We Christians talk a lot about God’s glory. We sing worship songs about it, and we desire to give the Lord all the honor and glory in our lives (Pss 86:12; 115:1; 1 Cor 10:31). But what does the word “glory” actually mean? How does Scripture define it, and what does the Bible mean when it speaks of the glory of God?

Glory is a major biblical theme. Scripture brims with its language and imagery. As a result, the portrayal of God’s glory in the Bible is rich, multifaceted, and varied.¹ And the glory of the Lord appears at significant moments in the biblical narrative and in Israel’s history.

Although glory is a theme throughout the Bible, most OT texts about God’s glory appear in the Pentateuch, Psalms, Isaiah, and Ezekiel. In the New Testament, the theme of glory occurs most frequently in John, Romans, 2 Corinthians, 1 Peter, and Revelation.

In this essay, we will examine the meaning of the key biblical terms for glory. We will then trace the theme of God’s glory in the grand narrative of Scripture by looking at some examples. As we consider this glorious topic, I invite everyone to pray Moses’s prayer, “Please show me your glory” (Exod 33:18).²

What are the Bible’s key words for glory?

A quick survey of the key terms for glory demonstrates that the word has many nuances. Its specific meaning depends on the context of the passage in which it appears, as well as its historical, cultural, and canonical contexts.

The Hebrew term כָּבוֹד

In the Old Testament, the most important Hebrew term for glory is כָּבוֹד (transliterated kābôd; pronounced kavod), which occurs about 200 times. Roughly half of these refer to God’s glory. The possible nuances of the noun כָּבוֹד include weight or weightiness, substance, status, gravitas, prestige, reputation, authority, honor, and glory. The verb derived from the same Hebrew root כבד often means to honor or glorify (e.g., Ps 86:9, 12).

Explore the meaning of כָּבוֹד (“glory”) with Logos’s Bible Word Study. Try it for free!

The adjective כָּבֵד conveys this sense of weight when it describes Eli the priest as “old and heavy” (1 Sam 4:18; cf. 2 Sam 14:26; Exod 17:12). כָּבוֹד can also express abundance, describing Jacob’s wealth (Gen 31:1) and Joseph’s splendor (Gen 45:13). It can describe something beautiful and impressive, such as the majestic trees of Lebanon (Isa 35:2; 60:13) or the grandeur of a king or kingdom (Isa 8:7). It can refer to an important person of significant status, reputation, and authority, one who deserves honor and respect, such as the Prophet Samuel (1 Sam 9:6). Of course, this nuance is most often applied to the Lord, because YHWH is the true God and the king of glory (Ps 24:7–10). He deserves all the honor, glory, and praise (Pss 29:1–2; 115:1).³

The Greek term δόξα

The most common Greek noun for glory is δόξα (doxa), occurring more than 160 times in the New Testament. Interestingly, the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, adopted the nuances of the Hebrew term כָּבוֹד for δόξα instead of retaining the secular meaning of “opinion” from classical Greek. The NT writers followed the Septuagint in this shift in meaning. In the NT, the nuances of doxa are honor, prestige, reputation, glory, and visible splendor.⁴ The verb δοξάζω means to honor, glorify, boast, magnify, or praise.

Consider the following examples:

• To seek honor, glory, fame, or praise from others (John 5:41, 44; 7:18; 1 Thess 2:6)
• The glory and splendor of human kingdoms and kings (Matt 4:8; 6:29; Luke 12:27)
• Glory as shining light or visible radiance or splendor (Luke 2:9; 9:31; Acts 22:11; Rev 18:1)

Most references in the NT refer to God’s glory or Christ’s glory or to giving glory and honor to God the Father or to the Son:

• God’s glory: the glory of God (John 11:40; Acts 7:55; Rom 1:23), the God of glory (Acts 7:2), the Father of glory (Eph 1:17), the majestic glory (2 Pet 1:17)
• Christ’s glory (John 17:24; 2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:27)
• Glorifying God (Matt 15:31; Luke 5:25–26; 17:18; Acts 11:18; 1 Cor 6:20; 1 Pet 4:16; Rev 4:9, 11)
• Glorifying the Son (John 8:54; 13:31; 16:13–14)
• Doxologies speaking of giving glory, honor, and praise to God (Rom 11:36; Eph 3:21; 1 Tim 1:17; 2 Pet 3:18; Jude 25)⁵

The NT presents Jesus Christ as the ultimate revelation of God’s glory (John 1:14; 2 Cor 4:6; Heb 1:3).

How does the Bible portray God’s glory?

Beyond its key terms, the Bible conveys glory through imagery, metaphors, and related concepts. God’s glory is related to the Bible’s concepts and themes, such as divine presence, theophany, holiness, worship, divine kingship, and YHWH’s name, character, and reputation.⁶

For example, God’s glory is regularly associated with the image of YHWH as the divine king who sits enthroned in royal splendor. The Lord is the king of glory (Pss 24:7–10; 93:1–2; Isa 6:1, 5) who reigns over a kingdom of glorious splendor (Ps 145:11–13). Psalm 24:7–10 portrays YHWH as both the glorious king and the divine warrior. “Who is this King of glory? The LORD of hosts, he is the King of glory” (Ps 24:10 NRSV).

Scripture also compares God’s glory to the brilliant light of the sun, radiant brightness, flashes of lightning, and flames of fire (Exod 24:17; Isa 58:8; 60:1–3, 19–20; Ezek 1:4, 27–28; Hab 3:3–4). “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you” (Isa 60:1 NRSV).

How is God’s glory revealed across Scripture’s grand narrative?

God’s glory is a major theme in the Bible, appearing at significant moments in the biblical narrative and in Israel’s history.

1. Creation

God reveals his glory through his creation. Although God’s glory is not explicitly mentioned in Genesis 1–2, we know from other Scriptures that creation itself manifests and displays God’s glory.⁷ “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (Ps 19:1; cf. Ps 8:1; Isa 6:3; Rom 1:20). By virtue of its very existence, the universe displays God’s glory by serving as a constant witness to the splendor and majesty of its Creator.⁸

When God created humankind in his image (Gen 1:26–28), “[he] crowned them with glory and honor” (Ps 8:5 NRSV) to serve as his royal representatives and stewards over his creation (Ps 8:5–8). As God’s image-bearers, we are created for his glory and are to reflect God’s glory (Isa 43:7; 49:3; 60:1–3; 62:1–3). We are called to glorify God through our lives (Ps 115:1; cf. 1 Cor 6:20; 10:31).

2. The exodus

The glory of the Lord plays a significant role in Israel’s exodus from Egypt, appearing to Moses and the Israelites several times during their journey through the wilderness.

God’s presence

Sometimes Scripture describes God’s glory as physical, concrete, and visible to emphasize his presence. In these cases, we may refer to God’s glory as God’s manifest presence, meaning his divine presence is revealed and experienced in a real and tangible way.

Take, for example, the pillar of cloud and fire that accompanied the Israelites from Egypt to the promised land (Exod 13:21–22; 40:36–38). “To the Israelites the glory of the LORD looked like a consuming fire on top of the mountain” (Exod 24:17 NIV; cf. Deut 5:22–27). Likewise, the fiery cloud on Mount Sinai signified the presence of the Lord and served as one of the visible signs of God’s glory.

God’s salvation

God’s glory is revealed through his mighty deeds in salvation history, particularly in his powerful and miraculous acts of redemption, protection, and provision.

• God is glorified when he rescues his people from Egypt (Exod 14:4, 17, 18).
• God’s presence in the pillar of cloud and fire protects his people from the Egyptian army (Exod 13:21–22; 14:19–20, 24–25).
• God’s glory is revealed when he graciously provides food for his people in the wilderness (Exod 16:6–10).

God’s judgment

At times, divine glory appears when YHWH is about to mete out divine judgment (Lev 10:1–3; Num 14:10; 16:19; Ezek 8–11). This is because YHWH is a holy God and he expects holiness and covenant faithfulness from his people. The Lord calls his people to be holy as he is holy (Lev 19:2). In these moments, the appearance of God’s glory can be terrifying because it signals that judgment is imminent.

In a vision, the Prophet Ezekiel sees the glory of YHWH depart from the temple because of the abominations, idolatry, and sin committed there (Ezek 8–11). This is an ominous sign of impending judgment. The departure of God’s glory signifies the removal of divine protection over Jerusalem before the city falls to the Babylonians.

God’s sanctuary

God’s glory filled the tabernacle at Mount Sinai (Exod 40:34–35) and later Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem (1 Kgs 8:10–13; 2 Chr 5:13–14; 7:1–3). The glory-cloud filling the sanctuary became a visible sign of God’s presence with his people, as he had promised (Exod 29:45–46). Because of the Lord’s presence in the tabernacle, God’s glory was often revealed and experienced in the sanctuary and in the context of worship (Lev 9:22–24; Pss 26:8; 63:2).

3. God’s nature and character

When Moses prayed, “Please show me your glory” on Mount Sinai (Exod 33:18), he and the Israelites had already experienced God’s glory many times. But on this occasion, Moses needed reassurance of God’s continuing presence with them after the Israelites had sinned by worshiping the golden calf (Exod 32; cf. Ps 106:19–21; Rom 1:23). In this troubling context, YHWH’s response to Moses’s request was profound, demonstrating the Lord’s amazing love and grace (Exod 33:18–23; 34:5–7).

And the LORD said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the LORD, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” (Exod 33:19 NIV)

The LORD descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name, “The LORD.” The LORD passed before him, and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” (Exod 34:5–7 NRSV)

YHWH answered Moses’s request to experience God’s glory by proclaiming his divine name and his divine attributes. God’s glory is revealed in his divine character qualities of goodness, grace, mercy, compassion, patience, steadfast love, faithfulness, forgiveness, and justice. YHWH’s glory is manifest in who God is, in his very nature and character.⁹

4. The life and ministry of Jesus Christ

The NT tells us that ultimately the glory of God is revealed in Jesus Christ (John 1:14; 2 Cor 4:6; Heb 1:1–3).

Christ’s incarnation

God’s glory was made visible in Christ’s incarnation when “the Word became flesh.” Just as God’s glory filled and dwelt in the tabernacle and temple, Jesus “tabernacled” among us (John 1:14). Notice that Jesus is described here as “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14), the divine character qualities of God. This description alludes to “abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exod 34:6), the words YHWH used when he proclaimed his name to Moses (Exod 34:5–7). Jesus revealed God’s glory by living out the divine character qualities of YHWH in his ministry on earth.¹⁰

Christ’s birth

When Jesus was born, the shepherds experienced God’s glory as a brilliant light shining all around them: “And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear” (Luke 2:9). They heard the angels praising the Lord, proclaiming: “Glory to God in the highest heaven” (Luke 2:14 NRSV). The shepherds, in turn, responded by “glorifying and praising God” after seeing Jesus (Luke 2:20).

Christ’s transfiguration

When Jesus was transfigured before Peter, James, and John on a high mountain (Matt 17:1–8; Mark 9:2–8; Luke 9:28–32), the disciples saw both Moses and Elijah appear “in glory,” and they saw Christ’s “glory” (Luke 9:31–32). Luke is the only Gospel writer who adopts the term “glory” to describe what they experienced on the mountain. The disciples caught a glimpse of Christ’s glory when he was suddenly transfigured before them: “his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white” (Matt 17:2 NRSV). Here Christ’s glory is compared to the brilliant light of the sun.

Christ’s miracles

Jesus’s many miracles and healings manifested God’s glory. From Jesus turning water into wine to raising Lazarus from the dead, each miracle and sign “manifested his glory” (John 2:11; 11:4, 40). Speaking of Lazarus, Jesus said, “This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it” (John 11:4). Every healing and miracle Jesus performed revealed God’s glory and, in turn, brought glory to the Lord.

Christ’s death

God’s glory was revealed on the cross when Christ was crucified. When Jesus died on the cross, both the Father and the Son were glorified (John 12:23–24, 27–28; Heb 2:9). When Jesus was about to go to the cross to be crucified, he said, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (John 12:23 NRSV). Although Jesus’s soul was troubled, he prayed that the Father’s name would be glorified (John 12:27–28).

How does God reveal his glory according to the gospel of John? Find key verses along with a synopsis with Smart Search. Try Logos for free!

In an honor-shame culture, where being crucified as a criminal was an utterly shameful thing, it is ironic and yet profound that Christ’s death on the cross is seen as his exaltation and glorification (1 Cor 1:18, 23). Richard Bauckham puts it this way: “The point of Jesus’s deepest humiliation is, paradoxically, also his glorification.”¹¹ Donnie Berry also explains how profoundly significant this is:

At the cross, Jesus’ glory and the glory of his Father will be on full display. There we see glory full of grace and truth, mercy and justice. In his humiliation and shame, the Son of God shines with the glory of his Father’s compassionate, merciful, saving, forgiving, self-giving love, with the glory of his justice, righteous indignation, and determination to overcome all that stands against his goodness and love in the world.¹²

5. The church

As the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle and temple, now God fills the church and the Christian believer with his Holy Spirit. Our bodies are the holy temple of God’s presence (Rom 8:9; 1 Cor 3:16–17; 6:19–20; Eph 2:19–22; Col 1:27). Therefore, we need to honor the Lord in how we live our lives for his glory (1 Cor 6:20; 10:31; 1 Pet 1:15–16).

God’s people becoming like Christ

In 2 Corinthians 3, Paul describes Moses’s encounter with God’s glory on Mount Sinai and the impact it had on his face.

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. (2 Cor 3:18)

Moses’s face shone with God’s glory. But now, when believers turn to the Lord, they experience God’s glory in Jesus Christ. As we behold the glory of the Lord in Jesus, we are transformed into his image, becoming like Christ with the help of the Spirit. As we grow and become more like Jesus, we take on his character qualities and the fruit of the Spirit in our lives (Gal 5:22–23). God’s glory, revealed in Christ, transforms his people into Christ’s likeness.

6. The new creation

The biblical theme of God’s glory culminates with Christ’s return, when God will establish the new creation, the new heaven and earth.

The second coming

One day, Jesus Christ will return to reign as the King of kings and Lord of lords (Rev 19:16), and when he does, he will come in glory: “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne” (Matt 25:31; see also Matt 16:27; 24:30; Mark 8:38; Luke 9:26; 21:27).

When Christ returns, the church will also appear with Christ in glory: “When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” (Col 3:4). At that time, believers will be changed (1 Cor 15:42–43, 51–52). When Christ returns, “we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2 NIV).

This is our future hope! Having this hope sustains us in the present, helping us endure times of trouble, suffering, and persecution (Rom 5:2–5; 8:17–25; 2 Cor 4:16–18; 1 Pet 5:10). We can “rejoice in hope of the glory of God” (Rom 5:2). “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom 8:18).

When that day comes, what a glorious day that will be!

Universal revelation

At that time, God will also reveal his glory to the whole world. This is central to the Bible’s eschatological hope. The OT prophets prophesied about a day when the Lord will manifest his glory and presence to everyone, and all the nations will come and see and experience God’s glory:

• “And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken” (Isa 40:5; see also Isa 35:2).
• All the nations “shall come and see my glory” (Isa 66:18).
• “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Hab 2:14 NIV).

As I have written elsewhere:

One day the whole world will recognize and acknowledge the glory and presence of YHWH, and this knowledge will be universal. The verb “to fill” and the expression “as the waters cover the sea” both emphasize its universal reach. Everyone will know the Lord (Jer 31:34)!¹³

What a wonderful future hope!

The new Jerusalem

When the Lord establishes the new heaven and earth and the new Jerusalem, the holy city will shine with the glory of God (Rev 21:1–4, 10–11, 22–27; 22:1–5). In that day, there will be no more need for the sun or moon, because the glory of the Lord will be the source of light forever (Isa 60:19–20; Rev 21:23; 22:5). In God’s new and holy city, his glory will shine.

Conclusion

As we have seen, the glory of the Lord is a major theme in Scripture. The portrayal of God’s glory in the Bible is rich and profound.

This brief survey only begins to explore this hugely significant and marvelous topic, but I hope it inspires you to go further.

As we do, may we too humbly pray the prayer of Moses, “Please show me your glory” (Exod 33:18), and as we behold and contemplate God’s glory, may we be transformed into Christ’s likeness (2 Cor 3:18). May we become more like Jesus!

Share your thoughts

How does the theme of glory connect all of Scripture? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

Rebecca G. S. Idestrom’s recommended resources for further study

• de Vries, Pieter. The Kābôd of YHWH in the Old Testament: With Particular Reference to the Book of Ezekiel. Studia Semitica Neerlandica 65. Brill, 2016.

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• Jerusalem to New Jerusalem: Tracing God’s Holy City Across Scripture

The story in Luke 15:11–32 is universally recognized as the parable of the prodigal son. This designation is a much later addition, a fact that pastors and commentators rightly call out regularly. However, their correction typically swings in the opposite direction, focusing on the elder brother. The problem is that, either way, the focus is on one brother. But the text itself starts out with a different emphasis. Jesus begins, “There was a man who had two sons” (Luke 15:11). This is key to understanding the parable. I venture it ought to be called the parable of the two sons.

The very next lines establish the story’s context: The younger of the two sons wants his portion of the inheritance. Wait. A story about two sons, told to a Jewish audience, in which the central conflict is the younger brother trying to get his inheritance early? Beyond being a moving picture of grace, Jesus’s first-century Jewish audience would have recognized in the parable a master class in Torah subversion—one that echoes and transforms the patriarchal sibling drama of Jacob and Esau.

It is easy to see how readers miss this, because the stories don’t line up perfectly. But they aren’t meant to. What Jesus is doing is tweaking a well-known story to make a point.

The parable’s context

Let’s go back to the earlier context of the passage. We start at the beginning of Luke 15, where Jesus runs afoul of the Pharisees and scribes because this “fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2 NRSV). From the Pharisees’ perspective, he is being contaminated by their shame. As Craig Keener helpfully points out,

Tax gatherers and sinners were excluded from the religious community; cf. comment on 5:29–32. Proverbs (1:15; 13:20; 14:7) warns of the danger of spending time with sinners (cf. also Ps 1:1). But it is clear in this text that the moral influence is from Jesus to the sinners, not the reverse.¹⁴

In their eyes, Jesus ought to recognize what sort of people they are and reject them. Instead, he tells them three parables, the climax of which is our parable of the two sons.

First, there is a lost sheep. A sheep would be valuable, particularly for sacrifice, and his entire audience would appreciate the need to find one that was lost. Shepherds were not considered particularly honorable. And yet, even they recognize value and know how to respond appropriately to its loss. But more to the point, when a precious thing is found, this ought to motivate celebration. In other words, the Pharisees and scribes should rejoice to see these lost sheep returned to the fold, as it were.

Next, there is a lost coin. The value here is obvious. It’s money. The coin may also connect to the temple, since it could be used as an offering. In this way, these two parables have showcased items of value—and so highlighted the people the Pharisees apparently don’t value. By weaving these economic and ritual symbols into his narrative, Jesus quietly lays the groundwork for his central point: Mercy matters more than possessions or sacrifice.

Notice, too, the shift from a shepherd to a woman. Again, culturally speaking, it’s likely that the Pharisees didn’t have the highest opinion of women.¹⁵ Again the appropriate response is celebration.

In both cases it is obvious that when something valuable is lost, effort should be expended to find it, and upon success a celebration should occur. What is more valuable than a fellow child of Jacob? That question is also central in the parable of the two sons.

The parable’s setting

The younger son’s request for his inheritance is disrespectful, but there’s much more to it. Keener is again quite helpful:

To ask one’s father for one’s share of the inheritance early was unheard of in antiquity; in effect, one would thereby say, “Father, I wish you were already dead.” Such a statement would not go over well even in the West today, and in a society stressing obedience to one’s father it would be a serious act of rebellion for which the father could have beaten him or worse (cf. Ex 21:17; Deut 21:18–21). A not unusual response would have been for the father to disinherit the son! That the father grants the request means that most of the hearers will not identify with the father in this parable; from the start, they would think of him as stupidly lax to pamper such an immoral son.¹⁶

So, we have a significant shift here. Before, two things were lost, presumably through no fault of their owners. But here we have someone losing themselves, and his father letting it happen.

Moreover, the son goes off to a distant country, almost certainly a gentile one because he ends up feeding pigs. This is likely where Jesus’s audience expects the story to end. The son has acted shamefully. He has wasted his inheritance and received his just deserts. But this is just where things start to get good.

Study topics like the Parable of the Prodigal Son with Logos’s Factbook. Try Logos for free!

The parable’s parallels

The son “came to himself” (Luke 15:17). Notice: That isn’t quite repentance. Instead, it’s the realization that the life of a servant in his father’s house is better than what he currently has. So he returns to his father. He scripts out a speech and plans his journey.

This is where the parallels with Jacob and Esau begin to emerge. Jacob, after taking his brother’s blessing, departs to a foreign land. Upon returning, fearing the wrath of his brother, he scripts his speech to cast himself as unworthy of his brother’s love. It’s fascinating that when Jacob meets Esau, Genesis 33:4 (LXX) records: “And Esau ran forward to meet him, and, embracing him, he kissed him and fell upon his neck, and they both wept.” In Luke 15:20, Jesus uses near-identical Greek phrasing for the father greeting the prodigal.

Here we have what is likely the most scandalous part of the story for its original hearers.¹⁷ It was undignified for an elderly man to run.¹⁸ Doing so would require exposing his legs, which was scandalous. However, the father is overcome with love for his son.

And here is where it’s easy to argue that this text isn’t connected to Jacob and Esau. It’s not the brother who is receiving the prodigal. It’s the father. But that’s the genius twist that Jesus has given the story to make his point.

Think about who Jacob is for the Pharisees and the scribes. Jacob wrestles with God, actually on his way back to Esau, and is called Israel as a result. He’s the namesake of the entire nation of Israel. It’s his name and legacy that they are trying to preserve.

But in the Jacob and Esau narrative, Jacob has to humble himself before his brother. He’s not triumphant. He’s arguably shameful. Just like the tax collectors and sinners with whom Jesus dines. (Are we beginning to see the point?)

The parable’s twist

As is often pointed out, the narrative shifts toward the older brother, who seems to actually be the focus. He’s upset at the treatment of his shameful sibling, someone who has squandered his birthright and does not deserve love from his father. In contrast, he casts himself as the perfect son. More than that, he says he has been “slaving” for his father (Luke 15:29).

This is not the heart of a loving brother or son. It’s the heart of someone who believes his hard work has earned him a place in his father’s house.

This is why Jesus has to tweak the story: Esau received Jacob, but in Jesus’s context the “older brother” refuses to receive the shamed “younger brother”—and disdains Jesus for doing so.

It’s hard to overstate how huge this adjustment is. It’s easy to tell who Jacob represents for the Pharisees. But trace the history and consider who Esau is. The descendants of Esau become the Edomites. Here’s what Amos has to say about them:

Thus says the Lord:
For three transgressions of Edom,
and for four, I will not revoke the punishment;
because he pursued his brother with the sword
and cast off all pity;
he maintained his anger perpetually,
and kept his wrath forever. (Amos 1:11 NRSV; emphasis mine)

Even in the days of Amos, Edom was considered a brother to Israel and held to that standard by God. But by the time of Jesus, the Edomites (now called Idumeans) were ruling Judea through Herod, which was a source of great animosity between them and the broader Jewish population.

Conclusion

Imagine being a Pharisee and hearing a parable that reminds you that your patriarch was once a shameful refugee who was received in honor and love by your enemy’s patriarch. Imagine hearing a parable that paints the man you likely hate the most as a hero.

Just as Jacob stood as the dishonorable, grasping figure in Genesis who desperately needed unmerited grace, the tax collectors and sinners in Jesus’s audience stand as the contemporary embodiment of that same Jacob-like shame. Yet the bitter irony here is that the religious elite are not being called to account for failing to act like Israelites. They aren’t even being told to simply emulate Jacob. Jesus upends their entire worldview by telling the self-righteous older brothers of Israel that they ought to behave like Esau—extending radical hospitality and forgiveness to the disgraced sibling.

The whole point is that the elder brother (here the stand-in for the Pharisees) ought to see his patriarch Jacob in the tax collectors and extend hospitality to them. After all, that’s what Esau did.

Luke leaves the parable unresolved, challenging his audience to supply their response in place of the elder brother. Who do we wish wouldn’t receive God’s grace? Whose celebration would we refuse to attend?

Share your thoughts

What do you make of this interpretation? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

Ryan Lytton’s recommended resources for further study

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Two years ago, Logos made you a promise. As product manager and longtime Logos user Mark Barnes wrote, the new Logos will get better and better every few weeks.

Previously, new features and updates had to wait for the next big version every two years. With Logos’s move to subscription, we began shipping improvements as soon as they were ready.

Two years and sixteen releases later, it’s fair to ask whether we came through on our promise. One way to answer this question is to look at how we delivered on your most important requests. Here’s how your requests became features you use today.

Answers to questions you couldn’t ask before

For most of Logos’s history, searching meant matching exact words or learning complicated syntax for anything more. As one user expressed, “those syntax search are too complicated for most users, I bet 90% of Logos’ users never even search like that. You guys need to simplify the searches.” You knew what you were looking for. You just couldn’t ask for it in plain words. Many users voiced their desire for a smarter, simpler search: “Would you consider developing a more intelligent search engine for Logos? I’m looking for something that does more than just do keyword searches. … I’d like to be able to stay within Logos, and ask natural language questions.”

That longing became a reality. With Smart Search in Bible, you became able to type a theme, a question, or a verse you half remember, and Logos would find relevant Bible passages. Later, Smart Search in Bible also gained a Smart Search Synopsis that summarizes your results. One Logos user commented, “Smart Bible search is insane. What a game-changing feature.”

We also released Study Assistant, which lets you ask your library a question in plain language—just like you asked: “I would love it if Logos better understood the resources I own and become better at answering questions based on the resources I own.” Instead of thumbing through countless indexes, you get an answer drawn from the most relevant resources in your library, with citations that take you to the exact spot so you can check them yourself. One user wrote,

I have been using the new Study Assistant and it HAS to be the single greatest addition to Logos in the 13 or so years I’ve used it. What a blessing that it uses my resources but makes it SO easy to find good answers.

Even so, you immediately suggested improvements—so we made them. Within days of launching Study Assistant, several of you asked for the ability to save past conversations and to use Study Assistant on your phone. Both arrived six weeks later.

Most recently, we released a preview of Study Assistant’s research mode. One user shared this reaction on social media,

Wow! Loving the “Research Mode” in Study Assistant! … I am blown away how much more I can dig into my library. Logos is just getting better and better!

An update you may have missed: Just like you requested, you can share any Study Assistant conversation using the Copy Link button. The person you send it to doesn’t need to have Logos. They can pick up the conversation right where you left off.

Study Assistant searches reliable resources to get answers to your questions. Try it now!

A library that automatically connects the dots

Steady improvement to Logos also means helping you get more out of your library, connecting the dots between your study and your books.

One way we did this was through improvements to Factbook, developing it into a one-stop shop that brings your library together. Once you enter a passage or topic, Factbook can summarize what your commentaries and dictionaries say before you choose which to read. Factbook now also suggests questions to ask, includes lenses for different emphases (e.g., theological, counseling), and reaches beyond the Bible to early Christian writings such as the Didache.

If Factbook assembles your library while you are studying a given topic, Insights brings your library to you while you are reading. Insights now accompanies you not only in your Bible but also in your commentaries and favorite study Bible. Insights points you to related passages and to the other books in your library that speak to the text in front of you. Joseph Stewart, a software developer at Logos, commented,

I’m excited for Insights to help users discover the power of their interconnected library. So I think the new Insights improvements will be a really helpful discovery tool, particularly for deep textual study.

Your library also connects better to your daily reading. With our revamped Reading Plans, on both mobile and desktop, a guided wizard turns any book in your library into a plan built around your goals. Describe what you need—say, Bible passages on anxiety for twenty days—and let Logos build it. Every plan lives in one place, with reminders to keep you on track. Change your own plans without losing your progress and catch up easily if you fall behind. One user called such updates “a great leap forward for the serious reader.”

An update you may have missed: With a passage open, open a new tab on desktop and choose the Reference view. Logos will pull together the guides, commentaries, and translations in your library that connect to the text you’re studying.

Logos’s Reading Plans help you stay consistent in your Bible reading and meditation. Try Reading Plans today!

A shorter path from study to teaching

Many users have long asked for the ability to edit their sermons on Android devices: “When will it be possible to edit a sermon that I’m working on an Android device. I know it’s already possible with Apple devices.” The first subscription release brought Sermon Builder and Sermon Manager to the Android app.

That release also brought with it Bible Study Builder. Enter a passage, gather discussion questions from your library or AI’s suggestions (or write your own), then share the study or print it for your small group.

Sermon Builder also includes Sermon Assistant. Get suggested outlines to start your sermon-writing process. Brainstorm illustrations and applications based on your own sermon content. That said, Logos won’t write your sermon for you—and that’s on purpose.

The work you’ve already done shouldn’t get buried, either. You asked to see your past sermons and studies alongside the passage. We delivered sermon and Bible study markers to desktop, iOS, and Android. For instance, open John 3 on your phone, and the sermon you preached on it five years ago is a tap away.

An update you may have missed: In Preaching Mode on your phone or tablet, tap a Scripture link to preview the passage without losing your place in your notes. Just like you asked for.

A promise we intend to keep keeping

We’ve only scratched the surface here. Be sure to check out our Release Notes to see all the major improvements.

Two years in, the promise hasn’t changed. Since its founding, Logos has worked to “use technology to equip the church to grow in the light of the Bible.” Today, that means getting better every few weeks—shaped by the people who use it.

The next release is already in the works. Tell us what you’d like to see in it.

Related content

• The Next Era of Logos Is Here! What You Should Know
• Responsible Use of AI in Bible Study | Mark Barnes
• A Theology of AI by a Bible Software Nerd
• Redeeming Technology: How Technology Fits into God’s Story
• 5 Things I’m Most Excited for in the Coming Version of Logos

A few years ago, while serving as an academic administrator at a Bible college, I sat across from a graduating senior in our business program for his exit interview. He loved his professors in the major, and he loved his Bible and theology courses. He’d gotten a lot out of both. Still, something was missing. His business faculty hadn’t shown him how to connect the two departments. He left discouraged.

He wasn’t alone. Over about three years of exit interviews, I heard some version of the same thing from many graduates outside our biblical studies programs. To be sure, we’d given these graduates a close-knit community, faculty who mentored them well, and serious study of the Bible. But we had failed to keep one important promise: to help them bring those things together so that graduates could enter their fields as people formed by Scripture.

Their professors were capable and caring experts. Yet arranging this connection for their students called for something more than their own graduate programs likely had included.

That preparation needs to begin with the teacher’s own formation. Professors at Christian universities, Bible colleges, and theological seminaries start from different places, but the need is the same.

Biblical scholar Dru Johnson offers a useful distinction. Biblical literacy, as he describes it, means knowing what Scripture contains and how its parts work together.¹⁹ Biblical fluency is the ability to enter the world of Scripture and faithfully extend its principles to new questions. Literacy, then, comes first. By reading Scripture deeply over time, literacy grows into fluency. As it matures into fluency, biblical literacy shapes you, your field, your students, and your institution.

