Jimmy Akin delivers an eye-opening inductive Bible study! He meticulously examines every single Bible verse containing the phrase “word of God” (nearly 50!) and uncovers a shocking truth: Scripture never uses the phrase to mean the Bible itself. Instead, it overwhelmingly refers to divine revelation through preaching, prophecy, commands, and Jesus himself. Prepare for a game-changing perspective on a term you thought you knew! Don’t miss this deep-dive revelation.
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
Today, we’re going to do an inductive Bible study on the word of God!
But . . . what is an inductive Bible study?
And . . . what is the word of God?
Let’s get into it!
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“Inductive Bible Study”?
The first question you may have today is, “What is an inductive Bible study?”
Well, the term is used different ways by different people, but here I’m going to tell you how I’m using the term.
Bible studies are commonly divided into two main categories: Deductive Bible Studies and Inductive Bible Studies.
Deductive reasoning is when you move from the general to the specific, like if you say:
Deductive Reasoning
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
“All men are mortal” is a general statement, and “Socrates is a man” is a specific statement because it is about a specific man.
Inductive reasoning goes the other way around, from the specific to the general, like if you say:
Inductive Reasoning
Socrates is a mortal.
Plato is a mortal.
Aristotle is a mortal.
And you propose Therefore, all men are mortal.
With inductive reasoning, you look at a bunch of specific instances to build up to a general conclusion.
Applying these principles to Bible study, a deductive one—sometimes called a synthetic or topical study—is one where you know the general conclusion you are going to reach and then look at specific verses to prove it.
For example, if you want to do a Bible study showing your students that God is eternal, you might go to passages you know in advance say that God
- was present in the beginning,
- that say he is eternal or immortal,
- or that he is from everlasting to everlasting,
- and that he is the first and the last
On the other hand, in an inductive Bible study you start by looking at specific passages and build up to a general conclusion.
They could be passages in the same book—like doing a verse-by-verse study of the Gospel of Matthew from beginning to end.
Or they could be verses that are on the same topic—like going through every verse in the Bible that mentions animals.
Or they could be verses that use the same word or phrase—like going through every verse in the Bible that mentions the word “faith.”
A key difference between the two is that deductive Bible studies are usually used to demonstrate something you already believe.
While inductive Bible studies tend to be used to do research—either research on something you don’t know yet or at least research to check something you believe and see if it’s true.
Well, today we’re going to be doing an inductive Bible study on the word of God.
“The Word of God”?
Now, you may be saying, “Wait. Aren’t all Bible studies done on the word of God?”
In a sense yes, but that’s not the sense I mean.
What we’re going to be doing is looking at how the Bible uses the phrase “word of God.”
In other words, we’re going to be looking at how Scripture understands this term.
Recently, I’ve discussed a number of terms that are used differently in the Bible than they are in later theology.
And that’s okay, because language changes over time, so it’s okay for words to change meaning.
But you have to be aware of that fact and keep an eye on it, because if you don’t, you’ll start reading current theological uses back onto biblical texts and misunderstand them.
One term that is used differently in the Bible than it often is in theology today is the phrase “word of God.”
Today, this term is used in different ways by different Christian communities.
For example, the unofficial glossary of the Catechism of the Catholic Church defines the word of God as, “The entire content of [divine] revelation as contained in the Holy Bible and proclaimed in the Church.”
Paragraph 81 of the Catechism further explains that,
Sacred Scripture is the speech of God as it is put down in writing under the breath of the Holy Spirit.”
And [Holy] Tradition transmits in its entirety the Word of God which has been entrusted to the apostles by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit.
In Protestant circles, the phrase “word of God” has a similar but more restricted usage.
Protestants typically exclude Tradition from the word of God—at least today—and use the phrase “word of God” as a synonym for Scripture.
The impact of this Protestant usage on the English-speaking internet is clear.
If you ask Google, “What is the word of God?”, it may tell you “The word of God primarily refers to the Bible.”
And to confirm the Protestant source of this understanding, it may go on to tell you that a key aspect of the word of God is the Bible or written word consisting of 66 books, which is the Protestant understanding of how many books are in the biblical canon.
It’s thus no surprise when we find Protestant speakers using the term “word of God” when they mean “Bible.”
But the thing is, this understanding of the phrase “word of God” is much harder to find in Scripture than our Protestant friends commonly recognize.
Are there any passages where Scripture uses the phrase this way?
