God’s Use of Words

January 17, 2010

I’m going to put a couple of sentences on the screen and I want you to read them to yourself and think about what they mean.

• A woman without her man is nothing.
• A woman: without her, man is nothing.
• The man dropped the bullet in his mouth.
• The man dropped, the bullet in his mouth.

We communicate with words, but we don’t always to a good job of it. Sometimes the meaning of the words is uncertain – it can change depending on the way they are said or punctuated. Language can be imprecise, but it is the most effective means we have of communicating with each other.

Have you ever wondered why God chose language as the way to communicate His Good News to us? God conveys His message of love and a Savior to us with verbs and nouns, adverbs and adjectives, tenses and grammar, sentences and syntax, paragraphs and punctuation and parts of speech. Did you ever stop to think about why God did it that way? Maybe not. Maybe even now you are thinking, “If He didn’t tell us, how would we know?”

Language is a powerful tool, an integral part of our lives. It conveys thoughts, explains, describes, reveals, clarifies. We use words to make ourselves known, to share our heart, to express what we are feeling. We use words in order to understand the world around us when we listen and read. We express ourselves and get the perspective of others with the use of words.

God wanted to make Himself known to us. He wanted us to understand who He is, how much He loves us and what He wants for us. So He used words. But He took it a step further, as John explains.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. ” (John 1:1–3, NIV)

The name applied to the second person of the Trinity here, the one we usually call “Jesus,” is “The Word.” Jesus came into this world to be the Word of the Father now in flesh appearing. He was sent here to explain and clarify and reveal God.

Since we are talking about words and language and how God uses them, I want you to think about the difference between abstract and concrete terms.

Abstract terms refer to ideas or concepts. For example, “good” is an abstract term. It is a common, familiar word, one we use every day. We recognize the word and therefore we assume that we understand what it means. But that may not be accurate. The meaning changes depending upon who is using the term and in what context. Someone might say, “Your children are so good” and mean that they are intelligent, well-behaved and a pleasure to be around. Someone else might describe an evening of over-drinking and illicit sex by saying, “We had a good time.”  And the meaning of good in that case is not at all the same.

Or consider the word freedom. The word is familiar enough, but if you say, “I want freedom,” what are you talking about? A teenager might mean he wants his own car. An overworked woman might mean she wants a vacation. Some people will say they want their freedom and mean they want a divorce. For others it means self-employment, to be debt free. For some it may mean they want their clothes to be loose fitting, but for others it means they want to be delivered from slavery and tyranny. The meaning of freedom is not constant.

That is how it is with abstract terms. Ideas and concepts are not uniform. Does that mean we should not use abstract terms? Of course not—we need them. We need to talk about ideas and concepts, and we need words that represent them. But we must understand how imprecise their meanings can be, how easily they can be understood differently by people in differing situations.

Concrete terms refer to objects or events that are observable and can be known by our senses. They are the opposite of abstract terms, which not observable or knowable with our senses. Examples of concrete terms are stapler, table, nose ring, red, hot. Because these terms refer to objects or events we can see or hear or feel or taste or smell, their meanings are fairly stable. If you ask me what I mean by the word spoon, I can pick up a spoon and show it to you. You can’t do that with an abstract. I can’t pick up a freedom or a good and show it to you. I can hold and measure sand, but I cannot give you a box of responsibility. (Sand is a concrete term, responsibility is an abstract)

While abstract terms like love change meaning with time and circumstances, concrete terms like hot pretty much stay the same. Table and puppy mean the same to you now as they did when you were four.

I have a purpose in taking you through this little discourse on abstract and concrete terms. In Jesus, we have the abstract Word made concrete for us. “In the beginning was the Word” is abstract, an idea, a concept. But “The Word became flesh and lived among us” is concrete and real and knowable and touchable.

John 1:14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

That is a description of the Word of God becoming real for us – the event we were celebrating less than a month ago. The Word became flesh. God wanted us to understand Him and know Him and experience His love so much that He made His Word one of us. God took His Word, His promise, all of His Will for us and made them knowable and understandable when His Word became flesh. And in Him, we have seen the depth of God’s love.

The One who came to make God known would show us the extent of God’s love by taking our place in punishment and by that action pay the penalty our sins deserve, freeing us from condemnation.

“God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. ” (2 Corinthians 5:21, NIV)

God used His Word made flesh to give us what we don’t deserve – forgiveness, peace, life everlasting.

Jesus is the abstract word made concrete for us. God’s use of words is pretty impressive.

(Part of the discussion on abstract and concrete was found at http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/composition/abstract.htm in an article by John Friedlander, associate professor in the English department at Southwest Tennessee Community College.)