Here are five reasons biblical literacy matters for every professor.

1. Biblical literacy shapes your own discipleship
2. Biblical literacy puts Scripture at the center of your field
3. Biblical literacy trains you to teach within the world of Scripture
4. Biblical literacy teaches students by your example
5. Biblical literacy strengthens your institution’s mission
Where do we begin?
Conclusion

1. Biblical literacy shapes your own discipleship

Whatever else we are, those of us who work in Christian higher education are first and foremost disciples of Jesus. Biblical literacy serves that calling before any other.

The Apostle Paul gives the Church of Colossae a simple charge: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Col 3:16 ESV). For us, that Word comes chiefly through Scripture. “To dwell” is to make a home, and “richly” means in abundance. Paul pictures Christ’s Word settling into our lives over the years as a family settles and fills every room of a house, from the kitchen table to the study.

Borrowing a term from Christian educator Roger Erdvig, we might call this immersion: the steady habit of reading Scripture through which literacy grows (Josh 1:8; Ps 119:11).²⁰ And because it’s the Word of Christ, biblical literacy aims not merely at knowing more about the Bible but knowing, loving, and imitating him.

2. Biblical literacy puts Scripture at the center of your field

Most of us have seen it happen. A class opens with a thoughtful devotion and prayer, then moves into a lecture that leaves both behind. Students meet faith and learning back to back, but never together. Or a verse gets pulled from its context to decorate a point, a practice we call proof-texting.

Early in my own teaching, I displayed a slightly different problem. I resisted opening class with a devotion at all because I couldn’t see how it would connect to the day’s material. I knew my Bible well enough. I just hadn’t learned to think with it yet.

Faculty developer Paul Kaak points out that Christian colleges hire faculty for their disciplinary expertise, and many professors begin teaching with far more training in their field than in Scripture.²¹ For many, biblical literacy has yet to be learned.

Thankfully, it can be—and so can the fluency I was missing. Over time, Scripture starts to inform even the foundations of your field: what counts as knowledge, what human beings are, and what your discipline is for. This is biblical fluency, the Scripture-centered form of what many schools call faith integration.

3. Biblical literacy trains you to teach within the world of Scripture

Kaak offers the example of a cybersecurity professor asking what safety means in a field that emerged long after the Bible’s last book was written. (The Apostle Paul, as far as we know, never had to reset a password.) Kaak suggests starting simply with a search of Scripture for the word safety and then moving to larger themes: protection, trust, and discernment.²² I would add vulnerability to his list: Ever since sin entered the world, we have lived in fractured societies where “thieves break in and steal” (Matt 6:19).

That move from word study to theme, and from theme back to the field’s own questions, is what fluency looks like. Fluency, in Johnson’s terms, means entering the world of Scripture. Through that world runs one true story, the drama of creation, fall, redemption, and new creation. The church’s long tradition of interpretation, from the early Church Fathers and Mothers to the Reformers and beyond, then helps us read each theme faithfully, though it never replaces the text itself.

A professor who teaches from these themes can present security work as care for the people who depend on a system, and can frame each decision about access and risk as an exercise in discernment. The technical content loses none of its rigor. If anything, students gain more reason to pursue their subject well.

4. Biblical literacy teaches students by your example

Teachers tend to pass on what they themselves have been equipped to see. And students notice what we do with God’s Word more than we might think.

After more than a decade of teaching history and theology at Bible colleges, I saw this most clearly during a course I taught on the Bible in America. My students were upperclassmen with their Bible surveys and hermeneutics classes behind them. Together, we read Civil War-era sermons side by side with the passages they cited. North and South read the same Bible with seemingly equal conviction, reached opposite conclusions, and defended them doggedly—all the way to the battlefield. The defenders of slavery were wrong. They justified enslaving people made in the image of God. But even many opponents of slavery refused to recognize those same image-bearers as equals.

In both cases, my students discovered, culture had guided the reading of Scripture more than either side would admit. That realization unsettled many of my students. It also taught them that faithful interpretation takes discipline, humility, and a community of readers to help us see past our own moment.

Faculty report that students now enter college with less biblical grounding than earlier generations, so what they see modeled matters all the more.²³ Fluency shows in what we say about Scripture, but just as much in the questions we ask, the emphases we choose, and the room we leave for students to bring their faith into the discussion. Students absorb it from the people they watch, much the way an apprentice learns a craft at a master’s side. Your students will learn to read Scripture the way they see you read it and engage with it.

5. Biblical literacy strengthens your institution’s mission

I have studied at both a Bible college and a Christian liberal arts college, and I now work with institutions across Christian higher education. In both settings, I’ve been encouraged to see a fresh attentiveness to mission. At Christian and Bible schools alike, that mission begins with Scripture, and it’s made visible by faculty fluency in the classroom.

Yet as education scholar David I. Smith observes, it’s entirely possible to hold strong Christian convictions and still teach in ways those convictions leave untouched.²⁴ A nursing professor’s conviction that every patient’s days are in God’s hands (Ps 31:15) ought to shape both what she teaches about end-of-life care and how she teaches it, down to the way she has students practice speaking with a grieving family. Someday her students will sit at the bedside of a dying patient, and that patient will receive the school’s mission as care.

The same is true of every discipline, from accounting to music. Biblical fluency enables professors to connect the Bible and theology to every program so that students don’t have to figure out on their own how their Bible courses bear on their major. Schools already treat faculty outside biblical studies programs as essential, and fluency shows why: These professors carry the school’s Scripture-centered mission into every major.

Where do we begin?

How, then, do we begin to achieve biblical fluency?

Fluency appears after years of immersion. Kaak observes that faculty typically need three to five years of intentional development before they teach this way with confidence.²⁵ That may sound like a tall order, but the first steps are modest.

• Start by reading whole books of the Bible in one sitting. As Johnson puts it, “Gulp, don’t sip.”²⁶
• Then read through the whole Bible, and read it through again.
• Keep good reference works close at hand, such as commentaries and Bible dictionaries, so your questions lead to answers.

Some of this may seem almost too basic to mention. But simple isn’t the same as easy, and most of us—I’ll speak for myself—still have some gulping to do.

And don’t do it alone. Read and talk about Scripture with colleagues across your campus, Bible and theology faculty among them. The Word of Christ dwells richly where believers, filled with the Spirit, teach and admonish one another (Col 3:16; Eph 5:18–19).

At the Association for Biblical Higher Education (ABHE), our Leadership Academy has launched Inhabiting God’s Story, a microcertificate learning path in biblical and theological literacy. It’s free to faculty at every ABHE member institution and includes Logos Bible study tools built into its courses. It lays the groundwork for future courses aimed at cultivating fluency.

Conclusion

I wish that business student had had a professor who could show him his field from within the world of Scripture. Your students can see the same thing in you. The Apostle Paul gives the Colossians a charge that applies to every discipline we teach: “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col 3:17).

Share your thoughts

In what ways does Biblical literacy make a difference in teaching, even outside of Bible and theology courses? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

Resources for further reflection

Related content

• Developing a Teaching Philosophy: A Guide for Theological Educators
• Our Unspoken Curriculums: How Pedagogical Choices Communicate
• Revisiting the “Why”: To What End Do We Teach?
• 9 Tips to Keep Devotional Reading from Becoming an Exam
• Theology of Work: How and Why Our Work Matters to God

Technology pessimists are saying that AI will kill us all. To me, technology optimists are even scarier, believing that AI will eliminate our need to work, think, create, communicate, learn, invent, and have relationships.

Either scenario would end humanity as we know it.

To make sure we are using emerging technology—including AI—to benefit humanity, rather than to eliminate humanity, we need to think through both the purpose of technology and the purpose of human beings.

Humans were created with a purpose

The first purpose statement given in the Bible for human beings occurs at the very beginning of our creation:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” (Gen 1:26)²⁷

That God made man “in our image” is connected to man having “dominion … over all the earth.” Just as God has dominion over all that he has created, so, in a far lesser way, does man have dominion over the earth and its other inhabitants. God exercises his dominion, in part, by means of human beings.

The Hebrew word translated as “dominion” (רָדָה) refers to royal authority, not exploitation or tyranny. The nature of human dominion over the natural order is indicated in the next chapter, in which humanity is put to work: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Gen 2:15). This defines humanity’s purpose toward the created order.

Later, though, the Bible lays out the purpose of human beings in relationship to God and to each other. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” says Jesus. And “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt 22:37, 39; cf. Mark 12:28–31; Luke 10:27).

Jesus has pulled together two teachings, each repeated multiple times in the Bible. The part about loving God with all of your being is reiterated with variations no less than six times in the Old Testament (Deut 6:5; 10:12; 11:13; 13:3; 30:6; Josh 22:5). Significantly, Jesus adds to the Old Testament lists “mind”: We are to love God with our minds, as well as with our hearts and souls, opening up the intellectual pursuits to the Christian life. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” is repeated as a separate phrase five times throughout the Bible (Lev 19:18; Matt 19:19; Rom 13:9; Gal 5:14; Jas 2:8).

Where does the Bible teach us to love God and neighbor? Find key verses along with a synopsis with Smart Search. Try Logos for free!

Together, Jesus says, these two statements sum up everything that God requires of us. “On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt 22:40).

These two commandments also connect to other teachings in God’s Word. How, exactly, do we love God? The apostle John explains: “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). We don’t love God in our natural, sinful condition. But because of his love for us and the gift of his Son, who atoned for our sins, we cannot help but love him.

How, exactly, do we love our neighbor? Just as the gospel, which we receive by faith, enables us to love God, it also enables us to love our neighbor. John continues: “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:11–12). Because of our faith in Christ’s propitiation for our sins, God dwells in us. Therefore, God expresses his love for our neighbors through our love for our neighbors.

Thus, the two commandments come together and are resolved and fulfilled through the gospel. Faith works through love (Gal 5:6), both love of God and love of neighbor. “We love” them both “because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

Vocation is how we live out that purpose

If you put together those three biblical purposes for human life—dominion over creation, love of God, and love of neighbor—you get the doctrine of vocation.

That term, which is simply the Latinate word for “calling” (vocatio), is a powerful teaching for living the Christian life. It also gives a wealth of guidance for dilemmas we face, including how we should use technology.

But vocation is greatly misunderstood. Medieval Catholicism narrowed it to mean simply the calling to become a priest, a monk, or a nun. But we moderns have narrowed it in another way, so that it simply means “job.” Sometimes it is expanded slightly to mean a job that is particularly fulfilling or meaningful. But that too misses the richness and applicability of the biblical doctrine of vocation.

To recover that, we need to listen to the great theologian of vocation, Martin Luther.²⁸ Vocation, for Luther, is not a matter of some “will of God for our life” that we have to discover. Nor is it a job that we find really, really fulfilling. Rather, vocation encompasses all the tasks, offices, and relationships of the Christian life.

“Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him” (1 Cor 7:17). The Lord assigns to us a “life,” and then he calls us—that is, he gives us vocations—to that life. According to Luther, we have vocations in all of the “estates” that God established for human flourishing. We have vocations in the family (husbands and wives; parents and children), in the workplace (employers and workers; craftsmen and professionals), in the state (citizens and officials; soldiers and firefighters), and—for Christians—the church (pastors and laypeople; musicians and teachers). Luther also saw an estate that comprises the informal relationships of human life (friends and enemies; good Samaritans and strangers bleeding by the side of the road) that he called “the common order of Christian love.”²⁹

Characteristic of Luther’s teaching is his insight that God works through human beings in their vocations. As we’ve seen, God exercises his dominion over the creation when human beings, who share his image, exercise their dominion. God works through the vocations of earthly authorities to punish evildoers and to protect those who do well (Rom 13:1–7). Similarly, God gives us our daily bread through the vocations of farmers and bakers. He creates new human beings through the vocations of mothers and fathers. He brings people to faith and cares for them spiritually through the vocations of pastors who proclaim his Word. We could extend the principle: God heals by means of the medical vocations; he creates beauty by means of artists and musicians; and he makes our lives easier by means of technologists.

According to Luther, the purpose of every vocation—in the family, the workplace, the state, the church, the common order—is to love and serve the neighbors whom the vocations bring into our lives. Husbands are to love and serve their wives, and wives are to love and serve their husbands. People in business are to love and serve their customers. Rulers are to love and serve those under their authority. Pastors are to love and serve their flocks, and Christians should love and serve their fellow Christians. In the common order, we are to love and serve the people whom God brings into our lives.

Again, God is working through us in these vocations. As we’ve seen, God expresses his love for our neighbors through our love for our neighbors. Also, God expresses his love for us through other people when they love and serve us.

When we violate the purpose of our vocations—that is, the purpose of our lives—we sin. Too often we do not love and serve the neighbors we encounter. Instead of serving them, we demand that they serve us. Instead of loving and serving our neighbors, we often ignore, exploit, and even harm them. Resisting God’s love, which is to flow through our vocations to our neighbors, puts us into conflict with him.

In marriage, God calls spouses to love and serve each other, not to be cruel or demeaning. God gives children to parents not to neglect or otherwise abuse them, but to love and care for them. God does not call people into various business vocations for them to cheat their customers, but to give them goods and services that meet their needs. God does not call government officials to tyrannize their people, but to work for their benefit. God does not call pastors to lord it over their members or to mislead them by false teaching, but to feed and care for their flocks.

And God calls technologists to benefit humanity, not to end humanity.

Technology exists to serve our vocations

Nearly every vocation has its tools. Farmers have plows, carpenters have saws, office workers have desks, pastors have pulpits, musicians have instruments, parents have minivans, and nearly every vocation today uses computers. Luther wrote about tools:

If you are a manual laborer, you find that the Bible has been put into your workshop, into your hand, into your heart. It teaches and preaches how you should treat your neighbor. Just look at your tools—at your needle or thimble, your beer barrel, your goods, your scales or yardstick or measure—and you will read this statement inscribed on them. Everywhere you look, it stares at you. Nothing that you handle every day is so tiny that it does not continually tell you this, if you will only listen. … All this is continually crying out to you: “Friend, use me in your relations with your neighbor just as you would want your neighbor to use his property in his relations with you.”³⁰

For Luther, tools are instruments that we use in our vocations to love and serve our neighbors. Tools are a function of technology.

Through technology, we exercise dominion over nature. Of ourselves, we are weak and vulnerable. We would be easy prey for predatory animals, so we invented bows and arrows and eventually firearms. Our bodies are highly susceptible to disease, so we devised medicines. We invented ships, automobiles, and planes to overcome the limitations of distance. We invented the printing press, telephones, and the internet to help us tap into other people’s minds. Technology is a great gift of God, which helps us fulfill our purpose.

Then again, technology also helps us violate our purpose. We have turned our bows and arrows and firearms against other human beings. We exercise unlawful dominion over other people. We have used our technology for ravaging nature instead of caring for it. The test for technology is whether or not we are using it vocationally; that is, as a means of loving and serving our neighbors.

Technology fails when it displaces our vocations

Technologies can be used both for love and for sin. For example, computers and the internet can be used vocationally in love and service to our neighbors, keeping us in touch with family and friends, facilitating our work, and enhancing our citizenship by keeping us informed. Then again, they can also be used as a medium for bullying, fake news, and pornography.

So let’s apply this to artificial intelligence. Though AI can function as a tool—to gather research, to sort through information, to make you more productive at work—it also has a generative function that enables it to express ideas, create music, give advice, and simulate relationships. That is, AI presents itself as having vocations. But technology itself has no vocation. Only human beings have vocations and the spiritual makeup to love and serve other human beings like themselves.

Human musicians, filmmakers, writers, and other artists have a God-given ability to create works of beauty and meaning and so bless their neighbors. Today AI-generated music and books are clogging up the streaming services and the publishing industry, crowding out human artists.

A busy pastor can give an AI chatbot a Bible verse and have it generate a sermon. But the AI chatbot does not have a calling from God to preach. The pastor does, and while he may use AI to search out the Bible commentaries, he dare not farm out his divine vocation to an inanimate machine.

Many lonely people are turning to AI chatbots for counseling, friendship, even romantic relationships. But these are needs for human connections. We need to love and to be loved, both of which are satisfied in vocations, not AI simulations.

Students can use AI to do their homework, read their assignments, and write their papers. But that usurps the vocation of being a student, whose work of learning requires the mental exertion of study and original thinking.

When technology undermines or takes us away from our vocations—our family, friends, work, citizenship, church—we are misusing it. When we turn to a machine for what we should be receiving from human vocations, we violate our human purpose. When we use it to harm others or ourselves, we violate the purpose of technology.³¹

Share your thoughts

If AI can do our work and replicate our functions, what are we for? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

Gene Veith’s recommended resources

• Veith, Gene Edward, Jr., and A. Trevor Sutton. Irreplaceable: Humanity, Vocation, and the Limits of Technology. Baker Books, 2026.
• Sutton, A. Trevor, and Brian Smith. Redeeming Technology: A Christian Approach to Healthy Digital Habits. Concordia Publishing House, 2021.
• Mitchell, Mark T. Breaking Babel: How a Mysterious Biblical Story Can Help Christians Survive the AI Revolution. Creed & Culture, 2026.

Related content

• What Does It Mean to Be Human? Theological Anthropology
• What Does the Bible Say About Transhumanism?
• Redeeming Technology: How Technology Fits into God’s Story
• It’s Not What You Think: Exposing the Limits of Technology
• From Data to Discernment: Why AI Can’t Replace Cultivating of Wisdom

I knew the New International Commentary (NIC) series appeared often on bestcommentaries.com, but I was curious to see just how they stacked up, so I did some digging.

A few titles especially stood out, and I highlight them below. Beneath that, I include the full list volumes and how they rank on bestcommentaries.com. An impressive number of volumes—thirty-seven!—rank in the top three.

As you spot volumes you might be interested in, take a look at the various NIC bundles.

Highlights from the series

Matthew, R. T. France

Written by a member of the NIV translation committee and “Matthean scholar par excellence” (according to Donald Hagner), this verse-by-verse commentary is thorough and stays close to matters of context. France frequently draws attention to the distinctive nature of the province of Galilee and the social dynamics involved when a Galilean prophet presents himself in Jerusalem as the Messiah.

Judicious, well-written, and informed, […] likely to become a standard work on Matthew for some time to come.

—D. A. Carson

Mark, William L. Lane

Highly praised, this commentary adeptly uses redaction criticism to produce a work that is insightful for professionals but accessible to lay people. William Lane’s The Gospel of Mark presents this Gospel as a complete literary work in its own right, and a work of special genius that kickstarts the tradition of Gospel writing.

Romans, Douglas J. Moo

Moo teaches advanced Greek, New Testament theology, and Pauline studies at Wheaton College. This work finds him in his wheelhouse, which explains its strong reputation.

If a student could own but one commentary on Romans, this should be it—now and for a long time to come.

—Craig L. Blomberg, Distinguished Professor of New Testament, Denver Seminary

Joshua, Marten H. Woudstra

This volume must surely be regarded as the finest commentary on the Book of Joshua. . . . Should be a part of the library of any serious student of the Scriptures who anticipates teaching or preaching from this important and colorful Old Testament [book].

—Bibliotheca Sacra

Isaiah, John N. Oswalt

This commentary will be one of the most widely used and appreciated [in the NICOT series], and perhaps even one of the flagship volumes.

—Southwestern Journal of Theology

The completion of John Oswalt’s commentary on Isaiah in 1998 was a major blessing to the Christian church … It should be on the desk of every student of the Old Testament.

—Keith Mathison, Professor & Author

Volume ranking on bestcommentaries.com

Here’s a breakdown of how each volume ranks on bestcommentaries.com, which bases its decisions on which have received the best reviews.

Old Testament

Your commentaries are smarter and easier to use in Logos.
Build your library better.

New Testament

New and notable NIC volumes

• Deuteronomy, Chapters 1–11, Bill T. Arnold
• Ruth, Peter H. W. Lau
• Ezra and Nehemiah, Hannah K. Harrington
• Jeremiah, John Goldingay
• Daniel, Chapters 7–12, John H. Walton
• Joel, Obadiah, and Jonah, James D. Nogalski
• Micah, James D. Nogalski
• Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, Thomas Renz
• Haggai and Malachi, Mignon R. Jacobs
• John, J. Ramsey Michaels
• Galatians, David A. deSilva
• Ephesians, Lynn H. Cohick
• Colossians, Scot McKnight
• Philemon, Scot McKnight
• Hebrews, Gareth Lee Cockerill
• James, Scot McKnight

Purchase in bulk with bundles

Share your thoughts?

What are your favorite NIC volumes? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

Comparable commentaries series

• Zondervan Exegetical Commentary Collection | ZEC (30 vols.)
• Word Biblical Commentary | WBC: Old and New Testament (61 vols.)
• The New American Commentary Series | NAC (43 vols.)
  Baker Commentary on the Old Testament (12 vols.)
• Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament | BECNT (18 vols.)

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Guests expect a friendly church, but it’s not always what they experience.

As church leaders, we might believe that we are the friendliest church in town. In fact, according to a study done by Thom Rainer, virtually all churches overestimated their friendliness.

In over 500 church consultations and thousands of church member interviews, I heard it. Most church members really do think their church is very friendly. But, more times than not, they are wrong. Guests who visit the churches usually have a much different perspective.³²

In this article, I’ll share two common reasons our churches may not be as friendly as we think, as well as practical ways to become more friendly.

1. The insularity trap

Our first problem is insularity.

According to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, insularity can mean being “uninterested in ideas, cultures, etc., other than one’s own; narrow-minded.” Think of images like wearing blinders or living on an island.

For example, Peter struggled with insular thinking regarding who was able to be part of God’s family. Insular thinking led him to believe that the gentiles, as non-Jews, were unclean and therefore unwelcome in the family of God. His vision in Acts 10, however, reminded him that God could make anyone clean, including gentiles (Acts 10:1–11:18). As seen, Christ’s church was never meant to be insular.

When insulated, we develop tunnel vision that keeps us from noticing and being welcoming toward others. Insularity can communicate unfriendliness, even if we don’t intend it. In a church, insularity shows up as insider speech and insider culture. The issue is that guests aren’t familiar with these things, and so are made to feel like outsiders.

When we use terms or acronyms, for instance, that only regular members will understand, we create a cliquish culture. Although it’s unintentional, the result remains: People will feel left out. Every culture—whether it is a church, institution, or family—uses insider speech, such as code words and acronyms and inside jokes, familiar only to those who’ve been around long enough to know or have dared to ask their esoteric meaning (IYKYK).

Though it may be trendy and easy to use acronyms, they can isolate others. Take “CG.” It could stand for college group, covenant group, care group, couples’ group, children’s group, and more. If newcomers don’t know what it means in your church, they’re left scratching their heads.

Insularity also appears when people in the church create a culture that makes others feel unwelcome. In the church I pastored in Colorado, many of the congregants were financially well-off. Not only was that apparent when entering the parking lot, but people would often talk about the latest vacations, the restaurants they’d tried, or the shiniest new gadget they purchased. A guest of smaller means would immediately feel left out (the pastor included).

Insularity may be unintentional, but it leaves others feeling like they don’t belong at your church.

The way out? Improved communication

A key way to remedy such insularity is stronger communication.

To commune means to converse or talk together, or, to consult the Concise Oxford English Dictionary again: “to share one’s intimate thoughts or feelings with.” While communing with others doesn’t necessarily involve intimate communication, it does involve a shared, mutual experience of both talking and listening.

Consider our example of using acronyms. Acronyms aren’t a problem—if they are quickly explained. During a worship gathering, a church leader might say, “At our church, we use CG to mean college group. So if you hear CG tossed around, you’ll know that is what we are referring to.” Now everyone understands.

We would also do well to consider first- and second-layer conversations. We want to initiate conversations with newcomers, but we want to avoid going too deep or getting too personal too soon. First-layer conversations are surface level. We don’t ask or bring up anything too probing or personal. For example, our first question to a newcomer shouldn’t be how much they have saved for retirement (this actually happened to me). First-layer questions are about things that are easy to share.

Patty Lane, in her helpful book A Beginner’s Guide to Crossing Cultures (InterVarsity, 2002), uses the image of an iceberg to describe the difference between what she calls “objective” and “subjective cultures.” Above the water line is objective culture, those common characteristics of shared human experience that we can readily talk about, like food preferences or perhaps musical tastes. Subjective culture, which second-layer conversations reach, lies below the surface and is harder to uncover, such as a person’s concept of truth or their true feelings on a specific issue.³³ Once we’ve built a relationship with someone, we can ask about second-layer topics. Rushing the process may leave guests feeling that their privacy has been invaded.

Effective communication, then, helps solve insularity.

2. The comfort trap

A second common cause of unfriendliness is our pursuit of comfort.

It’s no surprise that pretty much everyone wants to be comfortable, ministry leaders included. Engaging or interacting with someone new is always a little uncomfortable. Our displeasure in leaving our comfort zones may even show on our faces.

But our pursuit of comfort can leave others feeling left behind or unwelcome. So being a friendly church requires us to get out of our comfort zones.

In Jonah 4:5–6, after reluctantly preaching to the Ninevites, the prophet Jonah rests under a plant given by the Lord to “save him from his discomfort.” In a humorous fashion, the author comments: “So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant.” Immediately after God sends a worm to destroy the plant, Jonah throws a fit. When God asks whether he does well to be angry about the plant, Jonah answers, “Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die” (Jonah 4:9). He cared more about his own comfort than about the eternal discomfort of his enemies, the Ninevites.

If we’re honest, making time for newcomers can feel like having our own “plant” (comfort) unfairly removed. Perhaps we’ve come home from a long day of ministry, ready to unwind, and someone calls who needs our attention—even worse, the caller is someone new. There’s nothing wrong with seeking comfort, but at times our desire for comfort prevents us from making others feel like they belong in our church.

The way out? Intentional hospitality

One way to address our comfort-seeking is intentional hospitality.

When we hear the word “hospitality,” we might envision shopping tirelessly in crowded grocery stores for elusive ingredients, spending hours slaving over the stove, and then slogging through the dishes and cleaning up afterward. All for what? Just to turn a stranger into an acquaintance. Is it worth the effort, energy, and resources?

The short answer is yes, if we value becoming a friendlier church. But I’d also challenge the notion that hospitality is a chore or that it’s only for those especially gifted for it. Hospitality doesn’t require extravagance. It can be simple. You can entertain others in a modest way, and it does not always have to be in your home.

Hospitality in the church can take many forms. Congregational meals give guests a chance to sit down and get to know others. These types of community meals don’t have to be weekly or even monthly. They can be done quarterly or even twice per year. When I pastored a smaller church of fewer than one hundred adults, we hosted weekly meals where one individual or family provided lunch for the entire congregation one Sunday per year. The lunches were simple: either takeout or, on rare occasions, home-cooked. A few times per year, we would have guests who were homeless join us for these after-service meals, which became a wonderful way to reach out and show them hospitality.

Your church can also extend hospitality by considering ways to make its space more accommodating to guests. This includes having good signage throughout, especially for basic things like restrooms and children/youth ministry spaces. Make it obvious to your guests where they should drop off and pick up their children. If your neighborhood is ethnically diverse, include signage in languages spoken by the community. Designate and label several parking spots closest to the entrance for guests.

Some churches announce weekly that after the service the pastoral staff will be available to greet and welcome guests in a particular location. You could offer some light refreshments here, if possible. You could also budget for hospitality gift bags, to be given to guests as they leave the worship space or meet with the pastor and staff. You might purchase Bibles or devotional materials to hand out to guests, especially if they are unchurched guests or returning prodigals.

Ways to show hospitality are endless, and each helps create a friendlier church.

Conclusion

In this brief article, I’ve identified at least two hurdles that inhibit congregational friendliness and how to overcome them. Of course, other problems and solutions exist, but these two are important starting points.

As we address them, I believe that your church guests will come back, learn to appreciate new acronyms like “IYKYK” and “CG,” and even find a place they can call their permanent spiritual home.

Share your thoughts

What practical steps can churches take to become friendlier to newcomers? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

Matthew D. Kim’s recommended resources

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Concupiscence is a word neither well known today nor well understood. Nonetheless, there is a rich, varied history of this concept in the Christian tradition. In fact, it has been the occasion of severe debates between, principally, Reformed and Roman Catholic theologians. In what follows, we will consider what concupiscence is from a Reformed perspective.

What is concupiscence?

One will find the word used in the King James Version in a few places: “But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence” (Rom 7:8); “Not in the lust of concupiscence …” (1 Thess 4:5; see also Col 3:5). The translators used “concupiscence” to translate the Greek word ἐπιθυμία.

Explore the meaning of ἐπιθυμία with Logos’s Bible Word Study. Try it for free!

In brief, concupiscence (concupiscentia) originates from the Latin verb concupisco, which means “to ardently desire.” There are proper, non-sinful forms of desire, which we would call “non-sinful concupiscence.” For example, Jesus said to his disciples, “I have earnestly desired [ἐπεθύμησα] to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Luke 22:15). But because we live in a fallen world, concupiscence typically has in view sinful desire, and usually in reference to sinful sexual desires. Because sin is the privation (lack) of righteousness and proneness to evil, concupiscence involves not just the acts but the desire of the person. Sinful concupiscence can be understood from God’s moral law: “You shall not covet” (Exod 20:17).

In the Roman Catholic tradition, it is acknowledged that concupiscence remains in the baptized and that the Apostle Paul sometimes calls it sin. However, the Synod declared that the “Catholic Church has never understood it to be called sin, as being truly and properly sin in those born again, but because it is of sin, and inclines to sin.”³⁴ Those in the Reformed Protestant tradition took a different view, namely, that concupiscence is not only a result of original sin but is in fact sin itself when even the desires are not agreeable to the law of God. They spoke of the habit of concupiscence which leads to acts of concupiscence.

How do our thoughts and will relate to sin?

To better understand concupiscence, we will need to focus on the nature of our thoughts and will in relation to sin.

Concupiscence and thoughts

Desire has an organic and necessary relation to our thoughts. The internal acts of our mind refer to, in the words of the Puritan Thomas Goodwin, “all those reasonings, consultations, purposes, resolutions, intents, ends, desires, and cares of the mind of man, as opposed to our external words and actions.”³⁵ These thoughts, far from being neutral, are judged by God (Heb 4:12). Our thoughts can receive forgiveness (Acts 8:22), be repented of (Isa 55:7), defile us (Matt 15:18–19), and reveal hypocrisy (Isa 29:13). Therefore, thoughts, not just actions, can be sinful.

The first motions of the mind, if against God’s law, such as the thought of murdering someone, are sinful. The Westminster Confession of Faith notes that corruption of nature remains even in the regenerate, and while our sins are pardoned and mortified, “yet both itself and all the motions thereof are truly and properly sin” (6.5). Our thoughts are the acting of our will, and these thoughts, whether sinful or non-sinful, reveal our different types of desires.

Concupiscence and the will

An understanding of the human will can aid us tremendously in our understanding of concupiscence.

