One of which is the massive collection of 1s and 0s that we call AI.

The discovery of AI

The capacity for “artificial intelligence” is not something humans invented; it’s something we discovered. Biblically speaking, the base technologies that come together to form AI were part of the “very good” creation of Genesis 1. Every law of nature that AI assumes, every bit of silicon and of metal that data centers use, every logical relationship on every motherboard—rests on the bedrock of divine creation. And all our discoveries of the power in these created things is the result of the cultural mandate, the creation blessing that God gave to all of the progeny of our first parents:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:26–28 ESV)

We, who are created in the image of a creator God, are blessed to be able to create. And what we create when we’re at the height of our powers is, not surprisingly, something in our own image: an “intelligence,” an intelligence that is the result of our own “artifice”—our capacity for making pieces of technological art. We can only do this because we ourselves have been given intelligence from an even higher source.⁵⁴

Fundamentally, then, the base technologies that make up AI are good. Very good. We were mandated—and blessed—as a species to explore (not exploit) the God-honoring, neighbor-loving uses of creation. As Crouch says,

Thousands of years after Genesis was written, we can see in a way its first readers could never have imagined just how much capacity these human image bearers had to fill the earth—just how much power was ultimately available to them, coiled in the physical elements’ chemical and nuclear bonds, and emerging from the incredible complexity of the human mind and the fecundity of human culture.⁵⁵

The real question comes when we ask how the fall has affected—has twisted or bent—the set of tools we call AI. Garbage in, garbage out; and humans can take good things and make them garbage. What human-created untruths lie festering in AI datasets? What God-dishonoring biases have we either taught our AI models or failed to remove from them? Now that AI is being used in the real world, what fallen tendencies of mankind is it exacerbating? We’re finding all this out as this new technology starts to work out its implications in our various human cultures.

Twisted AI

Some wise Christian culture watchers, such as writer Samuel James (author of the thought-provoking Digital Liturgies), have warned us that the internet is an “epistemological habitat,”⁵⁶ that the web has “heart-shaping effects.”⁵⁷

Non-Christian writers on tech themes, too, such as Nicholas Carr, have warned us that Google may be making us stupid. An earlier writer who wrote incisive criticisms of media culture, especially regarding television, was Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly.⁵⁸

It would be foolish to ignore the questions posed by these thinkers, especially as we consider the newer technologies of AI. Postman argued that technologies will always play their hand; they will manifest their inner tendencies in a way that only hindsight will truly see. FedEx overnight delivery initially made people in the publication industry breathe a sigh of relief: Now we’ll be able to meet our deadlines more easily without having to wait for page proofs. Of course overnight delivery played its hand and did the opposite: it simply ramped up expectations for tighter deadlines.

What will AI do to us, negatively speaking? What dark parts of its future can we see now? Certain of its dangers are already obvious, from faked nude pictures of celebrities to laziness and arrogance.

AI laziness: preachers, don’t have AI write your sermons. Don’t outsource Scripture memory to it (or to Logos, for that matter). There are some things that you ought to know in your own frontal lobe, which is not a data center. Speaking of which …

AI arrogance: AI is not the next step in human evolution; nor does it actually rival the human brain in its power and complexity. There will be no gotcha line at the end of this piece revealing that it was actually written by a Christian AI bot. I assure you (as does my wife), I am all too human.

Some of AI’s dangers are less obvious, and it takes perceptive people to spot them. Jeffrey Bilbro, professor of English at Grove City College, seems to be such a one; his essay on AI in Plough points especially to the ways AI alters the pain/gain calculus. The reason preachers shouldn’t have AI write their sermons is that pushing through “preacher’s block” seems to be necessary to growing as writers and thinkers, as Bilbro argues persuasively. Writing produced by AI is very commonly too cute by half (Bilbro points out: do we really need a Shakespearean sonnet on climate change?), painfully anodyne (“I’m not sure accelerating the production of pointless text solves the problem of its abundance,” Bilbro says), or confidently wrong.⁵⁹ Do sermons need more of these features?

Andy Crouch, too, points to the ways in which the invulnerability one has in a video game, for example (you’re not actually going to be hurt by the bullets flying at you; only your avatar will “die,” and he’ll be back in a moment), can be enervating, inimical to the development of the true and lasting strengths that teenage boys need to be forming for their futures as husbands and fathers.⁶⁰

At Logos, therefore, we’ve been careful not to talk about AI as a replacement for hard work, but as a facilitator of it. AI isn’t radically and materially different from some of the other efficiency-enabling tools Logos has included for years. For example, perhaps it would be helpful for my Hebrew skills to be required to parse all verbs myself, or to do my own original-language transliterations instead of using the Text Converter tool. Maybe, as Bilbro points out, having to go to my shelf to pull down commentaries—instead of using the rather convenient Logos Passage Guide—would produce moments of homiletical serendipity as I stumble on volumes I hadn’t thought to consult.

But the fallenness inside any technology does not erase the created goodness that is, to borrow a phrase from Lewis, “even deeper magic.” Making my work more efficient may make me lazy, but it doesn’t have to. I made the decision many years ago to outsource specific exegetical tasks such as these to Logos, and I haven’t regretted my choices. Our users, too, are readers; they’re educated and intelligent. I believe they can face these trade-offs honestly. We at Logos intend to put powerful Bible study tools in place, offer some suggested guidance as we have always done, and leave the work-AI balance to our users.

The Place of Technology in the Story of God

Sounds pretty HEPpy, I acknowledge. But if we evangelicals have Hopeful Entrepreneurial Pragmatism, it’s because we believe that creation and redemption overwhelm fall, that grace can restore nature even now, before the Father puts everything under Christ’s feet, as he “rule[s] in the midst of [his] enemies” (Psalm 110:2). We all need the divine wisdom so often praised in the Proverbs to discern where AI brings truly creative power, the genuine power of Christ to subdue the world and have dominion over the world for the good of the world—and where it brings opportunities for yet more verbal kludge.

I found Dyer’s earlier book, From the Garden to the City: The Place of Technology in the Story of God, very helpful and insightful. Broadly speaking, it saw technology as a God-given gift that, nonetheless, requires discernment: like Neil Postman before him, Dyer argued that “our tools are being developed at a rate faster than our capacity to evaluate their impact.” And yet Dyer—a seminary-trained tech nerd (indeed, the brains behind some great projects such as bestcommentaries.com)—is still willing to say in that book,

Christians who live God-honoring lives in the digital world are those who can discern the tendencies built into all technology and then decide when those tendencies are in line with godly values, and when those tendencies are damaging to the soul.⁶¹

In other words, Dyer’s first book argued that it is possible to do some evaluating, to do some discerning—and yet to decide to continue to use digital technologies, despite their acknowledged and even as-yet-unseen downsides. This may be reading between his lines (and my colleague Mark Barnes, who is leading a company reading group on Dyer’s book, disagrees with me here: I’m psychologizing more than may be justified), but People of the Screen seemed to take a bit more dire (sorry!) view of that possibility. The less theological, more sociological eye that Dyer turned on the evangelical use of technology in most of People of the Screen seemed to lead him to lower levels of personal HEP.

I want to get personal here: I tried for years to look at all my tech usage—and my Bible software usage in particular—through the lenses of what’s called “media ecology.” I’ve read Neil Postman; I’ve read Dyer; I’ve read Samuel James; I’ve read Tony Reinke; I even bought an incredibly boring textbook on the topic (that I won’t name), and I made it through some portions! I have seen genuine value in all these books. But several years ago, at the last BibleTech Conference Logos put on, I noticed that a full four or five speakers basically used their speaking slots to caution us sagely about the effects of computers on Bible study—and yet, I noticed, none could get specific. They could only warn in dark tones about the way digital Bible usage is likely to have negative effects. There were few to no persuasive, concrete examples of such effects. Even Dyer, it seemed to me, simply did not demonstrate through his empirical study in People of the Screen that technology alters Bible study.⁶² Good interpreters use both paper and digital tools well; bad interpreters use both poorly.

I’m 43. I use the tools I use. I’m comfortable with giving up the benefits I’m sure must exist for those who write their sermons on typewriters or with fountain pens.⁶³ I’m more than comfortable with giving up the benefits of (most) paper books—or of handwritten codices, and of scrolls before them. I seem to be a productive member of society despite an entire adult life in which Google has been making me stupid. With confidence that technologies are, at heart, fundamentally good before they’re bad, I will watch myself for the effects of the tradeoffs offered by AI. I’ll listen to wise people who can see the fall in AI better than I can. But I’ll maintain my confidence that all things, including AI, can and will be brought under Christ’s feet.

Titles mentioned in the article

From the Garden to the City: The Place of Technology in the Story of God (audio)

Regular price: $19.99

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Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

Regular price: $19.99

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Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power

Regular price: $13.74

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Strong and Weak: Embracing a Life of Love, Risk and True Flourishing

Regular price: $10.79

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Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

Regular price: $13.99

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The most important thing I have purchased for my Logos library—beyond what the major Logos packages already include—is commentary sets. I want careful, knowledgeable, reasoned opinions on interpretive questions. I want multiple opinions so that I can compare them through the Passage Guide. I do not find that this kind of “opinion polling” mires me in confusion or leaves me with nothing to say. I find that it is simply the better part of humility to listen to smart people—many of whom are gifts to Christ’s church (Eph 4:11–12).

I own the good majority of the commentary sets below, mostly purchased with my own money (full disclosure: a few Lexham titles I got for free as a Logos employee). I’m going to talk only about those series that I own and with which I have some personal experience. Hopefully, this will help you as you consider which sets might help you as a Bible student or teacher.

I’m going to divide the sets into categories and, within each category, rank them in my own loose order of their usefulness to me as a frequent Sunday school teacher, infrequent preacher, and inveterate Bible studier.

Standard commentaries

Standard commentaries are sets that attempt to treat effectively all the major and minor interpretive questions in any given biblical book. They often provide some level of synthesis, too, if only in their introductions but often in special features included throughout the commentary text.

A star (⭑) means that a given title made it to the semi-finals for the 2024 Logos March Matchups, an annual competition in which Logos users vote for their favorite products.

⭑ The Pillar New Testament Commentary Series has quite a number of heavy hitters. I love Carson on John. I’ve actually been known to open it up on my phone during church while my pastor was going through that Gospel. I’ve also turned for help many times to Moo on James. Ciampa/Rosner on 1 Corinthians has been a confident and insightful companion. Yarbrough on the Pastorals, too, is a go-to for me. Honestly, given my needs, this is the set I would vote for if I didn’t already have most of it!

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⭑ The Evangelical Exegetical Commentary I do get for free as a Logos employee, just to be clear. But Baugh on Ephesians got one of the best D. A. Carson blurbs I’ve ever seen, so I regularly turn to it when studying Ephesians. I also met Boyd Luter on a trip down the Grand Canyon—a knowledgeable and humble guy. I’ve since enjoyed his Song of Songs volume. This set originally had an overly ambitious timeline. In recent years, Lexham has taken steps to speed up production. But the volumes that have come out have made users happy, me included. This promises to be a quality series.

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⭑ The Baker Commentary on the Old Testament has some really heavy hitters, including Bartholomew on Ecclesiastes and Longman on Proverbs. Frankly, I’m not where John Goldingay is theologically, but I deeply love the Psalms, and I happily turn to him for insight in his more popular-level series (The OT for Everyone). In the BCOT, he has three full volumes on the Psalms. This is the main set I have my eye on during March Matchups, because I actually own only one volume (Bartholomew). It’s time for me to reveal that—for personal and not professional reasons—the BCOT is getting my vote for the 2024 March Matchups.

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The New American Commentary is a Logos classic. It came in my first Logos package in 2007 or so, and I have repeatedly turned to it over the years. I like Stein on Luke, Matthews on Genesis, Stuart on Exodus, and (especially) Block on Judges and Ruth. Garrett on Proverbs is a stalwart; Garland on 2 Corinthians is one I trust; and it’s tough to beat Schreiner on 1 and 2 Peter and Jude.

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One volume in the Understanding the Bible Commentary series rises to the top for me: Provan on 1 and 2 Kings. He’s a master. I’ve met him. He teaches at nearby Regent College. But the set is full of other responsible writers.

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The NIV Application Commentary hasn’t always been as useful for homiletical application as I’ve hoped. Application to one’s own congregation is hard to get good help with. But with major names like Doug Moo (Romans), Darrell Bock (Luke), Iain Duguid (Ezekiel), Iain Provan (Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs), Daniel Block (Deuteronomy), and many others, I haven’t minded that the applications aren’t always repeatable in my contexts. I’m still getting insightful, accessible commentary.

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Accessible commentaries

The commentaries below are some of the first I’d recommend to a beginner—though certain volumes are still very much useful for those who’ve spent years with commentaries.

The Tyndale OT/NT Commentary series is my first recommendation for those who are graduating from lower levels of study Bibles. Tyndale is a classic evangelical series that is continually being updated. It would take a while to list all the volumes I’ve used. The OT portion is especially valuable, and I’m a special fan of Derek Kidner (whose OT volumes can still be purchased outside the Tyndale set in which they originally came).

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The standout volumes in the Expositor’s Bible Commentary start, for me, with Carson on Matthew. I have opened that commentary as much or more than any other I own. I love that Gospel, and I love Carson. I’ve also enjoyed Van Gemeren on the Psalms. The EBC (or Revised EBC) is another great way for people to graduate from study Bibles.

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The ESV Expository Commentary is full of contributions from current major names in contemporary evangelical scholarship and preaching. Despite the name, it doesn’t really belong among “expository commentaries,” because it’s not a set of sermons. This is the kind of commentary I want to have around mainly for “plebiscites,” for the interpretive referendums I regularly like to have. I don’t do my interpretation by majority rule, but I still find it useful to get an aggregate opinion.

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Specialty commentaries

Specialty commentaries take a unique, specific angle on the text of Scripture. They help consistently highlight features that may or may not be covered in standard commentaries.

⭑ The Lexham Geographic Commentary is something I didn’t know I would ever need. And like all reference works (I find this fact really confuses my children), I might only need it a discrete number of times in my life. But having been to Israel, I can say that the LGC is like having a tour guide explaining key background information that I simply could not know otherwise. And the books—in print and in Logos—really are beautifully done. My good friend Doug Mangum has poured years of life into editing these. They’re good.

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The Lexham Research Commentary is practically cheating. There, I said it. It shouldn’t be this easy, or this inexpensive, to get a run-down of expert opinion on disputed or difficult matters within a given biblical book. I have friends, especially Paul Himes and David Wenkel, who supplied volumes to this series. Knowing their character and work ethic makes the LRC even more interesting and valuable to me.

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The Exegetical Guide to the Greek New Testament is something I don’t need and therefore don’t use. I was trained to do what it does. But there was a time when this was the kind of thing I needed. And I mention it because if you’re in that stage where you know some Greek, but you don’t know how to use your knowledge to assist in your interpretation, then you could do little better than pick up some of these writers as models.

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Historical commentaries

I wasn’t really taught by my models to use historical commentaries. They are a somewhat more recent addition to my exegetical toolkit.

The Reformation Commentary Series has proven useful and enjoyable for me. To many modern preaching audiences, Reformation writers are pretty much just as dead as ancient ones. It is powerful, then, for them to encounter Luther, Calvin, and others who show both profound agreement with my evangelical Protestant theology and yet who provide forceful insights that come from their different circumstances.

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Non-evangelical commentaries

I’m an evangelical. I get the most help from evangelical commentators. But I can learn from anyone who has something to teach me, whether they come from a non-Protestant tradition or simply write from secular biblical studies perspective.

I’ll never forget picking up the commentary on 1 Maccabees in the Anchor Yale Bible Commentary and marveling at the learned, judicious comments. There are a few volumes that are especially appreciated by evangelicals, including Fitzmyer on Romans and Fox on Proverbs.

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The main volumes of the International Critical Commentary that I have turned to are those written on Romans by C. E. B. Cranfield. He is a model of the judicious weighing of exegetical arguments. That’s what you need in a book like Romans. I’ve also used Davies and Allison on Matthew—and a few evangelicals snuck into the set during its history, including especially Marshall and Towner on the Pastorals, which is very valuable.

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Expository commentaries

I do not honestly use expository commentaries much, because I am not a regular preaching pastor. But if I were, I could definitely see one or more of these being in my regular diet. I do think that my personal engagement with the biblical text can’t and shouldn’t be short-circuited by immediate appeal to others’ finished sermons.

But sometimes there just isn’t time, and I think that has to be okay. A few times when I have preached on short notice (that’s small-church ministry for you), I have simply strung together quotes from my Logos commentaries and have announced at the beginning of the message that many of my lines were going to come from other Bible teachers.

Benjamin Franklin witnessed a controversy once in which a certain preacher was caught plagiarizing from others. Franklin defended the fellow: “I rather approved his giving us good sermons composed by others, than bad ones of his own manufacture.” As long as you are honest about what you are doing, there are many worse things you could do than “steal” sermonic elements from other gifted preachers. It’s not stealing; that’s why they write commentaries: they’re inviting you to learn from their explanations, use their illustrations, and think through (and, yes, use) their applications.

