Words

I am a wordsmith. I like words. I like to read them, craft them into entertaining and informative stories and articles, and play games with them. I like to learn new ones. I even like to learn foreign ones. We have some writings from ancient times: Aristotle and St. Augustine; from medieval and Renaissance times: William Shakespeare and the like; and from more modern times: Kant and Neitzche and Abraham Lincoln. My words do not compare. And neither their words nor mine will last forever.

God’s will.

I started a personal Bible study on the book of Ephesians. I made it to verse 3. I noticed that the same word was used three times in that one verse. The word that is translated blessing and blessings are all forms of the same Greek word, which means “to speak words of benediction.”

After looking up the words in the concordance and pondering their meaning, I wrote my own paraphrase. This is akin to a skill I would have my students do in the classroom: if you can rewrite something in your own words, it shows you understand it. So here is my version of Ephesians 1:3:

Speak words of praise to God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; God has spoken words of benediction over us with every regenerative (life-changing) kind of benediction, all of which are in the heavenly places right now with Christ.

This one verse got me thinking about the words of God. There are verses like 2 Timothy 3:16, which tells us Scripture is inspired by God, and whole Psalms (119) about the Law of God. And of course we know that Scripture and the Law (one part of Scripture) are examples of God’s word.

But I wanted to look up phrases that describe God’s words. You know, metacognition is thinking about thinking. I wanted to look up phrases that would use words to describe God’s word. I found quite a few, and I am sure the list is not exhaustive. After looking up examples of “God’s words are….” I came up with a dozen or so phrases that can finish this sentence, which again relates back to Ephesians 1:3:

God speaks words of benediction/blessing over us. When God speaks, His words are

Faithful True Light-giving

Life-giving

Pure sweet worth following

Should change me will be fulfilled

Do good to the Righteous ETERNAL

will stand understandable

regenerative dependable

If I believe all of these things are true, and if Scripture is God’s word written by human hands, than why don’t I read my Bible more?