All sin is voluntary if we make a distinction between the will considered narrowly (strictly) and broadly (generally). When we speak of the will in regards to the former, we have in mind anything—whether a desire or act—that is done by a movement of the will. Regarding the latter, we have in mind anything that affects the will or depends upon it. Narrowly or strictly speaking, not all sin is “voluntary” when considered this way. But all sin involves, broadly or generally speaking, the will. A sinful desire cannot bypass the human will. Sin can and does occur before the “voluntary acting” of the will. Since to exist means to be willing, we are never excused from what we desire, even if it is an involuntary desire.

John Owen speaks of this reality in relation to Christian believers:

I know no greater burden in the life of a believer than these involuntary surprisals of soul; involuntary, I say, as to the actual consent of the will, but not so in respect of that corruption which is in the will, and is the principle of them.³⁶

He understands the distinction between voluntary and involuntary sins, but would affirm that involuntary sinful desires are sin.

As noted, some in the Roman Catholic tradition have held that involuntary motions opposed to God’s law are not necessarily sins. However, Reformed theologians have held that the first motions of concupiscence are sinful, even if they are not completely voluntary (see Rom 7:7).

Herman Bavinck explains how involuntary sins simply cannot occur apart from the human will:

There is not only an antecedent but also a concomitant, a consequent, and an approving will. Later, to a greater or lesser degree, the will approves of the sinfulness of our nature and takes delight in it … even the sin that is done without having been willed does not occur totally apart from the will.³⁷

We are still responsible for any so-called “intrusive” unclean desire.

Francis Turretin, in his treatment on the tenth commandment and concupiscence, affirms that concupiscence is “evil in its root and forbidden by the law, so also as to all the acts and motions springing from it, whether they follow or precede the formal consent of the will.”³⁸ In addition, if sin requires a deliberate, voluntary consent of the will, then we would not be responsible for either original sin or sins of ignorance.

To say, then, that without the act of the will there is no moral culpability is to say that we can think and desire apart from the will. This is an ontological impossibility, since to be is to be willing. Since concupiscence is evil in its root and forbidden by the moral law, it does not need to “give birth” (see below) for sin to occur.

Study Assistant searches reliable resources to get answers to your questions about concupiscence.Try Logos for free!

How does concupiscence relate to temptation?

Concupiscence, understood as inordinate desire, is a form of temptation. Sin is the source of all temptation, but inordinate desire is still a temptation.

When it comes to sin, there are several stages one should carefully note. Each leads to heightened aggravations of sinning.

1. The inclination and propensity toward evil: This involves an act of the will either broadly or narrowly considered. This includes both involuntary and voluntary sins.
2. Deliberation: We allow the temptation “time” as we think about it.
3. The resolution to commit the act that we are deliberating.
4. The act itself.
5. Enjoying the act.
6. Boasting about the act.
7. Deliberately repeating the act.
8. Eternal judgment, due to unrepentant sin, whereby the sinner exists as ungodly.

At every stage of sin, we are culpable. But as the stages take place, we aggravate the sin(s) in question. However, not all stages are required for sin to take place. The very inclination toward evil makes us culpable before God.

The voluntary or involuntary temptation is a result of our sinful nature. Temptation, according to John Owen, is a

raising up in the heart, and proposing unto the mind and affections, that which is evil; trying, as it were, whether the soul will close with its suggestions, or how far it will carry them on, though it do not wholly prevail. Now, when such a temptation comes from without, it is unto the soul an indifferent thing, neither good nor evil, unless it be consented unto; but the very proposal from within, it being the soul’s own act, is its sin.³⁹

Therefore, in relation to concupiscence, illicit desire is sin, not just an illicit act.

John Davenant makes the important point that “although the faculty of desire itself is not sin, yet the inclination and propensity of it to evil is sin.”⁴⁰ For instance, a “strong sexual desire” for one’s wife may be righteous (cf. Prov 5:19), but a “strong sexual desire” after a woman not your wife is sin (cf. Matt 5:28). Here we see the difference between non-sinful concupiscence and sinful concupiscence. Grace is not opposed to nature, but grace is opposed to sin. Hence grace does not remove desire altogether, but it is needed for the mortification of sinful desire.

What does James 1:14–15 teach about concupiscence?

James 1:14–15 has been the occasion of some dispute, particularly as to whether desire before it gives birth to sin can be termed sinful. One type of reading may give this impression, but upon closer analysis this would not only do violence to James’s letter but the rest of the Scriptures, as well.

James 1:14–15 reads,

But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.

From these two verses some have objected that being lured and enticed by one’s own desire is not necessarily sinful. One can possess a desire toward some evil inclination without it being a proper sin.

The NIV inserts the word “evil” to capture James’s sense of ἐπιθυμία. As noted, the word can be used in terms of an intensity of desire that is positive (e.g., Luke 22:15; Phil 1:23; 1 Thess 2:17). Yet the sinful sense appears more often in the New Testament (e.g., Mark 4:19; John 8:44; Rom 1:24; 6:12; 7:7–8; 13:14; Gal 5:16, 24; Eph 2:3; 4:22; Col 3:5; 1 Thess 4:5; 1 Tim 6:9; 2 Tim 2:22; 3:6; 4:3; Titus 2:12; 3:3; 1 Pet 1:14).

The immediate context is also helpful. James 1:13 forcefully removes God from the type of temptation in view because God cannot be responsible for this type of temptation. There are other contexts where God “tempts” (tests) his servants (e.g., Gen 22:1), but in terms of the temptation James is dealing with, God is not to be credited as the source in any way.

As one who was clearly intimate with the teaching of Jesus, James surely would not be saying something different from what we read in Matthew 5:28, “But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” The lustful desire is sin. Sin produces in us many forms of illicit desire (covetousness), as Paul notes in Romans 7:8. The desires of the flesh should not be gratified (Gal 5:16) because they are “against the Spirit” (Gal 5:17). Sinful desire is put to death by the Spirit (Rom 8:13), but these evil desires, which come from the heart, include evil thoughts (Matt 15:19).

This corrupt principle, a result of original sin, means that the enticements arise from a disordered desire that we are responsible for. This (evil) desire brings forth actings of sin. To suggest that concupiscence (evil desire) is not a sin unless there is consent or a formal acting out of the desire is to make the tenth commandment no commandment at all. However, the tenth commandment includes the illicit desires of the other nine commandments.

Thoughts and desires are morally evil when, according to Stephen Charnock, they “have a bad principle, [lack] a [proper] end, and converse with the object in a wrong manner.”⁴¹ The “first motions” of illicit desire arise in the believer from indwelling sin—sometimes these are voluntary and sometimes involuntary, as noted above. In connection with this, Charnock adds, “Voluntariness is not necessary to the essence of a sin, though it be to the aggravation of it.”⁴²

Thus when John Calvin comments on James 1:15, he notes that it would be

improper, and not according to the usage of Scripture, to restrict the word sin to outward works, as though indeed lust itself were not a sin, and as though corrupt desires, remaining closed up within and suppressed, were not so many sins. But as the use of a word is various, there is nothing unreasonable if it be taken here, as in many other places, for actual sin.⁴³

James is not arguing that sin formally takes place when there is an act. Instead, his concern is more so with the trajectory of one’s desire, which can lead to death. The persistent, unrepentant acts of sin are the obvious evidence that someone is on the path leading to death. Illicit desires give birth to non-visible and visible acts of persistent sinning that we can observe in the godless, whose end is death. Sinful desire (concupiscence), apart from the contrary presence of good works (e.g., mortification and vivification), ends in death.

Conclusion

Concupiscence as a word is not used often today, but the meaning of the word and its theological implications are of vital importance for Christian living. Christ died for our illicit desires, and he sends his Spirit to change those (evil) desires into righteous ones. We will not go far in the Christian life until we realize that God cares deeply about who and what we desire.

To the extent that we desire God and Christ as our chief good, our desires for all that is good will follow. Just as God is displeased with our ardent desires toward what is evil, so he is pleased with our ardent desires to serve him. As James tells us, concupiscence really is a matter of life and death.

Share your thoughts

What does the Bible teach about concupiscence? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

Mark Jones recommended resources

• Thomas Goodwin, The Vanity of Thoughts.

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The “Quest” for the historical Jesus is the attempt to describe the man Jesus of Nazareth—his life, message, death, impact, and the origins of belief in his resurrection—using historiographical methods. It uses all the sources available, including the New Testament, early Christian writings, non-canonical Gospels, Jewish and Roman sources, archaeology, coins, papyri and more. It also applies certain methods related to historical criticism, studies of orality and memory, and comparative historiography.

How should we approach historical Jesus studies?

The whole subject of the historical Jesus is a dizzying maze for anyone starting out in biblical studies or the history of the early church.

Why do people study the historical Jesus?

On the one hand, scholars often undertake the Quest with an anti-Christian and anti-theological bias, intending to find the “real” Jesus behind the church’s dogma or the faith-veneer of the Gospels—a Jesus who is purely human, perhaps a religious genius or a deranged apocalyptic fanatic, but definitely not the divine Son of God of the creeds.

On the other hand, the Quest can also be an exercise in Christology which seeks to understand Jesus in his socio-historical context, within his cultural milieu, embedded firmly in Second Temple Judaism and the currents of the Greco-Roman world. The Quest can clarify the humanity of Jesus and locate his mission in relation to the hopes of the Jewish people in the first century. In this sense, the Quest helps us avoid docetism (a heresy denying the humanity of Jesus) and anachronism (the error of making Jesus address our age rather than his own).

What are problems with historical Jesus studies?

There are, however, several pitfalls that come with pursuing a historical Jesus, whether as a matter of history or as part of a theological project.

First, the temptation is to create the historical Jesus in your own image. Many biographies and lives of Jesus have been written, and the Jesus that they portray often has an uncanny resemblance to the author and his/her own philosophical and religious perspectives. Albert Schweitzer’s famous work surveys the history of the various “life of Jesus” books written by European liberal Protestant rationalists. As Schweitzer shows, they produced a Jesus who himself was a European liberal Protestant rationalist (or at least was agreeable to the same). The irony is that even Schweitzer’s Jesus (constructed on the eve of the First World War) came across as a Nietzschean figure in the garb of a Galilean peasant who was hyperfixated on prophecies of doom.

Second, portraits of the historical Jesus can be too purely exegetical. They can end up being a Gospel harmony that merely mashes together the stories in the Gospels without addressing the big historical questions.

Third, portraits can play into narratives of conspiracy. A popular example is the sensational claim that the true story of Jesus had been hidden by the subterfuge of institutional religion. Books about Jesus like these do not really advance our knowledge of Jesus very much.

Finally, there is the danger that the Jesus of history will upend the Christ of faith. Scholars propose all sorts of theories about Jesus:

• He learned magic in India.
• He was a revolutionary zealot.
• He wrote part of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
• He was an apocalyptic fanatic.
• He was a dispenser of Hellenistic wisdom.
• He was an advocate for decolonizing Judea.

Against those speculative theories, others protest that the real Jesus is not the object of scholarly hypotheses but of faith, the Lord. The Jesus of prayer, devotion, and worship is the real Jesus. The Jesus of the church’s faith is more important than the scholarly fads, sensational fabrications, and futile attempts to find a purely historical Jesus lurking (supposedly) behind the Gospels.

Study Assistant searches reliable resources to get answers to your questions about historical Jesus studies. Try Logos for free!

Should Christians study the historical Jesus?

I think Christians should be interested in the historical Jesus because the early church was! The church’s faith in Jesus was rooted from its earliest days in the concrete: his life, teaching, mission, and identity.

The Gospel writers set Jesus within Israel’s political context, recount astonishing accounts of healing and exorcism, weave in scriptural echoes throughout, borrow the biographical conventions and literary forms of their era, embellish certain details, rearrange chronology at times, and leave traces of their own perspective in how they tell the story. Yet despite all this, their aim remains to convey the historical person of Jesus as he was seen and heard on the streets of Galilee.

Study of the historical Jesus is necessary because the New Testament is truly and really about Jesus. I endorse the observations of Udo Schnelle: “Jesus of Nazareth is a historical figure, and the New Testament is testimony to his historical impact.”⁴⁴ Consequently, studying the New Testament requires saying something historically about the figure of Jesus, for without a historical Jesus there would be no New Testament, and the New Testament would not be worth studying without a historical Jesus.

So, concerning the task of studying the historical Jesus, yes, it’s difficult, debated, but ultimately indispensable for the life of Christian faith. Dale Allison is right:

God became incarnate not in a text, but in a human life, from which it follows that Christians are obligated to inquire beyond and behind the canonical texts, impelled to learn all that they can about a first-century Galilean Jew.⁴⁵

What are the best introductory books on the historical Jesus?

For beginners or people starting out, I’d go with these books.

1. Bond, Helen K. The Historical Jesus: A Guide for the Perplexed. T&T Clark, 2012.

Bond offers a trim, student-friendly orientation to both the sources and the major phases of historical Jesus research, from the nineteenth-century Quests through contemporary debates. Readers will find it useful because Bond combines methodological clarity (how to use the Gospels historically) with accessible “snapshots” of Jesus’s life and ministry, making it an ideal first port of call for readers wanting to understand the whole fuss about the historical Jesus work.

2. Bauckham, Richard. Jesus: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions 275. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Bauckham offers a brisk but dense treatment of what can be known about Jesus historically and how the Gospels present him. Readers will appreciate the way he challenges both skeptical and overly simplistic apologetic readings, arguing that the canonical Gospels are closer to eyewitness testimony than often assumed, which makes this a stimulating bridge between academic study and Christian faith.

3. Wright, N. T. The Challenge of Jesus. InterVarsity Press, 1999.

Wright distills his larger academic work into a readable exploration of Jesus within first‑century Judaism, adding an examination of the implications of that historical portrait for contemporary discipleship. Readers will find it engaging because it combines narrative retelling, historical argument, and pastoral challenge, inviting them to see how serious historical work on Jesus intersects with issues of mission, politics, and personal faith in the twenty‑first century.

4. Beilby, James K., and Paul Rhodes Eddy, eds. The Historical Jesus: Five Views. Spectrum Multiview Books. InterVarsity Academic, 2009.

This book offers different views on the historical Jesus, ranging from sceptical minimalism to fairly robust confidence in the Gospels. It includes:

1. Robert Price (Jesus did not exist),
2. John Dominic Crossan (Jesus was an egalitarian Mediterranean peasant),
3. Luke Timothy Johnson (the real Jesus is the Jesus of the church’s faith),
4. James D. G. Dunn (Jesus was a prophet of Jewish restoration eschatology), and
5. Darrell L. Bock (the Gospels accurately portray Jesus).

The authors in turn respond to one another. Readers will find it particularly useful because it lays out the spectrum of major positions, allowing students to see how different methodological and theological commitments drive different reconstructions of Jesus.

Verdict: If I had to pick one, it would be Wright on The Challenge of Jesus. It is scholarly, historical, yet interested in questions of faith, as well.

What are the best textbooks and reference works on the historical Jesus?

For those who want something more robust, that’s good on context, will introduce you to scholarly debates, and will explain the technicalities of sources and methods, then go for these:

5. Levine, Amy-Jill, Dale C. Allison Jr., and John Dominic Crossan, eds. The Historical Jesus in Context. Princeton University Press, 2006.

This book gathers roughly thirty essays that situate Jesus within the literary, social, archaeological, and religious environment of early Judaism and the Roman world. It is valuable for readers because it places Gospel texts alongside contemporary inscriptions, prayers, miracle stories, and legal documents, helping them see Jesus’s words and deeds against a richly textured backdrop rather than in isolation.

6. Evans, Craig A. Jesus and His World: The Archaeological Evidence. Westminster John Knox Press, 2013.

Evans surveys major archaeological materials that illuminate the historical setting of Jesus of Nazareth. He explores questions such as the character of Nazareth in Jesus’s day, the existence and nature of synagogues, what material culture reveals about the priestly elites who orchestrated Jesus’s death, and whether any proposed tomb of Jesus is credible.

7. Theissen, Gerd, and Annette Merz. The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide. Fortress Press, 1998.

Theissen and Merz provide an exhaustive treatment of sources, methods, and major themes, with extensive bibliographies and careful discussion of the social and historical contexts in which Jesus operated. Students will find this a go‑to reference work: It is demanding but rewarding, offering detailed argumentation on issues such as authenticity criteria, Jesus’s relationship to Judaism, and the coherence of various sayings and deeds.

8. Bock, Darrell L., and Robert L. Webb, eds. Key Events in the Life of the Historical Jesus: A Collaborative Exploration of Context and Coherence. Eerdmans, 2010.

This volume is the sweet fruit of a decade‑long collaborative project published in one volume. It examines twelve major events in Jesus’s life, weighing their historical plausibility and exploring their socio‑cultural setting. Readers will appreciate the combination of rigorous historiographical method, close exegesis, and detailed bibliographies, making it especially useful for advanced students probing specific subjects, such as Jesus’s baptism, miracles, the kingdom message, the choosing of the twelve disciples, Sabbath controversies, the temple cleansing incident, the Last Supper, and the crucifixion.

9. Bock, Darrell L. Studying the Historical Jesus: A Guide to Sources and Methods. Baker Academic, 2002.

Bock introduces readers to the primary sources for historical Jesus research (canonical and extracanonical) before walking them through methodological issues such as criteria, context, and historiography. It is particularly helpful for readers who need a methodological primer: It spells out how to move from Gospel texts to historical claims in a way that is accessible for students but also attentive to scholarly debates.

10. Dunn, James D. G., and Scot McKnight, eds. The Historical Jesus in Recent Research. Eisenbrauns, 2005.

This volume brings together classic and contemporary essays tracing the development of historical Jesus research, from figures like Albert Schweitzer and Rudolf Bultmann through to more recent voices such as Richard A. Horsley, Amy-Jill Levine, and Tom Wright. Readers will find it a valuable map of the field, seeing how questions, methods, and conclusions have shifted over time. It serves well as a companion for graduate seminars or advanced reading courses.

11. Brown, Colin, and Craig Evans. A History of the Quests for the Historical Jesus. 2 volumes. InterVarsity Press, 2022.

These volumes are the definitive history of the various “lives” or “biographies” written about Jesus. It investigates the scholars who investigated Jesus, showing that any critical study of Jesus should be matched by a critical scrutiny of all scholarship about him. Fascinating and erudite.

Verdict: There are many good choices here, but the one I normally recommend as a textbook is Theissen and Merz. It’s a great primer on the sources and main issues at play.

What are the best books that teach about the historical Jesus using story?

There are occasional Jesus-books which are done a bit differently. They are fun while still informative. If you prefer novels to monographs, then these might be more your thing.

12. Theissen, Gerd. The Shadow of the Galilean: The Quest of the Historical Jesus in Narrative Form. Fortress Press, 1987.

Theissen uses a fictional account of a Galilean merchant caught up in a Roman investigation into an annoying Galilean prophet named Jesus to introduce readers to the social, political, and religious world of Jesus and his disciples. Readers will enjoy how the narrative form smuggles in serious historical and sociological analysis, making it an ideal text for students who might otherwise find technical discussions of Jesus’s context a bit dry and overly cerebral.

13. Fisk, Bruce N. A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jesus: Reading the Gospels on the Ground. Baker Academic, 2011.

Fisk frames his exploration of Jesus and the Gospels around a fictional student’s pilgrimage through Israel/Palestine, blending travelogue, dialogue, and exegesis. Readers will find it an inventive way into historical Jesus study, as the book models how to read the Gospels “on the ground” with archaeological sites, landscapes, and contemporary Jewish and Palestinian contexts in view. A fresh and fast-paced book not without a little tongue-in-cheek humor.

Verdict: Theissen’s Shadow is a good example of how history and theology can be communicated in the mode of fiction.

What are my go-to books on the historical Jesus?

In terms of the books that I go back to time and time again, it is these ones:

14. Sanders, E. P. Jesus and Judaism. Fortress Press, 1985.

Sanders’s landmark study situates Jesus squarely within Second Temple Judaism and argues that his mission was centered on the restoration of Israel, culminating in his symbolic actions in the temple. In some ways, Sanders was building on the work of others such as Geza Vermes and Ben Meyer, but he made programmatic that Jesus belongs in the world of Judaism not in the imaginations of German theologians. Readers will find it crucial because it reshaped the field’s understanding of Jesus’s aims and of the continuity between Jesus and Judaism, forcing both critics and apologists to rethink caricatures that merely provided a dark background against which Jesus and Christianity shine.

15. Dunn, James D. G. Christianity in the Making, vol. 1: Jesus Remembered. Eerdmans, 2003.

Dunn’s first volume in Christianity in the Making emphasizes the remembered Jesus of early Christian communities. It focuses on oral tradition and communal memory as the medium through which Jesus’s words and deeds reached the evangelists. We have access to Jesus, but only as his followers remembered him. Always thorough and judicious, this work consistently arrives at judgments informed by primary sources.

16. Bockmuehl, Markus. This Jesus: Martyr, Lord, Messiah. T&T Clark, 2004.

Bockmuehl’s concise book reflects on Jesus as martyr, exalted Lord, and Messiah, drawing together historical, theological, and ecclesial perspectives. Readers will appreciate its combination of scholarly insight and theological nuance, making it a fine example of how historical Jesus study can serve the church’s confession rather than undermine it. A superb work that seeks a conversation between the critic and the confessor.

17. Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 2. Fortress Press, 1996.

This was the book that blew my mind. It changed how I read the Gospels as history, not just as the warm-up act to Paul’s Epistles. Wright’s monumental volume offers a full‑scale reconstruction of Jesus’s career, message, and symbolic actions, interpreting them within the story of Israel’s continuing exile and hoped‑for restoration. Readers will find it both demanding and exhilarating as Wright integrates detailed exegesis with a sweeping narrative of how Jesus announced and enacted the kingdom of God, challenging conventional readings across the theological spectrum. It is a masterpiece, even if it can be challenged on several points.

18. Allison, Dale C., Jr. Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History. Baker Academic, 2010.

Allison foregrounds the role of memory and imagination in the formation of the Gospel traditions, arguing that broad patterns and themes often carry more weight than individual sayings. Readers will benefit from his careful methodological reflections and from his sober, often skeptical, but still sympathetic assessment of what can be responsibly claimed about Jesus, making this a key conversation partner for anyone working with memory theory and Jesus research. Allison is sharp and is truly his own man. Any book by him on Jesus is an indispensable partner for conversations about the historical Jesus.

19. Keener, Craig S. The Historical Jesus of the Gospels. Eerdmans, 2009.

Keener offers a massive, heavily footnoted defense of the historical reliability of the Gospel traditions, drawing extensively on ancient Jewish and Greco‑Roman sources. Readers will find in it a plethora of comparative material and a detailed case that the Synoptic narratives, though theologically shaped, preserve substantial historical memory of Jesus.

20. Fredriksen, Paula. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity. Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

Fredriksen reconstructs Jesus as a deeply Jewish apocalyptic prophet whose proclamation of the kingdom and his clash with authorities led to his execution, and she traces how his followers’ interpretation of his death contributed to the emergence of early Christianity. Readers will value Fredriksen’s lucid prose, sharp historical instincts, and sensitivity to Jewish–Christian relations, making the book compelling for both scholars and lay readers.

21. Bird, Michael F. Whispers of Revolution: Jesus and the Coming of God as King. Apollos, 2025.

Disclaimer: This is my book, published last year, and represents the fruits of my own foray into the historical Jesus.

This volume presents Jesus as announcing God’s revolutionary kingship in ways that both fulfilled Israel’s hopes and unsettled existing power structures, drawing together themes of God’s reign and Israel’s restoration. I hope readers benefit from the way I attempt to combine the crucial and critical historical work of studying Jesus alongside theological reflection and contemporary application. In the end, I am trying to show how the “coming of God as king” still reshapes political, ecclesial, and personal realities today.

Verdict: I say, start with Wright, then go to Allison, and finish with Bird (but I am biased, remember).

Share your thoughts

What are your favorite books on the historical Jesus? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

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Had Bruce Wilkinson not published The Prayer of Jabez in 2000, most of us probably would not have heard of it. Oh sure, we would have read the prayer when our Bible reading plan marched us through 1 Chronicles 4:9–10. Yet I wonder if we would have thought much about it.

Historically, Christians have not paid much attention to this prayer. Commentaries from the early and medieval church give it little more than a glance. And yet it has entered into our religious lexicon, and the credit for this goes almost entirely to Wilkinson’s work.

But in so entering, it has made us think more carefully about how strange the story of Jabez is. As Scott Hahn points out, “Jabez appears as if out of nowhere in the Chronicler’s genealogy—in the middle of a list of Judahites but without any reference to his father.”⁴⁶ In other words, Jabez has a mysterious air to him, much like Melchizedek in Genesis 14.

But we should not let this mystery, nor its neglect by centuries of commentators, prevent us from patient study of the prayer of Jabez. This passage is truly spiritually rewarding. In this article, I want to demystify the prayer of Jabez by uncovering its original context and commending its edifying use as a prayer for Christians today.

Who was Jabez in the Bible?

According to 1 Chronicles 4:9, “Jabez was more honorable than his brothers. His mother had named him Jabez, saying, ‘I gave birth to him in pain.’” The Hebrew word behind Jabez’s name (עֹצֶב) means “anxious toil, hardship,” and it is only used three times in the Bible (Isa 14:3; 1 Chron 4:9; Ps 139:24).⁴⁷

A variant of this word appears in Genesis 3:16 and 5:29. In Genesis 3:16, it describes the increase of pain in childbirth, following the sin of Adam and Eve. Given the context of painful birth, the Chronicler plausibly refers to Eve’s increase in pain during birth. Peter Leithart asserts:

Jabez is a child of Eve, a child of curse; the name he inherits from his mother names the curse of his origin. There is nothing but pain in his ancestry, but God makes a new future, answering Jabez’s prayer for blessing, for an enlarged border, for God’s hand to be with him, and for deliverance from the pain of his birth, the pain of primordial curse.⁴⁸

While Leithart’s theological reading may seem like an overreach, one must remember that Chronicles is a theological interpretation of Israel’s history whose story begins with Adam (1 Chron 1:1). So it is not unreasonable to see Jabez, who is the first person in Chronicles to call upon the name of the Lord, as representing a pathway to overcome sin and its effects.⁴⁹ If so, we can better understand why the Chronicler included Jabez here in the opening genealogies of 1 Chronicles.

Regarding Jabez as a name, it only appears here and in 1 Chronicles 2:55, where it is a name of a town in Judah in which a clan of scribes dwelt. The person (not the town) Jabez is also assumed to be Judahite because his name appears in a Judahite genealogy.

Beyond these scraps of historical information, we also learn that “Jabez was more honorable than his brothers” (1 Chron 4:9). The word translated “honorable” is often translated as “glory” in the Bible, although the term “honorable” contextually renders the sense well enough. Even so, it may be worth translating the phrase as “more glorious than his brothers” because, as we’ll see, Jabez prays for glorious ends in 1 Chronicles 4:10.

Explore the meaning of כבד (“glory”) with Logos’s Bible Word Study. Try it for free!

What was Jabez’s prayer?

Jabez prayed for glory and he received it. The text says,

Jabez cried out to the God of Israel, “Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain.” And God granted his request. (1 Chron 4:10)

This request, along with God’s granting of it, explains why Jabez had more glory than his brothers. Glory describes a good work well done, and honor is what is given to one who has gained glory. The Apostle Paul in the New Testament uses the terms in this way, encouraging Christians to pursue glory and honor (Rom 2:7).

In the commentary tradition, this has not always been well understood. For example, Louis Jonker comments, “The writer indicates that Jabez was honored more than his brothers, without giving any reason for this statement.”⁵⁰ But reasons are given. First Chronicles 4:10 explicitly explains how Jabez prayed and received great rewards from God. That is how he is more glorious than his brothers.

When speaking of glory in this way, a brief caution is in order. Attempting to gain the glory that belongs to God alone is inappropriate for anyone, since God has unique glory, being the Creator and King of all things. Jabez, however, does not seek God’s unique glory but rather a glory given by God, as I will show.

What glory did Jabez receive?

What exactly is the glory that Jabez attained?

First, “Jabez is the first one in Chronicles to ‘call on [qrʾ] the God of Israel’ by name.”⁵¹ So part of his glory is that he calls on the name of God early on. This reminds us of how the Sethites called upon the name of the Lord after Adam and Eve fell into sin: “At that time men began to call on the name of the Lord” (Gen 4:26). In the context of Chronicles, Jabez shows his glory by being the first to call on the name of the God of Israel.

Second, as Jabez’s birth in pain recalls the effect of sin in the garden (Gen 3:16–17), so God’s protection of Jabez results in him being “free from pain.” In other words, something about Jabez’s glory involves a reversal of the effects of sin. Leithart notes, “Jabez provides a small glimpse of the fulfillment of Yahweh’s commitment to bring Israel from the ‘pain’ of its exilic new birth into an enlarged space, blessed and guided by the hand of God.”⁵²

Third, Jabez receives blessing from God in the form of enlarged borders, which prior Scripture has associated with God’s covenantal blessing. For example, God promises in Exodus 34:24: “For I will cast out nations before you, and enlarge your border” (see also Deut 19:8). The language of enlarging one’s borders, therefore, is not merely well-wishing for riches and land. It accesses the structure of God’s covenantal relationship with Israel. Once again, we see Jabez not pursuing glory for his own private ends but rather accessing God’s good promises.

Fourth, Jabez gains glory because the hand of the Lord is with him. Hahn explains, “The reference to God’s hand recalls the exodus wrought by the strong hand of the Lord (Exod. 13:14, 16). And later in Chronicles, this expression will figure in several key prayers, including David’s great penitential and intercessory prayer, where he asks that God’s hand be against himself rather than the people (1 Chr. 21:17; 29:12, 16).”⁵³ When God’s hand is with someone, it means he will bring them success. Indeed, in the context of Chronicles, “Jabez ben Judah stands for the hope that the seed of David, despite being guilty of ma’al, can call on the Lord and be delivered into a large place of blessing.”⁵⁴

Fifth, when Jabez prays, “keep me from harm,” he uses a word that can also mean “evil.” It certainly means harm, since in the Hebrew Bible, the word “evil” could mean calamity, harm, and natural disaster. Yet it is worth understanding this semantic range because, as I will suggest below, Jabez’s prayer has much in common with the Lord’s prayer; and there, Jesus taught his disciples to pray that God would deliver them from evil (Matt 6:13). In any case, Jabez’s glory here is that he prayed to avoid evil.

Putting these five elements together, we can think of Jabez’s prayer as a public prayer for the common good of Israel. The prayer is thus political. “Prayer,” explains Leithart, “will be one of the keys to the Chronicler’s political theology.”⁵⁵ These gifts of God that Jabez receives, in line with the promises of God, explain why the Chronicler calls Jabez more glorious than his brothers.

Should we pray the prayer of Jabez? If so, how?

Yes, not only can we pray as Jabez did. We must. Every Christian must seek glory, honor, and immortality by our good works (Rom 2:7). By faith, God hears our prayers. And God crowns his gifts. Glory is therefore the effect of a good work done well. And here, Jabez prays for glorious works that accord with God’s promises. What else is a good work but doing what God wills? In this sense, the pursuit of glory is not vainglory (a vice) but rather what Christians pray when they say, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10).