The Bible Speaks Today is the one expository commentary I have used the most, because it rides the line between expository and traditional commentary. John Stott, author of several BST volumes, is brilliant. He helps me help others see what Scripture says.

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The Reformed Expository Commentary features sermons from some of today’s Reformed luminaries, collected by P&R. If you’re a preaching pastor, it’s a good thing when a chapter of a commentary opens with, “One summer, a family man traveled to Paris, where he spent a morning enjoying Luxembourg Gardens …” This means you are going to get expert help with illustration, not just explanation.

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Preach the Word is Crossway’s equivalent to the set I just mentioned. We really have an embarrassment of commentary riches. Want R. Kent Hughes or Barry Webb or Christopher Ash or Phil Ryken or Ray Ortlund or David Helm or Jim Hamilton to show you how to preach a given text? Get PtW.

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Christ-Centered Exposition is Holman’s equivalent to the REC and PtW. Do we really need this many homiletical series? Why not? The promo video speaks repeatedly of exalting Christ in all of Scripture. How could there be too much of this?

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James Montgomery Boice’s expositions are beloved by many who remember this great man’s ministry. As with the expositions of David Martyn Lloyd-Jones and those of John MacArthur and J. Vernon McGee, they bear the consistent mark and character of one man. This has upsides and downsides, of course. But many know how important it is for one particular Bible teacher to make a deep impression. Perhaps Boice or DMLJ or MacArthur or McGee will do that for you. For me, a dash of Boice and a dribble of Lloyd-Jones have given me what I wanted from collections of sermons, namely the impression of the gravitas they brought to the pulpit. That has had a greater impression on me than their specific exegetical judgments, the illustrations they used, or the applications they made.

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Commentary on commentaries

I’m actually not the grand commentary master that I know some are. I never can bring myself to just read them from cover to cover. I have certain questions, and I go scurrying around in my commentaries in Logos looking for answers. Commentaries for some books (Obadiah?) I admit I’ve probably never even opened. But even so: I know where to find grace to help in time of exegetical need. And my multiple commentary sets rarely let me down.

Here’s what I will say after this big exercise in commentary hot takes: I just think there’s no excuse for preaching a dumb sermon. A bad one I can take. We can’t all be at our best all the time, and sometimes we preachers get jumbled or even a little incoherent. But dumb sermons, sermons which are based on zero listening to anyone else, zero homework—thou art inexcusable, O man. There are so many good models, and they’ve made it so easy to follow them, both in exegesis and in homiletics. Get wisdom, my friend; get wisdom.

Other book recommendations by Mark Ward

40 Best-Selling Books for Baptists

We at Logos looked at the stats, and here are forty of the top one hundred books self-described Baptists have bought from us.⁶⁴ Certain trends are quite interesting.

For example: Pastor John MacArthur utterly dominates the top hundred books for Baptists. This is a bit of an overgeneralization, but the list below is mostly the top hundred with individual MacArthur New Testament Commentary volumes removed (because you can buy the whole set if you want to, so I’m counting it as just one entry!).

Tom Schreiner, as you’ll see, is something of a close second.

Baptists are Bible oriented. So, some other trends: biblical commentaries in general are very popular among Baptists. Even the theologies that are popular are usually biblical theologies—though several systematics definitely made the list.

In the following list, the number at the head is the sales ranking for the book. What follows are some brief comments from me, Mark Ward, a Baptist my whole life (or starting at age eight, when I was baptized); I’m a senior editor for digital content here at Logos.

40. The Pleasures of God, by John Piper

This is one of the most important books in my personal history. Piper takes what could be a dry datum in a list of systematic–theological postulates, the Trinitarian doctrine of perichoresis (the Greek term) or circumincession (the Latin term), and roots it solidly in the Bible, expanding from it to ask about the other things that God himself desires and delights in. A worthy place to start the top-40 countdown.

39. The Deity of Christ, by John MacArthur

I took many other MacArthur books off this list, because they were mostly commentaries that seemed to belong, rather, in one entry rather than dozens. But this MacArthur title is a standalone book. I haven’t read it, but I know what to expect in it: straightforward, confident biblical exposition on a vital theological truth.

38. With the Clouds of Heaven: The Book of Daniel in Biblical Theology (NSBT), by Jim Hamilton

I keep up with this set. I buy all the volumes with my own money, for my personal Logos account. This is one I haven’t read yet, but I’ve seen it mentioned repeatedly. Jim Hamilton is insightful and knowledgeable; I’m excited to dip into this one when I get the chance.

37. The Baptist Heritage: Four Centuries of Baptist Witness, by H. Leon McBeth

I read this in undergrad. It was masterful. I really need to go back through it.

36. Baptism in the New Testament, by George R. Beasley-Murray

Many books on this list are new. That doesn’t mean Baptists read only new books, only that they tend to buy them in Logos. But this book is old(ish), a classic on the topic.

35. Reading the Gospels Wisely: A Narrative and Theological Introduction, by Jonathan Pennington

Jonathan Pennington, a professor at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (like a disproportionate number of writers on this list), has written a book on the Sermon on the Mount that I personally found incredibly helpful and insightful. I haven’t read his Reading the Gospels Wisely, but Tom Schreiner recommends it, and he—as you’ll soon see—appears on this top 40 list many times!

34. Finish the Mission: Bringing the Gospel to the Unreached and Unengaged, by John Piper, et al.

I haven’t read this multi-author book. John Piper, Ed Stetzer, and David Platt, however, are names that bring it weight.

33. Believer’s Baptism: The Covenant Sign of the New Age in Christ, eds. Tom Schreiner

Since we’re counting down, this is Tom Schreiner’s first appearance on the list, this time as editor and contributor. But he writes along with some major names in Baptist theology, including Andreas J. Köstenberger, Stephen J. Wellum, Duane Garrett, and Mark Dever. These are heavy, heavy hitters.

32. Suffering and the Goodness of God, eds. Christopher W. Morgan & Robert A. Peterson

Another entry in the Theology in Community series from Crossway, with entries by Bob Yarbrough, John Frame, John Feinberg, Walt Kaiser, and others.

31. The King James Only Controversy: Can You Trust Modern Translations?, by James White

This is a terrible book. Skip right over it and read Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible, by—I can’t remember who.

Just kidding. Get both. White’s work is the major book on the topic, and I have personally known many people who were helped to leave the conspiracy theories of KJV-Onlyism through White’s work. White delves into textual criticism, a difficult topic, and one that is not accessible to (in my judgment) most defenders of exclusive KJV use. His book is, therefore, a complement to my book, Authorized, which focuses instead on KJV readability and purposefully leaves textual criticism to the side.

30. Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary

I don’t tend to use illustrated Bible dictionaries. It’s just not my field of interest. But I love it when preachers and teachers are excited about that field and share relevant images in sermons. And everybody ought to have a Bible dictionary or two. I tend to turn to the Lexham Bible Dictionary out of company loyalty. It’s also free inside the free edition of Logos.

29. Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective: An Introductory Christology, eds. Fred Sanders & Klaus Issler

I’m not sure why this book is here, I must confess. Perhaps because Bruce Ware, Baptist theologian, was one of the contributors? But if you’ve never read anything by Fred Sanders on the Trinity, you must remedy that situation, and you can do so by getting this book.

28. Interpreting the Pauline Epistles, by Tom Schreiner

I used this title in seminary with great profit. I haven’t actually followed Schreiner’s direct methods: I get impatient with the need to label relationships among clauses. I work at a more intuitive level (and hence zero of my books are on this list!). But I do still lay out passages in much the way Schreiner taught me to do—sometimes using the Canvas tool in Logos. This is a classic.

27. God with Us: Themes from Matthew, by D. A. Carson

D. A. Carson deserves more spots on this list. He is a writer whose work I will never cease to give God thanks for. And his commentary on Matthew in the Revised Expositor’s Bible Commentary series is rightly considered one of the very best; I’ve used it repeatedly. This little book is different but complementary: it’s a sweeping theological overview of Matthew.

26. Desiring God, by John Piper

This book had a profound influence on my life. I think—with Don Carson—that Piper’s The Pleasures of God (also on this list) is more important and more foundational than Desiring God. But I needed both. I’m glad Baptists are still reading it.

25. Acts (New American Commentary), by John B. Polhill

I don’t have much direct experience with this volume, so I won’t say more. I just know I’ve come to value having the series.

24. Dominion and Dynasty: A Biblical Theology of the Hebrew Bible (NSBT), by Stephen Dempster

This book by Dempster (I interviewed him about it for the Logos YouTube channel) is a modern classic, one of the relatively few books in this vale of to-do lists that I’ve read more than once, and will probably read again. It’s profound; one of my top favorite books of all time.

23. The Justification of God: An Exegetical and Theological Study of Romans 9:1–23, by John Piper

This was, sort of, John Piper’s first book. His dissertation doesn’t quite count, and it doesn’t sound a great deal like Piper. This book does. It’s not exactly vintage Piper, either; but it’s the exegetically rigorous work that underlies and creates vintage Piper. Piper, like Spurgeon, bleeds Bible. This is a demanding, intense book on a passage vital to the Calvinism–Arminianism debate.

22. The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, ed. D. A. Carson

I was just reading an essay from this volume last week, one by Peter Williams answering some charges from Bart Ehrman. This is a huge, landmark effort by major evangelical scholars on a huge, landmark issue for Christian faith: the inspiration and authority of Scripture.

21. Spurgeon Commentary: Galatians, by Charles Spurgeon

Spurgeon belongs on this list. And his “commentary” on Galatians—put together from sermons by a personal friend at Lexham who has edited some of my own work—is a brilliant idea. Spurgeon didn’t write a commentary on Galatians (he’s known for his commentary on the Psalms), but he nonetheless offered many insights into the book in his sermons, and these have been collected into a neatly useful volume.

20. The New Testament: Its Background and Message, by David Alan Black & Thomas Lea

I used Carson and Moo’s NT intro in my seminary studies, and I pored over it very carefully a second time for my doctoral comprehensive exams. Matters of New Testament introduction—author, date, purpose, setting, structure, text, etc.—are extremely important building blocks for all work within New Testament studies. To read a commentary intelligently is to know the concerns it’s addressing and the framework it’s assuming. Black and Lea’s New Testament introduction is another worthy (Baptist) effort to acquaint students with these basics.

19. What Is a Healthy Church?, by Mark Dever

I’m a little surprised I didn’t see more Dever (and/or 9Marks) books on the top-forty list. Dever is the preeminent Baptist ecclesiologist. But one thing I’ve noticed about Dever: his Cambridge PhD and his prodigious intellect has not caused him to focus on “scholarly” output—and that is not a criticism. He has dedicated himself to serving the church, to producing books that are often very simple, straightforward, and accessible. This book is an excellent example. Dever, as a pastor, loves to hand out books to his congregants. He writes books that other pastors should use for the same purpose.

18. Fallen: A Theology of Sin, eds. Christopher W. Morgan & Robert A. Peterson

The Theology in Community series, put out by Crossway, includes several notable volumes. This one contains essays by D. A. Carson, Paul R. House, Robert Yarbrough, Douglas Moo, Gerald Bray, Bryan Chapell, and others. Major names on a major topic.

17. 40 Questions about the End Times, by Eckhard Schnabel

The 40 Questions series is truly excellent. It has rapidly established itself as a reliable, accessible resource for all sorts of questions. Honestly, the format is more than half the value. I read a fair number of books each year in a busy life—my general goal is a book a week—and I really love it when authors keep their chapters short.

16. Luke (New American Commentary), by Robert H. Stein

Luke is one of the NAC volumes I regularly turn to. I have repeatedly found it helpful to use the work of Robert H. Stein—yet another name on this list associated with The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (don’t underestimate the power and importance of institutions, which we lose at our peril).

15. God, Revelation, and Authority (6 vols.), by Carl Henry

Carl F. H. Henry’s magisterial work is, perhaps, more mentioned than read. I have to wonder how many people who buy it in Logos do so with the intention of reading through the entire thing. But one of the values of Logos for me is books like this that—let’s be honest—I’ll probably never read straight through, but can still be useful to me as part of my theological library. I can dip in here and there as needed; the books come up in search results; and (this is no small thing for me) I can look up for myself citations of Henry’s work that are found in other books and read them in context.

14. God’s Indwelling Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Old and New Testaments (NAC Studies in Bible and Theology), by Jim Hamilton

Jim Hamilton is another major name in Baptist biblical studies, one who (like Tom Schreiner, who was Hamilton’s doktorvater) is associated with The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he teaches. Hamilton is a Bible guy: he knows Scripture in detail, and he brings his knowledge of all of Scripture to bear on his presentation of any portion of it.

13. New Testament Theology: Magnifying God in Christ, by Tom Schreiner

It’s Schreiner again. This time with a testamental theology. Honestly, I knew Schreiner was a major figure (I’ve interviewed him about yet another commentary of his), but I’m not sure I put all the pieces together. His work appears in different genres. It’s remarkable.

12. 1 Corinthians (New American Commentary), by Mark Taylor

I don’t have a great deal of personal experience with this commentary; it’s one among others that I’ll check when I do a round-up of opinion on a difficult question. What I find interesting here is that the New American Commentary (and a related series, the NAC Studies in Bible and Theology) pops up so many times on this list. That’s appropriate, given that the NAC is put out by Broadman & Holman, a Baptist publisher. Nonetheless, I don’t ever remember thinking, while reading an NAC commentary, “Oh, how Baptist this is!” I know the NAC instead for its good, solid exegesis.

11. The Second Letter to the Corinthians (Pillar New Testament Commentary), by Mark Seifrid

Baptists love their commentaries. Seifrid actually teaches at a Lutheran school as of this writing, but taught for many years at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. D. A. Carson—another favorite name among Baptists—edits the Pillar New Testament Commentary series, another series that shows up in Logos libraries and is very much worth owning.

10. 1 & 2 Peter and Jude (New American Commentary), by Tom Schreiner

Speaking of Schreiner, what can one say? Here he is again, in one of the first commentaries I remember being praised by my own commentary sensei. This comes in a set I bought many years ago in my first Logos library, and one I’ve consulted repeatedly.

9. Galatians (Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament), by Tom Schreiner

Tom Schreiner appears twice in the top ten,⁶⁵ The structure and focus of ZECNT commentaries is unique, and the series has built a lot of good will among commentary readers. Schreiner is able to do, not just teach: the exegetical methods he taught in books like Interpreting the Pauline Epistles (see no. 28 on this list) he employs here, including a detailed visual breakdown of each passage.

8. The King in His Beauty: A Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, by Tom Schreiner

And here’s Schreiner again, writing in a second major genre (both commentary and biblical theology). That’s a remarkable achievement, as was this book.

7. Systematic Theology: Biblical and Historical, by Robert Culver

It takes some chutzpah—a Hebrew word meaning “chutzpah”—to write a systematic theology. It also takes years of one’s life. Theology is an old man’s game. Robert Duncan Culver published his systematic while in his late-eighties. It most definitely gets used and cited; it’s a standard, and it deserves its place near the top of this list.

6. Learn to Read New Testament Greek, by David Alan Black

David Alan Black makes a rather wry observation at the beginning of what he knew to be yet another textbook for teaching New Testament Greek: “I am sure that the call for this book did not arise from the deficiencies of its predecessors.” But incremental advances are still advances. And Black incorporates insights from linguistics into his instruction, something I personally consider very important. I am often asked where to start when studying Greek; I even wrote a little booklet on the topic, and I didn’t mention this volume, because I have not personally used it. But tons of Baptists can’t be wrong.

5. Romans (Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament), by Tom Schreiner

Tom Schreiner is clearly one of the top NT scholars among Baptists, and his Romans commentary is, if often considered second-place to that of Moo’s, still always mentioned in the next breath.

4. NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible Notes, ed. D. A. Carson

I was glad to see this work so high on the list. The real editorial workhorse behind these notes was my respected friend and former fellow student (and church member, as it happens) Andy Naselli. Andy is a machine: he produces a lot of work, and he always has, ever since I’ve known him. But he made a comment once that really struck me: his work writing and editing notes for this study Bible was likely to reach more people than all of his other work combined. The lead name on the volume is actually that of Don Carson, Andy’s mentor, but I always think of it as Andy’s work. Major names in evangelical biblical theology signed on for this project, from T. D. Alexander to Jim Hamilton to Doug Moo.

3. Biblical Doctrine: A Systematic Summary of Bible Truth, by John MacArthur & Richard Mayhue

It’s MacArthur again—but not by himself. This systematic is the work of multiple members of The Master’s Seminary faculty. It is, as the preface says, everything MacArthur fans will expect: biblical, exegetical, systematic, comprehensive, pastoral, and practical.⁶⁶

2. Christian Theology, by Millard J. Erickson

Millard Erickson’s systematic has been a textbook and a go-to resource for decades now. I used it in seminary myself. What struck me about Erickson was his judiciousness. It could be frustrating to not be told The Right View on any given topic, but in Erickson’s practice this was an important lesson for me to learn: major views tend to exist for good reasons, even if you must ultimately disagree with some of them.

