Living by the Book/Living by the Book Workbook Set (41 page)

I
n one of Gary Larson’s
Far Side
cartoons, a French horn player is sitting in the middle of a symphony orchestra during a concert. Pointing at the sheet music on his stand, he says, “Gee, look at all the little black dots!”

The words in the biblical text are just little black dots on a page to many readers, strange hieroglyphics that remain inscrutable. These folks may own a Bible, but they don’t own the words in the Bible because they don’t know how to determine their meaning. Tragically, they are missing out on the very words of life that God has spoken.

But that need not be the case for you. If you’ve been practicing the process outlined in this book, you’ve already discovered a number of strategies to make sense out of Scripture. The most important thing you’ve learned to do is to look for terms. In this chapter, I want to help you investigate biblical terms in order to discern their meaning.

A “term” is a key word or phrase that an author uses to make his point. He may use the word repeatedly to give it emphasis. He may place it on display in some prominent verse. He may build a story around it to illustrate its significance. Or he may put it in the mouth of a central character in his
narrative. However he signals them, an author wants you to pay attention to his terms, because they are freighted with meaning. Unless you “come to terms with the terms,” you’ll never understand his message.

Two secondary resources mentioned in the last chapter are especially helpful in this process—the concordance and the Bible dictionary. Let me show you how you can use them to advantage.

Say you run across the word
joy
in Paul’s letter to the Philippians.
Joy
and
rejoice
appear to be key terms for that book. So you open your concordance and look up
joy
. (Let’s assume you are working with the
New American Standard
translation and its concordance.)

The first thing you notice is that there are scores of references, in both the Old and New Testaments. That’s significant:
joy
is not an obscure term; it is very common. If you want to launch an exhaustive study of the term, you need to look up each and every passage where it is used. You want to evaluate what light the various contexts shed on the meaning and significance of
joy
.

But since you are concentrating on Philippians, pay special attention to its usage there. Here’s what the listing shows:

So the word
joy
appears seven times in the letter. You need to do a little observing to compare and contrast these different uses. You might even want to expand your study to the use of
joy
in Paul’s other letters.

One thing to be sure to notice is the little number to the right of each entry. At Philippians 1:4, it is
5479
. Likewise at 1:25 and 2:2. But at 2:17, it changes to
4796
. Those numbers refer to the Greek words which are translated
“joy.” In the back of the NAS concordance, you’ll find that
5479
is the word
chara
, which means “joy” or “delight.” It comes from the Greek verb
chairo
, “to rejoice” or “be glad.”

What about
4796
? That’s the word
sugchairo
—obviously related to
chairo
, but with a prefix,
sug
, that shades the meaning. The concordance tells you that
sugchairo
means “to rejoice with.” So in the two instances of
joy
in Philippians 2:17–18, Paul is talking about a shared experience. That’s obvious enough from the English text. But a good concordance will help you when something is not so obvious. So even though you don’t know the original languages, you do not have to be at a disadvantage.

Another use for a concordance is to chase down obscure references. For example, suppose you are studying the books of 1 and 2 Kings, and you come across the name
Molech
at 1 Kings 11:7:

Who or what was Molech? The text tells you that it was a detestable idol, and that Solomon was apparently building a center of worship for it. But you decide to do a little comparative study. So you look up Molech in your concordance and find that the name appears eight times in the Old Testament and never in the New. That tells you something about the time span for Molech.

You also notice that of the eight references, five are in Leviticus, one in 1 Kings, one in 2 Kings, and one more in Jeremiah. That ought to draw your attention to Leviticus. Just looking at the concordance entries, you read in four of the five cases about offspring being offered to Molech. So already you have a clue as to why the author calls Molech “the detestable idol.” People were sacrificing their own children to it. And apparently that’s what Solomon was getting into.

Of all the tools of Bible study, a concordance is the one you will use most
frequently. It’s ideal for word studies because it locates terms in the text. It also gets you started in the task of comparing Scripture with Scripture, which is the best way to understand the meaning of biblical terms. If you buy only one secondary resource for your Bible study program, make sure it is an exhaustive concordance. The investment will pay for itself many times over.

The other tool to use when investigating terms in Scripture is a Bible dictionary. I mentioned
Vine’s Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words
. Let’s use it to investigate the word
earth
.

Remember our observation of Acts 1:8 (chapter 6)? Jesus told the apostles that they were to take the gospel “even to the remotest part of the earth.” I said that the word
earth
meant the inhabited earth. How did I know that? I looked it up in Vine.

Vine gives a comprehensive overview of the word
earth
. He shows that there were two Greek words that we commonly translate “earth”:
gé
(pronounced “gay”), and
oikouméne
(pronounced “oi-koo-men-nay”).

Gé
was used to describe five main ideas: earth as arable land; the earth as a whole, the world (as opposed to the heavens); the inhabited earth; a country or territory; the ground; and land. Based on his extensive knowledge of ancient Greek, Vine lists verses in the New Testament for each of these usages. Acts 1:8 is listed with the third meaning, “the inhabited earth.”

It’s interesting to notice that all of the references in Luke and Acts fall under this third meaning, and none under the other five. And of the nine references listed with “the inhabited earth,” six are from the book of Acts. So
earth
is a crucial term for Luke. And every time he uses it he is referring to “the inhabited earth.” Its prominence in Acts adds weight to our conjecture that Acts 1:8 is something of an outline for the book. Jesus tells His followers to go to the inhabited earth, and that’s exactly where they go.

Another piece of information that Vine gives you is that the other word for earth,
oikouméne
, also denotes the inhabited earth. And he adds this note (italics added): “It is translated ‘world’ in every place where it has this significance,
save in Luke 21:26 . . . where it is translated ‘earth.’
”Very interesting.
Again, Luke always has in mind the inhabited earth. What do you suppose that suggests about the purpose of his two-volume account?

Words are the basic building blocks of language. To understand any piece of literature, you have to come to terms with the author; you have to interpret his words. Concordances and Bible dictionaries are invaluable in helping you do that. However, some words have a meaning that lies beneath the surface. We call them figures of speech, and we’ll look at how they work in the next chapter.