Notice that Jabez does not pray for just anything. He did not ask for the throne of Jerusalem or for personal aggrandizement (cf. Jas 4:2–3). Instead, he prayed for enlarged borders because that accorded with God’s prior covenantal promises. He asked God to give what he promised. And God answered that prayer.

Likewise, when we pray according to God’s will, he answers (1 John 5:14–15). But if we ask God for sinful things or with evil desires, God will not hear or answer. Hence, we ought not to pray for God to enlarge our borders today as if that means that God will make us rich, wealthy, and whole in every way (cf. Luke 22:42). Jabez sought God’s blessing in accordance with his promises. That is how we should pray today as well.

It is an irony then that the prayer of Jabez has become so associated with prosperity theology. Far from enriching himself, Jabez prayed for God to bless him as part of Israel, in line with God’s promises. This would be equivalent to us today praying for God’s kingdom to come. In both cases, it is good and right to pray for these things. As David, another Judahite, reminds us in 1 Chronicles 29:11, we should pray,

Thine, O Lord, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty; for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is thine; thine is the kingdom, O Lord, and thou art exalted as head above all.

Jabez prayed for the enlargement of the border of God’s kingdom on earth to symbolize God’s kingdom coming across the whole earth. So too may we today pray for the enlargement of God’s kingdom.

Share your thoughts

Should Christians today pray the prayer of Jabez? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

Wyatt Graham’s suggested resources

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In his famous sermon “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” Jonathan Edwards illustrates the distinction between intellectual and experiential knowledge:

There is a difference between having an opinion, that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness.⁵¹

Here, Edwards highlights the possibility of knowing something to be true of God (and food) without any affective “sense” of that truth. Our experience regularly confirms this disparity: There’s a long road between the head and the heart.

You’ve likely been there before. You carve out time for a devotion, read a passage on the Lord’s majesty or grace—something that you know should thrill your heart—but you don’t feel thrilled. You don’t feel much of anything. Further reflection yields low-level guilt: “Why do I tear up in Toy Story 3 when Andy gives his toys away but struggle to feel something when I read Psalm 23?”

To be sure, it’s a mistake to make “experience” the ultimate measure for whether or not our Scripture reading is “working.” And yet, we should acknowledge that there’s something wrong with being completely unmoved at God’s self-disclosure in his Word.

How can we move forward?

What is Bible meditation?

Imagine that you receive a love letter from your significant other. After reading and understanding the letter, you re-read it a dozen times, perhaps even reviewing certain sentences.

Do you re-read it because you’re struggling to understand what the words mean? Of course not! In fact, it’s precisely because you understand what’s being communicated that you read it again, each read-through deepening your gratitude and affection for the author.

At first, you were “reading.” You were gathering information and making sure you understood what was being communicated. In your last twelve read-throughs, you were reveling in what you had learned. Savoring it. Taking comfort in it.

You were meditating.

For centuries, Christians have meditated on Scripture. Meditation comes after you’ve grasped what a text means. It aims to sense the beauty, weight, and moral force of the truth under consideration. It’s a disciplined lingering over the text that seeks to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps 34:8).

There’s no silver bullet fix for spiritual dryness. But more often than not, meditating on Scripture functions as “the bellows of the soul, that doth kindle and inflame holy affections.”⁵⁴

How do I meditate on the Bible?

Consider these four steps as you begin to meditate on the Word.

1. Prepare your heart

While we may open the Word in a quiet room, we rarely do so with a quiet heart. We often come to our devotions having already read emails, checked notifications, and considered the variety of obligations that will demand our attention and energy that day. Few of us are able to simply “be still” the moment we open our Bibles.

Beyond making sure your cellphone can’t easily distract you, here are two strategies to help you prepare to engage the Lord.

First, address yourself. Have you ever noticed that the Psalmist periodically addresses himself?

• “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name” (Ps 103:1)!
• “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God” (Ps 42:5–6).
• “Return, O my soul, to your rest; for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you” (Ps 116:7).

Before you begin your time in the Word, take a moment to be still and address yourself. Acknowledge the distractions—the laundry that needs to be done, the grass that needs to be mowed, the asinine comment someone made on your social media post. Those concerns will be waiting for you when you’re finished. Remind yourself of your need for communion with God and the privilege of being able to study his Word. Call yourself to hope in his promises.

Logos’s Reading Plans help you stay consistent in your Bible reading and meditation. Try Reading Plans for free!

Second, ask the Lord to help you understand and engage with the text. In our own strength, we’re unable “to accept the things of the Spirit of God … because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor 2:14). Confessing our dependence on God, we pray that “the eyes of [our] hearts would be enlightened” (Eph 1:18). We plead with the Psalmist, “Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law” (Ps 119:18).

Having asked the Lord for help, you’re ready to begin studying the Word.

2. Read carefully

Understanding the text you’re reading is a necessary prerequisite for meditation: The truth(s) of the text is the “meal” over which your soul will chew.

While an extended discussion of Bible interpretation methods is beyond the scope of this article, picking up a good study Bible will provide you with some accessible, brief commentary on the passage you’re studying. Additionally, consider the Logos Bible study app to get access to a host of Bible study tools. Finally, it’s often helpful to ask how each word in a verse contributes to its meaning, for example, “If this word wasn’t in the sentence or the author had chosen a different one, what difference would it make?”

If you’re studying, “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men” (Mark 1:17), your observations might look something like:

• Follow me—Jesus doesn’t want us to merely “believe” in him.
• Follow me—We’re called to follow a person, not just adopt new ethics/doctrine.
• I will make—Christ does the work in me. There are no self-made fishers of men.
• I will make—Jesus isn’t crossing his fingers, hoping that he can transform us. Christ-followers will share the gospel.

Crucial clarification: While accurately interpreting the text is necessary, it’s important to remember that the end goal of meditation is not biblical literacy but active communion with God. In this context, interpretive accuracy is not an end in itself, but a means to an end, namely, engaging the Lord with our inner man.

If you carve out thirty minutes for devotion and spend twenty-eight of them diagramming sentences and highlighting verbs, you will have almost no time to prayerfully linger over what you have read. Timothy Keller offers a similar caution:

Serious study of the Bible is something that must be done in order to grow as a Christian, but it is a mistake to spend most of your daily time with God in an in-depth interpretive Bible study. It leaves you little time and perhaps no inclination to meditate and pray.⁵⁵

With this caution in mind, meditation is often more conducive to studying shorter chunks of text. Shorter passages allow you to give appropriate time to the work of interpretation—a nonnegotiable—without reducing your subsequent meditation to a few brief petitionary prayers.

3. Ask specific questions

There isn’t one “correct” method for meditating on the Word. However, one of the most effective strategies is also the simplest: Ask questions of the text aimed at discerning where the truth it communicates intersects with your life. In making these connections, you are gathering fuel for the prayer—the rejoicing, repenting, and requesting—that will immediately follow.

You can interrogate this text from at least three angles.

First, what does this text teach me about God? Here you’re asking questions like, “Does this text teach me about God’s holiness, love, faithfulness, justice, compassion, power, etc.?”

If you’re studying Moses’s reception of the Ten Commandments, you might note that:

• God’s holiness is both beautiful and terrifying. He must be approached on his own terms (Exod 20:18, 26).
• God’s grace is seen in rescuing Israel before giving them the law. They are not saved from Egyptian slavery because of their obedience (Exod 20:2).
• God’s supremacy is seen in his demand that his people have no other gods alongside him (Exod 20:3).

Second, what does this text teach me about myself? Spend some time thinking about how the passage may address your beliefs, emotions, and personal holiness. Don’t expect every question to be eye-opening. Some will be illuminating, others won’t. While each text is different, I’ve found that working through a series of questions geared toward deliberate introspection consistently engages my heart.

If you were studying Philippians 4:6–7, your introspection might look something like:

• Does this text reveal sin in my heart? A need that I have? Yes—God’s promise that he’ll “guard my heart and mind” is unsatisfying because my joy is so often rooted in my life circumstances. I also tend to think of my anxiety as “bad” because of how it affects me, not because it reflects a lack of trust in the Lord.⁵⁶
• Does this text offer a promise I should claim? I should seek the peace found in God’s goodness and sovereignty, not in the hope of achieving specific outcomes. Then I can thank God in advance for how he will manage the situation.
• What behaviors or emotions emerge when I forget this truth? I try to increase my control rather than going to the Lord. Rest in God’s sovereign goodness is replaced by worry about whether I’ll get the circumstances I want.
• Does this text teach me how to think about or respond wisely to life’s various situations/people? Not so much.
• Is there something about this text that rubs me the wrong way? Yes, it’s a bit disappointing that the text doesn’t read, “Present your requests to God and he’ll work it out in a way that is agreeable to you.”
• Does this text describe a privilege—hope, joy, security, purpose, sense of worth, etc.—that I’m asking something else to fulfill? Already covered in the first question—I often look to my circumstances for my security.

Finally, how does this text point me to Christ? Consider how your study and introspection direct you to the person and work of Jesus.

• How does Christ provide for my need?
• How does Christ address my sin?
• How does Christ fulfill my longing?
• How does Christ strengthen me to do what I’m called to do?

Asking Christ-centered questions helps you to move beyond “Do better, try harder” and reframes the promises, privileges, or sin struggles you’ve discerned in light of the grace of the gospel.

4. Respond to the text

Finally, you’re reading to turn the fruit of your reflections into prayer.⁵⁷ Many Christians have found it helpful to pray along the lines of the three movements represented in the Lord’s prayer.

Rejoice:⁵⁸ Praise and thank the Lord for what you saw in the text—for his mercy, grace, patience, faithfulness, holiness, etc.

Fight the urge to move immediately to petitionary prayer. Asking for daily bread is important, but it shouldn’t replace “Hallowed be thy name.”

Repent: Confess any sin that your study has revealed. Rest in the promise that “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

That said, this is not a time for self-loathing or unending idol hunts. Sometimes, you won’t be able to discern any sin in connection with your text. Don’t feel like authenticity requires that you sit long enough to feel bad about something. Simply move on.

Request: First, ask God to help you apply what you’ve learned so that you might be a doer of the Word and not a hearer only, deceiving yourself (Jas 1:22).

As you pray, don’t forget that God uses means to achieve his ends. While asking “Help me stop lusting” is well-intended, God usually mortifies our sin through grace-fueled effort rather than giving us instant “victory” through one powerful moment of surrender. It’s better to ask, “God, help me have the discipline to avoid the media that tempts me to lust and the situations that present me with opportunities to fail. Help me see others as people to love and not objects for use.”

Second, pray for other people and life-specific circumstances. Here you might think in “concentric circles,” beginning with yourself and moving outward toward family, friends, neighbors, church, city, and world. This helps keep your spiritual life from becoming myopic and forces you to look outward to the needs around you. Consider systematically praying through your church’s membership directory (if they have one) or using Operation World to pray for the advance of the gospel among the nations.

Conclusion

Thomas Watson insisted that “The reason our affections are so chill and cold in spiritual things, is, because we do not warm ourselves more at the fire of meditation.”⁵⁹

To be sure, we shouldn’t expect every devotional time to be life-changing or charged with emotional intensity. The most mature Christians have “meh” devotions. Feelings aren’t the litmus test for efficacy. Run-of-the-mill devotions nourish your soul too. And yet we should do our best to move beyond mere interpretation and engage our inner man with old promises and new beauties.

Meditation seeks to do just that. While not an automatic formula for spiritual warmth, it “hoists the sails of the soul in hopes of experiencing the gracious wind of God’s Spirit.”⁶⁰

As we make a Scripture-fueled effort to delight ourselves in the Lord (Ps 37:4), we can be certain that we’ll gradually behold more of the glory by which we’re “transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor 3:18).

Share your thoughts

What are the best practices for meditating on Scripture? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

Chase Krug’s suggested resources

• Keller, Timothy. Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God. Penguin, 2016.
• Owen, John. The Grace and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded. In The Works of John Owen, vol. 7: Sin and Grace. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1862.

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At the heart of all effective interpretation of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (HB/OT) lies a nuanced understanding of syntax (discourse).⁶¹ Syntax involves diligently studying the way(s) in which words, phrases, clauses, and sentences relate to one another to create meaning.⁶² Life-changing exegesis of Scripture requires more than merely being able to discern elementary phonology, morphology, and vocabulary.⁶³ In the words of Bill T. Arnold and John H. Choi, “achieving a deep-level reading [of Hebrew] requires an [acute] understanding of syntactical relationships, a topic that beginning grammars simply cannot cover in detail.”⁶⁴

This guide for second-year(-plus) Hebrew students helps to bridge the gap to some more intermediate/advanced reference works.⁶⁵

The following resources are arranged roughly according to their level of technicality, depth, and pedagogical sensitivity.⁶⁶ Readers will have to discern for themselves what level of proficiency in Hebrew grammar and syntax they would like to obtain overall. One must always keep in mind, however, “the ultimate goal of … Hebrew study: to know and love the Triune God and to love people who are made in his image.”⁶⁷ Ad fontes!⁶⁸

Introductory Hebrew grammars

For a beginning Hebrew grammar, I’ll be a “realist”⁶⁹ and encourage you to stick with the textbook(s) you first used.⁷⁰ Additionally, refreshers in English grammar can prove to be surprisingly helpful as well for beginners.⁷¹ There are also superb tools to assist those who are struggling with specific elements of Hebrew like weak verb morphology.⁷²

Beyond these, the following list consists of some of the best introductory Hebrew grammars.

Williams, Ronald J. Williams’ Hebrew Syntax. Revised and expanded by John C. Beckman. Third edition. University of Toronto Press, 2007.

This short book is divided into four main sections:

1. nominals,
2. verbs,
3. particles, and finally
4. the syntax of clauses.

Notably, in the treatment of verbs, Beckman’s work prioritizes aspect over tense, yet it retains the “preterite imperfect” as a distinct grammatical category—a category that encompasses the “converted imperfect” or the wayyiqtol.⁷³ Each individual section offers a concise introduction with one to three biblical examples for illustration (and a clear index of Scripture references).

Though now, regrettably, becoming increasingly dated, the bibliographic entries within each of the different sections are ample. The most helpful component for most users is that Beckman’s work is keyed to each of the other major Hebrew reference grammars, namely BHRG, Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, IBHS, and Joüon and Muraoka’s Grammar of Biblical Hebrew (all of which will be discussed later in the advanced Hebrew grammars section).

Do note that Williams’ Hebrew Syntax sometimes “obscures the difference between describing Hebrew syntax and providing English translation equivalents.”⁷⁴ Even so, for overall utility and ease of use (not to mention its thoroughly broad coverage), it is exceptionally hard to beat!⁷⁵

Chisholm, Robert B. From Exegesis to Exposition: A Practical Guide to Using Biblical Hebrew. Baker, 1998.

As esteemed professor of Old Testament John W. Hilber states,

In my view this is the best book for pastors to own beyond their first-year grammar. It includes a chapter on discourse grammar (grammar beyond the level of the sentence) that cannot be found in such concise form anywhere else I am aware of. It offers many practical illustrations in exegetical method.⁷⁶

I heartily concur with this assessment, particularly when one combines this volume with A Workbook for Intermediate Hebrew: Grammar, Exegesis, and Commentary on Jonah and Ruth (Kregel, 2006) and A Commentary on Judges and Ruth (Kregel, 2013), where you can see the theory parsed out more clearly.⁷⁷ It also helpfully cross-references to both Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar and Waltke–O’Connor’s superb grammars. As a critique, all the examples given in Hebrew script are unpointed, which may “provide a slight hurdle for those who have come to depend on the vocalized text.”⁷⁸

Despite its age (if only we had an update!) it remains sui generis since there is nothing else comparable to it available.

Honorable mention: Gibson, J. C. L. Davidson’s Introductory Hebrew Grammar–Syntax. Fourth edition. T&T Clark, 1994.

This book should not be confused with Davidson’s earlier counterpart, Davidson’s Introductory Hebrew Grammar, by James D. Martin. Notwithstanding its title, Gibson’s work is designed for more advanced students.⁷⁹ It contains six main sections:

1. syntax of the pronoun,
2. syntax of the noun and nominal clause,
3. syntax of the verb and its object,
4. syntax of the infinitive and participle,
5. syntax of the adverb and adverbial phrases and clauses, and
6. syntax of the sentence.⁸⁰

Often, paying attention to the reference works employed by trusted interpreters reveals (or vindicates) their value for exegesis more than published reviews. The proof is in the pudding! One example of this work’s astute grammatical insights may suffice. Genesis 6:8 reads, “But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord” (וְנֹחַ מָצָא חֵן בְּעֵינֵי יְהוָה). Old Testament scholar John Goldingay cites Gibson approvingly, commenting, “GKC [Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar] 142b takes the word order with the subject first to indicate that the clause provides background information and that the verb should be rendered in the pluperfect. But it is simpler to take the word order as indicating that the clause offers a contrast with what precedes it (DG 142c).”⁸¹

Intermediate Hebrew grammars

Much like in the realm of boxing, a heavyweight champion might not necessarily be the best boxer pound for pound. Similarly, an intermediate guide is not necessarily better than an introductory one; rather, it represents a “step above” introductory works in terms of the scope and nuance of the material presented.

Patton, Matthew H., and Frederic Clarke Putnam. Basics of Hebrew Discourse: A Guide to Working with Hebrew Prose and Poetry. Edited by Miles V. Van Pelt. Zondervan Language Basics. Zondervan, 2019.

Basics of Hebrew Discourse (BHD) was intentionally designed to provide intermediate (second-year[-plus]) Hebrew students with a “functional introduction to the use and application of discourse analysis as a necessary component to textual analysis and the exegetical process.”⁸²

For prose narrative, BHD does not treat waw (ו) as a discourse marker unto itself. To be clear, Patton (astutely) contends: “the seemingly endless functions of waw are actually not so much functions of waw alone but of the larger clausal and supra-clausal structures of which waw is a part.”⁸³ In a related way, Patton clarifies that biblical Hebrew also uses sequences of verbs in certain forms and in a certain order in order to communicate discourse relationships. For instance, a waw + yiqtol after an imperative usually communicates purposes (“so that”) despite the absence of any particular discourse marker.⁸⁴ Patton also judiciously maintains each verbal form (qatal, yiqtol, etc.) has its own “‘default’ meaning in terms of tense, aspect, and mood, but … these defaults can be overridden based on discourse considerations.”⁸⁵

With respect to biblical Hebrew poetry, Putnam argues “a poetic line consists of a single clause: one clause per line and one line per clause” and (most distinctly) line length (as opposed to rhyme or meter, for example) is a “discourse-level device that the biblical poets used to organize their poems.”⁸⁶ Uniquely, Putnam also opines that parallelism is “neither unique nor necessary to biblical poetry. It is a cohesive feature of biblical poems, a linguistic resource that helps to make biblical poems examples of patterned language.”⁸⁷ Putnam suggests that the process for poetic discourse analysis consists of several steps:⁸⁸

1. list all nouns/verbs,
2. parse verbs,
3. gloss the text,
4. determine the length (number of words) and structure (syntax) of each line,
5. analyze the morphology of predicates,
6. describe the type of each clause and its syntax, and
7. look for semantic cohesion (semantic analysis, chiasm, ellipses, participant tracking) and logical cohesion (kinds of information/interclausal relationships).⁸⁹

Modern linguistic theories can be ignored only to one’s peril.⁹⁰ Veritably, “discourse analysis provides the stimulus and foundation for further literary, historical, and theological study.”⁹¹ Students and educators alike, though, must discern for themselves whether or not appropriating Patton and Putnam’s specific methodologies as laid out in Basics of Hebrew Discourse truly pay the dividends that they claim.⁹²

The accompanying lectures are superb.

Hardy, H. H., II, and Matthew McAffee. Going Deeper with Biblical Hebrew: An Intermediate Study of the Grammar and Syntax of the Old Testament. B&H, 2024.

This book is designed for students of Hebrew who have completed an introductory grammar and are looking for an appropriate next step. Rather than using the fully deductive or strictly inductive methods, however, Hardy and McAffee have successfully navigated a mediating approach that embodies the transitional space between beginning grammars and advanced texts.

The book consists of three main parts.

• Part A introduces the Hebrew language, in general.
• Part B covers the verbal system (including stems) alongside volitives and the prefix and suffix conjugations.
• Part C covers nouns and noun phrases, pronouns, adjectives, participles, infinitives and temporal clauses, conjunctions, adverbs, and other particles, then prepositions.⁹³

Aside from three guided lessons—(1) textual criticism, (2) semantic analysis, and (3) syntactic analysis—there are also four excellent appendices:

1. Continuing with Hebrew
2. Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary
3. English to Hebrew Catalogue
4. Glossary: Three Indices (Name, Subject, Scripture)

An extensive bibliography rounds things out.⁹⁴

Only time will tell how this volume will fare in the future, but for many users, this is the most up-to-date resource on the block for intermediate Hebrew. The exercises and guided reading of biblical texts are particularly notable, even if the linguistic nomenclature is (as a whole) quite dense.⁹⁵

Arnold, Bill T., and John H. Choi. A Guide to Biblical Hebrew Syntax. Second edition. Cambridge University Press, 2018.

With respect to its basic structure and outline, A Guide to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (GBHS) divides things into four main parts.

• The first three sections cover the key categories of individual words: (1) nouns, (2) verbs, and (3) particles.
• The fourth section moves beyond phrase-level phenomena and considers the larger relationships of clauses and sentences (nominal and verbal clauses, subordinate clauses, and additional sentence types).
• There are also two clear appendices (A: Stem Chart; B: Expanded Stem Chart).
• There is also a thoroughly helpful ten-page glossary (with cross references!).

While the first edition of GBHS used imprecise labels such as “perfect” or “imperfect” when discussing the verbal system, the second edition uses more accurate terms like yiqtol form/prefix conjugation or qatal form/suffix conjugation. Other such improvements abound. For instance, with respect to nouns, Arnold and Choi have (further) explained the marked difference between form and function concerning the terms nominative, genitive, and accusative, and note that though “some authorities believe we should abandon these grammatical labels altogether (especially ‘nominative’) when describing BH syntax” their objective is

to identify and describe the functions of the noun. Because the nouns in BH function syntactically in the same distinct ‘cases’ as its parent language, it is still helpful to distinguish three case functions in BH using the terminology nominative, genitive, and accusative. We will introduce other designations for these functions where appropriate to assist the advanced student … if the reader remembers that we are describing the syntactical functions of these nouns rather than their grammatical morphemes, we believe the traditional terminology is more helpful.⁹⁶

Concerning the nominal clause, Arnold and Choi write “we are using ‘nominal clause’ narrowly defined to refer to clauses without verbs, and so as interchangeable with ‘verbless clause’ or ‘nonverbal clause.’ Terminology is a debated topic related to this subject.”⁹⁷ Mention could also be made of the increased specificity concerning word order, the primary function of the Niphal (as medio-passive independent of any original function that was reflexive), and the particles.

From a technical standpoint, some readers may be disappointed that this volume does not do more than merely provide a “guide.” That is, it is no substitute for the “heavyweight” grammars. However, the effective use of biblical illustrations combined with a clear, easy-to-use format, copious footnotes and numerous other up-to-date references makes this volume one of the most accessible introductions currently in print to students of biblical Hebrew syntax. It easily remains (among guidebooks of this kind) my first recommendation—bar none.⁹⁸

Honorable mention: Fuller, Russell T., and Kyoungwon Choi. Invitation to Biblical Hebrew Syntax: An Intermediate Grammar. Invitation to Theological Studies Series. Kregel, 2017.

This book is divided into three parts:

• the syntax,
• compositions, and
• MT accents.

Keys to its drills are supplied to further aid the student. There is also a helpful glossary in the appendix. In grammar, and particularly, in syntax, Fuller and Choi are fully persuaded that

Biblical Hebrew closely resembles Arabic. Since Arabic is the dominant living Semitic language and since modern Arabic preserves much of classical Arabic, it furnishes the best model for Biblical Hebrew [and Aramaic] grammar and syntax … The syntactical categories for this syntax, therefore, follow the categories of native Arabic grammarians as appropriate, rather than arbitrary or novel linguistic categories. This methodology emulates the study of classical languages for centuries.⁹⁹

I especially found the section on Hebrew accents quite stimulating!¹⁰⁰

Advanced Hebrew grammars

Finally, this next section explores some of the most substantial and advanced reference grammars (for syntax), while illustrating how to use them more effectively in exegesis.

Kautzsch, E., ed. Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar. Second edition. Clarendon Press, 2006.

Frequently cited, this classic is widely considered to be the “Cadillac” of advanced Hebrew grammars.¹⁰¹ Commonly known as Gesenius–Kautzsch–Cowley (GKC) or simply Gesenius, this book has been the standard (advanced) reference grammar since the first German edition came out in 1813.¹⁰²

GKC’s primary strength is its comprehensive survey of the grammar, combined with extensive textual citations that are easily accessible through the indices.¹⁰³

In addition to its grammatical descriptions, GKC also contains a facsimile copy of the Siloam Inscription (with an English translation) alongside an eminently helpful Table of Alphabets which delineates the so-called “Square Script” of the text from Old Hebrew and the like.¹⁰⁴ The value of this historical feature can be illustrated from Ezekiel 9:4:

וַיֹּאמֶר יְהוָה אֵלָו עֲבֹר בְּתוֹךְ הָעִיר בְּתוֹךְ יְרוּשָׁלִָם וְהִתְוִיתָ תָּו עַל־מִצְחוֹת הָאֲנָשִׁים הַנֶּאֱנָחִים וְהַנֶּאֱנָקִים עַל כָּל־הַתּוֹעֵבוֹת הַנַּעֲשׂוֹת בְּתוֹכָהּ

Now the Lord said to him [the man], “Pass over in the midst of the city—yes, in the midst of Jerusalem—and inscribe a mark on the foreheads of all mortals who mourn and lament concerning all the abominations which have been done in her.”¹⁰⁵

While most Hebrew lexicons designate the תו as “mark, sign,” it is also the name of the final letter of the Hebrew alphabet—namely taw. As H. H. Hardy II translates, “Yahweh said to him, ‘Go, throughout the city, Jerusalem, and mark a taw on the foreheads of anyone who groans and sighs over all the abominations being done within it.’”¹⁰⁶ The question thus becomes, which “mark” (taw) is being inscribed or written by the man? Is it the three-sided character of the Aramaic square script (ת) or the cross-like shape of the Old Hebrew script (x)? Two things clarify: (1) Ezekiel’s vision occurred prior to the destruction of Jerusalem, meaning that the taw would have originally been written in the Old Hebrew script,¹⁰⁷ and (2) in Job 31:35, the same lexeme functions as a written mark of ownership, authentication, and protection, much like a signature or ancient seal.¹⁰⁸ GKC’s careful attention to the history of the Hebrew language enables readers to see at a glance an interpretive possibility that might have otherwise remained hidden, thereby providing a valuable background for the New Testament’s otherwise enigmatic imagery of God’s people being “sealed” (Rev 7:2–4; cf. 13:16; 14:9, 11; 20:4).

Waltke, Bruce K., and M. O’Connor. An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax. Eisenbrauns, 1990.

Commonly abbreviated as IBHS, Waltke and O’Connor’s book presents a contemporary linguistics perspective and, what was once cutting edge (and nigh exhaustive) bibliographic information. The table of contents and indices are especially thorough.¹⁰⁹

Tremper Longman III relates,

This volume was the first significant intermediate-to-advanced level grammar published [in English] in many decades. It is magnificently done in terms of both content and production. The section on the verbal system is especially important. This volume is a must-buy for students of Hebrew. It is also good for ministers who have let their Hebrew slip to get back into it.¹¹⁰

Don Parker is likely correct in stating that students should not read IBHS straight through but rather (to gain a quicker exegetical payoff) study the noun case functions and nominal clauses first,¹¹¹ then the verbal system,¹¹² and then, lastly, clauses.¹¹³

Joüon, Paul, and Takamitsu Muraoka. A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew. Subsidia Biblica 27. Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 2006.

Takamitsu Muraoka’s reputation as a linguistic scholar is well established.¹¹⁴ Muraoka’s work was considered by (notable) Hebrew experts at the time to be “the best overall general reference grammar for biblical Hebrew.”¹¹⁵ The work has been translated and significantly expanded from the original French edition. Particularly suited for advanced students and scholars, it is a volume that specialists of Hebrew simply can’t do without!¹¹⁶

The following examples illustrate Muraoka’s approach to grammar (syntax), translation, and exegesis. First, though controversial, Muraoka asserts on the basis of a close (syntactical/grammatical) reading of the preposition(s) involved that Tamar actually became pregnant by Judah for his best interests (see Gen 38:18). To be specific, Muraoka contends:

Tamar probably had heard of God’s promise to Judah’s grandfather, Abraham, that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky or as the sands on the sea beach. However, she saw that Judah was most likely to die with no grandchild. She thought that she must do something about this prospect. The moment she reached that conclusion, she did not lose a single minute.¹¹⁷

By way of another example, Muraoka rather effectively addresses, from my perspective, a thorny issue regarding capital punishment in Genesis 9:6. He (cogently) observes,

ב [beth] is used and not מן [min] because man is here the instrument of justice (the exception to the law which forbids the shedding of blood, vs. 5 [sic]): He who sheds a man’s blood, by (means of) a man shall his blood be shed.¹¹⁸

Lastly, the Hebrew phrase of “going and returning” (הָלוֹךְ וָשׁוֹב) within the Noachian Flood (see Gen 8:3) has oftentimes been used to justify great tidal waves. Instead, Muraoka observes that the infinitive absolute grammatical form should be employed in a “figurative sense of movement in time and hence continuation.”¹¹⁹ Thus, it is best rendered as “and the waters receded in a continuous [uninterrupted] fashion.”¹²⁰ The same grammatical phenomena (infinitive, etc.) apply to the story of the raven sent forth by Noah who “kept flying back and forth repeatedly” (Gen 8:7).

Van der Merwe, Christo H. J., Jacobus A. Naudé, and Jan J. Kroeze. A Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar. Second edition. Bloomsbury, 2017.

This fully revised edition of A Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar (BHRG) serves as a user-friendly and up-to-date source of detailed information on the morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of biblical Hebrew verbs, nouns, and other word classes (prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs, modal words, negatives, focus particles, discourse markers, interrogatives, and interjections).

Incorporating the most important developments in modern linguistics, the second edition of BHRG is accessible enough for exegetes who have completed an introductory (or intermediate) course in biblical Hebrew while offering sufficient depth for advanced exegetes, scholars, and translators. In my view, not only is it one of the most linguistically sophisticated and accessible Hebrew reference grammars available, but also, in many ways, it remains my first pick for all students to read in its entirety.¹²¹

Honorable mention: Brockelmann, Carl. Hebräische Syntax. Neukirchener, 2004.

Brockelmann’s strength is that he does not limit himself to the Masoretic Text (MT) but includes examples from Ben Sira and epigraphic materials (such as the Zadokite Fragments, manuscripts from Qumran, the Moabite Stone, and the Kilamuwa and Karatepe inscriptions, for instance), giving a broader view of Canaanite–Hebrew dialects.¹²² Brockelmann’s sections on the numerals and prepositions, in particular, are “especially good” alongside, one notes, the use of emphatic lamedh [ל], the way in which climactic conditions are expressed, and the notes on ellipse[s].¹²³

One added bonus of using Brockelmann (for certain users) is that it will help them interact more effectively with the German language (a daunting yet oft-required task for many anglophone terminal degree students).¹²⁴

Special mentions

Although not Hebrew grammars, the following are worth mention for those interested in improving their grasp of Hebrew grammar and syntax.