1. John MacArthur Sermon Library

The man, the expositor, the still-living legend. Baptists love his sermons. And his commentaries are (kind of) his sermons. I actually had to remove dozens of MacArthur commentary volumes from this list, lest MacArthur dominate it. But here is a link to the whole set.

A good pride

As a Baptist myself, I’m feeling a little bit of that elusive good kind of pride right now. I really like it that Baptists reach for Bible-oriented books. I like seeing so many commentaries, so many biblical theologies, and some biblical languages books. I’m pleased with and impressed by our Baptist customers’ tastes. They reach for solid and not vapid resources. This, to me, feels like a golden age of good English theological writing, one paralleled mainly—or only—by the time of the Puritans.

Baptists must be right.⁶⁷

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What is the most violated verse on the internet? Probably, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart.” Every online sin draws its nourishment from that root.

But right behind that violated verse might be—our second-place winner—Paul’s words: “Speaking the truth in love” (Eph 4:15).

People online don’t have a great reputation for speaking the truth. And even when they do it, it’s just as likely to be spoken in disdain as in love. The internet version of Ephesians 4:15 might be, “Shouting falsehoods in anger.” How’s that for a shareable meme?

Warning: you’re on the internet right now. Its gravity is pulling you. You need to spend the next few minutes reflecting on what it means to “speak the truth in love.”

What does it mean to speak the truth in love?

“Speaking the truth in love” is a phrase Paul uses in his letter to the church at Ephesus. It’s part of a list of things that are meant to flow from one particular action of the risen Christ; namely, his decision to give “apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers” to his church.

He did this, Paul explains, “to equip the saints for the work of ministry.” And this, in turn, will “build up the body of Christ,” Paul says. And once that body reaches “maturity,” it won’t be gullible like children; it won’t be “carried around by every wind of doctrine.”

Instead, it will find itself “speaking the truth in love.”

This will happen.

And this is the context for Paul’s famous phrase. It’s not as if “speaking the truth in love” is unnecessary outside church; no, as I said, we could sure use some more of it on the internet. But Paul’s original intent was not to make a general statement about the way all humans should behave, but to describe what actually will happen when the body of Christ is functioning properly underneath its Head.

Is “speaking the truth in love” what’s happening through you at your own church, and among Christians you connect with in other venues? How can you encourage the growth of this practice in yourself and in your church?

We’ll get there.

Some Bible nerd questions

But first—it’s time to get Bible nerdy for a second. I habitually check multiple Bible translations whenever I study a verse. Here’s the Text Comparison Tool in the Logos Bible Study app at Ephesians 4:15, featuring all the Bibles I normally check. Look how they translate the key verb:

I noticed a little something—did you see it? (I kinda drew attention to it.) The Tyndale New Testament of 1526 had, “Follow the truth,” not, “Speak the truth.” In cases like this, in which a pre-KJV translation differs from the KJV in some minor particular, I often find that the older translation matches the Latin Vulgate. And indeed here it does. Facientes is from facere, the root of our “manufacture.” It means “doing”—“doing the truth,” not “speaking the truth.”

If checking the Latin Vulgate feels beyond you, it need not. I used Logos 10’s Translation tool to check up on my own rusty Latin—it’s as easy as highlighting some text and clicking an icon:

European Christians for many centuries have read “doing the truth” here in Ephesians 4:15.

Five other translations in my standard list also went with something other than “speaking.” They had Christians “practicing,” “maintaining,” “living,” and “following” the truth.

When you see minor variation in Bible translations like this, I think you should not assume that one rendering is right and the others are wrong. I think you should assume that the many translators involved had good reasons for their choices. And indeed, here the verb the Spirit chose in Greek is genuinely ambiguous. The word could focus on verbal communication (“speaking the truth”), or it could focus on ethical action (“practicing the truth”).

The NET Bible notes are frequently an excellent tool for tracking down questions about Bible translation. They defend ably the minority view among modern translators. They point out uses of the word in the Old Testament⁶⁸ in which the word means “practicing the truth.”

But I tend to side with the majority view, ably represented by S. M. Baugh’s excellent Ephesians commentary in the Evangelical Exegetical series. He points to the other use of the word in the New Testament, and he notes that “the contrast with deceit and lies in v. 14 makes ‘speaking’ or ‘telling’ the truth the best meaning.”

Bible nerdiness complete. Let’s move to application.

How do you speak the truth in love?

The part of Ephesians 4 in which these words appear is written in the indicative mood: even fourth graders who have paid attention in English class should be able to see that Paul chose declarative sentences in the paragraph we’re looking at. But then this paragraph comes right after Paul’s famous switch to the imperative in Ephesians 4:1: “I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called.” So, as is often the case with the ethical commands of the New Testament, “speaking the truth in love” is something that will happen, because Christ, the Lord of the church, has ordained that it be so—and it is something that must happen, because we are called to obedience to Christ’s purpose.

Now, my lived experience as a Christian suggests to me that “speaking truth in love” wouldn’t have to be in any way a command for us, or an expectation, if it didn’t have something to do with telling other Christian people truths about their sin that they probably don’t want to hear. That’s why the hardest question about how to apply these words—how to use these words faithfully and obediently—is more the when and not the how. When do you confront another Christian, and when do you refrain?

But I think it’s important to recognize first that Paul isn’t actually drawing a contrast in this passage between “speaking the truth in love” vs. “speaking the truth with a bad temper,” or “speaking the truth in love” vs. “failing to speak up when you see another Christian sinning.” His contrast is between the cunning, crafty, and deceitful words of false teachers and the honest, straightforward, loving words Christians should speak to each other.

If, on occasion, these words must include some kind of rebuke, it sure helps if the rebuker already has a pattern of speaking other truths in love.

But I am writing to an internet audience who very likely rode the Google wave here because you are anticipating having to confront another professing Christian’s sin. “Speaking the truth in love” feels like a very scary prospect at the moment. You’re wanting to make sure it means what it sure seems to mean. Is it really your job to tell other Christians that you saw them being divisive or angry or gossipy or indiscreet? Is it really God’s call on you to speak the truth to your sister about her disrespect toward Mom? Would it spoil some vast, eternal plan if somebody else took this plum job?

That’s where love comes in. If you love someone, that will go a long way toward making your words of rebuke palatable. Be driven by love, not fear. If you love a fellow Christian, this will drive you to care more about the negative effects their sin has on them than the negative effects their poor reaction might have on you. If you love your brother, this will lead you to carefully feel your eyeballs for beams before you engage in a mote intervention. Love will bring questions before bringing accusations. Love will cover a multitude of other little sins so that the focus can remain on what’s truly serious.

And note that Paul didn’t say, “Speaking the truth in love and thereby guaranteeing a favorable response.” As with the gospel, so with any truth: you can’t control whether another heart will receive it.

Go and speak some more

I design church websites on the side, and I’ve done it for well over a decade now in my free time. So I have on many occasions pored over two hundred smartphone photos of this or that random small church. With apologies to all my wonderful clients, not once has any of the pictures revealed a stock-photo-worthy collection of exceptionally attractive, perfectly coiffed people, all smiling ecstatically while both enjoying and spreading Christian love.

I’m not saying the church people of Random Baptist Church are unhappy. I’m not saying they’ve all been uglified. I’m saying that not many people of power and of noble birth are called. Most church people look like average Americans—except more so. I often think to myself, Church ministry is not all about fame and self-fulfillment; it’s regular people in unexciting places doing often slow and tedious things. Living in love with the other Christians who actually attend your real-live church will not always be fun and will win you no public awards.

But “speaking the truth in love” is an essential descriptor of what goes on in church, even if the people in your church don’t make it particularly easy. It’s part of an overall pattern in Ephesians 4:15, a pattern of mutual edification that draws from the equipping ministry of faithful church leaders—that, in turn, derives from the gracious gifts of Christ himself. Christ is the source, and he is the goal: “speaking the truth in love” is supposed to lead to us “grow[ing] up in every way into him.”

Take these simple thoughts to church with you next Sunday. See if they don’t invest that day with a significance you forgot was there.

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• Holiness: A Short Guide to a Complicated Doctrine
• 4 Tips for Reading the One Anothers in the Bible
• Sermon on the Mount: 5 Keys That Unlock Understanding
• What Is Envy? Analyzing This Subtle Sin

A former coworker of mine, now retired, a very sharp editor and faithful Bible reader, sends me occasional Bible questions. She sent one the other day about the alleged secret meaning of God’s name:

Hey, Mark, I’ve seen this circulating on social media and wonder if this is how Hebrew works.

My friend continued:

I’ve never heard this meaning before. Do you define the word by the individual meaning of the letters? If so, how does this meaning square with Exodus 3:14? Thanks!

Secret meaning

I love these questions. And I have some guidance for those who run across such memes.

Anytime I encounter claims about secret meaning in the Hebrew or Greek, especially those employing some kind of apparently consistent linguistic method, I like to see where that method takes me. If it takes me to consistent insight, and insight that persuades other judicious interpreters, then it probably reflects something about how God made language or how he inspired the Bible. If it takes me to greater and greater absurdities … perhaps I can at least get an article out of it for Word by Word.

So let’s try this method. Under the rules as stated, the meaning of YHWH would actually be, “Hand behold nail behold” (where did the source get the “my” and the “the”?).

But then the “true meaning” of other words that contain these letters would also be some mixture of “hand,” “behold,” and “nail.” For instance, by this method, the very common word וַיְהִי (WYHY), which usually gets translated, “And it came to pass,” or sometimes just “when” (sometimes it’s not translated at all), would mean “nail hand behold hand.”

And those three letters aren’t the only ones in the Hebrew alphabet: the method can be extended, presumably. The internet tells me what the other Hebrew letters “mean,” so now we can know the secret meaning of all the words in the Hebrew Bible!

• By this method, another major title for God, Adonai (usually translated “lord” or “master”), has the secret meaning, “Ox door serpent hand”—or perhaps, because possible alternate meanings are given for each letter at Wikipedia, “Cow head fish fish hand.” And if you think about it long enough, you can probably come up with some way for that to picture Jesus. If it’s ox-door-serpent-hand, you can imagine an ox trying to enter the door to the sheepfold of the kingdom, but the hand of the serpent stops him. Or if it’s cowhead-fish-fish-hand, you can think of, um, a barley loaf in the shape of a cow head and two small fishes in the hands of the little boy who shared his meal, enabling Jesus’ miracle of the feeding of the five thousand (??).
• The longest Hebrew words are the best: you can get the most meaning out of them. The name “Hazzelelponi,” a descendant of Judah (1 Chr 4:3), really meant something like, “There’s a papyrus plant in the window—goad yourself, goad yourself with the fish hook in your hand.” This, too, has deep theological meaning. The papyrus, of course, was the main kind of paper used for making early copies of the Greek New Testament, so I think the name Hazzelelponi was probably a promise that that the New Testament would soon be seen—it was in the window, as it were. And if the ancient Israelites would just have goaded themselves to study, to the point of sharp physical pain, they’d have seen that papyrus—they’d have known that the Messiah (which really means “water sun hand wall”) was coming.
• But there’s something even better than long words. This method works equally well with whole verses, too—and why not, if we can do it with words? Under this method (and if your source gets to add connector words, so do I), Genesis 1:1 really means: “The house’s head ox had a tooth in his arm—marked with a house head ox, in fact. And an ox goad in the window had a hand on the water ox. But, mark well, the window tooth also had a water arm, a water hook, and an ox mark window. Ox heads are papyrus plants.”

Absurdities

I think we’re discovering greater and greater absurdities. There is also a significant complication here called matres lectionis, consonants that are used to indicate particular vowels but were likely not present when Moses actually sat down to put pen to parchment using, we presume, some kind of paleo-Hebrew script. In other words, the exact original spelling of some Hebrew words was probably a bit different than what we see in the Hebrew Bible today.

I’ll confess now the weakest point of my answer: I don’t know for certain where the conventional associations named in that meme actually come from. I assume they have at least a partial basis in fact, because indeed it is widely accepted that Hebrew (and Greek, for that matter) alphabets have their ultimate source in pictograms/ideograms.

But we’ve got precisely zero indication that the authors of the Hebrew Bible had any of those historic associations in mind—anymore than we today think about the palm of the hand when we write out the letter K.

Indeed, why shouldn’t this method work in English?

I’ll tell you why: if my wife wrote me a Post-it Note and stuck it on the fridge, with some text saying, “Please take out the trash,” and if I spent fifteen minutes figuring out the secret meaning supposedly invested in every letter instead of taking out the trash, my wife would be mad.

I think God is not pleased by the herculean efforts some people go to look so hard for hidden meanings—whether linguistic or allegorical or what have you—that they miss the simple point of what he said. Bible interpretation is hard enough without layering on top of it all kinds of linguistic silliness.

Exodus 3:14

My old coworker’s reference to Exodus 3:14 is on point: God had a chance to tell us the meaning of his name, and that’s the closest he chose to come. She, in fact, had come up with an excellent example of doing just what I always recommend: if someone makes an interpretive argument based on the alleged meaning of a Hebrew or Greek word, an interpretive argument you (by definition) can’t verify from your English translation, look instead to sentences—sentences you can read in English. If a sentence or paragraph or narrative bears out the argument, you’re good. But frequently it won’t. God’s word in translation is not hiding essential information, or he would have called us all to learn Hebrew and Greek.

If there are layers of meaning in the Hebrew that aren’t available in English, the way to find them is to check multiple English translations. They do sometimes help you see shades of meaning in difficult words—like the paraclete of John: is he a comforter, a helper, an advocate? Probably yes.

But if you compare translations at Exodus 3:14, you’ll find that the translations are pretty united. God chose to give an ambiguous, veiled, layered answer, and no respected translations really make it clearer.

Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’ ” (Exodus 3:13–14)

I’m not saying knowledge of Hebrew is irrelevant to the study of this puzzling statement from God. But it’s a help mainly at the technical level. I do expect people to be able to get a sound interpretation out of this verse even through translation alone. The themes of authority and divine aseity (the idea that God exists by himself and to himself without any dependence on others) that most interpreters see in the Hebrew are just as visible in English. Honestly: I don’t think Moses understood God at the burning bush with anymore clarity than we do now, especially given the subsequent history of Abraham’s seed that we know and he didn’t—not to mention our centuries of reflection on the famous and glorious passage we know as Exodus 3.

My advice

My advice: keep reading and reflecting on the English, and if the Hebrew really has something to say that you can’t see in English, it’ll probably be in the notes in a good study Bible—or, certainly, in a good commentary in Logos.

If it’s not, you can move on to lexicons—Logos has plenty of good ones (try CHALOT for Hebrew, BDAG for Greek)—or to the Lexham Theological Wordbook.

Related articles

• Why We All Need the Biblical Languages
• How to Study with Hebrew Lexicons
• How to Use Greek Lexicons

In my previous article in this two-part series, I offered my thoughts on John Piper’s recent off-hand comments about Logos and BDAG. While very appreciative of Piper’s love for Logos, I argued that BDAG may be more useful to more people than his brief words on the topic suggested.

I’ll argue something similar about commentaries. Piper also said on the Pastor’s Talk podcast,

If I consult a commentary, I consult it after I’m stumped. … That’s one of the reasons I don’t bother with commentaries very much. They don’t get as far as I do, often. … My favorite commentaries are commentaries like Ellicot and Alford, because those guys pose the questions I’m stumped by. They pose serious, detailed, grammatical questions. The others, they just say things everybody sees. They all write the same things. So I’m not helped much.

Piper’s influence on me

John Piper has had an immense and positive impact on me, especially in my more formative years. He showed me the glory of God and he stoked my love for God. What could be more important? My dissertation on Paul’s Religious Affections was born out of a love for his key works (Desiring God and The Pleasures of God). He was a gateway for me to Edwards and the Augustinian tradition. He is a stupendously careful and effective reader of Scripture. But I cannot honestly say that I have followed Piper’s bent toward Greek grammatical study and away from commentaries. I’m not condemning it or disregarding it or devaluing it: I’m relativizing it to the personal gifting and interests of the exegete.

Two major influences have pushed me away from Piper’s practices with commentaries.