Let’s do our Bible study and find out.
Thinking Through Options
As a first step, it will be useful to think through some options about what the phrase “word of God” might mean so that we’re aware of possibilities and don’t miss them when we encounter them.
If you think about the phrase “word of God,” it could mean a number of things.
The “of God” part tells you that the word in question is linked to God—it’s either a word that comes from him or is about him.
The more ambiguous part is the term “word” itself. That can mean a number of things, some of which are rather surprising.
- Incarnate Word
For example, at the beginning of his Gospel, John the Evangelist says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Here he is speaking of the pre-incarnate Christ, the second Person of the Trinity, who took on flesh and became man.
So, we have Jesus himself as God’s incarnate word.
- Creative Word
When John says that, he is deliberately echoing Genesis 1, where we read that God said, “Let there be light!” and there was light.
This is a metaphor, since God doesn’t literally use sound waves in the air to create things.
In fact, at the first moment of creation there wouldn’t have been any air to send sound waves through.
So Christians and Jews have always recognized that the Bible sometimes speaks of God’s word as a creative force.
III. Revelation
However, most of the time, when humans use words, they do so to communicate—they reveal their minds to each other.
Consequently, the word of God could be anything that God reveals—anything God says would be an item of revelation.
And the Bible might have passages that simply conceptualize God’s word as revelation, without further specifying it in any way.
- Revelation by Content
On the other hand, a biblical author might conceptualize the word of God in a narrower way, based on some quality the revelation had—like what content it has.
- Command
For example, God’s revelation might take the form of a command, like when God says, “Honor your father and mother.”
- Prediction (Promise, Warning)
Alternately, it might take the form of a prediction—something that will happen in the future, especially if things keep going as they are.
For example, God might reveal a promise about the future, like when he tells David that he will have an everlasting house that comes from him.
Or God might reveal a warning, like when God says that if the Israelites don’t stop worshipping idols, disaster will happen.
- Revelation by Transmission
On the other hand, a biblical author might conceptualize the word of God not based on its content but on another characteristic—like how the revelation was transmitted.
- Arrival to Revelator
The first moment in the transmission of revelation is when it arrives at the revelator but before he has transmitted it to anyone else.
This is like when a prophet sees a vision or hears God’s voice but hasn’t told anyone yet.
- Announcement by Revelator
The next moment in the transmission of revelation is when the person who receives the information announces it to someone else.
Like when a prophet tells others about the vision he has seen or the voice he has heard.
- Preaching by Post-Revelator
After the revelation has been received, it may be further distributed by others.
This is like when the disciples of Jesus preach the Christian message based on what Jesus revealed.
- Reception by Audience
The final stage of the transmission of revelation is when it has been received by its audience.
This is like when the first Christian converts heard the preaching of the apostles, believed God’s revelation, and received it into their hearts.
- Writing by Revelator
Alternately, instead of communicating the revelation orally, the receiver might write it down and publish it in written form.
This is like when the authors of the New Testament write letters that are divinely inspired.
You can thus see that there are a bunch of different ways that the phrase “word of God” can be conceptualized.
As we go through the passages where this phrase is used in the Bible, keep these different meanings in mind, and we’ll see which ones are actually used in Scripture.
Now, I should point out that these categories are not always mutually exclusive.
For example, a biblical author might be conceptualizing God’s word as both a prediction and an oral revelation—like when Nathan the prophet reveals the promise of the kings that will come from David and does so in oral rather than written form.
However, here we’re especially interested in the mode of transmission rather than the content of the revelation, so that is what we’ll ordinarily focus on.
And we’ll only look at content when that element is clearly in the foreground.
Written Revelation
The category we are most interested in is written revelation, because that is what Scripture is.
So if you want to say that the Bible uses the phrase “word of God” to mean Scripture, you’ll need to find places where it’s conceptualizing the word of God primarily as written revelation and not as something else.
A good test for this is whether you could take the phrase “word of God” and substitute a phrase indicating written revelation like:
- Scripture
- Bible
- Book of Scripture
- Book of the Bible
- Passage of Scripture
- Passage of the Bible, or even just
- Written Revelation
If you can’t substitute a phrase like that without changing the meaning of the passage—or if the statement makes less sense with a phrase like that plugged in—that’s a sign that the phrase “word of God” is being conceptualized in a different way.
Most of the time, though, we won’t need to use this test, because the text or its context will make it obvious how the phrase is being conceptualized without having to make a substitution.