Noonan, Benjamin J. Advances in the Study of Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic: New Insights for Reading the Old Testament. Zondervan, 2020.

While space precludes an exhaustive analysis, all students of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament should consider perusing this work. Noonan offers a one-of-a-kind (pedagogically sensitive) compendium to the multifaceted issues of the academic community—it is truly exemplary.¹²⁵

“Semitic cross-training”

We also do well to acknowledge the value of learning other Semitic languages as a way to improve one’s grasp of the Hebrew. It cannot be overstated, perhaps, how much value comes by learning Aramaic, arguably the most neglected of all biblical languages.¹²⁶ It can also be an excellent way to improve your Hebrew grammar—particularly through the comparison/contrast model.¹²⁷ Even the Targums themselves can play a role in improving one’s understanding of Hebrew syntax.¹²⁸

It also behooves me to mention how much diving into cognate languages, such as Ugaritic and Akkadian, can bolster one’s overarching understanding of Hebrew as a Semitic language within the context of the ancient Near East.¹²⁹

The goal, however, is not to accumulate more languages but to cultivate an increased awareness of how language communicates meaning so as to gain a clearer, more exact, and more persuasive understanding of God’s redemptive message, the gospel.¹³⁰

Conclusion

No grammar can do everything. Some resources prioritize comprehensiveness or accessibility while others engage more intentionally with specific methodologies (such as linguistic theory). The best resource depends on where the student currently is in their journey and where they want to go. In the end, exegesis (and more exegesis!) remains the surest foundation for faithful research and life-changing engagement with Scripture. Ad fontes!

Share your thoughts

What Hebrew grammars do you turn to most? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

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• Best Biblical Greek Lexicons & Dictionaries: Your Complete Guide
• How to Teach the Languages—& Actually Help Students Learn
• The Best Septuagint (LXX) Translations in Logos: A Comparison Guide

Hermeneutics is the art and science of interpretation. Most often, in my experience, the word is used to describe interpreting one specific book, as that book presents a wholly unique set of interpretive challenges. That book is, of course, the Bible. Good hermeneutics is good Bible study.

And what is good Bible study? It is, to paraphrase Kevin Vanhoozer, right readers reading rightly.

And that means hermeneutics is impossible to codify completely. There is a science to it, but Bible interpretation involves readers. It’s humans acting. It’s flesh-and-blood (flesh in both major biblical senses) subjects living in specific circumstances, asking specific questions, bringing specific sets of background beliefs, listening to God speak through other humans. And it is therefore, at minimum, as complex as humans are.

Proper biblical hermeneutics is an endless pursuit. Every Bible reader who pursues it will do so until he knows even as also he is known (1 Cor 13:12).

What is the difference between hermeneutics and exegesis?

Bible study means observing, analyzing, and labeling not only

1. various features of the scriptural texts we are reading, but also
2. successful and unsuccessful acts of communication more generally.

Category 1 is exegesis. Category 2 is what we call hermeneutics.

Exegesis and hermeneutics are observable in nature because human communication is part of nature, as it has been given to us by nature’s God. But these two observable things are like colors that blend on a spectrum. My way of distinguishing them is both a little trick of my own invention and something of an attempt to describe the way I see biblical studies practitioners using the two words.

Exegesis, in my understanding, can helpfully be boiled down to the set of grammatical, literary, and other labels we give to observable features of human communication. Perhaps also one might include the methods or steps of interpretation that are commonly taught to Bible students. That’s exegesis. It’s a word that tends to get used only to describe the most careful acts of interpretation, and that tends to pertain to religion and law.

Hermeneutics, in my understanding, is probably the broader category. It’s the theory that overarches our acts of exegesis, the theory that tries to explain successful human communication.

Why is hermeneutics important for interpreting the Bible?

And that means that a hermeneutic of some kind is essential for interpreting Scripture because, above all, we want God’s communication to us to be successful. If the Bible is God’s word (and it is), and if we are both fallen and finite (and we are), then one of the acts of redemption which God’s Spirit needs to perform in all Bible readers is that of guiding us into the truths he has revealed in his written Word.

This is not an easy task, because God in his wisdom made us not just finite but awfully and subtly so. And God in his plan allowed us to become not just fallen but—the same: awfully fallen, subtly fallen. It’s an amazing work of God when someone becomes a right reader; it’s hard for man, empowered by God’s Spirit, to put in the time to read rightly.

And the subject, the reader, is not the only difficulty in the hermeneutical task. The Bible is a big book and a complex one. It is the only book I’m aware of that is considered by anyone to be one book despite containing, in fact, sixty-six separate books—books written in two major languages (Hebrew and Greek, with some Aramaic sprinkled in) over the course of 1,500 years.

And those “books” come in all kinds of genres, some of which we don’t really use anymore. We tell historical narratives like both testaments do, but we don’t encounter much apocalyptic literature like Revelation in our day-to-day lives. We have letters (do people still write letters?), but the semi-open letter, the public letter of the type Paul wrote to various churches—do we encounter such things very often?

The genres come with characteristic literary conventions that we don’t use either. One of the most obvious is the parallelism that is endemic to Hebrew poetry: rhyming thoughts instead of rhyming sounds.

The Bible also tells a story in which God is openly and explicitly advancing a great plan of redemption, and therefore readers cannot simply rearrange the books or chapters of Scripture—like the Qur’an can be rearranged—and expect to catch the meaning of what they read. Bible readers have to know pretty much at all times where they are in the story the Bible is telling about our world, or they’re likely to misunderstand.

How does hermeneutics impact Bible study?

Permit me just a little more theorizing before I get practical. My mind never stops turning on this usually implicit element of exegesis: I think we all necessarily bring into our Bible reading our own general feel for what language is and what successful communication entails.

Not all communication is successful—like the time I told my church’s youth group my one hilarious true story about my clever/stupid comment to a border guard. They all just stared at me. Nary a titter was heard among them. Or the many times I have talked to tech support in a foreign land, and the polite person trying to help me got my tech problem completely backwards.¹³¹

In real life, whenever you can, you adapt to communication failures. You repeat yourself, explain yourself. You provide more background information. And at a certain point, you gain some evidence that your act of communication is successful. Maybe it’s a glint in the other person’s eye or an answer they give to your question or the way in which they anticipate what you’re going to say next.

The authors of Scripture are dead. They can’t shake or nod their heads while you explain back to them what you think they just said. But the Bible is a big book, and if it coheres as a single divine message the way it claims (this I believe with all my heart, Lord help my unbelief!), then good and diligent and wide Bible reading will start to provide some of the same confirmation that good real-life communication does. Paul and James will start to nod at one another; Moses and Peter, too. The story of the New Testament will reveal itself to be the only possible completion to the story of the Old.

What is hermeneutics, and why does it matter? Kevin Vanhoozer explains on Logos Live.

How does hermeneutics shape the way we read the Bible?

I am no specialist, but I have learned from figures in hermeneutics and linguistics to assume a high degree of cooperative intent whenever someone talks to me or writes to me.¹³² I am safe in assuming that the sender wants me to receive and understand the sender’s message. I can also assume that the writers of Scripture were not dummies, that they were internally consistent as authors (Paul in 1 Corinthians won’t contradict Paul in 1 Timothy), and that—because of inspiration—they were consistent with one another.

So the most important practical step I can take to employ good hermeneutics is to get a good and accurate big picture of the Bible. As I have said before, I say now again: The Bible is the story of what God is doing to glorify himself by redeeming his fallen creation. If I come into my Bible reading with that basic expectation, one I didn’t see with real clarity until I was in my early twenties, I will have a place to hang each hat I encounter in Scripture.

• The historical narratives line up reasonably neatly along the timeline of biblical chronology.¹³³
• The wisdom sections of Scripture hang on the creation and fall that constitute the foundation of the Bible’s story: Proverbs can tell me, for example, that in God’s created world things usually work like so; Ecclesiastes can tell me that in this fallen world, things don’t always work out the way they were designed to.
• The Gospels—I was just saying this to my adult Sunday school class yesterday—can now have truly meaningful handoffs from the Old Testament story. I’m embarrassed at how little of this I saw as a young man when I read Mary’s Magnificat before Jesus (Luke 1:46–55) and Zechariah’s prophecy before John (Luke 1:68–79). These two figures believed that they were not seeing God starting a new story but continuing a very old one.

I could most certainly go on, touching every portion of Scripture. If there is just one hermeneutical principle I think most naturally (a) arises out of Scripture and (b) becomes a lens through which to view Scripture, it is that the Bible tells one story.

Is hermeneutics necessary for everyday Bible reading?

I am going to have some kind of big-picture expectation for the Bible. It’s a rulebook. It’s the product of the work of a bunch of drunk monks in the dark ages (someone said this to me once). It’s a physical talisman. It’s a communication of God to my spiritual leaders and not to me. It’s a set of moral stories. It’s a political symbol. Et cetera and more cetera. The Bible is, properly, none of those things (though it contains some of them).

Read the Bible like a rulebook and you’re going to be awfully confused by the judicial killings of the Amalekites by Israel.

Read the Bible like a set of moral stories in which the good guys are GOOD and the bad guys are BAD, and you’re going to be awfully confused by every character who gets any screen time in the biblical movie—excepting Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

Treat the Bible like a physical talisman or a physical symbol, and you won’t read it at all. To actually read it would be a category error.

Literally every day I read the Bible, I employ a hermeneutic, a basic set of expectations that the one story of Scripture will cohere. Without some recourse to that big picture, I am lost.

What are the main schools of biblical hermeneutics, and how might they lead to different practices of Bible study?

Good Christian people do tell the one story of Scripture a little differently from one another. I recently gave a lecture to a seminary class I teach in which I quoted ten different attempts at summarizing the whole Bible. All were different, though they divided into recognizable categories.

I think that probably the most impactful differences that you’ll see in evangelical Protestant hermeneutics¹³⁴ are probably best summarized by the title of a book that is now a generation old: John S. Feinberg, ed., Continuity and Discontinuity: Perspectives on the Relationship Between the Old and New Testaments (Crossway, 1988).¹³⁵ Christians who, to my fallen and finite eyes, sure seem to accord equal reverence to Scripture and to give equal effort in reading it do nonetheless differ on how much continuity they see between God’s methods of dealing with Israel and his methods of dealing with the church. Emphasize continuity between the testaments, and pretty soon, very practically, you’ll be baptizing babies—because the church can be expected to have a covenant sign like circumcision for Israel. Emphasize discontinuity between the testaments, and pretty soon, very practically, you’ll be baptizing only believers—because in the New Covenant of which (gentile) Christians are a part, all members know the Lord (Jer 31:31–34).¹³⁶.

Personally, I have concluded that I am not smart enough to pick The One Hermeneutic to Rule Them All. Faithful Christians seem to be reasonably stable and faithful in their various dispensationalisms (classic and progressive), their various covenant theologies (Presbyterian and Reformed Baptist), and their various mediating positions (Stephen Wellum’s progressive covenantalism, for example). I get pretty nervous when dispensationalists of an older stripe want to relegate the Sermon on the Mount to a future era and cut a fine distinction between “the kingdom of God” and “the kingdom of heaven”; and I get pretty nervous when covenant theologians want to so wrap God’s old covenant promises into his new covenant ones that Israel seems to get lost in the shuffle. (I suppose I also get nervous about the Christians who want to throw all other whole-Bible hermeneutics into the stupidity bin and proclaim their big-picture to be The One Ring.) Most of the rest of the time, however, I forget which kind of interpreter I’m reading. A whole-Bible hermeneutic is important, even essential, but the vast majority of the Bible reads the same at the granular level from each perspective.

Brief excursus: Here are the books that seem to get cited most often from each of the various whole-Bible hermeneutical frameworks:

• Classic dispensationalist: Alva McLain, The Greatness of the Kingdom: An Inductive Study of the Kingdom of God (BMH, 1974).¹³⁷
• Progressive dispensationalist: Darrel Bock and Craig Blaising, Progressive Dispensationalism (Baker, 2000).
• Progressive covenantalism: Stephen Wellum and Peter Gentry, Kingdom Through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the Covenants, 2nd ed. (Crossway, 2018).
• Reformed Baptist covenant theology: Pascal Denault, The Distinctiveness of Baptist Covenant Theology, rev. ed. (Solid Ground Christian Books, 2013).
• Covenant theology: O. Palmer Robertson, The Christ of the Covenants (P&R, 1980).

How do hermeneutical frameworks shape theological conclusions?

At the level of day-to-day Bible reading, I don’t know that the various major hermeneutical framework options I just mentioned make as much difference as their progenitors insist—though I appear to have a minority view and may need to climb out of the stupidity bin. But at the level of theological conclusions, and the confessions and denominations that arise therefrom, these frameworks most certainly have practical ramifications. I do wonder sometimes which is the chicken and which is the egg, hermeneutical framework or theological conclusions? If that were clear, maybe evangelicals could declare a winner and move on.

I’d rather put it this way: Major frameworks embody major tendencies or values. And they’re major because they are indeed found in Scripture. At the highest level of abstraction that I can muster in this redheaded brain, I’d say that paedobaptist covenant theologies tend to value and emphasize the corporate nature of the people of God (hopefully without forgetting the individual); dispensationalist theologies tend to value and emphasize the individual necessity of conversion (hopefully without forgetting the church these individuals form, the one Christ is building). These values can go to seed: Presbyterianism can end up with “halfway covenants” and mixed multitudes; Baptists can end up being so independently minded that they are no earthly good.

Wherever you enter “the hermeneutical spiral”¹³⁸—be it while looking at the forest of the whole Bible or the trees of one biblical passage—I’d just urge you to let both your big picture and your details be correctable by more Bible reading. I think that this kind of humble correctability by the Bible as your standard is the most important thing Protestantism offers to the world, and I suggest that the rise of mediating views between dispensationalism and covenant theology may indicate that there is still a center to be found.

What can I do to become a good Bible interpreter?

In addition to applying a the-Bible-tells-one-story expectation to all your Bible reading, the most practical step you could take to make sure you’re doing proper hermeneutics (exegesis and not eisegesis) is to enter into conversation with good interpreters who can both model the art and explain the science. Hopefully your own pastor is such a one.

It’s the chicken and the egg again, of course: How can you know what counts as a good interpreter until you are capable of forming good interpretive judgments yourself? That is actually a huge question with many possible answers. Pray, of course. Read your Bible, of course. And I’d add, look for fruit at the broadest possible level. Which of the major Christian traditions or denominations or tribes or groups has, in your experience, produced people who know and obey their Bibles and love God and neighbor?

A leading hermeneutical light, Kevin Vanhoozer, has said,

My ultimate concern … is with reforming churches … so that they become the kind of reading cultures that can form readers to inhabit the strange new world that has been brought into being by the gospel of Jesus Christ.¹³⁹

When you enter the exegetical conversation, you are going to land in one or more “reading cultures.” Look around, and keep looking around to see if those cultures are producing good fruit.

Do theological commitments rule out honest exegesis?

One biblical studies academic, a former evangelical, said recently that the conservative biblical scholarship I both turn and contribute to, the kind of scholarship I’ve paid good money for in Logos over twenty-five years, is a massive act of self-deception. It is, he said, “a discursive creation of American evangelicalism.” He argued that if a biblical scholar signs a statement of faith, his scholarship is suspect. Conservative biblical scholars, he says, are “incentivized to lie to you” because the conclusions they draw—about the meaning of Isaiah 53 or the number of temple cleansings described in the Gospels or the author of Hebrews or any number of scholarly and exegetical questions—are at least partly predetermined by already codified evangelical beliefs. Unless someone can follow the evidence wherever it leads, says this PhD in biblical studies, he is no biblical scholar. His exegesis is actually eisegesis.

I’m tempted to reply acidly: So exegesis is what we—in this case, unbelieving scholars who are not bound by orthodox statements of faith¹⁴⁰—say the Bible means, not what evangelicals say it means? But these matters are serious, and I won’t respond acidly. I will say this: I am a conservative evangelical Protestant who was ordained according to a doctrinal statement and teaches for multiple evangelical institutions, all of which have doctrinal statements. Not only do I resent being told that I am incentivized to lie; I regard it as part of my duty to God himself to treat my sixty-six books the way Jesus treated his (then) thirty-nine: “The Scriptures cannot be broken.” I stand with Augustine, who said many centuries ago in a letter to the famous Bible translator Jerome that the Bible cannot err—even though manuscripts, translations, and interpreters can.¹⁴¹

I am unwilling to say that this skeptical ex-vangelical YouTuber scores no points, because interpreters can indeed err, and I am the chief of misreaders. I also grant that I am influenced by various “interpretive communities,” and that mine—the Great Tradition, or lower-case “o” orthodoxy, as embodied in Reformation Protestantism—lacks a perfect God’s-eye view of our own exegesis. We lack it now, anyway. I feel certain that Bible reading is part of the “everything” that Christ will reconcile to himself (Col 1:20).

Do you know what I would like to be my most eloquent argument against online skepticism that good scriptural exegesis can actually and rigorously hear God’s speech in Scripture? You. Christians. Pastors and other Bible nerds. Logos users. Go use this tool I kind of helped make, Logos, to get meaning from Scripture. Let your exegesis guide and correct your exegesis—and then guide and correct you. Let God’s Word, carefully heard, form you into God-loving salt and neighbor-loving light.

Sometimes skeptics get to me: Isn’t pervasive interpretive pluralism¹⁴² an observable fact of our polarized church? Yes, it is. But then I go read Scripture again, and I feel and believe and know that I can’t blame God for this state of affairs. We humans found ways to misunderstand—actually to twist to the point of denying—“You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen 2:16–17). Our hermeneutics failed us when that was pretty much the whole of the ethical section of the “Bible.” Surely falling into sin all those centuries ago didn’t make us better Bible interpreters.

Our fallenness and finiteness mean we will never escape different conclusions about Scripture until that day when we know even as also we are known (1 Cor 13:12). The wheat of good hermeneutics and the tares of bad continually grow together. But take your one, five, or ten talents and invest them in Bible study, and see what fruit—some thirty, some sixty, some a hundredfold—might grow till the end of the age.

Conclusion

I have a lot of thoughts about Bible interpretation. Time would fail me to tell of the historical and cultural contexts of Scripture, common hermeneutical mistakes, and other juicy topics. There are just so many important questions regarding exegesis and hermeneutics. What role should theology play in exegesis? (Some!) Does the Holy Spirit guide exegesis? (Some!)

I think the most fundamental things I want to say about biblical hermeneutics are the following:

1. You are a subject. You will never stop being one. Being a right reader—that is, loving God and neighbor—is essential to reading rightly.
2. You will have some kind of big picture of the Bible, so it might as well be good.
3. The Bible is like every other book in that it must be read straightforwardly according to the normal, expected senses of words and phrases and idioms current at the time—being a good communicator and listener more generally should help you with Bible reading. The Bible is unlike every other book in that its most important Author knew the future and sent his Son to die for your sins.

Share your thoughts

How does hermeneutics shape Bible study? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

Mark Ward’s suggested reading

Related content

• What Is Hermeneutics? | Kevin Vanhoozer
• All about Hermeneutics: A Guide to Interpreting God’s Word Faithfully
• Everything Boils Down to Hermeneutics
• Exegesis vs. Eisegesis: Are You Reading Scripture or Reading into It?
• Theological Method: How Should We Do Theology?

The living God is and always has been a missionary God. God’s passion for his glory to be known and enjoyed by all nations is at the heart of this missionary God. This missionary heart is most clearly revealed in the gospel: Seeing his people in darkness, the Son of God left the glory of heaven to walk among us. Jesus Christ came to our place, embraced our nature, spoke our language, and engaged with our culture so that he could make the glory of God known and knowable among the nations.

Likewise, the people of God are, and always have been, a missionary people. Like our missionary God, we are called to share God’s heart for our neighbors and for the nations so that they might see and enjoy his glory.

In our local churches, we often see people develop a heart to share Christ with their neighbors (though that can itself be a challenge). But how do we also help them cultivate a burden for God’s glory to be known among the nations? What follows are eight practices to help build cross-cultural missions into your church’s DNA. The aim is to expand our people’s vision so they can cultivate a heart to reach not only their neighbors with the gospel, but also the nations.

1. Ground missions in worship

John Piper begins his excellent book on missions by saying, “Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t.”¹⁴³ God is worthy of the worship of every human being on the planet. Millions are not giving him the glory and honor due his name, so missions exists to proclaim to the nations, “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised” (Ps 96:4).

As the Apostle Paul walked around Athens, he experienced deep distress as he witnessed the people giving glory to idols rather than to the one true God (Acts 17:16). This burden for God to be known among the nations drove him to preach in the marketplace and later in the lecture hall of Tyrannus. As we help our people become more God-centered in their thinking about missions, perhaps they will come to share this burden for God to receive the honor he is due from all the peoples of the world.

2. Teach people missiology

Paul’s missionary task included planting churches that would continue the work of local evangelism in their surrounding areas. But local church evangelism is not the same as cross-cultural missions. Missions is what drove Paul away from established churches to keep pressing on to preach the gospel where Christ had not been named (Rom 15:20).

Evangelism is the outreach we do in our own home culture and language. Cross-cultural missions involves moving beyond our own culture and people to engage ethnically or culturally different peoples with the aim of establishing and strengthening local churches that can, in turn, evangelize their own people.

To help your people appreciate the distinct value of missions, teach them the difference between evangelism and missions, as well as missiological concepts like “people groups” and “unreached peoples.” The Lausanne Movement defines a people group as “the largest group within which the gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance.” An unreached people group is described as “a people group with no indigenous community of believing Christians able to evangelize that people group.”¹⁴⁴

When people understand these terms, they can better appreciate the church’s work of sending people into their local area for evangelism and sending others across cultures to plant new churches among unreached peoples. A clear understanding of these terms will bring clearer definition to the remaining work of proclaiming the gospel among all the peoples of the world.

3. Make missions your mission

Our church mission states that we exist

1. to glorify the God of the gospel,
2. to grow in our understanding and enjoyment of the gospel, and
3. to go into our city and the world with the gospel.

We intentionally crafted this statement to keep before our church both the call to local evangelism and the responsibility to take the gospel to the whole world.

Whether this same commitment is expressed in your mission statement or embedded within your church’s core values, it is vital to state clearly that part of your church’s vision is to send and support missionaries who will cross cultural boundaries to proclaim Christ among all peoples.

Deepen your understanding of God’s missionary heart.
Ed Stetzer unpacks missions from Genesis to the Great Commission.

4. Build missions into your structures

Create ways to keep world mission at the forefront of your church’s thinking.

In our church, every monthly leaders meeting includes a brief update on our missionaries, highlighting how they are doing and any specific prayer needs they might have. We have a missionary policy incorporated into our constitutional documents, a missionary secretary, and a missionary committee that oversees our missions involvement. We also hold regular missionary prayer meetings, often inviting representatives from mission agencies to share about their work so that we can learn about and pray for different aspects of God’s work around the world. In addition, we set aside an annual Missions Sunday to focus on a particular country or people group and to hear from someone serving among them.

Keeping focus on world mission will not happen on its own. We have to be intentional about building missions into our church’s structures and rhythms.

5. Pray about missions regularly

In nearly all of our Sunday services, we include a segment called “Prayers for the World and the Church.” This is our time of intercessory prayer. Each week, a different church member is invited to lead. We encourage them to pray for a cross-cultural mission concern, a national issue affecting the wider church or society, and a local matter related to the needs of our own church family. In this way, our congregation is regularly reminded that our prayers should extend from our immediate context to the ends of the earth.

Jesus said, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Matt 9:37–38). In an effort to obey this command, we have, for the past five years, adopted an unreached people group as a particular focus for prayer. Working alongside a local mission agency, we produce a short booklet introducing the people group and outlining their background, challenges, and prayer needs. We then invite church members to sign up for a month of focused prayer. This simple but intentional practice has helped foster a growing awareness of the spiritual needs of the nations and a deeper commitment to praying for the spread of the gospel among those who have little or no access to it.

6. Inspire through biographies

Missionary biographies can be a powerful way to stir and sustain a church’s passion for world missions.

Recently, one of our church members led a summer book club based on Elisabeth Elliot’s Shadow of the Almighty, her account of her husband Jim’s life and missionary work among the Auca people of Ecuador. Participants read the first half of the book, met together to discuss it, and are now reading the second half, with another discussion planned in the coming months. Simple initiatives like this can help bring to life the realities, challenges, and joys of missionary service. Leaders should look for opportunities to regularly recommend missionary biographies, whether through brief book reviews or personal recommendations.

From time to time, it may also be beneficial to devote an entire teaching session to the life of a missionary whose example can both instruct and inspire. Such biographies not only educate believers about God’s work in different times and places but also serve to broaden a church’s vision for the advance of the gospel. Recently, I preached a biographical message on Adoniram Judson, drawing on Courtney Anderson’s excellent biography, To the Golden Shore, which recounts Judson’s remarkable commitment to take the gospel to Burma despite immense hardship.

Give your congregation the tools to explore God’s heart for missions. Get Logos for your entire church.

7. Launch short-term missions teams

Short-term mission trips can be an excellent way both to encourage missionaries and give church members firsthand exposure to cross-cultural gospel ministry. Such trips should be planned carefully, with the needs and priorities of the host missionaries firmly in view, but when undertaken thoughtfully, they can be a tremendous blessing to everyone involved. In our own church, many people have returned from these experiences with a deeper understanding of God’s work among the nations and a greater passion for global mission.

8. Be excited about missions yourself

Someone once told me, “Your children will become excited about the things that excite you.” The same principle often applies in the life of the church. Congregations tend to become passionate about the things their leaders are passionate about.

If pastors and church leaders want to see a greater commitment to cross-cultural mission among their people, they must first cultivate that passion in their own hearts. We cannot expect our congregations to value the nations if we ourselves give little thought to God’s global purposes.

Perhaps one way to respond to this essay is to ask the Lord to deepen your own burden for the advance of the gospel among the nations. Pray that he would enlarge your vision of his glory and renew your passion to see Christ proclaimed where he is not yet known.

May a genuine passion for God’s worldwide mission shape the hearts of those we lead, creating a missionary vision that bears fruit for years to come!

Share your thoughts

How can a church foster a culture of missions? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

Steve Auld’s suggested resources

• Roseveare, Helen. Living Sacrifice: Willing to be Whittled as an Arrow. Christian Focus, 2007.

Related content

• A Theology of Mission | Ed Stetzer
• 5 Steps to Align Your Church’s Theology & Ministry Philosophy
• 5 Steps to Starting a Prayer Ministry in Your Church
• 5 Ways to Motivate & Train Students in Evangelism
• Are You Making These 7 Common Evangelism Mistakes?

Some days you want to open the app and just read. Other days you want all your study tools spread across the screen. And most of us have started a reading plan with good intentions, only to lose track by week 2.

Version 54 (v54) lets the mobile app work the way you do, builds a Reading Plan around whatever you’re wrestling with, and gives you a little encouragement to keep coming back to God’s Word. Plus, a preview of Study Assistant’s brand-new research mode is on the way for your hardest study questions.

Watch the update

Prefer a video walkthrough? Product manager and longtime Logos user Mark Barnes will share everything you need to know about this update in a live session. There’s even time for a Q&A at the end, so stick around with your burning questions.

Sign up for the video walkthrough on October 14 at 10 a.m. (PST), or catch the replay.

Highlights at a glance

1. A preview of research mode: A more advanced way to work through big questions with Study Assistant.
2. Your mobile app, set up your way: Open a book and start reading. Want your tabs and layouts? They’re one switch away.
3. A reading plan for whatever’s on your heart: Type a topic and Logos will build a plan around it.
4. Streaks that forgive a busy week: Watch your reading streak grow, and repair it when you catch up.
5. Your next book, easier to find: The store is closer at hand on mobile, desktop, and web.

1. A preview of research mode

Some questions require more digging to answer. Maybe you want to trace the Sabbath through Scripture and see where theological traditions disagree, analyze the reasons behind the different translations of Deuteronomy 32:8–9, or get a breakdown of what commentaries say about a verse you’re studying.

Research mode is a new way to use Study Assistant, built especially for questions like these. It plans how to research your question and works through your library much like a researcher would. It checks your top Bible, commentaries, dictionaries, and lexicons, keeps reading when a book looks helpful, and changes course when it finds a new angle.

Just like with Study Assistant, every answer comes with citations, so you can check each claim against the source and then go dig in those sources for yourself.

A preview of research mode is available now. It’s an early look, so expect it to keep improving. Once it’s fully developed, research mode will be a Logos Max feature, but this preview will be open for anyone to try.

2. Your mobile app, set up your way

In the Logos mobile app, tabs and layouts let you keep several books and tools open at once. Some people build their whole study routine around them. Others just want to open a Bible and read.

Starting with v54, by default the mobile app turns off tabs and layouts to keep things simple to use.

If you love your tabs, nothing is lost. When you first open v54, you’ll be asked whether you want to turn them back on. Or you can go to the More menu and flip the Tabs and layouts toggle. Every tab and layout you had open before the update will be waiting exactly as you left it, and you can switch the setting on or off whenever you like.

Want more tips on setting up your mobile workspace? Take a look at this article.

3. A reading plan for whatever’s on your heart or mind

Logos already has a library of ready-made reading plans, but sometimes what you want isn’t on the list.

Now you can enter a topic in your own words, like “Passages that address anxiety for 20 days,” and Logos will automatically build a plan around it with a title for each session and each passage to read. (Plans can be up to 31 days long.)

Before you commit, preview the whole plan to see what you’ll be reading. If it’s not quite right, describe what you’d like changed, such as more sessions or a narrower focus, and the plan will update.

You’ll find it in the Reading Plan Creation wizard, either in the Find a plan search box on the first screen or under the new By topic option when you choose what to read.

Build a topical reading plan

Those not subscribed can create one free topical plan of up to seven sessions each month.

4. Streaks that forgive a busy week

When you finish your readings on time, a streak shows how many you’ve completed in a row. You’ll see it on your reading plan card on the Dashboard, in the Reading Plan Manager, and on each plan’s details page.

Streaks count sessions finished on or before their scheduled day, so a weekly plan builds a streak just as well as a daily one.

Life happens, though. Fall behind and your streak breaks. But once you catch up, open the menu on any past session and choose Mark as if read on time to repair the gap and pick your streak back up. Read it in your paperback Bible that morning? This is for you too.

The point isn’t a perfect record. It’s to see how you kept coming back to God’s Word, even after a week that didn’t go as planned.

See your reading plans

5. Your next book, easier to find

Sometimes the book that would help you most with a passage is one you don’t own yet. This update puts the store closer to where you study to help you find the resources you need.

In the mobile app:

• Tap the new Store button at the top of Today and Study, or find Store pinned in Study.
• Switch between your Library and the Store right from the library screen.
• When you search your library, a note at the bottom of the results points you to matching books in the Store.
• Books you already own no longer show up in the Store, so you’re only browsing what’s new to you.