Barr on going from grammar to theology

One is James Barr (and others who have written in his vein, especially evangelical scholar Moisés Silva, in books like Biblical Words and Their Meaning). Barr wrote one of the most important paragraphs I’ve ever read about exegesis:

Theological thought of the type found in the NT has its characteristic linguistic expression not in the word individually but in the word-combination or sentence. … [Since] important elements in the NT vocabulary were not technical … the attempt to relate the individual word directly to the theological thought leads to the distortion of the semantic contribution made by words in contexts; the value of the context come to be seen as something contributed by the word, and then it is read into the word as its contribution where the context is in fact different. Thus the word becomes overloaded with interpretative suggestion.⁶⁹

What Barr said about words I say about grammar. In my experience, preachers with Greek training want to relate individual grammatical constructions directly to theological thoughts. They do this, for example, with verb tenses. As my friend Andy Naselli says in his book Let Go and Let God: A Survey and Analysis of Keswick Theology, Keswick theologians were fond of pointing, for example, to the “punctiliar action” (think of precisely one point [Latin, punctum] on a right-to-left timeline) allegedly always indicated by the Greek aorist tense. They used this impressive grammatical datum to argue that the aorist (bolded) in Romans 6:13 speaks of a once-for-all, point-in-time act of consecration:

Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. (Rom 6:13 ESV)

The first “present” at the beginning of the verse is in the present tense. The second is aorist. Therefore, said Keswick theologians, you’re now giving your body away continually as a tool for sin, but you’ve got to make a once-for-all decision (punctiliar aorist) to consecrate yourselves to God.

But often—using Logos to search for (or at least display) the morphological information—you can just read on a sentence or two to find a place where a nifty argument like this just doesn’t work. So it is in Romans 6, which goes on to say, “You once presented [aorist] your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness.” When did such a deadly consecration occur? Was it a one-time, punctiliar action? No. It was an ongoing reality. And yet Paul used an aorist, as Logos shows with the hover a mouse:

Jesus used an aorist too, when he said, “Abide [aorist] in me” in John 15. But context makes it clear that abiding is the very definition of a non-punctiliar action. It’s the very opposite of punctiliar. (Your abiding in Christ had better not be merely punctiliar.)

I’m not commenting here on Keswick theology itself, only on the way certain of its theologians argued from grammar to theology. Nifty grammar-to-theology arguments often end up promising more than they deliver, in my experience.

Here’s my rule of NT-scholar-Rod-Decker’s thumb: you probably shouldn’t preach a point that isn’t present in your hearers’ English Bibles. If most major translations make no distinction (in English) to reflect the variation between present and aorist tenses in Romans 6:13 (in Greek), it may not really be there—or, at least, it may not be wise to preach it. Indeed, only the rather fastidious New American Standard Bible makes a distinction here; even the Literal Standard Version does not do so.

Piper

It actually just so happens that I was listening to a John Piper sermon after I wrote the first draft of this piece, and I heard this otherwise excellent, legendary preacher do what I’m describing. I didn’t go looking for this example, and I dislike disagreeing with a hero of mine such as Piper! He was actually disagreeing (mildly) with his own beloved ESV and arguing for a particular significance for a given preposition in Luke 10:27—“Love the lord with/out of [εκ, ek] your whole heart.” He pointed out this significance to the audience—which, in his defense, probably contained a noticeable percentage of people who knew Greek (it was Joel Beeke’s Puritan Conference at Grace Community Church). Piper named the Greek words at issue and drew a contrast between loving God “with” your whole heart (which would be εν, [en] and is in fact used in the parallel passage in Matthew 22) and “out of” your whole heart (which is εκ [ek], the word used in Luke 10:27).

I immediately suspected that I just couldn’t buy this interpretation: Piper was cutting too fine a distinction. (He went on to make some arguments I felt were much more solid, such as pointing out that “heart” is first in the list.)

So I checked BDAG. Sure enough, BDAG lists an instrumental use of the preposition at issue here, and it gives an example use from Luke: “Make friends by means of [εκ, ek] unrighteous mammon.” And—significantly—I couldn’t find a major translation that reflected the difference in Greek pronouns in Luke 10:27. I didn’t, don’t, and can’t quite buy Piper’s particular argument. I see εκ (ek) as being used in stylistic variation with εν (en) in that verse. (If BDAG hadn’t done this work for me, I would have used the Bible Word Study in Logos to find instrumental uses of εκ [ek] on my own.⁷⁰)

It’s common enough for Bible interpreters to read very specific theology out of very arcane grammar that I have found myself instinctively going back to Barr: I place more weight on the sentence than I do on the individual parts of a sentence, including both specific words and specific grammatical points. I also place a lot of weight on paragraphs, which is the single biggest reason why I care so much about good Bible typography.

A little more nerdity before I get to my second big influence: over and over in Nigel Turner’s Syntax, which I read in its entirety and marked up extensively back in seminary, Turner would say things like this:

Already in the Koine the distinction between the relative pronoun of individual and definite reference (ὅς [hos] and ὅσος [hosos]) and that of general and indeterminate reference (ὅστις [hostis] and ὁπόσος [hoposos]) has become almost completely blurred.⁷¹

Or this:

Imperfects are retreating before aorists in the Koine.⁷²

The pattern seemed to me to be that arcane grammatical distinctions that were once observed in classical Greek came to be eroded in the Koine Greek used in the New Testament. I speculate, but I wonder if common people ever observed all those fine distinctions. How many of us today know the official, grammar-book difference between “that” and “which”? And this very day as I write, I was in a formal public discussion with well-educated Bible nerds who repeatedly “mixed up” the words “lie” and “lay” (They said, “I want a Bible that lays flat”). I pointed this out in mock seriousness, but I knew that the distinction exists mainly in books for pedants and isn’t really true in the language as it’s used even by expert English speakers—such as the well-educated people with whom I was speaking.

Exegesis is an art and a science. And I’m genuinely grateful for those—from Keil and Deilitzsch to Steve Runge—whose strength lies in the grammatical and arcane portions of that science. They help me know the limits of where the art can bring me. And maybe I’m too grammar-skeptical. Maybe, also, it’s good to have right hands and left hands in the body—people who have a bent toward interpretive precision at the molecular level, and people who default more to the sentence.

But all I’ve just described is why my use of commentaries is different from Piper’s. In my own conservative, biblicist circles, I fear that going beyond the Bible text is a more common sin than failing to say all the text says. Other groups have different gifting and bents.

Frame

The other major influence on my exegesis whom I wish to discuss in light of Piper’s commenting on commentaries is theologian John Frame. Frame taught me that if usage determines meaning, then, to some degree, meaning is use. In other words, I put a lot of weight on what other skilled and Spirit-filled Christians over time have seen in a given passage. How have they “used” it? If no one else in the history of interpretation has come to the conclusion I’m entertaining, perhaps entertainment has too big a place in my life.⁷³ And if no one else answers a question I have, perhaps it’s not as important as I thought.

Frame points out that if someone “understands” a given passage of Scripture but has no idea what bearing it has on his life, no idea how to—again—“use” it to increase his faith, hope, and love, or to shape his obedience, then he probably cannot say that he “understands” it.

Frame’s classic illustration is the doughnut (like his predecessor, Van Til, the brilliant Frame is fond of very accessible illustrations).

If God says “Thou shall not steal” and I take a doughnut without paying, I cannot excuse myself by saying that Scripture fails to mention doughnuts. Unless applications are as authoritative as the explicit teachings of Scripture (cf. The Westminster Confession of Faith, I, on “good and necessary consequence”), then scriptural authority becomes a dead letter. To be sure, we are fallible in determining the proper applications; but we are also fallible in translating, exegeting, and understanding the explicit statements of Scripture. The distinction between explicit statements and applications will not save us from the effects of our fallibility. Yet we must translate, exegete, and “apply”—not fearfully but confidently—because God’s Word is clear and powerful and because God gives it to us for our good.⁷⁴

Here’s where my mind takes all this: God knows all the situations to which all his rules, precepts, statutes, and laws apply. He knew them when he inspired Scripture. He knows all the faithful and appropriate uses of those pieces of revelation, and he knows all the faithless and twisting (2 Pet 3:16b) uses of his words.

The tools of exegesis are all methods of doing our best, along with the illumination of the Spirit, to make faithful and appropriate use of God’s words in our respective circumstances. We read the context to make sure we’re assuming appropriate definitions of words. We study the literary genres so that we observe the patterns of meaning present therein. We learn about historical background so we can have some idea who is on the other end of the phone line as we hear Paul talking. And, yes, we observe grammatical patterns as we try to reach the authorial intent of every Bible passage.

I may seem to have gotten pretty far afield from commentaries again, but I haven’t. Here’s the connection: I look for the best signs I have that a given commentator is (and here I borrow from hermeneutical theorist and theologian Kevin Vanhoozer) a “right reader reading rightly,” and I take what that commentator says seriously. When he or she “uses” Scripture in a certain way, I take that as a weighty vote.

I can’t go as far as Augustine and one biblical scholar I interviewed once who both seemed to say that if an interpretation promotes love of God and neighbor, it’s “true.” I wouldn’t want my words to be interpreted that way; I want people to know what I meant. But I feel the pull of that Augustinian view. So I place a fair bit of weight on the small-o orthodox interpretive tradition. I doubt interpretations that have never occurred to any other Bible readers in the history of the church, and I tend to view interpretations that lots of serious, skilled Christians have held as—prima facie, in principle—acceptable. With Charles Hodge of the old Princeton Seminary, I hope I never say anything truly new.

This kind of leads me back to a more positive assessment of John Piper’s use of the εκ (ek) preposition in Luke 10:27. He has flaws and sins, as he would admit and often does, but I believe he is a right reader reading rightly. His vote is valid. I suppose we won’t find out till glory exactly who’s closest to right on such arcane questions as the intent of the variation in prepositions in Luke 10:27. Long, careful attention to accurate Bible interpretation has led me to have a sense of where our claims of knowledge need to stop. But I can’t deny that Piper has given even longer and more careful attention. God will judge.

Conclusion

For years, I kept commentary use till the end of my exegetical process—just like Piper says he does. I felt duty-bound to follow that principle. And I still think that waiting to check commentaries is the least lazy method—for me. But in recent years, I’ve realized that I truly just don’t have time to do all the exegetical prep I’d prefer to do. When I teach in the Spanish ministry or the youth group or the equipping classes or the young adult ministry at my church, I sometimes have to fit prep into the wee hours of the morning. Or I have to do what I’ve never before done: I have to use notes prepared by others.

And I figure that as long as I’m taking an interpretation that responsible people have taken, responsible Christian scholars who did have the chance to do the exegetical work in their well-appointed studies and their cushy endowed chairs, I’m probably okay. And if they all write the same things about a passage (and let me say clearly that Piper is right about this), I actually like that situation: I feel more secure having seen the Spirit guide them all into the apparent truth of that portion of his Word. And even when commentators echo each other a lot, they still often provide exegetical tidbits that are useful to me, if only in homiletics. I love checking lots of commentaries in Logos. For me and my calling, they’re a big help. I rarely use them all, but I’ll frequently use the Passage Guide to call up at least 10–15, from Calvin to NICOT.

I’m not fit to tie Piper’s homiletical shoes. I owe a great debt to him. But I’m forty-two. I don’t have much time left in this vale of tares. I have to say what I believe is true: I think my fellow conservative evangelical Bible teachers are prone to over-interpret New Testament Greek, to demand of it more precision than its authors intended. This leads me to a different use of commentaries than some of my heroes.

Related articles

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Have you ever looked closely at Jesus’s story of the Good Samaritan?

All knowledge begins with asking basic questions, and through the magic of internet technology, I know what people out there are asking about the Sermon on the Mount. I see your searches, your questions. And as we’ll see, some of these questions can lead to profound truth.

It is my task today, internet, to answer your questions about the Good Samaritan. Here’s what you wanted to know:

What does the Bible say about the Good Samaritan?

The Good Samaritan is a story Jesus tells in the latter half of Luke 10.

When I want to make a quick check of the context of a given portion of the Bible, I often glance at the headings in my Bible. Or I pull up the Lexham Context Commentary, which tells me, in this case, that

at the close of the previous passage (10:1–24) Jesus indicated that foreign, despised cities such as Tyre and Sidon will be in a better place on the day of judgment than certain cities in Galilee. Now Jesus describes a despised Samaritan as being more law-abiding than a priest or Levite. However, in the immediate context, the parable of the good Samaritan is told to demonstrate the true meaning of love for one’s neighbor. True, godly love is not provincial.⁷⁵

So this famous story seems to operate on two levels within this portion of Luke.

1. The Good Samaritan story follows a passage in which Jesus communicates God’s judgment of his own chosen people—judgment for rejecting the Messiah he sent, and for refusing to repent from their sins. He contrasts his Jewish hearers unfavorably with nearby Gentiles.
2. In its own context (in its “pericope”), the Good Samaritan story also answers a question posed to Jesus by a Jewish expert in Old Testament law. The expert first asks, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus replies by asking the man what God’s law says. The man replies with the great love commands: love God, love neighbor. The lawyer, “wishing to justify himself,” asks, “Who is my neighbor?” The story of the Good Samaritan is Jesus’s answer to this question.

The story is well-known, and I won’t retell it here. You can read it in the Logos web app in a number of translations. For our purposes, it is sufficient to point out where the flow of thought has come from (the two contexts I just mentioned)—and, now, where it goes: the parable ends, as few do, with an explicit call to “go and do likewise.” The parable of the Good Samaritan is certainly never less than an example for us.

But is it more?

What is the meaning behind the Good Samaritan?

Darrell Bock is one of the most respected evangelical commentators on the book of Luke. If you wish to boil down the moral of the story to a single line, you could do little better than Bock. Here is how he summarizes the parable of the Good Samaritan:

Jesus’ answer to the lawyer’s … question is, “Do not worry about spotting God’s people first, just be a neighbor to all, as this Samaritan was.”⁷⁶

Bock suggests that “the real issue” in this parable “is not whom we should serve, but that we serve. … We are not to ask who our neighbor is; we are to be a neighbor.”⁷⁷ Another insightful writer on the parable is Klyne Snodgrass, who says something similar:

This parable is intended to show that love does not allow limits on the definition of neighbor. … We cannot say in advance who the neighbor is; rather, nearness and need define “neighbor.”⁷⁸

We humans like to lower the bar of divine expectation. Jesus won’t allow it. There is no such person as a “non-neighbor.”⁷⁹

Another small note: as Snodgrass points out, early Christian interpreters commonly took the parable of the Good Samaritan as referring allegorically to Jesus. But as Snodgrass, Bock, and multiple other commentators point out, Jesus ends with a call for his hearers to follow the example of the Samaritan. There need be no allegorical level of meaning here.

What does it take to be a Good Samaritan?

Something wonderful happens when the Bible influences a culture, as it has Western culture: our concepts and our very language reflect biblical themes and images. One wonders what “grace” and “justice,” for example, would mean in the West today if Christ’s gospel had never had any impact on us.

But to this silver lining is attached a cloud the size of a man’s hand: biblical concepts can be transmogrified and muted. They can be leached of their substance by the passage of time. This is what has happened with one specific bit of meaning that “Samaritan” had for Jesus’ hearers but doesn’t for us.

For us, a “good Samaritan” is a helpful stranger, someone who notices trouble while passing by and stops to help. I just saw an instance of this use not a few days ago in New York Times letter to the editor just days ago:

When my 81-year-old father fell on the sidewalk, a good Samaritan called me and stayed with him until care arrived.

The writer was trying to demonstrate the essential goodness and kindness of New Yorkers.

The Samaritan of Jesus’s parable was indeed a helpful stranger. But he was something else, he was what one writer called the RCO, the Repugnant Cultural Other. Snodgrass observes that the Jews of Jesus’s day “believed Samaritans to be people of doubtful descent and inadequate theology.”⁸⁰ The Samaritans were half-Jewish both racially and religiously. The woman Jesus met at the well in John 4 was a Samaritan, and she herself observed to Jesus with apparent surprise at his kindness to her, “The Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans.” And yet Jesus spoke to her—and chose a Samaritan to be the hero of his parable.

An excellent series of short films was put out several years ago called Modern Parables. They recontextualized a number of Jesus’s parables, setting them in modern America. In the video depicting the Good Samaritan, the man who was beaten and left for dead was an elderly man walking the streets of a city and suffering a violent mugging. The religious people passing by included a youth pastor and a wealthy church deacon. The man who stopped to help him was a swarthy Palestinian cab-driver who had been reading an Arabic newspaper before he noticed the elderly mugging victim.

I thought this was brilliant. At the time the short film was made, America was engaged in armed conflict with Muslim men looking rather like this cab driver. I’m a Christian who has always known that the line between good and evil doesn’t pass between states but through every human heart.⁸¹ But I remember the wave of fear that swept America after 9/11. People like that cab driver were the Repugnant Cultural Other. The bad guys in Star Wars (1978) looked like Nazis. I’ll wager that the number of bad guys who looked like (or just were) Muslims went way up in American movies after the Twin Towers fell. They became our Repugnant Cultural Other.

Jesus could have made his hero anyone and he could have made the same overall point. But he chose someone unexpected and memorable. And he chose as his antiheroes the very kind of person who was at that moment, in Jesus’s presence, trying to weasel out of having to be a neighbor.

What does it take to be a Good Samaritan? It takes a willingness to set aside your schedule—this is the hard part for me, I admit it, God help me—to help a stranger, especially across some kind of cultural line that might otherwise divide you. Rare is the mugging victim who will turn down assistance from someone across such a line. That line fades away in tragedy, crossed on the one hand by need and on the other by love.

