The Word About the Word

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What do we mean when we talk about the word of God?

For most of my Christian life, the answer was reasonably simple. The word of God was the Bible. That big book I have a bunch of copies of on my shelf. (My son came home from school recently and told me he got a new book to read. He seemed pretty excited, so I asked what it was. He said, and I quote, “Well, it starts with the word the, but that’s all I can remember.” I asked if it was the Bible. It wasn’t. He also didn’t think pastor Dad was very funny. I do, but that’s fine.)

Still, for most Christians, the word of God has long signified this collection of 66 books and letters gathered together and bound into two testaments. And there’s good reason for that. The scriptures themselves talk about the word of God constantly. “Your word, O Lord, is a lamp for my feet, a light unto my path” (Ps 119:105). Or Isaiah 40:8: “The grass withers and the flowers fail, but the word of our God endures forever.” Jesus regularly talks about the word of God too. He warns in Mark 7:13 about how we can nullify it by weighing it down with heavy burdens we put on each other. He speaks about how blessed we are when we hear the word of God and then actually live it. (Lk 11:28)

So the word of God is itself a very common idea within the word of God.

But here’s the thing. In all those references, there’s a subtle nuance worth noticing: they are, each of them, in our Bible, and they all refer to the word of God, and yet they all seem to be referring to something other than the Bible.

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