On desktop and web:

• On desktop, the Store now opens in a panel alongside your work, just like it already does on web.
• Books in your preferred language now show up first, then original-language resources like Greek and Hebrew lexicons.

More updates

Want to see all the under-the-hood updates and bug fixes? Take a look at the technical release notes. Reach out to our support team if you need help.

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Few would dispute that all students of biblical languages must prioritize learning vocabulary.¹⁴⁵ As Jennifer E. Noonan asserts, “One of the most essential parts of language fluency in general, and reading fluency in particular, is vocabulary acquisition.”¹⁴⁶ Incontrovertibly, aside from the basic necessity of mastering the fundamentals of grammar (including syntax!),¹⁴⁷ there are few things that students of the biblical languages require more than cultivating a high degree of proficiency in vocabulary acquisition and retention. Miles V. Van Pelt and Gary D. Pratico poignantly state,

Few things will hinder a student’s proficiency and enjoyment of a language more than an inadequate stock of basic vocabulary. In fact, those who would minimize the issue of vocabulary memorization will almost certainly struggle with proficiency in the language and find it difficult to fully realize the benefits of studying and reading Hebrew. Stated plainly, vocabulary memorization is vitally important.¹⁴⁸

To that end, this guide covers some of the best resources for effectively building one’s Hebrew vocabulary.¹⁴⁹

1. Landes, George M. Building Your Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary: Learning Words by Frequency and Cognate. Society of Biblical Literature Resources for Biblical Study 41. Society of Biblical Literature, 2001.

This volume is actually an extensive revision of Landes’s 1961 Scribner volume, entitled A Student’s Vocabulary of Biblical Hebrew. Expressly designed with the uninitiated in mind, this book shows which words occur the most frequently within the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.

It contains three lists and two appendices:

• List I: Verbal Roots Occurring Ten or More Times, and Their Most Frequently Attested Nominal and Other Cognates
• List II: Nominal and Other Cognates Occurring Ten or More Times, with Their Less Frequently Attested Verbal Roots
• List III: Nouns and Other Words Without Extant Verbal Roots in the Hebrew Bible
• Appendix I: Proper and Place Names That Occur Seventy or More Times in the Hebrew Bible
• Appendix II: The Forms and Meanings of the Hebrew Pronominal Suffixes

I found List I (verbal roots) to be exceptionally helpful. As a commenter, under the alias “Logosed,” astutely observes,

[S]ince Hebrew is a language that depends far more substantially on roots than, for example, does Greek, in the long run it is much better to learn Hebrew words by root than by frequency. This way one can see how Hebrew words are formed, and how they relate semantically to one another. One also gets into the habit of learning groups of words rather than individual words. With the other approach [i.e., arranging words by frequency] one may never learn that one word is related to another. If one learns roots, one is also less likely to mistranslate a word that looks like another word. If one knows that this root only has two or three words based on it, one can know that word X cannot mean Y.

Vocabularies are kept to a manageable size. For example, List I has 52 “vocabularies” (usually averaging between 20 to 25 words or so), which span seven parts:

1. verbs occurring more than 500 times (vocabularies 1–4),
2. verbs occurring 200–499 times (vocabularies 5–8),
3. verbs occurring 100–199 times (vocabularies 9–15),
4. verbs occurring 70–99 times (vocabularies 16–20),
5. verbs occurring 50–69 times (vocabularies 21–24),
6. verbs occurring 25–49 times (vocabularies 25–36), and
7. verbs occurring 10–24 times (vocabularies 37–52).

Glosses take their cues from the Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT).¹⁵⁰ Extensive cross-references document where words appear frequently with different meanings.

There is also a helpful outline of Hebrew grammar concerning “How Hebrew Words Are Formed”¹⁵¹ which is mostly derived from Waltke and O’Connor’s superb volume, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (Eisenbrauns, 1990), alongside some useful tips¹⁵² on how one can best leverage mnemonics (making various associations in one’s mind).¹⁵³ Landes also recommends color coding—would that more publishing houses/educators leveraged his recommendations!¹⁵⁴

2. Mitchel, Larry A. A Student’s Vocabulary for Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic: Frequency Lists with Definitions, Pronunciation Guide, and Index. Updated edition. Zondervan, 2017.

Initially published in 1984, for over forty years Mitchel’s work has been a trusted aid for students learning biblical Hebrew and Aramaic.

The book has six major sections. Five are devoted to Hebrew and one to Aramaic:

1. Hebrew words occurring more than 500 times,
2. Hebrew words occurring between 500 and 200 times,
3. Hebrew words occurring between 199 and 100 times,
4. Hebrew words occurring between 99 and 50 times,
5. Hebrew words occurring between 49 and 10 times, and
6. Aramaic vocabulary.

Within each major section are smaller subsections that are also divided according to word frequency. For instance, section 1 has a total of 106 words that are divided into four smaller subsections, each of which contain between 25 and 28 words. Each entry provides concise technical information, including parts of speech and basic meaning, while alphabetical indices allow for quick reference.

My primary reservation is that the updated edition still relies heavily on William L. Holladay’s A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 1972).¹⁵⁵ That said, the definitions remain adequate for most uses.

Due to its affordability, conciseness, and ease of use, it remains a great resource for beginners.¹⁵⁶

Logos currently sells the first edition (1984).

3. Pleins, J. David, and Jonathan Homrighausen. Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary by Conceptual Categories: A Student’s Guide to Nouns in the Old Testament. Zondervan, 2017.

Pleins and Homrighausen offer a distinctive approach to Hebrew vocabulary acquisition and retention by organizing nouns according to semantic fields rather than frequency. The authors argue that vocabulary is learned most effectively through meaningful associations. Accordingly, this volume is designed to help students build those connections instead of relying primarily on rote memorization.¹⁵⁷

The book is arranged around four broad categories—the created, human, social, and constructed orders—with numerous related subcategories beneath each.¹⁵⁸ As one reviewer notes, “this book has an accessible format, and a pragmatic approach (e.g., short lists, arranged alphabetically or in another way, e.g., ‘Human Anatomy’ from head to toe).”¹⁵⁹

Entries present the Hebrew word in a clear, well-sized font, provide concise glosses that reflect up-to-date lexical scholarship, and include a biblical verse (or two) illustrating usage. Rare words and hapax legomena are also identified, making the resource useful beyond the most common vocabulary.¹⁶⁰ One drawback is that there are no pictures.¹⁶¹ Since no other comparable resource exists right now, Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary by Conceptual Categories is a truly unique and invaluable book.¹⁶²

4. Van Pelt, Miles V., and Gary D. Pratico. The Vocabulary Guide to Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic. Zondervan Language Basics. Second Edition. Zondervan, 2019.

Initially published in 2003, VGBHA consists of a number of different vocabulary lists.

1. The first (and most important) one is titled “Hebrew Words Arranged by Frequency.” It contains all the Hebrew words which occur ten or more times in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (excluding proper nouns). It begins with the most frequent Hebrew words and progresses to those that occur only ten times.¹⁶³ The entries in this list are sequentially numbered from 1 to 1903, providing a helpful point of reference and a convenient system for breaking the words into discrete groups for memorization.¹⁶⁴
2. The second major list is an alphabetical listing of words that share a common root, that is, words that are etymologically related to one another (sometimes called a cognate list).
3. The third major list (and one that is new to the second edition of VGBHA) contains all Aramaic words, including proper nouns.

Individually numbered and boasting an impressive 705 entries (in contrast to Mitchel’s volume, which contains only 648 entries), verbal roots are listed without vowels.¹⁶⁵ Unlike Mitchel’s volume, however, these words aren’t alphabetized but instead are ordered by frequency.

Following these three major word lists are three appendices:

1. Hebrew Homonyms (formerly “Identical Words with Different Meanings”),
2. Hebrew Nominals, and
3. Hebrew Verbs.

Notably, this volume is keyed to the author’s grammar.¹⁶⁶

VGBHA is (bar none) the most comprehensive book of its kind. Period.¹⁶⁷

5. Van Pelt, Miles V., and Gary D. Pratico. Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary in Context: Building Competency with Words Occurring 50 Times or More. Zondervan Language Basics. Zondervan, 2019.

The distinguishing feature of this book is its emphasis on strengthening and reinforcing one’s vocabulary within the context of Scripture itself. That is to say, Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary in Context collates into 195 verses (and/or verse fragments) all 642 words of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (HB/OT) that occur 50 times or more (excluding proper names, which are, however, helpfully written in gray shaded text when they appear). It is of interest to note that once one has mastered all 642 words contained in this volume, one will have access to “approximately 90 percent of the Old Testament in the original language.”¹⁶⁸

The book is divided into two primary sections.

1. The first contextual vocabulary list functions much like a workbook. Each (pointed) Hebrew text (nos. 1–195) is accompanied by a “wooden” English translation. Lined space is also provided so that there is sufficient room to parse verbs, gloss words, identify syntactical constructions, and/or comment on morphology. Words occurring fewer than fifty times are glossed, and all proper names are identified in gray text.
2. The second section of the book provides the same biblical verses (in the same order, with the same numbering) as the first section, but with minimal room for notes and no translation. In this section, the student is encouraged to practice sight reading without supplements, that is to say, without recourse to grammars, lexicons, and/or translation(s).

Pratico and Van Pelt state, “The ultimate purpose and design of this resource is to facilitate a student’s ability to sight-read all 195 texts that appear in the contextual vocabulary lists.”¹⁶⁹

This volume also includes a Hebrew–English lexicon which is derived from the second edition of Pratico and Van Pelt’s Vocabulary Guide to Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic (Zondervan, 2019) and is also helpfully keyed to the second edition of their Old Testament Hebrew Vocabulary Cards (Zondervan, 2019). This lexicon often contains important statistical information and, at times, certain special grammatical information (such as the particulars of an assimilated nun, for instance, or how a certain word might be inflected within a specific corpus, such as the Pentateuch). It even includes special metaphorical usages.¹⁷⁰ Most welcome, also, is the fact that the lexicon distinguishes between each of the different Hebrew stems with respect to meaning. In this way, it is free from the all-too-common exegetical fallacies (such as the “root fallacy” or “basic meaning fallacy”) that often plague language studies.¹⁷¹

The exceptionally adept design also makes it especially amicable to self-study, while teachers will also appreciate the opportunity to create

vocabulary quizzes that depart from the traditional presentation of a simple lexical form requiring a generic translation from a student. Because the lists are numbered, instructors can assign texts and quiz from appropriate blocks of material that suit the particular needs of various classroom contexts and environments.¹⁷²

If I had to choose just one book for vocabulary, this would be it!¹⁷³

6. Osborne, William R., and Russell L. Meek. A Book-by-Book Guide to Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary. Hendrickson, 2020.

This book begins with a frequency-based list of the 418 words that occur more than 100 times. For easy review, these words are also divided into 21 sub-lists of 20 words each, except for the last list (which contains only 18 words).

Each subsequent chapter is devoted to the vocabulary of a single biblical book. Exceptions to this include the twelve Minor Prophets, that is, the Book of the Twelve, which are grouped together into one chapter, and also Samuel, 1–2 Kings, Ezra–Nehemiah, and 1–2 Chronicles, all of which are also treated as one book. For each individual book, except a handful of the shorter ones, namely the five Megillot, fifteen lists of twenty words each are included. Osborne and Meek clarify:

For the longest biblical books, the lowest-frequency words presented in this volume occur three times in the books in question. For shorter books, the lowest frequency words … occur either two times or one time in the biblical book in question. For books of this kind, however, we have only included in our lists words that also occur between three and 100 times in the Hebrew Bible as a whole. In other words, no words that occur either two times or one time in the Bible as a whole are found in this volume. We have excluded such words from our lists for two reasons: First, the meanings of rare words (such as hapax legomena) are sometimes unsure or even unknown. Second, for words that occur only once or twice in the Bible, as a whole, we believe that it is most efficient not to memorize them in the context of a vocabulary list but rather to learn them by encountering them in the passages in which they occur.¹⁷⁴

Reviewer Philip Johnston comments on this approach,

Verb stems are glossed variously: in the initial lists, for stems with 10 or more occurrences; in the separate book lists, for all stems that occur in that book. The limit of 15 lists per biblical book seems arbitrary, and means the shorter books have every Hebrew word included whereas longer ones do not—for Isaiah and Psalms, no terms occurring fewer than 5 times are listed. Nonetheless, this is a good pedagogical tool for weekly vocabulary learning.¹⁷⁵

Linguistically speaking, Osborne and Meek ably distinguish between each of the different Hebrew stems with respect to their sense and meaning. The authors also judiciously note that by providing “book-specific glosses,” they not only help readers develop the ability to read a given biblical book “more quickly and proficiently, they will also help students learn more about the semantic ranges of words for which they may have memorized only a basic gloss in their first year of study.”¹⁷⁶ Alongside this, the authors utilize and leverage many of the standard lexicons. A small but much appreciated detail is how glosses for non-verbs are in italics. The effective use of shading, white space, bold face type, and the like are also much appreciated.

This one-of-a-kind tool by Osborne and Meek is difficult to improve on. It is highly recommended.¹⁷⁷

7. Scheumann, Jesse R., and Merissa Scheumann. According to Their Kinds: A Biblical Hebrew Picture Dictionary. Ha’Arets Hebrew & Aramaic Accessible Resources for Exegetical and Theological Studies. Glossa House, 2019.

Meeting the lack of resources with images or graphics is According to Their Kinds. This work presents all vocabulary words that occur 100 times or more in the Hebrew Bible (470 words in total). The illustrations consist of the “Picture Hebrew Flashcards” (3rd ed.), along with 50 extra words to round out the sections.

This innovative resource assists users in three stages of learning, with English transliterations, simplified verb phrases, and sentences taken from biblical verses. There is also an alphabetized Hebrew–English glossary and an English index. As something of an aside, perhaps, this resource is endorsed by quite a few notable scholars.

Additional resources

More tools, of course, could also have been added to this list. Digital (and other media) versions of vocabulary acquisition remain an integral part of the learning process and ought not to be dismissed.¹⁷⁸

I have thoroughly appreciated Old Testament Hebrew Vocabulary: Learn on the Go, by Jonathan T. Pennington (Zondervan, 2004). This audio product enables those taking biblical Hebrew to work on (by ear) all vocabulary words that occur in the HB/OT twenty times or more, and all the names of people in the Old Testament which occur a hundred times or more. I find that the “tracks” are a good length (always important!), and the ability to learn on the go is quite beneficial.

For other digital ways to learn the vocabulary of biblical Hebrew, like Quizlet and such, see “3 Lifesaving Tools for Learning Biblical Hebrew” on Bite Size Seminary with J. C. Schroeder. See also “How to Memorize Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary with These 3 Hacks,” by Frank Hartmann, a YouTube video on the Biblical Mastery Academy channel.

Conclusion

As Jennifer E. Noonan cogently states: “When it comes down to it, students who have only strong vocabulary knowledge can achieve at least a basic comprehension of a text, but the same cannot be said for students with only strong grammar knowledge.”¹⁷⁹

Veritably, “we live in a golden age of language resources.”¹⁸⁰ In light of this abundance, it is easy to appreciate the unique strengths of each resource listed above:

1. Landes’s Building Your Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary is the only resource I know of that includes a helpful morphological mini-grammar.
2. Mitchel’s A Student’s Vocabulary for Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic has the added bonus of including Aramaic (and a pronunciation guide!).
3. Only Pleins and Homrighausen’s Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary by Conceptual Categories organizes the nouns of biblical Hebrew into logical categories of related words, making more perceptible connections between words.
4. We can appreciate the extreme thoroughness of Van Pelt and Pratico’s The Vocabulary Guide to Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic.
5. Van Pelt and Pratico’s Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary in Context allows readers to improve their sight-reading of biblical Hebrew without a BHS/BHQ on hand.
6. Osborne and Meek’s A Book-by-Book Guide to Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary‘s specific format makes it especially amicable to self-study, while many educators will also appreciate the volume’s unique book-by-book approach for teaching exegesis courses.
7. With its illustrations and use of examples, According to Their Kinds aims to make learning Hebrew vocabulary easy to memorize and even fun.

We truly suffer from an embarrassment of riches! Nonetheless, one must always remember that the ultimate goal of Hebrew vocabulary study is not mere slavish memorization but being shaped by the entire Scriptures. Ad fontes!¹⁸¹

Share your thoughts

What are the best Hebrew vocab resources? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

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At the moment of writing, I am at Cambridge University. I have just had the privilege of hearing Dr. John Lennox lecture to a room full of eager students at Jesus College. Lennox is a world-renowned mathematician, scientist, and bestselling author of several books, including God, AI, and the End of History, Can Science Explain Everything?, and Cosmic Chemistry: Do God and Science Mix? Lennox has taught at Oxford for decades. He heard C. S. Lewis deliver lectures in 1962. Many readers will know him from his public debates with some of the most influential atheists of our age, including Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens. Those exchanges have been viewed millions of times online.

Students packed into the Webb Library to hear the veteran apologist reflect on a lifetime spent in the academy. The evening felt less like a formal lecture and more like an intimate fireside conversation between a wise grandfather and the next generation of Christian scholars.

The line by Lennox that stayed with me afterward was simple: “Don’t fear them.”

Lennox once spoke these words to another Christian apologist before a public debate with an outspoken opponent of Christianity. After decades of engaging critics, he remains convinced that Christians have no reason to be intimidated in the academy. They can answer secular objections with confidence, intellectual honesty, and charity.

This article seeks to echo Lennox’s encouragement. Christians have no reason to be intimidated in the academy, nor should they feel out of place walking across a university campus with a Bible under their arm and confidence in the faith they profess.

A short intellectual history of the university

Earlier this summer, Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, founder of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, led several colleagues and me on a tour of Cambridge University to show how deeply intertwined faith and science have been throughout the university’s history.

One stop in particular left a strong impression on me. We arrived at a pub called The Eagle. Mounted on the outside wall is a plaque bearing the words, “The Secret of Life.”

For decades, The Eagle served as the local watering hole for scientists working at the nearby Cavendish Laboratory. It was here, on February 28, 1953, that Francis Crick burst through the doors during lunch and announced that he and James Watson had “discovered the secret of life.” They had just determined the double-helix structure of DNA in the laboratory directly across the street. It remains one of the most celebrated moments in the history of science.

What many tourists never notice, however, is what stands just across the road. Above the entrance to the original Cavendish Laboratory is a Latin inscription placed there in 1874 by the great physicist James Clerk Maxwell: Magna opera Domini, exquisita in omnes voluntates ejus. It is taken from Psalm 111:2: “Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them.” Maxwell believed scientific investigation was an act of studying God’s creation. Long before DNA’s structure was discovered, he intentionally placed Scripture over the entrance to one of the world’s greatest scientific laboratories.

The symbolism is difficult to miss. The Cavendish Laboratory would go on to become one of the most important scientific institutions in history. It was there that the electron was discovered in 1897. It was there that the atom was first split in 1932. It was there that the structure of DNA was uncovered in 1953. Some of humanity’s greatest scientific discoveries emerged from a laboratory whose entrance reminded every scientist who walked through its doors that creation belongs to God.

That history is worth remembering because it reminds us that Christians have not always been outsiders in the academy. On the contrary, they helped build it. For centuries, Europe’s universities were explicitly Christian institutions. Theology was known as the “queen of the sciences,” not because it replaced the other disciplines but because it provided the framework within which they were understood. To study chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, or biology was, in many respects, to study the orderly world God had made.

The intellectual landscape began to change during the Enlightenment as confidence in autonomous human reason grew and skepticism toward religious authority increased. In the nineteenth century, higher criticism and Darwin’s theory of evolution accelerated the movement away from confessional universities. By the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly throughout Western Europe and North America, many universities had become overwhelmingly secular institutions.

Today, scientific materialism has become the dominant intellectual atmosphere across much of higher education. Materialism is not simply the practice of science; it is the philosophical belief that the material universe is all that exists. As Carl Sagan famously declared, “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”¹⁷⁶ Many students now inhabit a culture in which scientific explanations are treated not merely as the best explanations of the natural world, but as the only legitimate form of knowledge. Questions of purpose, morality, meaning, and God are often dismissed before the conversation even begins.

This is the intellectual environment that Christian students increasingly inhabit. They will often find themselves swimming against the current, but they should not mistake being in the minority for being intellectually defeated. The very institutions that sometimes make Christians feel unwelcome were, in many cases, built by men and women who believed they were thinking God’s thoughts after him. This invites Christian academics to respond to secular critiques without fear.

3 ways to respond to secular critiques

Here are three practical ways to respond, having accepted that invitation.

1. With credibility of character

The strongest argument Christianity makes is often not an argument at all. It is Christian character.

Of course, we proclaim the gospel with words. But Scripture is just as concerned with how we speak as with what we say. Paul writes, “Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt” (Col 4:6). The manner in which we conduct ourselves is a witness in its own right.

I once sat next to a woman on an airplane. We spent much of the flight discussing philosophy, suffering, and the problem of evil.¹⁸² Intellectually, I could tell she did not have polished answers. Yet throughout the flight she quietly read her Bible with joy, treated the flight attendants with dignity, and carried herself with a kind of peace that was difficult to explain away.

As a philosophy student, that affected me more deeply than many of the abstract arguments I had been reading on such topics. Authentic Christian character tends to reach beneath the intellect and speaks directly to the heart. In an age of scientific materialism, it is easy to dismiss this as sentimental. I think that would be a mistake. Godliness has always been one of Christianity’s most persuasive apologetics.

2. With the credibility of testimony

Academics often ask where they should begin when responding to secular critiques of Christianity. Should they start with the cosmological argument? The teleological argument? The moral argument?

My answer is almost always the same: Why not begin with what Jesus has done for you?

The early church grew not because every Christian had mastered philosophy but because ordinary believers simply told others what Christ had done in their lives. Scripture calls us to be prepared to give a reason for the hope within us (1 Pet 3:15), and that hope is not merely theoretical but personal.

Tell people how you came to faith, how you encountered Christ, what he has changed in your life. Explain how the Holy Spirit has begun to satisfy those deep existential longings that so many people spend their lives trying to escape.

Nobody can tell your story better than you can. And few things are more difficult to dismiss than the story behind a genuinely transformed life.

3. With the credibility of Christian fruit

What becomes of a society that quietly forgets God? What happens when transcendence disappears and humanity is left to construct meaning on its own?¹⁸³

The conclusion is straightforward: The dream of scientific materialism does not produce a world free from gods. It simply replaces the true God with countless false ones—power, politics, celebrity, sex, wealth, identity, technology. None of these gods liberate us. They demand everything and give nothing in return.

The Christian God is different. He sets people free.

I was reminded of this while speaking with an organization that operates bachelor’s degree programs inside prisons. They told me something I have never forgotten. Many of the inmates who are enrolled in these programs will never leave prison. They are serving life sentences. Yet they educate them anyway—not merely to earn a degree, but to help them know God and learn to live faithfully, even behind bars. The result is remarkable. Violence inside the prisons consistently drops.

Christianity has always produced this kind of fruit. Wherever the gospel genuinely takes root, people become more loving, more forgiving, more self-controlled, more hopeful, and more willing to serve others. If that isn’t credibility, what is?

Conclusion

As an academic, I do not expect many universities across North America or Western Europe to abandon scientific materialism anytime soon. But I also do not believe Christians have any reason to be intimidated.

The history of the academy is deeply indebted to Christianity. More importantly, the credibility of Christian character, faithful testimony, and the societal outcomes of following Christ will continue to confront even the hardest skeptic until he returns.

Share your thoughts

How should one respond to critiques of Christianity in academia? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

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Nobody in my church was shaken by Richard Dawkins’s claim that God is a moral monster. However, Alex O’Connor explaining why he is not a believer by highlighting the problem of divine hiddenness hits much closer to home.

In the silence of seemingly unanswered prayer, could I be wrong? If God exists, why is it not more obvious?

In this article, I address key questions about divine hiddenness from a pastoral perspective and offer several ways Scripture equips us for faith in the presence of the hidden God.

What is the hiddenness argument?

Divine hiddenness refers to the lack of indisputable evidence for an all-powerful and all-loving God. If such a God exists, shouldn’t it be obvious?

Canadian philosopher John Schellenberg is a leading proponent of the hiddenness argument.¹⁸⁴ If God exists, Schellenberg says, he would be an “unsurpassably great person” who “could not be other than unsurpassably loving toward other persons.”¹⁸⁵ For Schellenberg, this means God must always be open to a relationship with anyone willing to be in such a relationship. Yet, Schellenberg claims, many people, although open to God, “lack the belief that there is such a reality and/or a true belief as to what it is.”¹⁸⁶

Such nonresistant nonbelievers may even wish for Christianity to be true. This is not Dawkins’s disgust of theism but your open-minded friend seeking to know goodness, truth, and beauty. Divine hiddenness, therefore, seems incompatible with the existence of an all-loving and all-powerful God.

Schellenberg summarizes his argument in the form of a syllogism:

1. An all-loving God would not hide from people who are genuinely open to a relationship with him (“nonresistant nonbelievers”).
2. If an all-loving and all-powerful God exists, nonresistant nonbelief would not exist.
3. Nonresistant nonbelief exists.
4. Therefore, an all-loving and all-powerful God does not exist.¹⁸⁷

The hiddenness argument targets apparent contradictions between our experience and biblical affirmations about God’s nature and God’s love. Would a loving God honestly hide from someone open to a relationship with him?

Study Assistant searches reliable resources to get answers to your questions about divine hiddenness. Try Logos for free!

The problem of God’s hiddenness is not new or limited to nonbelievers. Psalm 88 ends with the lonely lament, “darkness is my only friend” (Ps 88:18 CSB). Where skeptics may ask whether a hidden God even exists, Christians may ask whether a hidden God can really love them.

The experience behind the hiddenness argument is real, but is the argument sound and persuasive?

Is the hiddenness argument sound?

The hiddenness argument packs an existential bite. Certainly, we can sympathize with someone longing for indisputable proof of God only to be met by mystery.¹⁸⁸

Yet the philosophical argument of the hiddenness problem itself is problematic. In particular, as Gavin Ortlund has explained, the hiddenness argument centers on unwarranted assumptions and unmet expectations about God’s love which respectively challenge key premises in Schellenberg’s syllogism.

Unwarranted assumptions

Schellenberg’s third premise regarding nonresistance assumes knowledge of someone’s inner life that we often lack of ourselves. How often do we hear people say things like “I never knew I thought that way” or “I didn’t think I’d ever do that.” Our inner lives, even to us, are complex and mysterious.

We may be open to God in specific ways but resistant in others. For example, you may be intellectually open to theism but opposed to the concept of God as triune. There might be a sense of openness, albeit not enough to call it nonresistant. Likewise, someone might be open to God’s emotional support during a loved one’s cancer treatment but resistant to God’s commands regarding sexuality. They are nonresistant to a specific kind of God, one with whom, to some degree, they can dictate the terms of the relationship.

The nonresistance Schellenberg’s argument requires is probably impossible to discern or prove.

Unmet expectations

The hiddenness argument rests on certain expectations about divine love imposed upon God by us.¹⁸⁹ The “unsurpassably great” God becomes subject to the whims of every individual, which is deeply problematic for any argument resting on nonresistant nonbelief.¹⁹⁰

Schellenberg treats God’s love as the best of human love, separating it from and elevating it over God’s other attributes such as transcendence, holiness, and incomprehensibility.

Perhaps the issue is not with God’s love but our expectations of what love requires. Human love is analogous to God’s love, not identical. God loves according to his nature, and some sense of divine hiddenness is fitting with the nature of a God who is both “with us” and “higher than us” (Matt 1:23; Isa 55:9).

How does the Bible address divine hiddenness?

Scripture is not silent about divine hiddenness, but it also doesn’t neatly resolve our discomfort when God seems absent. Instead, Scripture addresses divine hiddenness in at least four ways that strengthen our assurance of God’s love.

1. God’s nature

God desires to be known and makes himself known in creation (Ps 19), Scripture (2 Tim 3:16–17), and Christ (Heb 1:1–3). Sometimes sin causes divine hiddenness, as Isaiah 59:2 says, “Your sins have hidden his face from you.” Yet human sin is not the Bible’s comprehensive answer to divine hiddenness.

There is a tension between the clarity of God’s revelation and divine hiddenness. Consider Isaiah 45:

Yes, you are a God who hides,
God of Israel, Savior …
For this is what the Lord says …
“I have not spoken in secret,
somewhere in a land of darkness.
I did not say to the descendants of Jacob:
Seek me in a wasteland.
I am the Lord, who speaks righteously,
who declares what is right.” (Isa 45:15, 18, 19)

The God who hides has not spoken in secret.

We are confronted with a God who is mysterious and incomprehensible. Ecclesiastes 3:10–11 says:

I have seen the task that God has given the children of Adam to keep them occupied. He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also put eternity in their hearts, but no one can discover the work God has done from beginning to end. (Eccl 3:10–11)

God creates a tension in the human heart. We have a sense of eternity but are bound in time. No matter how sincere our search, or how wide its scope, in some sense God always confronts us with the mystery of his existence, his nature, and his work.

Has God contrived an elaborate game of hide and seek, going to places we cannot follow? I think not. Revelation corresponds with God’s nature and our need. The tension of divine hiddenness emphasizes God’s nature as the transcendent creator and our need for humility to know him (Ps 8; Isa 66:2; Matt 11:25–27).

2. The incarnation

The locus of divine revelation and love in Scripture is in the incarnation (John 1:14; 3:16). This is the heart of the biblical story of how the holy and transcendent God dwells with us. As John says, “No one has ever seen God. The one and only Son, who is himself God and is at the Father’s side—he has revealed him” (John 1:18; cf. Col 1:15).

God proves his love, as Paul says, “in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). We know and experience God’s love personally through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ (1 John 4:8–9).

This does not remove all mystery. Many people watched Jesus do what only God could do, only to turn their backs or call him a demon (Mark 3:20–27; 8:11–13). In plain sight he was “hidden” from them. Knowing and experiencing God’s love cannot be manufactured or manipulated. It is a gift to be received in humility and sought by prayerful faith (Eph 1:15–19).

3. The cross and Holy Spirit

Apart from the cross, we could not find an emotionally satisfying reconciliation between God’s love and divine hiddenness. Divine hiddenness is answered for us in the cry of Jesus from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Mark 15:34). At the cross Jesus endured divine hiddenness for us.¹⁹¹ This is the objective ground of our assurance of God’s love.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul identifies two ways God communicates his love to us. First, in the context of intense suffering for Christ, he speaks about the assurance of God’s love because of Jesus’s death. “He did not even spare his own Son but gave him up for us all” (Rom 8:32), therefore,

I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 8:38–39)

Just as children especially can feel the weight of their parents’ absence upon waking suddenly from a nightmare, only to be met by a dark room, so you probably feel the weight of God’s (seeming) absence most in the darkness of suffering. But the cross is God’s word to us that, hidden behind the darkness, he holds us in his love.