What makes a Good Samaritan really good?

This is a profound question, internet. And I think we should build our answer on the thing I just said I struggle with—and the thing that Jesus’s hearers apparently struggled with. I struggle with getting off the busyness train, violating my all-important schedule. I don’t honestly—I don’t think—struggle to cross racial and ethnic and religious and cultural lines to show kindness. Maybe you do. God will judge us both. God can help us both. Divine love can reach us both—and flow through us to others.

A Good Samaritan is good because he remembers and lives by the second greatest commandment, love your neighbor as yourself. A Good Samaritan is good because she remembers and lives by Jesus’s massively expanded definition of “neighbor.”

Right now, my most important neighbors are probably the three children who live in my home and occasionally interrupt my article writing with petty fights (may I be frank?). Having to drop everything I’m doing to go tell this one that it doesn’t matter whether that one pronounced a given word incorrectly—that’s hard for me. It’s a spiritual struggle. I am preaching to myself as I type: Love your children as yourself. These are the neighbors God has given me most often.

The other problem I face, and I wonder if you face it, is implicitly accepting a minimalist definition of “neighbor” by living a life focused only on my wife, kids, and hobbies. I can’t meet all the world’s needs, and neither can you. But I was struck hard by the outward reaching, neighbor-seeking love of Rosaria Butterfield in her book The Gospel Comes with a House Key. I recommend this book to everyone who, like me, wishes to justify himself when confronted with the love command and, indeed, with the Good Samaritan.

How can I learn more about the Good Samaritan?

There are many, many books and commentaries discussing the parables of Jesus. Here are a few recommended resources for further study. They are ranked in loose order of difficulty, but all are careful and responsible treatments:

• Dan Doriani gives insightful instruction about the parables in this Logos Mobile Ed video course.
• Klyne Snodgrass has written the one modern book on the parables that can rightly be called “magisterial.” It is rigorous and insightful yet still readable. I highly recommend it and have relied on it for years. I have used the parables repeatedly in evangelistic preaching—precisely because Jesus did. Snodgrass has been my most important companion.
• Darrell Bock, Joel B. Green, and I. Howard Marshall have written the top three commentaries on the book of Luke. Bock is challenging but accessible. Green is a little more challenging but still accessible to non-specialists; Marshall writes in the New International Greek Testament Commentary and therefore assumes knowledge of Greek.

A friend of mine recently polled his church—both members and pastors—to see which Bible study resources they used. Independently, every single one of them named Strong’s Concordance. Many mentioned nothing else. Strong’s was their only Bible study tool.

I’m here to help you understand two things:

1. How to use Strong’s Concordance
2. Why you should probably reach for better tools instead

I’ll tell you what those tools are, and I’ll mention both free and paid resources. And I want you to know: I will work in good faith in both parts of this article. If you choose to use Strong’s in your Bible study, I’ll show you what to do and what not to do. But I hope you will consider my recommended alternatives.

1. How to use Strong’s Concordance

Here’s how the original 1890 title page describes Strong’s Concordance—gotta love those massive, explanatory, nineteenth-century titles:

Let me explain the elements:

• A concordance is just a list of all the words in a book in alphabetical order.
• Strong’s is a concordance of the words in the common English version, in other words, the translation then used by effectively all English speakers; namely, the King James (or Authorized) Version.
• It’s a concordance, however, of just the canonical books—the canon as understood by Protestants, so no Apocrypha or deuterocanon.
• It’s exhaustive: all the words are there, except for forty-seven words that are so common that they wouldn’t be helpful for the purposes of a concordance—which is (typically) finding passages of the Bible by searching for key words. Here are those forty-seven exceptions:

• Strong’s puts the KJV words it lists in regular order; that means alphabetical order—from Aaron, Abaddon, and Abagtha to Zain, Zechariah, and Zephaniah.

What to do with Strong’s Concordance

Before tools like the concordance, if you were studying your King James and just couldn’t remember where the phrase “wherewith Christ hath made us free” occurred, you were out of luck. But look up “free” in Strong’s, and soon enough you’ll see this:

Bam: Galatians 5:1. That’s helpful to the paper-oriented Bible student!

And at the end of the line, you’ll see one the other major values of Strong’s Concordance. It’s a number: 1659. That number actually tells you the Hebrew or Greek word (Greek, in this case) that was translated “free” in Galatians 5:1. The Greek word here happens to be 1,659th in the (also alphabetical) list of Greek words in the New Testament.

And that brings us to the next major portion of Strong’s title page:

What you’re supposed to do with Strong’s is find out what Hebrew or Greek word the KJV translators were looking at: the one they chose to translate as “free” in Galatians 5:1. Then you’re supposed to go look it up in the dictionaries in the back of the volume. This is what most people, most of the time, are doing with Strong’s—especially now that Google can help you find whatever passage you remember only a snippet of. Usually, today, when people say they “use Strong’s Concordance” for their Bible study, I think they mean they use the dictionary in it to look up the meaning of Hebrew and Greek words. In many circles of English-speaking Christianity, it is the go-to resource.

And Strong’s is indeed a potentially powerful tool for Bible study. Without even knowing Hebrew or Greek, you can go look up the Hebrew and Greek words of Scripture. You can even see where else a given Greek word you’re studying in one passage gets used (and translated) in other passages. This lexically focused approach is characteristically Protestant—and often fruitful. It’s powerful for Bible study if you know what you’re doing.

So let’s do it. Let’s look up G1659 and see what we find in Strong’s “brief” dictionary in the back of the massive volume. This is what we find:

Let me break down the elements of this entry.

• 1659 is the “Strong’s number” assigned to the Greek word we’ve just looked up.
• Then comes the Greek word itself, ἐλευθερόω, in Greek letters. This is likely to be little help to most users of Strong’s—because it wasn’t designed as a tool for those who know Greek or Hebrew. So what follows is a transliteration with pronunciation helps: ĕlĕuthĕrŏō, and then another transliteration with even more pronunciation helps: el-yoo-ther-ŏ´-o. (The acute accent mark [´] shows which syllable to stress.)
• What comes next is less helpful, in my opinion. Strong’s tells you the etymology of the word we’ve just looked up. It’s “from 1658,” which is easy enough to look up, because it’s the previous entry. It’s just the noun form of this verb. That word, in turn, says it’s from Strong’s 2064, which is the word “come.” I don’t see how this helps anyone. My honest advice in this how-to—and I’ll explain myself a little more later—is that you skip the etymologies in Strong’s. They will rarely tell you anything useful to actual Bible interpretation, and when they seem to tell you something useful, that something will very likely be wrong. A word’s history is no sure guide to its present meaning, or “December” (from the Latin decem, meaning “ten”) would be the tenth month, not the twelfth; and the “true meaning” of my name, Mark, would be “The Roman god of war.”⁸²
• Now we get to the meat on the dry lexicographical bones: a definition! “To liberate,” Strong’s says. “i.e., (figuratively) to exempt (from moral ceremony or mortal liability).” This is what Strong’s calls “applied significations of the word, justly but tersely analyzed and expressed.” This is what the Greek word means when used in the New Testament, as expressed in a few synonyms and (incredibly brief) explanations. This is what most people are after when they look up a Greek or Hebrew word, and this is what Strong’s delivers.
• Finally, we get two more words that may mildly confuse anyone who didn’t read the fine print at the beginning of the dictionary: “deliver, make free.” These are not definitions or synonyms; they are what are called “glosses.” These are the words actually used by the KJV translators to translate this word. They chose “deliver” in Romans 8:21 and “make free” in the six other places this word occurs in the New Testament.

So now what are you supposed to do? What are you supposed to make of all this? Three suggestions:

1. Strong’s gives you quick-and-dirty “glosses”—translated equivalents in English—of Hebrew and Greek words, and that’s useful in a pinch for Hebrew and Greek students who don’t have better resources at hand.
2. Those glosses should, in almost every case, simply confirm, strengthen, and establish what you already know from English. (More on this in the section below.)
3. If you don’t know any Hebrew or Greek, but you do have a sense for what counts as a literal/formal translation and what counts as a dynamic/functional one—like “they shake their heads at us” (NLT, formal) vs. “a laughingstock among the people” (NASB, functional)—Strong’s can give you some sense for what’s going on with idioms and figures of speech. Now, the NASB already has a footnote at that passage saying, “Literally, ‘shaking of the head.’” But you can come closer to seeing it for yourself by using Strong’s.

This summarizes the benefits of Strong’s dictionary of Hebrew and Greek. More advanced students of Scripture or of language may possibly use it to survey the usage of a given Hebrew or Greek word and then come up with their own ideas as to what it means. But there are much better tools for this work, as we’ll soon discuss.

What not to do with Strong’s Concordance

I must offer a few warnings here on how not to use Strong’s. These tips will end up being reasons for using different tools.

First, avoid thinking that you’ve discovered “the true meaning” of the word “free” in the Bible. Don’t assume that every time Strong’s word 1659 occurs, what it “really means” is “to liberate from moral ceremony or mortal liability.”

Because, again, what did Strong’s tell you that you didn’t already know from reading Galatians 5:1 in English? Let’s read the verse in the KJV:

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. (Gal 5:1)

In context, to which every Bible reader should always stay hyper-alert, Paul is talking about New Covenant freedom from certain Old Covenant expectations.⁸³

So, yes, the word translated “made free” is being used to speak of the freedom Christ has given to Christians to live apart from dietary and circumcision laws. We are free from “moral ceremony.”

But that’s not what the Greek word really means. And let me give two big reasons why I think that’s important enough to tell you:

1. You don’t want to develop the idea that only people who understand Hebrew and Greek can know what the Bible “really means,” as if there is a hidden mine of rich meaning that English (or Spanish or Russian or Urdu) Bible readers don’t have access to. Remember: Strong’s didn’t say anything about Galatians 5:1 that you couldn’t know from context in the KJV—or ESV or NASB or NIV or any of a number of the other excellent English Bible translations we have.
2. You don’t want to import meaning improperly from one context into another. The next move Bible readers are often tempted to make is to take the “real meaning” of a given Greek word and read it into other passages in which that word gets used. Look back at the entry for “free” in the Concordance, and you’ll see that Strong’s number 1659 pop up again in places like John 8:32, in a famous phrase:

When Jesus said, “the truth shall make you free,” what did he mean? The temptation is to say, “Aha! He meant to make you free from moral ceremony!” An excited preacher or small group leader might immediately scribble down some “insights from the Greek” to share with his or her group. And that preacher or leader might say, “Jesus was promising to make his Jewish hearers free from moral ceremonies!”

But in every instance in which that Greek word occurs, including John 8:32, the context specifies what it is that people are being freed from. And John 8 is no exception. Jesus soon clarifies that he means his hearers are “slaves of sin.” That, in context, is what the truth will free them from.

This may seem minor, but I’ve seen well-meaning Bible interpreters fall off the proverbial wagon this way. They get all jumbled up. Instead of focusing on what their very carefully constructed English translations are already clearly telling them in their own language—putting gold right on the surface of the ground, as it were—they get fascinated with this supposedly hidden layer of meaning in the Greek. But what they come out with is that other kind of gold, the one it would be offensive to name. You know—iron pyrite.

This is hard to say and, I’ve come to find, even harder to hear: most of the insights I see people derive from Strong’s are wrong. Not horribly wrong, not heretically wrong, just linguistically and hermeneutically wrong—which is wrong enough.

2. What to use instead of Strong’s

So what resources should you use instead of Strong’s Concordance? I’ll talk through several categories.

English

Honestly, my first replacement is that you stick with English. There are so many great Bible dictionaries and commentaries that use only the language you already know. Use multiple good English Bible translations, gain some sense for why they differ, and you may actually do better than someone who likes to ride the sacred cow of original language usage through the slaughterhouse of linguistic fallacies.

• Pick up the Lexham Bible Dictionary, which comes free in the free version of Logos. Any concept you want to study in Scripture is probably better studied through dictionary entries than through use of languages one does not truly understand.
• Grab the famous InterVarsity Press “black dictionaries,” a set of detailed Bible dictionaries that focus on individual portions of God’s Word and are written from an evangelical perspective.

I know it seems odd for an employee of Logos to point even a single person away from Hebrew and Greek and toward English. I love these languages—would that all the Lord’s people were Greek and Hebrew scholars! The more the makaroi! But we should not underestimate the capacity of English to express what is in the original languages. By all means, learn to read your Bible in Greek or Hebrew. But learn also to read it in English.

Logos Bible Word Study tool

If you do wish to push ahead into using Hebrew and Greek, my next suggestion is that you start with Greek, and that you set clear goals for yourself by picking up this free guide I wrote.

Then I encourage you to use the same tool I use all the time, the Bible Word Study tool in Logos. If you take a little time to go through D.A. Carson’s excellent little book, Exegetical Fallacies, for example⁸⁴, it truly is possible to gain insight from Hebrew and Greek without knowing them. All you have to do to replicate—and massively exceed—Strong’s Concordance is right click on any English word in any major English Bible translation, and Logos will give you access to tools for studying the underlying Hebrew or Greek word(s) at that place.

What you get is not only a concordance more powerful—and rapid—than Strong’s, but you get multiple tools for looking at how a given word is used. And they’re beautifully designed and arranged. I have used this tool literally thousands of times. I use it to do the kind of study that lexicons do.

And if you get stumped, the Bible Word Study gives you access to whatever original language dictionaries you own. Let me talk through a few of those.

BDAG and BrillDAG

BDAG—Bauder, Danker, Arndt, and Gingrich—is the top Greek-English dictionary. Its definitions are sentence-length descriptions, not merely one-word glosses. For example, for the first sense of that same Greek word for “trust,” it offers this definition: “to consider something to be true and therefore worthy of one’s trust.” That’s a restrained, careful description that actually fits the contexts in which the word gets used. And BDAG gives four other senses that are equally careful, along with various example passages in which they appear. Reliable resources don’t dunk you into a meaning soup; they give you some guidance on which sense of a word might be present in a given biblical context.

BrillDAG, the Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek, is a more recent competitor—or, I’d say, supplement—to BDAG. Its purpose is a bit different, and its definitions and citations are not as extensive. But it’s reliable and careful.

Both of these “lexicons” (the academic word for dictionaries) are much easier to use in Logos than in print. Not only can you look up words instantly with a click, using only an English Bible, but you can—and absolutely should—set them up to display their entries automatically “expanded,” so that you’re not wading through a dense thicket like you would on paper. I find the dense entry below difficult to wade through; I love the expanded, outline format:

Both of these lexicons would be difficult to use without the ability to read Greek, so, at the very least, learn the alphabet and some basic vocabulary so you can follow the argument.

Dictionaries of “semantic domains”

I also use Louw-Nida and Swanson in Logos; both use “semantic domains” to arrange meaning into categories in a way that helps you play synonyms off each other. The Lexham Theological Wordbook is also worth a look. It carefully distinguishes the different kinds of contexts in which important words get used.⁸⁵

BDB and CHALOT

For Old Testament Hebrew, the standards are the following:

1. HALOT, which is very complex and demanding
2. CHALOT, a concise and therefore easier-to-use version of HALOT
3. BDB, an older but still useful work

Commentaries

And that actually brings me back to English. Because I think the tools I’ve just recommended will cause some Bible students to rise to the challenge contained within them—but that those tools will bring most Bible students, ultimately, back to English.

There’s no way around the difficulty here, only through it:

On the one hand, I believe wholeheartedly in the value and importance of Bible study for all Christians, and I want to put as many useful tools in their hands as I can.

On the other hand, some of the finer details of Hebrew and Greek are not directly accessible to all Christians. It is not elitism to say this; it is simply true.

The best way for most Christians to access Hebrew and Greek details is usually through the mediation of gifted, trained teachers (à la Eph 4:11). And their work is available mostly in commentaries. Part of me hates sending those who want to do their own original language study to commentaries instead. And, I repeat, I would love to see more people studying Hebrew and Greek! But I do think that the healthy impulse that leads people to pick up Strong’s Concordance will ultimately lead the humble, faithful Christian to the kinds of resources that use Hebrew and Greek humbly and faithfully on their behalf.

Here are the tools I recommend to those Bible students:

1. The NET Bible is an excellent study Bible for the word-nerdy, for those who want to peek behind the curtain and see biblical scholars at work on the translation of the Bible.
2. The Tyndale Commentaries do an excellent job of using the original languages in an accessible way. They’re transliterated into English letters, and used sparingly. Here, for example, one of my favorite commentators, Derek Kidner, cites Hebrew words in a way that even those who don’t know Hebrew can follow:

1. The Bible Speaks Today commentary series is similar to Tyndale. One of its major contributors, John Stott, has written some especially beloved volumes in the series.
2. The Pillar New Testament Commentary is somewhat more demanding than the previous two, making it a good stretch goal. This series also transliterates Greek and Hebrew words for easier accessibility.