The “Word of God” in Scripture
There are just under 50 occurrences of the phrase “word of God” in Scripture, though precisely how many will depend on the translation you read.
What we’re going to do in this episode is go through all of them and see how they are being used.
We’ll start with a list of all the references, and as we go through it and find verses that use the phrase “word of God” as a reference to something other than the Bible, we’ll remove them from the list.
We’ll then see how many verses there are in Scripture that can be shown to use “word of God” as a synonym for the Bible.
Yes, going through fifty verses will take a bit of time, but that’s what serious Bible scholars—and serious Bible students—need to do sometimes.
As we’ll see, many of these verses won’t take very long to deal with, I’ll be here to help you as we do this Bible study, and you can always go through the episode at double speed or something.
Now, when I first conducted this Bible study, I did so by going through the verses and classifying them in the order that they appear in the Bible, but here I’ve sequenced them into categories so that we don’t have to constantly jump back and forth between categories in this episode, which should make it a little easier.
However, we will be covering all the passages that use the phrase “word of God.”
God’s Incarnate Word
We’ll start at the top of our category list with references that everybody agrees refer to Jesus as God’s incarnate word.
There are a number of passages like this, but they don’t all use the phrase “word of God.”
The one that does is Revelation 19:13, which describes Jesus as follows:
Revelation 19:13
And [Jesus] was dressed in an outer garment dipped in blood, and his name is called the Word of God.
So here the word of God refers to Jesus, not to the Bible.
We can thus eliminate Revelation 19:13 from our list of references to the word of God.
God’s Creative Word
Now we’ll move to references that everybody agrees refer to God’s creative word. These don’t include Genesis itself because the phrase “word of God” isn’t used there.
However, in Hebrews 11:3, we read:
Hebrews 11:3
By faith we understand the worlds were created by the word of God, in order that what is seen did not come into existence from what is visible.
And in 2 Peter 3:5, we read:
2 Peter 3:5
For when [scoffers] maintain this, it escapes their notice that the heavens existed long ago and the earth held together out of water and through water by the word of God.
Both of these passages refer to the power of God’s creative word in the world and are not references to the Bible itself.
There’s also 1 Timothy 4:5. Here, Paul says that every food created by God is good and is made holy by the word of God and prayer.
This is one of the more confusing references to the word of God in the Bible, and scholars are not at all certain how it is to be understood. There are multiple proposals.
Perhaps the most likely one is that the phrase “word of God” is being understood as God’s creative word, because Paul has just said that every food created by God is good.
So the food can be made holy both by God creating it good and by the prayer by which we receive it in thanksgiving.
However, it’s clear that “word of God” is not being used as a synonym for Scripture here, because the Bible does not make foods holy.
The Jewish Scriptures—which were what was most commonly understood as Scripture when this letter was written—most especially did not do so, as they declared many foods to be unclean for Jews.
Some have proposed that maybe early Christians read Scripture passages when they prayed over their food, but there are multiple problems with that.
First, we have no evidence that they did this.
Second, since every aspect of a book had to be produced by hand—including the paper and the ink—books were fantastically expensive in the ancient world.
A single copy of the Gospel of Matthew would cost you the equivalent of $4,000, so ordinary people didn’t have their own copies of the books of the Bible.
And the overwhelming majority of people—including in the Christian community—were illiterate and couldn’t have read such passages in their homes.
So this is not a plausible suggestion.
The interpretation of 1 Timothy 4:5 as God’s creative word is more likely, and so we can eliminate these three verses from our list.
Revelation as Such
Our next category is where Scripture understands the word of God as revelation, considered as such.
A passage that does this is Proverbs 30:5, which says:
Proverbs 30:5
Every word of God is flawless; he is a shield for him who takes refuge in him.
The key clue we need for our purposes is the fact this passage says that every word of God is flawless.
In the age when Proverbs was written, those words included the ones you could get by inquiring of the Lord, such as through a prophet.
So here it is clear that the words of God are not limited to what is found in Scripture.
The most logical way to understand Proverbs 30:5 is thus that the word of God refers to any revelation that comes from God.
We come now to Hebrews 4:12—a verse that is a favorite in the Protestant community.
The reason is that it praises the word of God—it says very impressive things about it—but it’s a metaphor and doesn’t give you much information to figure out how the phrase is being used.
Consequently, Protestant preachers can pour their own content into the phrase, and their audiences will just assume that it’s talking about the Bible.