Second, God communicates his love by the internal witness of the Holy Spirit. Paul says, “The Spirit himself testifies together with our spirit that we are God’s children” (Rom 8:16). God’s love, proven in the death of Jesus, is implanted in us as the Holy Spirit testifies to us that we are children of God (Rom 5:5).

While our assurance of this love can be strengthened by apologetic arguments, our assurance comes from resting in the finished work of Christ confirmed to us by the Holy Spirit.

4. The Christian life

Wrestling with divine hiddenness is not uncommon in the Christian life. The nineteenth-century pastor Charles Simeon said, “Occasional suspensions, also, of the tokens of God’s love are the means whereby God perfects the work of faith in his people’s hearts.”¹⁹²

Job experienced this hard token of God’s love. God permits Satan to test Job’s faith through a horrible series of events. Job loses his livestock and his crops. His children are killed and he gets incredibly sick. Through it all, he endures the miserable comfort of his friends, who blame his circumstances on his sin.¹⁹³ His wife eventually tells him to curse God and die (Job 2:9). In his misery, Job does not hear from God. Everything behind the scenes, including God’s work, is hidden from him.

God permits Job to endure divine hiddenness, but not forever. In the end, God confronts Job with the comfort of divine glory (Job 38–41). The God who created and sustains all things is sufficient for Job. As Joseph Minich explains, this models a way for believers to endure divine absence.

Therein, God is portrayed as one who will allow his people to hit the bottom, but not without shepherding them to the conclusion that God (by himself) is enough, sans all, to satisfy human longing. Job was reoriented, as it were, to the gravity of God.¹⁹⁴

Seasons of divine hiddenness can be tokens of love, replanting our feet in “Christ’s love that surpasses knowledge” (Eph 3:19).

Conclusion

Divine hiddenness does not undermine God’s love. It is equally probable that divine hiddenness reveals a God who is unlike us and whose love can confound and surprise us.

The “hidden God” makes himself known and proves his love in Jesus Christ (John 1:18; Rom 5:8–10). The mystery of divine hiddenness is one the gospel equips us to endure by faith.

Share your thoughts

Why isn’t God more obvious? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

Scott Hurst’s recommended resources

Additional resources for study

Related content

• The Attributes of God: Who God Is & Why It Matters
• Christian Apologetics: Truth, Love, and Faith Conversations
• How to Minister in a Disenchanted Age? 1 Peter and Re-Personalization
• The Problem of Evil: If God Exists, Why Is There Suffering?
• Through the Valley: 8 Lessons from Job about Suffering & Comfort

Would you ask a newly married couple on their honeymoon for marriage advice? Probably not with a straight face.

But that’s what it felt like when a small group of seminary students asked me to be their internship mentor during my second year of full-time teaching.

With my feet barely past the starting line of my now two-decade run as a seminary professor, I started taking on interns. Though I had personally been on the receiving end of profound and life-changing mentoring from high school through seminary, I found transitioning from mentee to mentor to be more challenging than that of going from doctoral student to professor.

Ill-equipped and unsure, I was hesitant to impart wisdom I didn’t think I had to students who were literally just a few years younger than I. This wasn’t a case of imposter syndrome. No. I was an imposter.

Young fool that I was, I took on that handful of interns anyway. At least I let that first batch of students know I didn’t know what I was doing. We would have to learn together. And we did.

The following are some of the crucial things that the Lord has taught me about mentoring students who are trying to sort out their vocations.

1. Weigh one-on-one vs. small group mentoring

As a newbie at mentoring, the first decision I had to make was whether I should do one-on-one or small group mentorship.

Both have biblical and historical precedence. Moses had his Joshua, Elijah his Elisha, Paul his Timothy. But David also had his mighty men, Jesus had his twelve, and the Apostle John left behind a group of pastors to carry the torch well into the second century. I couldn’t really say one approach was necessarily more historically anchored or in accordance with Scripture than the other.

Each approach has strengths and weaknesses.

• On the positive side, the one-on-one approach can create a long-lasting bond of friendship between mentor and mentee. It makes a safe space for deep, personal, individualized advising. It allows the mentee to experience a genuinely unique relationship with the mentor. And it may be the best option for smaller programs, departments, or institutions.
• On the negative side, one-on-one mentorship limits multiplication in discipleship to one at a time. It reduces the mentee’s exposure to a diversity of perspectives and personalities. And it can reinforce an individualistic approach to character growth.

Though I’ve engaged in limited one-on-one discipleship over the years, I’ve come to prefer small group mentoring of about three to five mentees at a time. There are several reasons for this.

1. A small group of about three to five students can nurture some of the relational skills difficult to address in the classroom—things like conflict resolution, consensus-building, community care, crisis management, and teamwork.
2. Each member comes to the group with unique questions, concerns, problems, and needs. Working through these as a team can be as much a learning experience for the mentor as for the mentees. As a result, members can learn as much from each other as they do from their mentor.
3. Group members can develop lifelong relationships—sometimes even lifelong ministry partnerships—that may outlive the mentor–mentee relationship.

Of course, if any of my mentees need to meet one-on-one, mine is an open door. So, the small group mentoring approach can incorporate, when needed, the strengths of the one-on-one approach.

2. Embody an incarnational approach to mentoring

From a theological perspective, mentoring can—and should—be the most incarnational ministry we do as educators.

Pause here for a moment. Because it’s the twenty-first century, I need to remind everyone what “incarnational ministry” isn’t. Simply put, if you can’t get bruised doing it, it’s not incarnational. By definition, incarnational mentoring means meeting in the flesh.

I want my mentees to lock in, not dial in. Effective mentoring requires life-on-life community. Real, in-the-flesh, personal presence.

In this vein, space matters. The warmer, less formal the environment, the better. An office space is fine if that’s all you have available. But a coffee shop, a cozy lounge, or a home? Way better. Coffee and an occasional meal don’t hurt. For-fun team-building events and ministry activities can also embody the incarnational mentoring experience.

I know the incarnational approach to mentoring has huge implications for the constant push to maximize online and virtual tools for education. For the record, I’m not opposed to these kinds of modalities. Technology has given us the ability to do some amazing things in the realm of theological education we could never have imagined before. But as leaders, we must value transformation as much as information, character development as much as curricular completion, heart knowledge as much as head knowledge. So, we must acknowledge the inherent limitations of non-incarnational means of connection.

This may upset a few, but unless there’s a crisis like a global pandemic, I don’t do mentorships by video.

3. Run meetings with care

So, how do I run mentorship meetings?

Each semester, I schedule weekly one-hour group meetings at a time “mutually inconvenient for everyone.” And everyone is expected to attend. Yes, everyone misses a meeting here or there. Even the mentor. But weekly, on-time attendance is vital.

Also, what’s said in the mentorship meeting stays in the mentorship meeting. This discretion allows members to be honest and vulnerable. It also carves out a safe space for me as the mentor to expose future ministers to the often stressful, sometimes frustrating, and occasionally heartbreaking realities of Christian life and ministry.

While I don’t want to turn them into jaded cynics, I also don’t want any of my mentees to launch into ministry with unrealistic expectations. They need to know ministry isn’t always a walk in the park. Sometimes it’s maneuvering through a minefield. The work of ministry is good, yes; but it also has its share of bad and ugly. For this reason, I let them see the joys and the struggles, the victories and the defeats.

4. Give enough quantity time for quality time

When I first started taking on mentees, I had to decide the terms of the mentorship: not only how often and how long to meet, but also how long the mentorship itself would last and what we actually did in those meetings. I experimented with a few different approaches.

Once I did a single-semester internship with a student whose name I have since completely forgotten. I think it was James, but it could have been John. I literally don’t remember. If that sounds horrible and impersonal, that’s my point. For me, one semester was just too short to get to know someone personally and to invest in them meaningfully.

Now brace yourself: I also learned that a whole year wasn’t quite enough. After one year, I’m just getting to know my mentees enough to build meaningful relationships.

I have since settled on a two-year mentorship model, and I’ve never looked back. The first year establishes the foundation of the relationship. The second year often results in great conversations addressing real life questions, issues, and challenges. In that second year, we harvest the fruit of trust planted and nurtured in the first year.

During those two years, my students wrestle with various facets of ministry calling and preparation—not just whether God is calling them into vocational ministry but which vocational ministry God is calling them into. Because of the deeper roots and taller branches grown in the two-year mentorship, our relationships can often continue to grow through changing seasons of ministry.

The two-year mentorship also relieves the pressure of trying to make every single weekly meeting a life-transforming experience. Some weeks we may discuss actual problems they’re facing in pastoral ministry. Other weeks we may debate theological questions that come up in class. Maybe we’ll talk about the prospect of PhD or DMin studies. We could hold a mock ordination interview, discuss a social or political issue, or even argue about the latest Star Wars movie.

All my mentees have been in my home. They have my phone number to text or call any time. Most have kept in touch over the years. They reach out to me for continued shepherding and advice. Some have even become colleagues and partners in ministry.

Bottom line: The two-year mentorship allows enough “quantity time” for “quality time” to occur. But even then, it has its limits.

5. Know your own limits

While I have one foot in church, where I’ve served as a member and leader, I’m primarily an academic serving as a full-time professor. Considering my own experience, I can mostly give my mentees a taste of the academician’s life. I let them in on the behind-the-scenes of institutional politics. They experience the life cycle of research, writing, and publishing projects. And they get to help me work through my own challenges as a professor. These are my strengths.

But I have limits.

I can’t give my mentees pulpit experience. They won’t gain hands-on experiences doing baptisms, communion, weddings, and funerals. And while we can and do talk through issues at their churches, they’ll never be able to sit through elder or deacon meetings with me to see how to work with leadership.

In short, I can’t be all things to all people. But I can be the right thing for specific people. Then, in the context of those relationships, I’m able to draw on my own experiences to help them navigate the obstacles in their journey toward fulfilling their ministry calling.

Paying the price and reaping the rewards

This leads to a surprising aspect of my two-year mentorship: it’s para-curricular. That means it doesn’t appear in the seminary catalog, doesn’t show up on the student’s transcript, and doesn’t get assessed or evaluated by accreditors. It costs the student nothing but time. And it doesn’t factor into my official responsibilities as a professor. (Read: I don’t get paid to do it.)

Why do I do it? I do it because I love my students. I do it because I love the body of Christ in which those students will one day serve. I do it because it reflects the priorities and passions of our Lord, who had his five hundred disciples, yes. But he also had his twelve. And his three.

Having engaged in two-year group mentorship for about two decades, I have the privilege of looking back and seeing the fruit of my labors. Some of my former mentees have gone on to pastoral ministry or missions—what I half-jokingly call “real ministry.” Others are teaching in Christian schools. Many have continued into PhD programs and are now laboring in Christian academia, hopefully discipling their own mentees. Some have transitioned out of ministry but continue to labor for the kingdom as faithful spouses, parents, and church members.

Since those first uncertain and unsteady steps onto the twisted path of mentoring, often through trial and error, I gained several insights along the way. My prayer is that current or future ministry mentors at academic institutions find some of the lessons I learned helpful as you seek to shepherd students discerning their own calls to ministry.

Share your thoughts

What are the best practices for professors to mentor their students for ministry? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

Resources for further reflection

• Svigel, Michael. Let the Wise Hear!: Devotions for Thriving in Theological Studies. Published by the author, 2024.

Related content

• Learning by Doing: How to Train Seminary Students for Ministry
• Where Have the Timothys Gone? 4 Ways to Address the Minister Drought
• 8 Ways to Gain Ministry Experience While in Seminary
• Developing a Teaching Philosophy: A Guide for Theological Educators
• The Importance of Theological Education | Albert Mohler

Our family cat Buttercup is a hunter par excellence. Almost daily she deposits a kill on our back porch, be it a mouse, bird, mole, squirrel, chipmunk, or even rabbit. (I have joked with my wife that we don’t need a dog, we already have a watch-cat, and she is fierce!) When I regard Buttercup’s latest offering, I often instruct one of our boys to go and dispose of it in the woods. Nature tells us that it is not right to leave a corpse out in the open.

But how best to do so, particularly when it is a person? A loved one?

In what follows, I will cover some of the history behind this debate and explore what the Bible says about both cremation and burial. I will argue that only burial gives specific witness to the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body.

What is cremation?

Cremation is a process that uses intense heat (1400–1800 °F) to incinerate a body. After the body has been vaporized and reduced to bone fragments, these fragments are then pulverized into a sand-like powder. The final step involves placing the “cremains” in a container and returning them to the surviving family.

The word “cremate” is actually a sanitized version of the crass “burning a corpse.”

What is the history of cremation?

Early Christianity

While there were a few exceptions (notably the Hebrews), cremation was a common practice in the ancient world. That rapidly changed, however, with the spread of Christianity in the Roman empire. As Francis Schaeffer explains, “Gradually Christianity came to Roman Avenches. We know this by studying the cemetery of that time—the Romans burned their dead, the Christians buried theirs.”¹⁹⁵ In some respects, the care with which early Christians disposed of their dead through the burial process would not have gone unnoticed in the pagan world.

The vast majority of the Church Fathers had an unfavorable view of cremation. Early Christians often went to enormous lengths to ensure that their dead received proper burial, fighting for burial rites even in the midst of Roman persecution. Likewise, there was little debate in the medieval church: Cremation was championed by pagan societies and religions such as Hinduism.

Recent history

It was not until the late nineteenth century that cremation came into view once again. In 1874, the first cremation society in England was formed. In 1876, the first cremation in America took place. In 1877, cremation in Italy was legalized. From these early successes, cremation slowly gained traction in the ensuing decades. It is noteworthy that the growing legitimacy of the practice happened in tandem with assaults upon the Christian faith from secular philosophy, scientific materialism, and an increasingly liberal church.

In 1963, the Vatican lifted its historic ban on cremation. Many Protestant denominations followed by publicly expressing openness to the practice. A consensus started to emerge among evangelical Christians that since the Bible nowhere explicitly condemns cremation, it is not a sin and thus permissible.

Cremation has now become the mode of choice for disposing of the remains of the deceased. In 1960, just 3.6 percent of American corpses were cremated. Today, the number is 63 percent. By 2040, that figure will probably be around 78 percent.

For most of the last two thousand years, burial was the standard practice in the Western world. Why the change? For many, it is economic. Cremation is generally less expensive. A friend of mine, living in a large city on the West Coast, where space is at a premium, told me that burial didn’t even occur to his parents as an option. It is far too expensive. In densely populated countries like Japan, the cremation rate is already 99 percent. Additionally, we live in an increasingly secular culture. People are more inclined to trade in pragmatic rather than religious considerations.

Modern reception

While at one time, cremation was considered strange and even pagan, today it is normative, and Christians have largely followed the trend. Having officiated many funerals over the past twenty years as a minister, I have watched more and more Christians opt for cremation over burial.

A blog post by John MacArthur represents the common pro-cremation argument:

Obviously any buried body will eventually decompose (Eccles. 12:7). So cremation isn’t a strange or wrong practice—it merely accelerates the natural process of oxidation. The believer will one day receive a new body, thus the state of what remains of the old body is unimportant.

He adds,

What we need to focus on as Christians is not how to dispose of our earthly bodies, but that one day new bodies will be fashioned for us like our Lord’s glorious resurrection body.

These arguments have been convincing, and now most see the question of burial or cremation within the realm of Christian freedom. Since the Bible is largely neutral on the subject, we must leave it to the individual or the family to decide for themselves—so goes the thinking.

Study Assistant searches reliable resources to get answers to your questions about burial and cremation. Try Logos for free!

What does the Bible say about cremation?

Having traced some of the history of cremation, we now turn our attention to Scripture itself.

Burning bodies

While the Bible contains dozens of references to God’s people burying their dead, references to cremation are scant. Nonetheless, in Old Testament Israel, we find that burning bodies by fire was a sign of God’s judgment. Consider the following examples:

• Under Mosaic law, fire was prescribed as judgment for sexual transgressions: “If a man takes a woman and her mother also, it is depravity; he and they shall be burned with fire, that there may be no depravity among you” (Lev 20:14).
• Similarly, a priest’s daughter who profaned herself through sexual immorality “shall be burned with fire” (Lev 21:9).
• In a clear pronouncement of God’s judgment, Achan and his family were executed for stealing items from Jericho that were under the divine ban. The Lord turned from his “burning anger” only after they were stoned and burned with fire (Josh 7:25–26).
• After the sons of Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, offered “strange” fire that the Lord had not authorized, “fire came out from before the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord” (Lev 10:1–2).
• Likewise, fire came out from the Lord and consumed 250 men who offered incense in rebellion against his appointed leadership (Num 16:35).
• On another occasion, when the Israelites were complaining before the Lord, “the fire of the Lord burned among them and consumed some outlying parts of the camp” (Num 11:1).

Perhaps the most well-known “cremation” account follows the deaths of Saul and Jonathan after they were mutilated by the Philistines (1 Sam 31:8-13). The men of Jabesh-gilead captured the bodies and burned them before burying their bones. There is debate regarding the original Hebrew of this passage, and at best, this event was descriptive, not prescriptive. It is likely that this was an attempt to protect the bodies of Saul and Jonathan from suffering further dishonor.

Burying bodies

What about burial?

On dozens of occasions, burial is referenced in Scripture as the appropriate means of dealing with the dead. The first burial in the Bible was in Genesis 23, where Abraham took great pains to ensure his wife, Sarah, was properly buried. Abraham was later buried in this same cave (Gen 25:10). Several more burials are recorded in Genesis (Gen 35:19, 29; 49:31; 50:14). It is particularly instructive that God himself buried Moses (Deut 34:5–6). In the New Testament, notable examples include John the Baptist (Mark 6:29) and Stephen (Acts 8:2).

Some may be surprised to learn that Ananias and Sapphira were given proper burial after God struck them down for their deceit (Acts 5:1–11). Yet this is consistent with the arc of Scripture, given that even a criminal who was put to death was afforded the right to be buried under Old Testament law (Deut 21:22–23).

The most famous example in the Bible was undoubtedly Jesus’s burial. The Apostle John records how Joseph of Arimathea, with the help of Nicodemus, prepared Jesus’s body with seventy-five pounds of myrrh and aloes before laying him in a tomb (John 19:38–42). Looking back a few decades later, Paul declared,

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. (1 Cor 15:3–4)

From its infancy, the church has held these three climactic events—Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection—at the center of our faith and profession.

From this brief biblical survey, we can begin to see why many Christians through the ages might have favored burial over cremation.

How does burial witness to our faith?

Although the Bible nowhere commands burial or prohibits cremation, the following reasons support burial as a Christian preference.

Their central idea: Burial offers compelling testimony to the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. In the same way that Jesus was raised to life on the third day, every Christian has the firm conviction that one day they will be raised with Christ to see him face to face. Burial proclaims such a hope in the resurrection of the dead.

1. The sacredness of the body

From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible has an overwhelmingly positive view of the body. Every person is created in the image of God (Gen 1:27). Paul says of Christians, “Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit … so glorify God in your body” (1 Cor 6:19–20). Jesus promises believers that he will return in glory not so that they will eternally dwell in the “higher realm of the soul,” but to wipe away every tear and gain ultimate victory over death through the resurrection of the body (Rev 21:4).

God did not create humanity as disembodied souls. Rather, he made us a composite of soul and body and called us to live in such a way that honors him with our bodies (Eph 5:3–5). Christians do not view the body as just a shell or container for the soul. Likewise, we should not view a corpse as “mere tissue” to be disposed of in an efficient manner. At least in some sense, that body is still a person (John 20:13).

There is an obvious violence that happens in cremation that forgoes our normal care for the body. Thus, one could argue that cremation devalues the goodness of the body.

When I was eight years old, a neighbor accidentally ran over our dog. That summer day, my dad took us kids and we helped dig a grave for Duke on the edge of our property, complete with a grave marker. How Dad handled this, including the care he showed our beloved dog, greatly aided the grieving process. I can only imagine how traumatized I would have been had he taken Duke and burned his body.

What you believe about the body will inevitably affect how you treat the body, in life and in death (Phil 1:20).

2. The body as buried seed

The Bible is rich with imagery, some of which contributes to this discussion. Jesus said, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). In a word, his death ushers in life.

Paul picked up on this teaching when saying,

What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or some other grain. … So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. (1 Cor 15:36–37, 42–44)

In accord with sowing a seed, burying a body holds the hope of something better—much better!—arriving later. As Donald Howard explains, only burial makes sense of these verses. “Burning simply cannot fit into the analogy. Seed is not burned to germinate; it is sown into the ground. Burial of the body is an expression of faith in its later being raised in the same likeness.”¹⁹⁶

3. Christian death as “sleep”

A common expression used to designate burial places is “cemetery,” meaning, “sleeping place.” This is fitting given that the Bible frequently uses sleep as a figure of speech for physical death (Ps 13:3; Dan 12:2; John 11:11–14; Acts 7:60; 1 Cor 15:18).

Christians have traditionally understood that when a loved one is “laid to rest,” they “sleep” in expectation of one day “waking” for the resurrection (1 Thess 4:15–16). There is a sense in which the dead in Christ are not simply dead—not annihilated—but, like Jairus’s daughter, they are “sleeping,” awaiting their resurrection (Luke 8:52–55).

4. The Bible’s use of fire

Fire is a remarkable element with countless uses (just try to imagine a world without fire). When it comes to how the Bible uses the imagery of fire, it can point to different things like purification through trials (Mal 3:2–3) and a sign of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:3).

But far and away the most common sign for fire is God’s wrath and judgment. Jesus warned of the “hell of fire” (Matt 5:22) and the “unquenchable fire” (Mark 9:43). The use of fire to consume the body is viewed in Scripture as a sign of contempt, whether here on earth through the burning of bodies or in the afterlife in the “lake of fire” (Rev 20:15).

In sum, the general direction of the Bible would seem to discourage cremation and favor burial as the proper means for treating our dead.

What about those already cremated?

Does cremation mean that a person can’t be raised? Will they somehow be ineligible for the resurrection? If a body is incinerated, how could it possibly be resurrected? But all bodies eventually disintegrate, including those that are buried.

God is God. Nothing is too difficult for him (Jer 32:17). For any resurrection to happen, a great miracle must occur, and we can all trust God to sort out the details. In the same way that our Lord can raise the bodies of countless martyrs who were burned at the stake or fed to the lions, so too your cremated loved one who trusted Christ. There is no need to fear.

The choice of burial or cremation is not about how best to facilitate the resurrection. That is God’s prerogative. The choice is about what best symbolizes and testifies to our Christian hope in the power of the gospel and the resurrection of the body. People are watching you and, believe it or not, you can have enormous influence simply by your faith in Christ. That influence extends to how you die. Paul declared, “as it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now and always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death” (Phil 1:20; emphasis mine).

Conclusion

The way that we deal with bodies after death should aim to honor Christ. It should reflect the Christian’s deep hope in the resurrection. “As death is the last opportunity any of us will have to testify to God’s truth, what is more fitting than that our passing should focus on the unique and distinctive doctrine of the resurrection of the body?”¹⁹⁷

The people of God have always had a forward-looking faith. They knew that they were citizens of a “better country” (Heb 11:16; Phil 3:20). Joseph even gave instruction that his bones should not remain buried in Egypt. Why? He was convinced that a much better inheritance awaited him and all God’s people (Gen 50:25; Exod 13:19; Josh 24:32; Heb 11:22).

In a joyful yet sorrowful way, burial testifies to that hope in the resurrection when body and spirit will be reunited. Death does not have the final word (Rom 8:38; 1 Cor 15:55–57). Amen!

Share your thoughts

How does the Bible inform cremation practices? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

Daniel Stegeman’s suggested resources

• Howard, Donald W. Burial or Cremation: Does It Matter? Banner of Truth Trust, 2001.
• Jones, David W. “To Bury or Burn? Toward an Ethic of Cremation.” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 53, no. 2 (2010): 335–47.

Related content

• What Is Christian Ethics? How Scripture Shapes Our Moral Lives
• You Are Your Body: Human Beings as Embodied Persons
• He Is Risen—So What? 20 Things Jesus’s Resurrection Accomplished
• Bioethics from Embryo to Deathbed: Right, Wrong, and Healthcare
• What Does It Mean to Be Human? Theological Anthropology

If God is good, why is there so much suffering?

Most of us have probably sought explanations for suffering in light of our faith in God, or else evil may have contributed to our doubts about God’s existence. If you have spent any extended amount of time thinking about these questions, you are exploring the problem of evil, a term that refers to analyzing challenges that the existence of evil causes for various religions.

What is the problem of evil? Technically, we would do well to speak of multiple problems of evil. Each religion may face unique challenges (is karmic suffering really just, as Hinduism suggests? Is evil an illusion, as some Buddhists claim?), but this article will consider the problem of evil in Christianity in three forms.

1. The logical problem of evil is a philosophical attempt to argue that a theistic God cannot exist if evil exists.
2. The evidential problem of evil argues that a specific kind or example of evil makes God’s existence improbable.
3. The existential problem of evil names the experiences that a sufferer wrestles with which might undermine faith in God.
   

This article will briefly consider how Christians respond to these problems and will evaluate responses against Scripture. Though the problem of evil is one of the bigger challenges to Christian faith, my hope is that this brief article shows that it need not destroy Christian faith in God or abolish hope in his defeat of evil.

1. The logical problem of evil

The logical problem of evil argues that it is logically impossible for God to exist if evil exists. Technically, there are a variety of logical problems of evil, each moving from a particular characterization of God to the argument that evil entails God does not exist as so characterized.¹⁹⁸

Consider an example of the logical problem of evil. We might encounter the following argument:

1. If God exists, God is perfect Creator.
2. A perfect Creator would not decrease the perfection of the world by creating.
3. Evil is an imperfection that exists in the world.
4. The world’s perfection would have decreased if God’s act of creating added evil, an imperfection, to the perfect existence of God.
5. Therefore, a perfect Creator God must not exist.¹⁹⁹ Or so this argument goes.

There are four common approaches to challenging a logical problem of evil, assuming the argument contains no logical fallacy. I will illustrate each by returning to the problem of evil based on God being perfect Creator.

1. We might object to the characterization offered. Perhaps God is not a perfect Creator, so the argument fails. But this strategy will not work for our sample argument given the clear teaching of Scripture which depicts God as perfect Creator (e.g., Gen 1–2).
2. We might object to the “generic theism” of most logical problems of evil. Typically, the arguments name a few divine attributes but without much theological analysis. Perhaps a theologically robust explanation of creation or of perfection defeats the argument.²⁰⁰ For example, if perfection requires God to maximize his glory, then perhaps creating a world with sin will allow God’s glory to be better displayed through his defeat of evil than would creating a world without evil. God is a perfect Creator, so he creates a world that maximizes the display of his glory.
3. We might object to one of the premises of the argument. In this case, the argument claimed that the world diminished in perfection when God created a world capable of evil. However, this assumes that God is part of “the world,” which does not adequately express the transcendence of a God who exceeds space, time, matter, and so forth. God did not diminish the perfection of the world. There was no world, and then God created one.
4. Finally, we might object to the starting point of the argument.²⁰¹ Why not begin with the premise that a perfect Creator would have a good reason to create a world capable of evil? This premise, with the observation that our world has evil, would lead us to conclude that there must be a good reason for this world to have evil.

Each of these examples could produce an extended debate of arguments and counterarguments. However, the basic strategies show you how to address the logical problem of evil in any form.

The most well-known and discussed forms of the problem of evil begin by characterizing God as all powerful and all good. This version was used by David Hume and others, but in modern philosophy it is associated with J. L. Mackie. Mackie poses the problem as follows:

According to traditional theism, there is a god who is both omnipotent (and omniscient) and wholly good, and yet there is evil in the world. How can this be? … If we add the at least initially plausible premises that good is opposed to evil in such a way that a being who is wholly good eliminates evil as far as he can, and that there are no limits to what an omnipotent being can do, then we do have a contradiction. A wholly good omnipotent being would eliminate evil completely; if there really are evils, then there cannot be any such being.²⁰²

Each of the four strategies listed above has been used against Mackie’s argument, but the following two objections are the most famous. Each criticizes one of Mackie’s premises.

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The soul-making theodicy

A theodicy is a defense of God in light of the problem of evil that explains why he is justified in allowing evil. The soul-making theodicy denies that a wholly good God would eliminate all evil, for evil serves some good purpose. This approach explains that struggle, suffering, and other evils are necessary to mold souls into their highest form.

John Hick offers the most famous soul-making theodicy. He appeals to Irenaeus of Lyons, arguing that a proper theological view of creation is one in which evil and good are mixed to provide an opportunity for human spiritual and moral advancement.²⁰³ Hick explains how things that we call evil are important for our personal growth. Physical pain is important for biological purposes, helping us to avoid danger but also serving to develop our ability to navigate our environment. Without the pains associated with hunger or exposure to the elements, we would have no need to work to develop our minds or invent technologies.²⁰⁴ Suffering of all kinds prompts us to love others, for the highest form of love requires bearing one another’s burdens.²⁰⁵ Similarly, suffering prompts us to develop virtues like courage and justice. These outcomes justify God allowing evil to exist, Hick claims.

There is some limited evidence for the soul-making theodicy in Scripture. There are clear biblical examples where God has turned evil into good outcomes (famously, Gen 50:20). Much of the support for the soul-making theodicy is found in Paul, though we will find that such biblical support is incomplete.

Often Christians appeal to Romans 8:28 in a manner that mirrors the soul-making theodicy: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Rom 8:28). This verse could suggest that everything that happens is for our good in the end. However, this might be an over-ambitious interpretation, for “all things” could refer to all kinds of things, and not universally to each individual thing. For example, when 1 Corinthians 2:15 says the spiritual man understands all things, it does not imply omniscience, and Colossians 1:20’s claim that Christ reconciles all things to God may not indicate universal salvation.

As we turn to consider Paul’s theology more broadly, we see that Paul presents two varieties of suffering:²⁰⁶

• Redemptive suffering brings about spiritual benefits as we share the sufferings of Christ (2 Cor 1:5; Phil 3:10).
• Tragic suffering is depicted as an enemy (1 Cor 15:26) and contrasted with our future hope (Rom 8:18).

It is wise to be cautious. Paul appeals to human sin as the ultimate explanation of death and suffering (Rom 5:12). Whatever redemptive suffering exists is because God’s work accompanies suffering, but it is likely going too far to make suffering, as such, redemptive.²⁰⁷ Only God saves, and part of his saving work is defeating suffering and death as evils depicted in Pauline literature as tragic.

The biblical support for the soul-making theodicy, then, is limited, given that there is no evidence that all evil is intended for or used for human good. This alone is a serious critique of the soul-making theodicy. But I will consider two further concerns (though the debate is far more expansive):

1. The soul-making theodicy relies on a consequentialist ethic where the end justifies the means. Yet, Christian ethicists usually reject doing evil actions to produce a good result. At the very least, we could ask whether the soul-making theodicy’s ethical assumptions align with what the Bible teaches about God’s character and ethics.
2. The soul-making theodicy instrumentalizes people. Rather than the well-being of a sufferer being a goal, that sufferer becomes a means to the well-being of others who might develop character in response to the sufferer.²⁰⁸

One of the biggest objections to the soul-making theodicy asks why evils of the magnitude of the bubonic plague or Auschwitz were necessary. Why did God need to use such severe suffering to bring about our moral formation?²⁰⁹ In the end, the soul-making theodicy drives us to consider the evidential problem of evil.