I really could go on and on about commentaries. But one of my best friends—the person I turn to for commentary advice—has written “The Definitive Guide to Bible Commentaries,” and that would be a good place to follow up on this article.

I honor—I love—the impulse that sends Bible students to Strong’s. I offer my advice here with the prayer that the Lord would bless your Bible study, that “our God will make you worthy of his calling, and by his power fulfill your every desire to do good” (2 Thess 1:11 CSB).

Related articles

• The Definitive Guide to Bible Commentaries: Types, Perspectives, and Use
• 7 of the Best Exegetical Bible Commentaries
• 29 Bible Study Tools for Reading the Bible More Effectively
• The Books of the Bible: Your Startup Guide

How many times have you heard this in a sermon?

How many times have you preached this in a sermon?

Faith in Greek is pistis, which means fidelity or trust. In Hebrew, the word usually translated as faith is emunah, which means steadfastness or fidelity.

Or:

The Greek word here, ploion, can be translated “ship” or, perhaps more accurately, “boat.”

I’d like to make a case that these kinds of comments are unnecessary at best, counterproductive at worst. I’m here to urge you to remember not to say “the-Greek-word-here-is” in your next sermon. And the next one.

Because I am a writer who refuses to use hackneyed rhetorical strategies, here are three breezily titled reasons for refusing to mention Greek in your next sermon or Bible lesson. Then, begrudgingly, a few reasons why you might want to do so.

Remember before you read, pastors: faithful are the wounds of a friend!

1. Don’t mention Greek in your sermon because it’s frequently redundant.

I’d say 80 percent of the mentions of Greek I hear in Bible teaching are banal observations. In my position as an editor for a Bible study blog, Word by Word, I have articles submitted to me all the time which do the same thing: leave me with no choice but to press my delete key.

I received an article a few years ago that argued that the Greek word for believe, πιστεύω (pisteuo), has a deeper meaning than the English one. So said the writer (the rest of whose piece was just fine!), the Greek word was richer and more precise than the English word “trust.” It meant “to consider something to be true and therefore worthy of one’s trust” (BDAG).

But there are several problems with this utterly standard line of argument. The main one is that this line often just doesn’t bear out when you look up the relevant English word. The contemporary English dictionary I use most often defines trust as “firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something” (NOAD). If anything, that sounds richer and stronger than the Greek word—it has the word “firm” in it.

But, of course, it isn’t richer or stronger. Believing and disbelieving are things all humans do. The direct objects of the verb “believe” in the New Testament are most frequently Christian objects, because the NT talks about believing Christ (John 3:16) and God (Jas 2:23) and the truth (2 Thess 2:12) far more than it talks about believing a mere human’s words (Luke 24:11). It is also true that “believed,” by itself with no object, comes to be used in the NT as a shorthand for “believed the gospel.” The context of the NT, in other words, fills in the missing direct object of “believe.”

And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number who believed turned to the Lord. (Acts 11:21 ESV)

And “believers” comes to be a word for the early Christians, without having to specify “believers in the gospel”:

Also many of those who were now believers came, confessing and divulging their practices. (Acts 19:18 ESV)

But none of this means that the Greek word pisteuo somehow means Christian belief, or belief in the gospel, or belief in God. It takes specific contexts for the word to communicate that particular (“pragmatic,” linguists call it) meaning. English is precisely the same way, or the two translations above would not work. Nobody would say that “believe” in English is a specifically Christian word. But nonetheless, people make perfect sense of Acts 11:21 and 19:18—“believed” and “believers”—without the object of belief needing to be specifically named.

So—if you point out that the Greek word for “believe” means [fill in any Greek lexicon’s definition here], you’ll only be saying, “‘Believe’ in Greek means exactly the same thing that the English word in the translation in your lap means.” You’ll be wasting 8.4 seconds of your sermon or Bible lesson on a distracting and counterproductive tautology. What could be the point of telling people who read the Bible in English something they already know, that “believe” means “believe”? People love to speculate here: maybe the preacher just likes to show off? I won’t say that. I’ll leave that between the preacher and his God.

Define the word, sure. Even use a definition from a Greek-English lexicon. But don’t tell Christ’s sheep you have access to a hidden and deeper meaning when you simply don’t. They already know that “believe” means “believe.” Don’t cock your head sagely and point it out to them again.

2. Don’t mention Greek in your sermons because there’s a good chance you’re just wrong.

About 20 percent of the time I hear mentions of Greek or Hebrew in sermons—I’m sorry to say—the preachers doing so are simply wrong somehow in their assertions. A few years back, I heard a preacher make particular mention of the fact that a given Greek word occurs only twice in the New Testament—as if that fact should lend its use more significance somehow? I wasn’t sure. Maybe he thought this was some nifty biblical–lexical trivia, or he thought he needed to justify his check of a particular cross reference (which could have been okay; he just didn’t say this).

But what he said about the Greek word under discussion just wasn’t true. Yes, that particular form of the root occurred only twice. But the word was ἐλεεινός (eleeinos), and anyone who knows basic NT Greek vocabulary will see immediately that the word stems from the ελεος (eleos) root, commonly translated “mercy.” And that root shows up seventy-eight times in the NT and eighteen in the LXX.

Claiming that the word is uncommon is both meaningless in this case (it added nothing to his argument) and misleading (it’s a common root).

These are modest examples. I’ve seen preachers and Bible teachers go much further than this down the path of linguistic silliness. I’m keepin’ it vague rather than real, because I don’t want to embarrass anyone, but if preachers and Bible teachers took their too-creative linguistic energies and applied them to producing better illustrations or transitions or introductions or something, they’d hit homiletical home runs.

In fact, the preacher who made the minor, erroneous aside about ἐλεεινός (eleeinos) did so in an otherwise excellent sermon on 1 Corinthians 15. It was an unforced error—forced, I suppose, only by a set of social expectations among certain tribes of Christians that real preaching will genuflect to “the-Greek-word-here-is” in every serious message.

I’ll stop here with examples. D. A. Carson has written the classic text on the kinds of linguistic errors well-meaning preachers commit. Consider this your semi-annual PSA: please Read Exegetical Fallacies.

3. Don’t mention Greek in your sermon because it doesn’t help people read their Bibles better.

Good Bible teaching, before it is anything else, is first good Bible reading. Good Bible teaching therefore models good Bible reading. It teaches listeners implicitly, and often explicitly, how to read God’s Word on their own. I think most mentions of Hebrew and Greek do not help most Christians read their Bibles better.

May I talk for a moment about lay Bible reading?

I don’t deny that traditions outside of my own evangelical Protestantism have their strengths; I don’t deny that my own evangelical Protestantism has massive weaknesses and troubles. One of these is what Christian Smith has called “pervasive interpretive pluralism.” I acknowledge this. And I account for it: we are all fallen and finite Bible interpreters; and in these last days, even after God has spoken to us by his Son, there are plenty of self-described “evangelicals” who will not endure sound doctrine (2 Tim 4:3).

I just figure that the group that emphasizes personal Bible reading and study at least has a chance to ameliorate their weaknesses and repent of their troubles—to be reformed by the Word.

So I want my pastor to preach the Bible using reading methods that are basically replicable by my twelve-year-old. And I’ve seen this work—in myself. I should get an ironic nineties throwback hipster T-shirt that says, “Hookt on Xpository Preaching Werkt 4 Me.”

Long before I had a call to ministry and became an inveterate theological scribbler, I was a teenage graphic design major thrilled to hear careful scriptural exposition through the book of Ephesians. That same preacher said more than once that expository preaching is “caught as much as taught.” And I caught it: I read the Bible with more skill, knowledge, and confidence (and, I hope, also humility) because I was hearing careful preaching.

I do think that hearers need to be reminded that they are reading the Bible in translation. I of all people know the damage that accrues when people start to treat the translation in their hands as itself perfect and inspired. But this can be done without explicitly mentioning a Hebrew or Greek word. It can be done in a replicable way. You can say, “The Greek word that is translated ‘exult’ here (Rom 5:11 NASB) is also used repeatedly in the NT to mean something more like ‘boast.’”

Exceptions to the general rule

And that brings me to two exceptions to the general rule I’m trying to defend in this piece. These are instances when it is useful to make digressions into lexical particularities from the biblical languages:

1. When a literary device needs to be clarified.

There are, occasionally, times when a literary device in the Hebrew or Greek, one that doesn’t carry well into English, is worth mentioning in a sermon. A literary device is the kind of thing that careful lay Bible readers will encounter in the footnotes in their study Bibles, and even in non-technical commentaries. So equipping them to expect and process such things isn’t so bad.

For example, the KJV translators rendered every instance of the μένω (meno) root in John 15 with the same English word, “abide”—except for three of the references. Can you spot them in the image below?

(I have “corresponding words” turned on in my visual filters in Logos; I found all these by clicking on just one of them. A nice feature I use regularly!)

I could imagine a preacher wanting to make clear that Jesus is, in the second paragraph (verses 11 and following) picking up on the theme of the first. You could preach, “Jesus spoke these things ‘that his joy might remain in’ his disciples; and that word ‘remain’ is, in Greek, the same as the word ‘abide’ in verses 1–10.” I can see some value in doing this.

But read your audience: What if for everyone in your church who cements the contextual connection in his or her mind because you mentioned Greek, there will be nine lepers who will not come and thank you after the sermon because they just got confused?

And, for what it’s worth, pointing out what’s going on in the Greek here runs somewhat counter to the advice of the KJV translators themselves—who said in their preface quite clearly that they refused to be “tied … to a uniformity of phrasing.” They thought that this kind of insistence on consistency “savour[ed] more of curiosity than wisdom.”⁸⁶

What they said about translation I say about preaching. If you can’t demonstrate a given point through appeal to the (English) translations in your hearers’ laps, you probably don’t want to appeal to the Greek. But I’ve opened the door just a crack for you.

2. When a Greek or Hebrew word has become an English one.

Another circumstance in which I might willingly name a Hebrew or Greek word in a sermon is when that word has effectively become an English one already.

Here are some such words I can think of off the top of my head, some of which actually appear in English Bible translations.

1. Agape
2. Hallelujah
3. Hosanna
4. Sheol
5. Tartarus
6. Hades
7. Arabah?
8. Negev?
9. Maher-shalal-hash-baz

If the translation you’re preaching from uses any of these transliterations, you almost certainly need to explain them. I can’t think of anything wrong with doing so. You’re helping people read their English Bibles. (Though I tend to think it is punting for translators to transliterate most words other than proper names. Why should you have to explain them? Why couldn’t they put them into English?)

I happen to believe that agape should not be an English word; I wish it weren’t. Most of the ideas I hear out there about agape are wrong. But it’s impossible for me to explain all that without using the word, so I do.

I might add the names of God and Christ. These feel to me like special cases in which it is truly beneficial to understand the interplay between Hebrew and Greek, Old Testament and New. So:

1. Messiah
2. Christ
3. Jesus
4. Elohim
5. Yahweh

A well-rounded Christian probably ought to know these proper names and their meaning (or, in the case of Yahweh, our best guesses as to that meaning).

Conclusion

I am far from devaluing the original languages of Scripture. I use them practically every day. But I think their use needs to be more subtle—more structural and skeletal, less on the surface—for it to be effective rather than counterproductive in a pastoring context.

You’d be surprised how often I use Greek without mentioning it. It helps me spot contextual connections that I can then point out in the English.

And it gives me word pictures. For example: my last name, “Ward,” is a borrowing from the same French root that gave us “guard” (different regions of France, I am told by the History of English Podcast, pronounced the initial consonant differently, hence the difference in English to this day!). So my ears perked up recently when a preacher friend of mine said that “guard the good deposit entrusted to you” was (and I’ll quote him to the best of my recollection) from φυλάσσω [phulasso], a military word meaning to guard.

When he asked for my feedback later (he asked!), I told him that he could have made the same point more safely without appeal to the Greek. He could have said, “Paul wanted Timothy to be like a soldier vigilantly protecting precious valuables.”

No mention of Greek was necessary, no implication that what the word guard “really means” is something military. It isn’t. No more than the English word guard is always something military. Instead, he could have used the metaphor that was baked into the Greek word to provide an idea for a brief illustration, anecdote, or word picture.

Bible teachers: resist, in general, the temptation to mention Hebrew or Greek words explicitly.

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Every Christmas Eve growing up, my father read the Christmas story from Luke 2 in the King James Version.

And every Christmas Eve, I thought I understood it. I largely did. But I now see little things I was missing—through no fault of my own, nor of the KJV translators, but simply because of the inevitable process of language change. The KJV is 400 years old, after all. I now see these little things because I focused hard on them while writing my book, Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible.

Here are five things you might not have noticed you were missing in the Christmas story in Luke 2 in the King James Version.

1. ‘That all the world should be taxed’

The very first sentence of the Christmas story in Luke 2 contains a fairly good example of a word that no longer means what it used to mean: “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.”

It’s a tiny bit unclear what the KJV translators were doing with this word “taxed.” They were excessively smart men, and they had to know that the Greek word they were translating here (ἀπογράφω, apographo) referred to census registration and not to the levying of taxes.

By choosing the word “taxed” they were following Tyndale (1526) and the Bishop’s Bible (1568) before them—the KJV is a revision of the latter. And I don’t think any of them made a mistake. It’s possible they chose what we now call a “functional translation”: they thought the point of the census was for taxes, so they translated according. It’s also possible they were using a sense of the word that is no longer available to us. The authoritative and exhaustive Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the only dictionary that traces the full history of English rather than merely describing its current state, gives weight to that second possibility. Look at sense 8 for the verb “tax”:

Joseph and Mary did not go to Bethlehem to pay taxes but instead to register for a census—in part, yes, for tax purposes (the Common English Bible of 2011 renders this word “enrolled in the tax lists”). But modern readers misunderstand “taxed” because we don’t (and can’t) use the word that way. This sense isn’t in our English like it was in theirs.

Many people know Luke 2:1 refers to a census or registration because it has been explained to them in sermons or books. But what they don’t realize is that the KJV translators (at least according to the smart folks at the OED) did not make a mistake; they used a different sense of the word.

2. ‘There were in the same country shepherds’

This is a minor distinction, but when Luke says,: “There were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field” (2:8), the “country” he was referring to wasn’t “Israel.”  Instead, he was talking about the “region” around Bethlehem.

We still say things like, “We drove through some beautiful Ohio farm country.” But none of the major modern English translations opt for “country” in Luke 2:8. The closest they come is “countryside” (New Jerusalem Bible). The most common choice is “region.”

But if you look up “country” in the OED, you’ll see a very interesting sense that is no longer available to English speakers—and yet may be what the KJV translators meant:

Could the KJV translators have used a sense of country that referred to the fields just outside Bethlehem? It fits. Where else were the shepherds likely to be but just outside the confines of the city? And it makes sense that we no longer have this sense, because we don’t need it: cities haven’t been walled for a long, long time.

3. ‘A multitude of the heavenly host’

The shepherds in the environs of Bethlehem saw “a multitude of the heavenly host praising God” (2:13).

I talked about this word for a good little while in Authorized. A host is an “army.” That’s what host meant in 1611 when the KJV was first published. That’s what the Greek word here (στρατία, stratia) means. But we no longer use host to mean “army.” We use it mean someone who entertains guests (“she was the host of an elegant dinner party”) or—and this is what most people probably hear in Luke 2:13—“a whole lot of” something. But “multitude” already told us that. The KJV translators weren’t trying to communicate, “a multitude of a heavenly whole lot of something.”

I don’t blame the KJV translators. What they did was perfectly fine in 1611. And I don’t blame people today. In fact, several modern translations stick with host. It’s not a huge deal. But Tyndale himself went with sowdiers (soldiers), as did the Geneva Bible (1599) with its souldiers. God the father didn’t just send “a whole lot” of angels. He sent an army of angels in militant array to make this special, joyous announcement.

4. ‘All they that heard it wondered’

The shepherds, having seen the baby Jesus, were eager to tell others about their experience. And “all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds” (2:18).

The KJV translators did not mean that they were merely curious; that’s the way “wondered” is most commonly used today. In 1611 the word meant “to be struck with surprise or astonishment, to marvel” (OED). The word can be used that way today, but my sense is that this is not common enough to be clear to many readers. Everyone who heard this news was “amazed”—that’s what the contemporary English translations say.

5. ‘Mary kept all these things’

One of the obsolete senses of the verb keep in the OED is “To take in with the eyes, ears, or mind; to take note of, mark, behold, observe.” This may be what the KJV translators meant when they said “Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.” I’m not sure. Maybe they did just mean what we would mean with “kept”: she “retained possession of” certain memories. But modern translations don’t follow the KJV. Most go for, “Mary treasured all these things.”

One of the difficulties of reading any literature from the Elizabethan era is that it’s really challenging, even with the help of a dictionary like the OED, to put yourself in the shoes of the original readers. It’s hard to forget what you “know” a word means and read like they would.