It’s also very muscular in their expression, and it compares the word of God to a sword, so that makes it popular.
Hebrews 4:12
For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any double-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, both joints and marrow, and able to judge the reflections and thoughts of the heart.
In Hebrews 4:12, the author says that the word of God is living and active and sharper than any double-edged sword.
If you treat the phrase “word of God” as a synonym for the Bible, you can imagine how popular that will make this passage in Protestant preaching.
The Bible is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword! Yeah! That’ll preach, brother! That’ll preach!
But if we’re not cheerleading and trying to take an objective look at this passage, is that what the author was actually trying to say?
It’s clear that the author is conceptualizing the word of God as divine revelation in this passage, but is he narrowing it down more than that—to just Scripture?
One indication that he isn’t doing that is the context of this verse. Just before it, the author warned his listeners not to fall into a pattern of disobedience.
And just after it, he warns the audience that no creature is hidden from the sight of God, and we must give an account to him.
So here the metaphor is being used to conceive of the word of God as a tool that God uses in evaluating our moral performance.
The author is warning the audience that the word of God will discern their deepest motives. That’s why he says that it is able to judge the reflections and thoughts of the heart.
But Scripture doesn’t do that. Scripture is words on a page.
Here, God’s word is best understood as divine revelation itself, because it doesn’t matter whether a revelation is written down or not.
God will still hold us morally accountable for obeying it.
This was particularly so in the apostolic age, when the Protestant idea that all divine revelation was written down was undreamed of.
We thus see that Hebrews 4:12 is not using the phrase “word of God” as a synonym for Scripture but for divine revelation in general—like Proverbs 30:5—and we can eliminate it from our list.
Revelation as Prediction
We now come to the category where a sacred writer is conceptualizing revelation by its content, and first we will consider whether there are any passages where an author thinks of revelation as a prediction—such as either a promise or a warning.
In Romans 9:6 Paul has been discussing how he has unceasing anguish in his heart because of his fellow countrymen—the Jewish people—and how he could even wish he was cut off from Christ on their account.
He also lists a bunch of benefits the Jewish people have had—the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the temple service, the promises, the patriarchs, and even Jesus Christ himself.
He then says, “But it is not as if the word of God had failed.” In saying this, it’s clear that he is referring to some previous revelation that has come from God—a prediction or promise about Israel—that you might think has failed because of the current status of the Jewish people.
But it isn’t clear what revelation he is thinking of. Is it a prediction or a promise that all Israel will be saved? Or that it will embrace the Christ? Or that it will always be God’s people? Or that it will come into God’s kingdom?
It’s not clear.
Paul does not identify any passage of Scripture as containing this revelation, and scholars have not been able to identify one, either.
Paul does go on to cite several passages of Scripture to argue that the word of God has not failed, but that’s not the same thing.
Just because you can use different passages of Scripture to argue that the word of God has not failed does not tell you what the word of God in question is.
So what we can say about Romans 9:6 is that Paul is using the phrase “word of God” to refer to a promise or prediction God made about Israel.
But we cannot say that he’s using the term as a synonym for Scripture because we can’t even confidently identify what part of Scripture he would be talking about on this interpretation.
We can thus eliminate this passage from our list.
Revelation as Command
What about understanding the word of God as a divine command? Are there any passages where a biblical author does this—without conceptualizing it strictly in terms of what Scripture says?
There are two relevant passages, and they are parallel passages in the Gospels.
In Mark 7, the Pharisees and scribes ask Jesus why his disciples eat with unclean hands instead of according to the tradition of the elders.
Jesus says that they abandon the commandment of God and hold fast to the tradition of men.
Then he says the same thing in another way: that they ignore the commandment of God so that they can keep their tradition.
He then cites two statements from the Law of Moses that he sees as conflicting with their tradition.
The first is from the Ten Commandments, and it is the command to honor your father and mother. This command is found in Exodus 20:12 and in Deuteronomy 5:16.
The second passage Jesus cites says that one who curses his father or mother must certainly die. This command is found in Exodus 21:17 and in Leviticus 20:9.
He then says that they make void the word of God by their tradition.
We find the same story in Matthew 15, only Matthew tells it in fewer words, as usual.
Again, the Pharisees and scribes ask Jesus why his disciples eat with unwashed hands in contrast to the tradition of the elders.
Jesus says that they break the commandment of God becau... Read more on Catholic.com