Conclusion

Over time, languages change on multiple levels. Some words have dropped out of English, words we know we don’t know. We don’t say besom, we say “broom.” We’ve traded emerod for “tumor.” And chambering is now called “immorality.” If you read the KJV, you’ll notice those dead words. And it’s nobody’s fault we don’t know them! How could the KJV translators have known what words would fall out of use?

But sometimes, changes in English lead to actual misinterpretation—and that’s what we must guard against. There are words we don’t know we don’t know, because we still use them—but those words mean different things today.  But often that modern sense seems to make sense in context and we don’t notice our misunderstanding! These I call “false friends.” And they’re nobody’s fault. Language just does this. You shouldn’t feel dumb, anymore than you should feel dumb for not knowing Sanskrit.

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• The Shepherds at Jesus’ Birth and the Geography of Bethlehem
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If I thought I was a pretty scintillating Bible teacher, the kind that makes people sit on the edge of their seats, the kind that is also able to put the cookies on the lower shelf and interest even kids, that thought was shattered when my own kids got old enough for family devotions (age 2). You have never seen such bored kids, kids achieving new and powerful levels of bored. I confess that this caused no small level of frustration for me. Nothing tests my sanctification more than trying to promote theirs.

But what good is all the stuff I learn about the Bible in my extensive Logos Bible Software library if I can’t teach any of it to the three little people in the world whom I love most?

And at Christmas, I feel extra pressure: candy canes, presents, and Rudolph are fun, but how do I stoke wonder and even excitement about what we’re actually celebrating, one of the most precious Christian truths, the incarnation?

After some trial and error, and error, and error, and error, and a few times basically giving up, I’ve been having “Bible time” with the kids with reasonable consistency for a good while now.

Here’s what I can share  for having meaningful Christmas family devotions.

1. Use pictures.

My two oldest kids, six and five, love reading. They love being read to. They will listen to a bedtime story—even one without pictures—for half an hour and beg for more. But they won’t listen to portions of the Bible without pictures. With even one picture to hold their gaze, they’ll do it, and do it well. I honestly don’t know why this is; ask a child psychologist. I think my kids are normal. I do not “blame” them for this need.

I do blame myself a bit. I’ve heard that other fathers succeed in reading the Bible text directly to their children, even starting in Genesis and making it to Revelation after a year or two. I want my kids to hear direct Bible, not just already-been-chewed Bible. When I attempted something like a sustained read-through, however, it failed. I feel I have to wait till they’re a little older. Right now, I don’t dare forget to use a picture. (I’ll even confess to occasionally using the amazing Bible Project videos.)

2. Keep it incredibly brief.

Ideally, Christian families would delight to spend an hour each night going through Scripture, singing psalms, and praying together. I gather that in Richard Baxter’s day they were doing this in his town of Kidderminster. I don’t have the wisdom to know why this is not reality for me today, but it just isn’t. Maybe that’s exactly what I should be doing. But my gut and/or conscience is that an hour a night would be too heavy a burden for my kids. I don’t want to violate Christ’s command to “suffer the little children” to come to him. I fear tying a heavy burden on them that even I cannot lift—how often do I spend an hour of my free time in the evening on devotional exercises?

A friend of mine still resents the drawn-out family devotions his (otherwise excellent) father insisted on dragging the family through every night. Armed with that knowledge, I started family devotions when the kids were little with something like a fifteen-minute expectation. That has shrunk to about five, though I’m happy to let it grow to ten or fifteen or more if the kids get engaged.

At first I fought the kids, I threatened and cajoled to reach the fifteen-minute mark. But that only made me (true confessions) so angry and on edge that I didn’t want to do family devotions at all. Right now—and I welcome wisdom from readers—my main goal is to do something most nights. And I’ve found that a relatively small diminution of my expectations has almost completely eliminated the need for threats and cajolements. My kids actually enjoy Bible time; maybe we can build on this. My goals are to fill their heads and, by God’s grace, stir their hearts. So that enjoyment is key.

3. Find a time that really works, and stick to it.

It sounds so unspiritual, but the main thing I’ve done which has brought me the most success is simple: I found the one time that really worked for us, and I stuck to it.

Kids, mine at least, feel safe in routine. I have read a bedtime story to my kids every single night for pretty much their entire sentient lives and I realized that “after dinner” or “at breakfast” are rather variable time slots, whereas bedtime happens every night at the same time. I came to see that to achieve success I had to attach family Bible time to this rock in our daily schedule.

So we read a story together, and then we pull out a children’s Bible (with pictures) and do a little reading. Then we brush teeth, I sing separate lullabies, and I field one question of any kind. Then ZZZZZ. Bible time is an accepted, standard part of our schedule. You’ll know you’ve reached that point when you forget it one night and the kids spontaneously protest.

4. Ask the kids one question of recall.

The family devotional Bible I’m using now includes two or three brief questions after each reading. Sometimes they are recall questions (the lowest level of Bloom’s taxonomy), and this is totally appropriate: I want to know if my kids grasped the details of whatever story or passage we just read.

Processing the basic facts of a story is an important step; it’s the first step toward trust and obedience of that passage.

5. Ask the kids one question of understanding.

But I don’t want to stop there—it wouldn’t be letting my kids come to Jesus if I satisfied myself with recall. I want to go at least to the next of Bloom’s steps: understanding. The Bible I’m using helps me do this. But I’m always happy when the kids do it on their own, as they sometimes will do once discussion begins. They can sometimes ask profoundly good questions. That is very satisfying, even when I have to utter a quick, silent prayer for wisdom because I don’t know quite how to answer. Occasionally Almighty Dad says, “I don’t know. I’ll check.” That’s okay, even good.

6. Ask the kids one question of application.

I also, ideally, help the kids apply the Bible to their lives—to see how its authority ought to function for them. This isn’t always possible or even desirable. I have concluded that it is acceptable for the proper application of some passages to be “know this Bible fact.” I don’t have to relate the story of Jonathan and his armor bearer directly to their lives right now. It’s enough that I’m building up the story of the Bible and pointing the kids little by little to the perfect Prophet, Priest, and King at its center.

7. Pray.

Have your kids pray. Ask them in advance to pray for one thing above and beyond the stock phrases that begin to fill their prayers before you know it (“thank you for this day”). I have even asked them to pray again, like it’s practice: “Sweetheart, pray for one thing you want God to do for someone you love. Try again.”

I used to be nervous about having my kids pray, because I didn’t want to push them into spiritual hypocrisy. I didn’t want to train them to talk to a God they didn’t really love or believe in. (And even now, if they ever express an unwillingness to pray, I don’t push them—because what do forced prayers do for a little soul?)

But I have concluded that Deuteronomy 6:6–7 knows better than I do. Though it doesn’t specifically tell me to teach my kids to pray or to have them pray, it tells me not to be worldview-neutral (as if that were possible) while I raise them. Like it or not, these kids got me as their dad and they’re going to be shaped by my love for the Lord and the Bible. I believe this means teaching them spiritual disciplines, not just intellectual truths—because biblical faith is designed to be embodied in practices as well as to be received in a list of doctrines.

8. End with a song. Let them alternate picking the song.

We sing the Doxology to end pretty much every Bible time (“Praise God from whom all blessings flow . . . ”) But sometimes I do also let the kids pick a song. They like it. My main job is to remember whose turn it is, lest Bible time become UFC.

One of my pastors used to make up little Bible songs for his kids. He’d take a verse right out of Scripture, put a little tune to it, and teach it to his kids. When he started up a long-term weekly ministry to impoverished kids and teens that I was a part of, he taught those same songs to them. Now there are hundreds of young people (up to about age 30) in Greenville, South Carolina, who know a bunch of Bible verses they wouldn’t know otherwise because of that ministry, and because of those songs. I’m reminding myself that I need to teach those to my own kids . . .

9. Use the NIrV. Maybe.

You don’t know how hard and how long I’ve struggled over what Bible translation to read to my kids. I’m not assuming anyone cares, but you may find it edifying to hear a tiny bit of my thinking on this.

On the one hand, I want my kids to understand as much of the Bible as possible. Both of my older kids, as I’ve said, are readers; but there’s no doubt that the NIrV (New International Reader’s Version) would be easier for them in many places than the NIV or CSB (Christian Standard Bible), let alone the ESV or NASB. I don’t want to put an unnecessary linguistic barrier between them and Jesus.

But on the other hand, my goal in reading the Bible to them is not merely a goal for the present but a goal for their future. I want them to have what I have: a memory of Scriptural words borne of lifelong exposure. I grew up on the KJV, and to this day, after 15 years spent reading other translations (though regularly using the KJV in exegesis), when I quote the Bible, the KJV comes out. My personal feeling is that my children are verbally proficient enough to skip the NIrV. I’m an inveterate explainer; I know when they don’t “get” a word in a literal translation, and I’ll stop and make sure they understand. (I also sometimes make a translation easier on the fly, a habit I picked up when using the KJV.)

10. Use this bonus tip for Advent.

One of the children’s Bible storybooks we’ve used is the redemptive-historical treasure, the Jesus Storybook Bible. I was just informed that it has precisely 24 stories from creation to the birth of Christ. One per night for advent. Perfect.

Go and trial and error likewise

I love my kids so, so much. It is so, so cool to watch them grow and learn. I find their recent jumps in reading skill particularly fascinating. But parenting is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, far outpacing doctoral comprehensive exams and that time I had to get across the American border from Mexico without a picture ID. I frequently feel like I need wisdom injections. I am not the best model for family devotions. I can only pray that the Lord will bless my meager efforts and that my kids will turn out okay despite my failures. Being humbled is good.

***

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Is it dangerous to accept changes to our language? Does doing so amount to moral relativism?

I once had to stand as a young man in front of an adult Sunday school class and wait for ten minutes (it felt that long, anyway) while a much older man in my class rebuked me for teaching that change is a God-given feature of language. He was a good man, a godly one, even an educated one. But he was certain that I was on a slippery slope. Was he right?

The idea that language change is morally bad is mostly a hidden assumption. And I get its intuitive appeal: we know language is a communal thing. It feels wrong for someone to change it without our consent. It’s like changing the code on the back door. It’s a violation of family trust. It locks us out.

As Ammon Shea wrote in his book Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation, 

There are two things that have remained constant: The English language continues to change and a large number of people wish that it would not.

Let me explain briefly why language change is actually a good thing for Christians who love God and his word.

First, knowing that language changes brings minor benefits to your sanctification. It will help you not be rude, for example, when you hear other people languaging wrong. Correcting kids or students is one thing; telling a fellow competent adult not to say “go lay down” is just unkind. Maybe at one time, the lie–lay distinction was widely observed, but it was never heaven-sent truth, and it’s OK that most people “violate” it all the time.

Second and more seriously, knowing that language changes drives Christians back to the Bible. And in two ways:

(a) The phenomenon of language change drives people back to translation of the Bible. On this topic I never tire of quoting C. S. Lewis, who said that you cannot buy your son a suit “once and for all”—he will grow out of it. Likewise, Lewis said, you can’t translate the Bible once and for all, “for language is a changing thing.” Language change is one of the forces that sends many Christians in every generation back to the Hebrew and Greek sources, continually refreshing the stream of Christian understanding of Scripture.

(b) The phenomenon of language change also drives people back to teaching the Bible. Language change means, as my editor said to me recently, that “we must never stop reading and expositing the Scriptures.” Spurgeon didn’t preach the Bible “once and for all”—nor did Calvin, Luther, Augustine, or Chrysostom. Changes in language (and in culture) send teachers and preachers back over and over to that same fresh stream of divine words.

The Old Testament people of God both were and were not a missionary people. They were supposed to be a “kingdom of priests,” even a “holy nation” displaying God’s character to the world. Jewish prophets frequently wrote woes to the nations, but they didn’t tend to go to them. The most famous prophet who did go, Jonah, was perhaps not the best representative of the God who sent him. And yet ancient Jews did find the energy to translate their sacred Scriptures into at least one other language, namely Greek.

Christians have a much clearer commission to take truth outward to the nations. It’s imperative that we honor and even marvel at—gotta quote my editor again—“the gospel’s awesome capacity for translation.” God can speak every language and every historical version of every language. God’s words can go anywhere, and they can go “anytime.” (See how flexible language is? I just invented a new sense for a common word!)

There are changes to English that I reject. Tip: if it takes the Twitter Police to enforce a given change, it’s not a real change; it’s politics. But Christians who insist that language shouldn’t change must do so using words that are themselves the results of language change. I encourage Bible students: learn to see the benefits of language change!

***

This article was originally published in Bible Study Magazine.

Love is the most important commandment in the Bible. And the second most important. On love for God and neighbor hang both testaments. And at the center of the Bible hangs a Savior who loved his own even to the end. Love saved the world.

Love also made the world. It is common for theologians—Jonathan Edwards prominent among them—to argue that it was the mutual love of the persons of the Trinity that spilled out of heaven and formed all creation.

And yet it is just as common for preachers to insist that most people misunderstand what “love” truly means. If you’ve been around church for long enough, you’ve almost certainly heard that a particular New Testament word solves this problem, that agape—one of the comparatively few Greek words most Christians know—names a specific kind of Christian love. That love is commonly said to be an unconditional love, one that transcends feeling and may not even include it. “Agape love,” many say, “is a choice, not a feeling.”

Is this true?

This question divides into two parts, a theological and a linguistic part. 1) Is love-is-a-choice theology true, and 2) does the Greek word agape really communicate that theology? Here we’ll get some help from Jonathan Leeman, who has written insightfully and practically on the theology of love. We’ll also get some help on the language of love by talking with linguist and Bible translator Vern Poythress about the Greek word agape. As the great theologian—and expert swordsman—Inigo Montoya once said, I’m not sure that word means what you think it means.

Leeman on love (eros, philia, agape)

Jonathan Leeman is editorial director for 9Marks, a ministry to churches. He’s also an elder and a dedicated churchman. Leeman has written two books on love—because he loves the church, and because he wants to see the church reflect the love of Christ both inside and outside church walls. His entry point into discussion about love is one you might not expect, however. He set out to write about church discipline, something the Bible clearly teaches but churches rarely practice.

And one reason they don’t practice it is this objection: Isn’t Christian love, agape love, supposed to be unconditional? How can love ever demand discipline?

I sat down with Jonathan in the basement at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., to talk about these questions, to talk about love. (View our discussion in full above.)

I pointed out to Jonathan that at first, in his books, he sounds like the countless other preachers I’ve heard—who then go on to teach that the New Testament has multiple specific Greek words for love:

• Eros for romantic love
• Philia for friendship love
• Agape for Christian love

I’ve heard many times that eros and philia are “acquisitive” loves, while agape is a “giving” love. So I asked Jonathan, “Why don’t you say that?”

“The problem is, this idea of love that’s either pure gift, or pure desire …, it’s just not quite how love works,” Leeman says.

Leeman points to John 5: “Think of the Father saying to the Son, you are My beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. … He takes pleasure in the Son. I love you, my beloved Son. So he’s going to give to the Son, but he’s also taking pleasure in the Son.” In other words, the most fundamental love in existence—Trinitarian love—doesn’t fit clearly into either of the “gift” or “desire” buckets. It’s both.

Shoving love into just one of the buckets causes problems. Seeing love as only desire is the error our culture falls into, a view in which to love yourself is to give all your desires full expression—to, with Elsa, Let it Go. “No right, no wrong, no rules for me.”

A common error with agape

But seeing Christian love, “agape love,” as gift only is the more common error in the Christian church. And this error causes others. For example, Leeman says, “If love is entirely [gift] and I’m putting absolutely nothing on you, requiring nothing of you—well, that leads to a kind of easy-believism [where] Jesus is Savior but not Lord.”

Seeing love as only gift also tends to place man at the top of God’s priority list, Leeman says. Such a view “careens towards a sort of universalism, a liberal Christianity, because if I’m defining love entirely in terms of God just loves me no matter what, wherever I am, whatever I’m doing …, it becomes kind of a man-centered view of love. I’m the center of the universe. God loves me no matter what, no matter whether or not I believe …, no matter whether or not I repent.”

Seeing love as gift also makes some passages meaningless—like, Leeman says, John 15:10.

If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. (John 15:10)

If love is only gift, how can it ever come with conditions, such as keeping Jesus’ commandments?

God’s love for us is not unconditional, Leeman says—though he appreciates the truth such an idea is getting after, namely that I do not deserve God’s love. Here Leeman borrows a word from the late biblical counselor David Powlison: God’s love for us is best called contraconditional, precisely because it is contrary to what we deserve. God’s love is also, in another sense, simply conditional: God’s love met the conditions of God’s justice.

This is the point of perhaps the central paragraph of the central book of the Bible, Romans 3. How could God maintain his righteous and yet declare sinners to be what they weren’t, namely “cleared of all charges”? Isn’t that a lie? It isn’t a lie, because Jesus’ loving, self-sacrificial death fulfilled the terms laid out by the Old Testament: without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins.

We are not justified by accurate doctrinal formulation. You can have some wrong ideas about love and still love the God who first loved you.

But it sure helps to get love right when it’s the most important commandment.

The language of love in the Bible

Biblical scholar and ESV translator Vern Poythress also works hard to get love right, but his interests and training lead to more of an emphasis on the language of love—or, rather, the linguistics of love. As with the theological categories of gift-love vs. desire-love, love in Scripture doesn’t fall neatly into the linguistic categories we set up for it.

I asked Dr. Poythress, while we sat in the library at Westminster Theological Seminary in Glenside, PA, “Does the Bible ever define ‘love’? Does it ever define any words?”

Poythress responded with some real wisdom for Bible students. “There are things that look like definition,” he said. “For instance, 1 John says ‘sin is lawlessness.’ But couldn’t you also say sin is rebellion against God? And couldn’t you also say sin is imitating Adam’s sin?” In other words, “sin is lawlessness” doesn’t, in Poythress’ words, “once and for all establish a technical meaning” for the word “sin.” No, the best way to “define” the concept of sin is to read the whole Bible and pick up all its explicit and implicit statements about sin. The meaning of “sin” is a summary of everything God has to say about it.

“A similar thing goes for the issue of love itself, “ Poythress says. What we really want—or should want—when we look to define “love” is a summary of the entire Bible, everything it says “about the obligations to love God and to love neighbor.” Poythress points out that “there is more than one way of summarizing” all that teaching it. There are different themes and emphases.

Dr. Poythress (warning: solid gold insight coming) says that when we propose “definitions” of things like love, what we’re often really saying is, “These things are the things that I found important and that therefore you should find important.” But, he says, while someone’s summary may indeed be valuable and true, “you’re always going to leave something else out.”

The definitions of love that emphasize choice and unconditionality are getting after something important, but they are leaving other important themes out.

An important way to discipline yourself to stay tied to what the Bible says about love is to actually look at the ways the word “love” gets used. Enter, again, the word agape.

Dr. Poythress observes that this word (or word group, including the verb form) gets used in the Greek of the time of the New Testament to refer to the selfish, incestuous “love” of Amnon for Tamar, whom he raped. There in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, is that word agape:

And Amnon hated her with very great hatred, for so great was the hatred with which he hated her, greater wickedness than was at the first and far more than the love with which he loved her. And Amnon said to her, “Get up and get out!” (2 Kgs 13:15 Lexham English Septuagint)

And in the New Testament, the word agape simply cannot mean, unconditional, self-sacrificial, non-emotional choices to do what is best for someone else. Even in John 21, the classic passage in which the difference between agape and philia is supposed to be on full display, Dr. Poythress points out that the two words are “basically synonymous.” When Jesus says, “Do you agape me?” and Peter replies, “I philia you,” we are witnessing “colorful variation, and little more than that,” says Poythress.

Poythress worked on the committee responsible for the English Standard Version. “We had to deal repeatedly with this kind of issue,” he says. “But we tried to stay with normal English” instead of picking some artificial distinction in English vocabulary to reflect different word choices in the Greek.

“Frequently,” Dr. Poythress says, “we don’t realize just how flexible our own language is—because we take it for granted. So when we come to another language that we imperfectly understand, we expect it to have a kind of rigidity that it doesn’t have.”

Love in Western culture

I asked Jonathan Leeman, “When people walk into church off the cultural street here in the Western world, what do they think love is?”

“Love is self-expression,” says Leeman. “Love is self-discovery, self-definition, self-realization, self-actualization. If you love me, you will let me be who I am.” This view goes so “deeply into into our cultural DNA,” says Leeman, “that even as Christians, we come into the church building on Sunday morning with these views of love.”

Leeman observes, “And so when Jesus says something like, ‘If you love me, you’ll keep my commandments’—that just sounds kind of legalistic. Jesus, you’re get[ting] a little legalistic there!”

The disciple Peter once received the most blistering indictment possible—“Get thee behind me, Satan!”—for contradicting Jesus. But we ourselves, because of our culture’s view of love, are often tempted to answer Jesus’ equation of love and obedience with, “Not so, Lord!”

When Western culture makes it difficult to even process what our Lord tells us, we know something is wrong. We need to get Satan behind us.

Leeman says, “I think we as teachers of the Bible and as Bible readers need to look at the whole of Scripture and say, What exactly is love?” Leeman and Poythress come to the same point: if you wish to understand love, read the one book written by the God who is love, the story that climaxes in the greatest example of self-sacrificial love in all history. Want to know love? Study the Bible in its entirety.

***

This article originally appeared in the November 2022 issue of Bible Study Magazine.

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]]> https://www.logos.com/grow/4-simple-tips-getting-logos-bible-software/ Fri, 18 Nov 2022 17:00:00 +0000 https://www.logos.com/grow/?p=84675 I sometimes hear Logos users say, with a resigned, apologetic tone, “I probably use only 5 percent of the capabilities of Logos.” People with lots of responsibility, lots of training, lots of gifting, and lots of experience in ministry or scholarship (or both) all of the sudden grow bashful and embarrassed. They stare at the floor like it’s report card day. They crawl into nearby holes.

They should not. Logos is not that hard to use, because you honestly don’t have to use all its capabilities to be counted as proficient. Don’t believe me? Let me show you how simple Logos is: If you can (1) open books and (2) search them, you’re well on your way. All of the complicated things Logos can do essentially boil down to these two simple tasks.

And if you can (3) type topics and references in the Go box and (4) right-click, you’ll have quick access to all the most significant things Logos can do.

Logos is a pro-level tool. I won’t pretend that there are no complexities in it even though the latest version is the easiest-to-use version yet. But even as a longtime Logos user, I mainly do the four things I just mentioned. Here’s how easy they are . . .

Opening and searching

1. How to open books in Logos

To open any book or resource you own, just call up the library by clicking the library icon or hitting Ctrl+L (Windows) or ⌘L (Mac). Then type the name of the book you want, or the series, or the author—anything we’ve tagged about the book should bring it up.

2. How to search books in Logos

To start any search, click the search icon. There are two kinds of books in your library: Bibles and everything else, and the search tabs reflect this.

A) Searching Bibles

You search all Bibles with the “Bible” tab and Greek/Hebrew Bibles with the “Morph” tab. One of the best ways to learn how to run these searches is to look at the sample searches we’ve already provided—like recipes in a cookbook. You can click on any example and run that search.

B) Searching Everything Else

You search everything that’s not a Bible with the “Books” search tab. Here you can search “All Resources” in your library, or just a portion of your library. Searching is that simple.

Two other things

3. How to type topics and references into the “Go box”

To explore the Bible using Logos, you don’t have to watch tons of training videos (though you can, for free, right here). Just launch Logos, type a topic (like “Covenant,” “Love,” or “Abraham”) or a Bible reference (like “John 3:16” or “Isaiah 40”) into the Go box, and—here’s the hardest part—click the arrow.

If you’re on the desktop app in Logos 10, get to the Go box by clicking the Logos icon.

If you type in a topic, Logos will open up a Bible, some dictionaries (opened to the entry for your topic), and guides linking you to more resources within your library. Type in a Bible passage, and Logos will open several Bibles, a commentary, and guides linking you to more resources.

4. How to right-click in your Bible

There are plenty of websites and phone apps with searchable Bibles. But only the thorough tagging built into Logos can bring you the power to search for all metaphors using “salt” or “light,” all interrogative sentences which are asserting information (in other words, rhetorical questions), or all references to Abraham or Babylon—even those using pronouns.

If you want to search for any of these things or many others, Logos has tagged them in Scripture for you. Just find one example in the Bible, right-click it, and all the tags that apply to that word or phrase will be visible on the right side of the pop-up menu. With a single click, you can select those tags and search for them elsewhere in the Bible.

All the things

Logos is two things and two other things. All the other things grow out of these four basic functions. Don’t be intimidated, or feel that you need to use every last feature or resource. Just start exploring, and you’ll quickly discover the value of studying with Logos.

Recently, our ears at Logos were perked up by an unsolicited shout-out from well-known writer and careful scriptural exegete John Piper. He brought up two issues I’d like to address: (1) the use of BDAG, the great Greek-English lexicon; and (2) the use of commentaries, which is bread and butter for us at Logos.

I’m going to write a two-part series on Piper’s brief comments. Today: Piper’s comments on BDAG. Is BDAG a tool you should own?

Piper said to Mark Dever and Jonathan Leeman on the Pastor’s Talk podcast,

With my Logos, and the power that I have to search Greek and Hebrew, I hardly need BDAG. What do you need it for? You do the work yourself.

I have purchased BDAG—Bauer, Danker, Arndt, and Gingrich—three times:

• I bought BDAG once in paper, a copy I soon sold because I realized that having it in electronic form would be so much more useful for me.
• I bought it once for BibleWorks, a copy I also ultimately sold after BibleWorks died.
• I bought it once and for all for Logos, and it’s a resource I use frequently.

I use BDAG in church, I use it in sermon prep, I use it for articles. I’ve even checked it while writing emails. I can use it in a house; I can use it with a mouse. I love BDAG, and I am right.

But so is Piper. I find that, over time, I have tended to use BDAG as I often use commentaries: as either (1) a quick and trusty crib sheet for instances in which I lack the time or need to do my own work; or (2) a validation (and/or correction!) after I’ve already done my own work on the usage of a given Greek word.

Crib sheet

Sometimes I just need a quick refresher on a straightforward word—like εἰσπηδάω (eispedao). It’s the verb Luke used to refer to the motion of the Philippian jailer who “rushed in” to see whether all his prisoners had escaped in Acts 16. This is not a common word; it occurs only once in the New Testament and once in the Septuagint. BDAG gives me a quick and authoritative definition (“a rapid motion forward into”) and two simple, clear glosses (“leap in, rush in”). I doubt I would ever need to study this rare but straightforward word in a narrative context; BDAG gives me all I need and more.

Validation and/or correction

But when I have time and interest, and when a word is more important to my interpretation, I frequently use the Logos Bible Word Study tool to write my own “dictionary entry” for a given word.

For example, I was writing a video script recently in which I examined the Greek word ὑπόστασις (hupostasis), the word translated “substance” in the KJV at Hebrews 11:1—“faith is the substance of things hoped for.” The Bible Word Study showed me, beautifully and efficiently, all the places where the word is used in the Greek New Testament and in the Septuagint, and I found it particularly interesting that the word gets translated “confidence” in most of its few occurrences in the New Testament—at least in some translations!

This rendering, “confidence,” fits Hebrews 11:1; it also has a historic pedigree, having been used by Tyndale here; and it honors the principle of concordance: it’s kind of nice to be able to use the same English word to translate a given Greek word when possible. It aids English-only word studies.

This is the kind of thing I’m sure Piper does without BDAG: he looks for himself to see how a given Greek word is used, and using principles of linguistics—especially “usage determines meaning”—he is able to essentially be his own lexicographer. Like he said, he hardly needs BDAG.

But, that word ὑπόστασις (hupostasis) provides a good example of why and how BDAG can be helpful. And to whom. Piper has a European doctorate and extensive experience with Greek. Even I, with my not-nearly-as-august Southern US doctorate, have some facility with linguistic concepts, and I’ve done some training and reading in lexicography. I’d love to think that anyone can learn to do his own word study, but I’m just not sure how widespread are the necessary skills.

And, frankly, ὑπόστασις (hupostasis) is a difficult case. When I looked it up, BDAG both validated my own work on the term (as far as it went) and offered ideas that had not occurred to me. BDAG mined the long tradition of discussion of this difficult word in English and in German; and it offered four distinct senses for me to evaluate. It expressed appropriate amounts of scholarly restraint by using phrases like “a strong claim can be made for …”—that in itself was helpful for me. It also incorporated evidence from extrabiblical literature.

This last point is especially important: I don’t know how good Piper’s skills are with extrabiblical Κοινή (Koine) Greek, but my experience in the world of New Testament exegesis suggests that such skills are rare. God revealed himself in history, using an established language. It is regularly helpful and important to see how Greeks of the day used a given word. That’s why BDAG references Josephus’s use of ὑπόστασις (hupostasis), among other ancient writers’ uses. This is work Logos can help you do—the Bible Word Study has a “Textual Searches” section that found two of the same Josephus references BDAG did (plus another BDAG doesn’t list!).

But checking Koine Greek from outside the New Testament and Septuagint is difficult and demanding work for which I’m very glad to have assistance from Frederick W. Danker, the D in BDAG.

Upshot

Upshot: I have followed Piper’s path by preferring to do my own lexicography before appealing to BDAG. And I use Logos just as Piper does. But when I hit difficulties, BDAG is my go-to tool, always.

My late friend Rod Decker wrote a review of BDAG shortly after it came out. Decker was a linguist, a scholar, a Greek expert, and this is what he said:

You will never accomplish any serious exegesis if you remain forever with only a beginner’s lexicon (as Newman’s Dictionary must be judged; it has other limitations as well). There is no other equivalent tool. Louw and Nida’s Lexicon has a different focus altogether. Abbott-Smith is much more limited (though handy enough to carry on vacation). Thayer ought not even be considered since his work is both inaccurate and seriously out of date (it is “pre-papyri”). The only other major lexicon is Liddell and Scott, but that work focuses primarily on classical Greek even though the LXX and NT are included. So buy BDAG (sell your car if necessary!) and learn to use it. You will not regret your purchase. (Journal of Ministry and Theology 55.1 [2001]: 122.)

Can I get an “affirmation of what is stated”?

James Strong’s 1890 Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible is one of the most frequently cited Bible study resources out there—perhaps because it is freely available in many places online. But its dictionary portion is often misused. I humbly offer three reasons why you should use better resources if you can.

1. Strong’s dictionary entries lend themselves to abuses.

First, Strong included Hebrew and Greek dictionaries—but nobody ever seems to read the fine print to discover what exactly he was trying to do in his entries. These dictionaries therefore sometimes lend themselves to abuses. Just the other day, a Christian said to another Christian online (where else?), “Most English-speaking believers don’t know the true meaning of the words in their Bible.” And to illustrate, he quoted Strong’s (and, as it happens, mixed up Hebrew and Greek entries). “When you read the word ‘trust’ in English,” he said, “you may not realize that in Hebrew and Greek, what it really means is ‘believe, trust, place trust in, RELY, CONFIDE—to entrust (especially one’s spiritual well-being to Christ).’”

But if you read [James] Strong’s introduction, you’ll understand that he isn’t saying that “believe” and “trust” and “put in trust with” add up to a definition of the Hebrew and Greek words for “trust”; they are what’s called “glosses,” single-word translation equivalents drawn, in this case, straight from the King James Version. Some of these fit in only particular contexts; they’re not a menu from which you can select whichever meaning appeals to you.

2. Strong’s dictionary entries often tempt people to make “meaning soup.”

They’re not a soup, either, of all those meanings mixed together, that you can then pour into other Bible passages. This is a second reason you should probably replace Strong’s dictionary: people love to make meaning soup with Strong’s. Take the definition I just quoted from social media. It doesn’t work: the Greek word for “trust” clearly does not always mean “to entrust one’s spiritual well-being to Christ.” How do we know this? Because the demons “believe”—same Greek word (Jas 2:19)—but they haven’t entrusted themselves to Jesus. Dictionaries like Strong’s tend to invite Bible readers to load up Bible words with more meaning than the Spirit intended. Context, not hidden Hebrew and Greek meanings, tells you what level or quality or object of trust is meant.

3. Strong’s dictionary can lead Bible readers into word-study fallacies.

Third, Strong’s dictionary sometimes leads unwary readers straight into word study fallacies. For example, under the simple, common New Testament Greek word for “rejoice,” you get this: “from ἄγαν agan (much) and 242 [the word “jump”]; properly to jump for joy, i.e., exult.”

But words mean what they are used to mean in any given time period, not necessarily what they used to mean. So it simply isn’t true that agalliao means “much jumping.” That meaning doesn’t work, at least not everywhere the word occurs: Mary says in the Magnificat that her “spirit rejoices in God her Savior” (Luke 1:47); her spirit didn’t “much jump.”

So are there better options?

What resources should you use instead of Strong’s dictionary? 

Honestly, my first suggestion is that you stick with English. There are so many great Bible dictionaries (Lexham Bible Dictionary and Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible are excellent options) and commentaries that use only the language you already know. Use multiple good English Bible translations, gain some sense for why they differ, and you may actually be better off than someone who likes to ride the sacred cow of original language usage through the slaughterhouse of linguistic fallacies.

My second suggestion is that you use the same tool I use all the time: the Bible Word Study in Logos. It can give you access to good Hebrew and Greek dictionaries such as BDAG (Bauer-Danker-Arndt- Gingrich), CHALOT (A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament), Louw-Nida, Swanson, and the Lexham Theological Wordbook. It will also most certainly help you look at how any Bible word actually got used by the native Hebrew and Greek speakers whom we know as the apostles and prophets. 

***

The article on why Strong’s concordance might not be the best Bible study resource is adapted from an article in Bible Study Magazine.

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