The free will defense

The second famous response to Mackie’s version of the problem of evil is the free will defense (or theodicy). This response rejects the premise that an omnipotent God could eliminate all evil if God also wanted to create a world with free persons in it. It argues that free will includes the possibility of evil, but the goods that arise from free will justify the suffering that accompanies it.

Augustine of Hippo is associated with the free will theodicy, which argues that free will is the reason why God allows evil to exist.²¹⁰ Alvin Plantinga is associated with the free will defense, which does not claim to know why God allows evil with certainty. Instead, it merely attempts to show that free will could be a justifiable reason for God to allow evil, thereby defeating Mackie’s version of the logical problem of evil.

According to Plantinga, omnipotence only means that God can create possible worlds, i.e., those worlds that can logically or actually exist. God could not create impossible worlds, for example, where triangles had four sides.²¹¹ Plantinga considers the idea of “transworld depravity,” which refers to a condition where a person would be significantly free and would do moral wrong with respect to some act in all possible worlds. If transworld depravity is an essential or necessary property of all truly free human beings, then it would not be possible for God to create a world with free human beings that included no evil.²¹² Any world with free humans would include sin and evil. Plantinga does not insist that transworld depravity is true, but the possibility that it is true is sufficient to show one logically possible reason why God might allow evil.

Freedom is important to bring about moral goods like love and the virtues, so it may be that freedom is good enough to justify God creating a world in which evil arises from free will. This would refute Mackie’s claim that an omnipotent God could fully eliminate evil by providing one possible reason why this may not be the case.

At this point, the observant reader might remember the moral objections to the soul-making defense, where a good outcome may not justify the means. Does this concern apply to the free will defense? The free will defense and the soul-making theodicy are slightly different. The soul-making theodicy suggests that God uses evil for good purposes, claiming that evil is thereby justified. The free will defense says that God causes something good, which has an inescapable evil associated with it. In the free will defense, God is not using evil to bring about good. Rather, he is causing good which unavoidably results in humans causing evil.²¹³

Philosophically, the free will defense is largely seen as a successful response to Mackie’s version of the logical problem of evil. It shows one logically consistent explanation for why an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God would allow evil.

Is the free will defense biblical? In one sense, the answer must be no, for the Bible nowhere says that the good of free choice explains why God permits evil. However, in a more broad sense, the biblical narrative fits the free will defense. Genesis 3 depicts sin entering creation through the choice of Adam and Eve, and Romans 5:12–21 depicts evils like sin and death as the result of the one sin of Adam. The doctrine of original sin could fit with the free will defense. Since we are only considering a defense, which poses a possible answer, and not a theodicy that claims certainty, this may suffice.

Some object to the theology of freedom that Plantinga uses, which is overtly libertarian in a manner rejected by some theologians. In other words, humans are free with respect to an act if they are able to do or not do an act.²¹⁴ Many traditional understandings of the doctrine of sin deny this power with respect to evil actions. However, while many Protestants would deny that humans have libertarian freedom with respect to sin today, most would allow the possibility that Adam was able to avoid sin.

A second objection to Plantinga focuses on natural evil. Moral evil arises from free human action, but natural evils like earthquakes or plagues apparently come from features of the universe, not from human choices. A robust narrative of the fall may link natural evil to the moral evil of Adam’s sin (as in Rom 5:17 and 8:20–21), but Plantinga also explains that natural evil might arise from demonic freedom. That possibility alone suffices to fit natural evil with the free will defense, even if the ultimate explanation for natural evil is different.²¹⁵ By considering specific varieties of evil, we are again being drawn to consider the evidential problem of evil.

Anti-theodicy

Finally, we must consider those who object to theodicy altogether. Anti-theodicy is an approach that rejects the quest to identify explanations for evil and suffering altogether.

In part, this approach emerges because of pastoral problems that can arise from theodicies. Some theologians have argued that theodicy is problematic and should be avoided. For example, John Swinton names three problems that emerge from theodicy. Theodicies can:

1. “Rationalize evil”: For example, the soul-making theodicy might lead us to accept an injustice as a necessary part of our moral improvement rather than something to resist.
2. “Silence the voice of the sufferer”: When someone is given an explanation for their suffering, they might feel as if they cannot grieve or express anger, leading them to bottle up their emotions.
3. “Become evil in themselves”: If evil is rationalized or sufferers are silenced, it may cause more suffering, adding evil to evil.²¹⁶

It may be sufficient to recognize that theodicy is not appropriate for the existential problem of evil, when suffering is personal. In such contexts, abstract philosophical answers can cause the problems Swinton identifies. If you are asked why God allows evil, it would be wise to seek some context for the question rather than offer a quick theodicy that may face Swinton’s three problems. Because of the potential harms of theodicy, others object to using theodicy in any context, insisting on anti-theodicy.

The Bible may provide further reasons for anti-theodicy. For instance, advocates of anti-theodicy often appeal to the book of Job to explain their concerns. Job’s assertions are fairly consistent throughout the book. God has caused Job’s suffering (e.g., Job 9–10; 19:7–9) and Job claims innocence (e.g., Job 9:21; 27:5–6). Job laments that the human plight is misery (e.g., Job 7:1–10; 12:5–25; 14:1–6). Yet Job’s “expressives change remarkably.” He begins with cursing (Job 3:1) but soon moves from this to increasing expressions of hope (e.g., Job 16:18–17:1).²¹⁷ Job also shifts from calling for a neutral arbiter (Job 9:33) to seeking a witness to verify his innocence (Job 16:19), to finally asking for a defender or avenger who shall facilitate Job seeing God (Job 19:25–27).²¹⁸

In other words, Job has taken advantage of a unique opportunity not evident in many other religions. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, dispute with God was permitted, not met with instant divine judgment.²¹⁹ In fact, given the presence of psalms of lament and imprecatory psalms in the canon, Jews and Christians were encouraged to voice their anger, grief, despair, and frustration to God. Perhaps the main lesson from Job is that continuing honest communication with God is more important than offering a logical explanation for suffering.

2. The evidential problem of evil

Where the logical problem of evil argues that it is impossible for God to co-exist with evil, the evidential problem of evil makes more meager claims. It merely argues that certain kinds of evil make God’s existence improbable.

The argument of Paul Draper will illustrate the problem well. Draper considers three basic kinds of evil:

1. Moral agents experience biologically useful pain (e.g., pain that helps life survive by alerting of danger). Draper says God would need a moral reason for this pain, such as pain building character in the soul-making defense. After all, he could create life that did not need pain. He argues this pain is more likely to emerge from an indifferent universe than from a good God.
2. Non-moral agents also experience biologically useful pain. Draper says this would be probable in an evolutionary universe, but since there could be no moral benefit to this pain (non-moral agents don’t have character to build), this would be unlikely in a universe made by God.
3. Sentient beings experience pain that is not biologically useful. Draper says that both theism and an indifferent universe could explain this pain fairly easily.

Draper concludes that the “hypothesis of indifference,” that the universe is a product of impersonal forces, is a more probable hypothesis given the existence of these three kinds of pain.²²⁰

Responses to the evidential problem of evil

There are two basic strategies Christians use to respond to the evidential problem of evil.

Offensive strategies typically make a case for the existence of God that can counterbalance the evidential problem of evil by providing evidence that God’s existence is probable.²²¹ For example, pain may make theism less probable, but the complexity of the universe may make theism more probable through the teleological argument.

Defensive strategies merely attempt to show that a given evidential argument is not successful in showing that theism is improbable. One defensive strategy focuses on arguing that human beings are unlikely to know the reasons why God might allow certain pains or evils, which makes it impossible to determine the probability that God might allow a specific kind of evil. One such defensive strategy is named skeptical theism. If we affirm that God exceeds human understanding (e.g., Isa 55:8–9; 1 Cor 2:11), then we do not have reason to think that we would always understand why God allows certain kinds of evil. Thus, probabilistic arguments are unreliable.²²²

Theodicy and the cross

One theological response to the evidential problem of evil focuses on the cross.

Marilyn McCord Adams has focused on what she calls “horrendous evils”: those extreme instances of suffering like brutal torture which make it doubtful that a person’s life could be good for them overall.²²³ While one might appeal to the good of free will to explain why creation, on a global scale, is better off with evil than without, to the person who suffers horrendous evil the benefits of suffering on a global scale may seem irrelevant to the catastrophic suffering experienced.

In response to such situations, Adams focuses on how “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor 5:19). In the incarnation, the Son was subjected to the horrendous evil of betrayal, bodily torture, public humiliation, and grave injustice. By identifying with such “ruinous” suffering, God “integrates” such suffering “into the participant’s relationship with God.” Not even horrendous evil can cause separation from God (Rom 8:31–39). Our personal relationship with God culminates in our seeing him face to face, an “incommensurate good.”²²⁴

The crucifixion does not mean that horrendous evils are a good or necessary thing for encountering God, but it does mean that God enters even the worst forms of suffering to allow us to encounter him as a perfect good that can heal all wounds. Through the cross, no evil is capable of making a life impossible to redeem—which brings us finally to the existential problem of evil.

3. The existential problem of evil

Both logical and the evidential forms of the problem of evil are philosophical, but the existential problem of evil is a more personal and spiritual problem. This version of the problem of evil describes the experience of someone who doubts God’s existence or experiences anger toward God or hopelessness as a result of suffering or of witnessing someone else’s suffering. Because it is so personal, the existential problem of evil should be treated differently than the logical and evidential problems.

In the above discussion of anti-theodicy, we considered John Swinton’s list of problems that theodicy may cause. These problems are especially likely in the context of the existential problem of evil. The point should be obvious if you imagine visiting a friend whose child just died of leukemia and offering them a syllogism explaining the free will defense. However, we may not always recognize the personal reasons that may lead someone to express the problem of evil.

Given these concerns, John Swinton advocates developing a “practical theodicy,” an approach which fosters practices of hope and healing with a goal of restoring “right relationship with God, self, and others.”²²⁵ Such theodicy may not explain why evil happens as much as provide opportunities for faith to persist despite suffering, grief, or pain.

Lament and evil

One example of practical theodicy is lament, a genre in Scripture, represented especially by the Psalms and Lamentations, through which grief, doubt, pain, and other emotions are expressed to God.

Lament can provide a practical help against evil because it gives voice to the community’s grief, names horrors and trauma in a way that calls for justice, and fosters hope for restoration.²²⁶ When churches provide spaces for lament through regular Sunday worship, grief support groups, memorial services, and in pastoral counseling, the expression of lament can be a means of healing or a way to gather support for the pursuit of justice.

How not to respond to suffering

While the theological framework of the cross may help us think about evil conceptually, we must be careful regarding how we use such conceptual frameworks. When someone is having a traumatic experience, four common responses may shut down grief and close off the sorts of open communication with God that the book of Job encourages. Undermining grief may cause more long-term trauma, so it is best to avoid:

1. Trivialization: minimizing an experience of suffering or evil by downplaying pain or emotional struggle (e.g., “It’s not as bad as it seems”)
2. Particularization: treating the harm experienced by the sufferer as less important or serious than other kinds of pain (e.g., “It could be worse”)
3. Spiritualization: offering a spiritual slogan that prevents grieving (e.g., “Just bear your cross”)
4. Universalization: reducing a specific loss or harm to a general human experience (e.g., “We all suffer in our own ways”)²²⁷

Though each person and conversation is different, often these responses prevent healthy grieving or expressions of pain in a manner that could cause long-term problems. Avoiding these patterns contributes to a helpful practical theodicy.

Conclusion

The problem of evil in its various forms is one of the more substantive challenges to the Christian faith. This survey of the problem in its three forms certainly does not exhaust the conversation, but it does show viable Christian responses that prevent the problem of evil from destroying Christian faith.

Several basic strategies for responding to specific versions of the logical problem of evil are fruitful in defending Christian convictions, and the soul-making theodicy and free will defense make progress in explaining why God might allow evil, though in the end anti-theodicy may be a wiser approach. The evidential problem of evil faces serious problems in its methodology, particularly its assumption that we would understand God’s reasons for anything.

In the end, most of our attention should be directed toward the existential problem of evil—the personal sufferings we face daily—as we seek to support those who grieve without further harming them through unwise appeals to theodicy. Our response to evil must therefore be guided by the Spirit who gives wisdom to discern when to offer a rational answer and when to join in lament with those who suffer.

Share your thoughts

What is the best response to the problem of evil? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

Glenn Butner’s suggested resources for further study

Meister, Chad. Evil: A Guide for the Perplexed. Second edition. Bloomsbury, 2018.

Additional resources

Related content

• What Is Evil—Biblically? What the Bible Says about Good & Evil
• Why Do Good People Do Bad Things? The Problem of Free Will
• From Genesis to Judgment: Original Sin Fully Explained
• What Is Sin? Is Your Definition Missing the Mark?
• Christian Apologetics: Truth, Love, and Faith Conversations

Jerusalem, for most people, refers primarily to a real city in the Judaean Mountains between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. Also known as Zion, this city is mentioned many times in the Bible.²²⁸

But the name Jerusalem is also associated with another location in the Bible.

In his letter to the Galatians, the Apostle Paul contrasts earthly Jerusalem with a “Jerusalem that is above” (Gal 4:26). The author of Hebrews also mentions a “heavenly Jerusalem” (Heb 12:22). Strikingly, this heavenly Jerusalem reappears in the final chapters of Revelation, where the Apostle John sees a “new Jerusalem” descend from heaven to a “new earth” (Rev 21:1–2, 10; cf. 3:12).

What are we to make of this?

Jerusalem as God’s earthly residence

In the Old Testament, the city of Jerusalem stands apart from all other locations.

After God dramatically redeems the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, the people sing of how he will “plant them” on a “mountain” where he will dwell in the “sanctuary” which he has established (Exod 15:17).²²⁹

This expectation of residing with God on a holy mountain is partially fulfilled after King David captures Jerusalem from the Jebusites and transports there the ark of the covenant (2 Sam 6:1–19).²³⁰ As the footstool of God’s heavenly throne (1 Chron 28:2; cf. Pss 99:5; 132:7), the ark signifies God’s majestic presence on earth.

God’s association with Jerusalem is confirmed by the building of an ornate palace/temple, which becomes his earthly residence (1 Kgs 6–8). After Solomon’s dedication of the newly constructed building, God’s glory fills the palace/temple as it did the tabernacle (1 Kgs 8:10–11; cf. Exod 40:34–35). By replacing the portable tabernacle with a palace/temple, Solomon makes Jerusalem God’s permanent home (e.g., Pss. 46:4; 48:8; 135:21). No other city experiences God’s presence in this way.

The presence of God transforms Jerusalem, making it a source of blessing to those who live or travel there as pilgrims to worship God (e.g., Pss 84:5–7; 128:5–6; 133:1–3; 134:3; 147:12–14).²³¹

As God’s holy mountain city, Jerusalem is “perfect in beauty” (Ps 50:2) and becomes an object of praise. The author of Psalm 48 declares:

Great is the Lord, and most worthy of praise,
in the city of our God, his holy mountain.
Beautiful in its loftiness,
the joy of the whole earth,
like the heights of Zaphon is Mount Zion,
the city of the Great King. (Ps 48:1–2; cf. Ps 125:1)

More significantly, the Israelites emphasize the mountain’s holiness due to God’s holy presence. Not surprisingly, God expects exemplary moral behavior from those who dwell there. As the Psalmist declares:

Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord?
Who may stand in his holy place?
The one who has clean hands and a pure heart,
who does not trust in an idol
or swear by a false god. (Ps 24:3–4; cf. Ps 15:1–5)

Unfortunately, despite being known as the city of God, Jerusalem’s residents live immorally. They break their unique covenant with God. Moses warned that disobedience would lead to exile (Deut 28:64–68).

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When the kings of Judah turn away from God, disastrous consequences follow. Despite the Davidic dynasty’s role in establishing Jerusalem as the city of God, the prophets announce God’s condemnation. Various prophets condemn the citizens of Jerusalem for their immorality (e.g., Isa 1:2–31; Jer 2:1–37; Ezek 5:8–12). In a notable parable illustrating God’s disappointment with their behavior, Isaiah compares Jerusalem’s residents to bitter grapes (Isa 5:1–5).

Eventually, through divine punishment, Jerusalem falls to the Babylonians in 586 BC. Ironically, challenging the belief that God would always safeguard Jerusalem, Jeremiah predicts that the Judaeans exiled to Babylon are safer than those left in Jerusalem. And, as the Prophet Ezekiel reveals, Jerusalem is so corrupted by idolatry that God can no longer dwell there.

A new Jerusalem anticipated

While Lamentations graphically reveals the devastating reality of God’s judgment against Jerusalem, all is not lost. Remarkably, the eschatological hope of the Old Testament centers on a new Jerusalem.²³²

Against a backdrop of destruction and exile, the Old Testament prophets envisage a transformed Jerusalem where the nations will come for divine instruction, leading to universal peace (Mic 4:1–4; Isa 2:2–4). As Heath Thomas observes, “Zion becomes a symbol of new creation and redeemed humanity that lives before God without sin, death, or pain because God rules in its midst.”²³³ Significantly, however, “in all this Jerusalem—the historical city—recedes into the background.”²³⁴

In a series of oracles, Isaiah looks forward to a transformed world centered on a new Jerusalem that is highly prized by God (Isa 62:1–5, 12). Isaiah contrasts God’s rejection of a deeply corrupted Jerusalem with a future Jerusalem that is associated with a second creation that mirrors the creation of the heavens and the earth in Genesis 1. Strikingly, Isaiah describes how this new Jerusalem will be marked by harmony in the natural environment (Isa 65:25; cf. Isa 11:6–9).

Like Isaiah, the Prophet Ezekiel envisions a future Jerusalem on a holy mountain where God will reside (Ezek 40–48). Scholars see this vision as symbolic, discounting a literal fulfillment. For example, Daniel Block writes, “All in all Ezekiel’s scheme appears highly contrived, casting doubt on any interpretation that expects a literal fulfillment of his plan.”²³⁵ Ezekiel foresees a time when the Jerusalem sanctuary is undefiled and everything is holy (Ezek 43:12; cf. 43:6–11). To convey the otherness of this transformed city, Ezekiel’s vision notably depicts a river originating from the temple that revitalizes the Dead Sea’s lifeless waters (Ezek 47:1–12).

The city envisaged by Isaiah goes far beyond all that is achieved under the post-exilic restoration initiated by Cyrus, the king of Persia. While Isaiah portrays Cyrus as a gentile messiah who rebuilds the temple in a restored Jerusalem (Isa 44:28),²³⁶ still more significantly, Isaiah anticipates a future Davidic king who, as the “servant of the Lord,” will be a light to the nations (Isa 49:6) and will atone for the sins of others (Isa 53:4–12).

The rebuilding of Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile highlights that God’s plan to establish a holy city where he will dwell with his people remains intact. Starting with the rebuilding of the temple, the city’s reconstruction offers hope for the return of a Davidic king, as foretold by various prophets during the exile (see Jer 23:5–6; 33:14–26; Ezek 34:23–31; 37:24–28; cf. Zech 9:9–10).

While it is often assumed that the new Jerusalem envisioned by Isaiah and Ezekiel involves the transformation of the post-exilic Jerusalem, there are indications that the new Jerusalem will be inhabited by those who are resurrected from the dead. Using imagery of captives returning from exile, Isaiah describes “those the Lord has rescued” entering “Zion with singing” and enjoying “everlasting joy” (Isa 35:10). This refers to more than exiles returning from Babylon. Elsewhere, Isaiah speaks of how God “will swallow up death forever,” having prepared “a feast of rich food for all peoples” on his holy mountain (Isa 25:6–8). With confidence Isaiah proclaims:

But your dead will live, Lord;
their bodies will rise—
let those who dwell in the dust
wake up and shout for joy—
your dew is like the dew of the morning;
the earth will give birth to her dead. (Isa 26:19)

These expectations suggest that Isaiah has in view a city that far exceeds the Jerusalem of his day or anything that it could become through merely human actions. The same is true of Ezekiel’s vision of Jerusalem. In light of such expectations, Jewish writings from the intertestamental period express belief in an eternal, heavenly Jerusalem.²³⁷ The same hope is also present in the New Testament.

The eternal, heavenly Jerusalem

Building on the Old Testament, New Testament writers emphasize the importance of Jerusalem’s role in God’s redemptive plan.

Significantly, attention shifts from the earthly city to a heavenly Jerusalem. Declaring him to be the promised Davidic king, the Anointed One, the Christ (i.e., Messiah), Jesus of Nazareth is central to this transition. While Jesus’s birth is associated with the “redemption of Jerusalem” (Luke 2:38), the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke emphasize Jesus’s public ministry in Galilee, suggesting that earthly Jerusalem is not the primary locus of the kingdom of God, contrary to the hopes of Jesus’s contemporaries. Matthew’s references to the “kingdom of heaven” also diminish the importance of the earthly Jerusalem, as does the Galilean ending of his gospel with its international perspective.

While Jesus’s death in Jerusalem is exceptionally important, it is striking that when Luke writes of Jesus’s journey to the city, he does not portray it as the final goal: “As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51). Jesus’s ascension to heaven takes precedence for it results in his enthronement as universal king at God’s right hand in the heavenly sanctuary (cf. Ps 110).

Highlighting Jesus’s ascension in Luke 24:50–53 and Acts 1:6–11, Luke notes that God moves from residing in the Jerusalem temple to dwelling through the Spirit in the followers of Jesus.²³⁸ Importantly, consistent with Jesus’s prophecy that the temple will be destroyed (Matt 24:2; Mark 13:2; Luke 21:6), God transitions from living among his people to living within them, thereby reducing earthly Jerusalem’s significance as the holy city.

Although Jesus appreciates Jerusalem’s importance in God’s redemptive plan and shows concern for its people’s well-being, he highlights its rejection of God.²³⁹ While welcomed as the “son of David,” his brutal death, provoked by the religious leaders, reveals the city’s hostility toward God. Under a new covenant established by Jesus, God’s plans for ransomed humanity involve a heavenly Jerusalem.

The Apostle Paul highlights this dramatic change of location in his letter to the Church of Galatia. He uses the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar to illustrate a crucial contrast between the “present Jerusalem” and the “Jerusalem above” (Gal 4:21–31).²⁴⁰ Additionally, he reminds the Church of Philippi that “Our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil 3:20).

The author of Hebrews also highlights the significance of “the heavenly Jerusalem,” calling it “the city of the living God” (Heb 12:22). He adds, “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (Heb 13:14). Linking this concept of a “city that is to come” to the patriarch Abraham, Hebrews states that Abraham, in faith, looked forward to “a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Heb 11:16), and “to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God” (Heb 11:10). Though Abraham never lived in this city during his earthly life, the writer of Hebrews foresees a time when Abraham and his readers will dwell there together (cf. Heb 11:39–40).

Recalling the expectations in the book of Isaiah of a new creation involving a transformed Jerusalem, the Apostle John’s climactic vision in Revelation 21–22 depicts the descent of a heavenly city to a new earth. Highlighting its grandeur and splendor, this cosmopolitan Jerusalem hosts redeemed believers who experience abundant, eternal life in a world purged of all evil. Remarkably, as the goal of God’s redemption activity, the entire biblical story from the garden of Eden onward comes to a finale in this new Jerusalem.²⁴¹

For believers, the Bible emphasizes that our future hope does not lie in present-day Jerusalem, despite its past importance in the purposes of God. Rather, we look with confidence to the creation of a new Jerusalem where the resurrected followers of Jesus will experience life in all its fulness in the presence of their Savior and Lord.

Share your thoughts

How would you describe the role of Jerusalem in the Bible? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

T. Desmond Alexander’s suggested resources

• Fuller Dow, Lois K. Images of Zion: Biblical Antecedents for the New Jerusalem. New Testament Monographs 26. Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010.
• Walker, Peter W. L., ed. Jerusalem Past and Present in the Purposes of God. Deo Gloria Trust, 1992.

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• Salvation History: The Bible’s Grand Story of Redemption
• The Promised Land & Beyond: How God Reclaims His Whole Creation
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Presbyterian and Reformed colleges, universities, and seminaries equip their students to fulfill what many Reformed Christians confess is their primary goal, which is “to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”²⁴² Within college and university contexts, this may mean preparing students for a broad variety of academic and professional pursuits in the humanities and the sciences. Seminaries offer biblical and theological education that prepares men and women for vocational ministry, with a particular focus on the ministry of Word and sacrament. Both types of institutions have a high view of the Bible and Reformed theology and seek to submit all of faith and life to God’s revealed will.

What makes a college, university, or seminary Reformed or Presbyterian?

Put simply, the common denominator between Reformed and Presbyterian colleges, universities, or seminaries is a commitment to Reformed theology.

But what is Reformed theology? Ligon Duncan describes it this way:

Reformed theology, representing the public, ecclesial, doctrinal convictions of a major branch of Protestantism, is a school of historic, orthodox, confessional Christianity that maintains and emphasizes the sovereignty of the triune God, the authority of Scripture, God’s grace in salvation, the necessity and significance of the church, and covenant theology.²⁴³

For the purposes of this article, I highlight several aspects of Reformed theology:²⁴⁴

1. Historic

Reformed theology finds its roots in historic orthodox Christianity and finds fuller expression in the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, most famously in the theology of John Calvin.

2. Confessional

Reformed believers confess the faith that has been received and adopted by the church as it is documented in the Reformed confessions. The colleges, universities, and seminaries listed here have adopted the Three Forms of Unity (The Heidelberg Catechism, The Belgic Confession, and the Canons of Dort) and/or the Westminster Standards (The Westminster Confession of Faith and Larger and Shorter Catechisms) as their doctrinal standard.

3. Ecclesial

Reformed theology emphasizes the importance of the church. It highlights the church as the people of God, the instrument through which the Great Commission is fulfilled, outside of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation. As Reformed institutions, the schools below have close (if not official) affiliations with various Reformed and Presbyterian denominations.

Reformed and Presbyterian are sometimes used interchangeably. Reformed and Presbyterian churches share a common theology and practice some version of Presbyterian polity. However, the terms can also serve to differentiate between the Continental (primarily Dutch) Reformed and Scottish Reformed (or Presbyterian) stream. The Continental Reformed stream finds contemporary expression in the United Reformed Churches in North America. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church and Presbyterian Church in America represent the Scottish Reformed stream.

Notable Reformed and Presbyterian colleges and universities

The following list includes colleges, universities, and seminaries that identify as Reformed or Presbyterian. The list is refined using several criteria:

• This list includes institutions that continue to identify themselves as Reformed and/or have active affiliations with Reformed churches. There are other colleges, universities, and seminaries that have historically identified as Reformed but no longer do so, but these are not included here.
• The colleges on this list represent evangelical expressions of Reformed theology. Mainline institutions are not included.
• As mentioned above, each of the colleges and universities use either the Three Forms of Unity or The Westminster Standards as their confessional standard or are affiliated with churches who use them as such.
• The colleges listed here are found in the United States.
• The colleges, universities, and seminaries listed here possess accreditation that is recognized by the United States Department of Education.

1. Calvin University, Grand Rapids, MI

• Denomination: Christian Reformed Church
• Confessional standard: Three Forms of Unity
• Undergraduate tuition: $42,120/year
• Graduate tuition: $640–995/credit hour
• Enrollment: 3,681²⁴⁵
• Programs: associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s
• Online programs: microcredentials, certificates, and master’s degrees
• Athletics: NCAA Division III
• Accreditation: Higher Learning Commission (HLC). Several programs also possess specialized accreditations.
• Founded: 1876

Calvin University began as The Theological School, established to train ministers for the Christian Reformed Church. The school was renamed John Calvin Junior College in 1906 and began offering four-year degrees in 1920. Renamed Calvin University in 2019, the school offers over a hundred academic programs in the humanities, arts, and sciences.

2. Covenant College, Lookout Mountain, GA

• Denomination: Presbyterian Church in America
• Confessional standard: The Westminster Standards
• Undergraduate tuition: $44,050/year
• Graduate tuition: $500/credit hour
• Enrollment: 1,100
• Programs: bachelor’s, master’s
• Online programs: N/A
• Athletics: NCAA Division III
• Accreditation: Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC)
• Founded: 1955

Originally located in Pasadena, California, the college later shared a campus with Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis before moving to its current location atop Lookout Mountain, Georgia, in 1964. With over twenty undergraduate majors in various disciplines and a master of arts in teaching program, the college seeks to “offer the world biblically grounded men and women equipped to live out extraordinary callings in ordinary places.”

3. Dordt University, Sioux Center, IA

• Denomination: Christian Reformed Church
• Confessional standard: Three Forms of Unity
• Undergraduate tuition: $38,200/year
• Graduate tuition: $405–710/credit hour
• Enrollment: 1,952
• Programs: associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s
• Online Programs: One undergraduate and seven graduate programs
• Athletics: NAIA
• Accreditation: Higher Learning Commission (HLC). Several programs also possess specialized accreditations.
• Founded: 1955

Dordt originated as Midwest Christian Junior College to train Christian school teachers. When it began offering four-year degree programs, the institution changed its name to Dordt College in honor of the 1618–1619 synod that produced the Canons of Dort. Dordt University now offers degree programs including agriculture, nursing, engineering, business, social work, criminal justice, construction management, international business, and more.

4. Erskine College, Due West, SC

• Denomination: Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church
• Confessional standard: The Westminster Standards
• Undergraduate tuition: $34,435/year
• Graduate tuition: $550/credit hour
• Enrollment: 803 (undergraduate)
• Programs: bachelor’s, master’s
• Online programs: Some online courses are available, but no fully online programs.
• Athletics: NCAA Division II
• Accreditation: Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC)
• Founded: 1839

Erskine College formed out of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church’s academy for men. Three institutions, including Erskine College, the Woman’s College of Due West, and Erskine Seminary, merged in 1927, resulting in a single institution known as Erskine College, with the seminary serving as its graduate school of theology. The college offers over twenty undergraduate majors in a variety of fields, in addition to a master of arts in Christian counseling.

5. Geneva College, Beaver Falls, PA

• Denomination: Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America
• Confessional standard: The Westminster Standards
• Undergraduate tuition: $34,130/year
• Graduate tuition: $699/credit hour
• Enrollment: 1,366
• Programs: associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s
• Online programs: Five bachelor of professional studies (BPS) degrees available online
• Athletics: NCAA Division III
• Accreditation: Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE). Several programs also possess specialized accreditations.
• Founded: 1848

Geneva Hall was founded in Northwood, Ohio, and named after one of the epicenters of the Reformed faith: Geneva, Switzerland. It moved to its present location north of Pittsburgh in 1880, where it became the site of the first recorded intercollegiate basketball game in 1893. The school now offers over a hundred undergraduate majors, online adult degree programs, and graduate degrees.

Notable Reformed and Presbyterian seminaries

6. Calvin Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, MI

• Denomination: Christian Reformed Church
• Confessional standard: The Three Forms of Unity
• Accreditation: Association of Theological Schools (ATS)
• Enrollment: 379
• Degree programs: master of divinity; MA in Bible and theology; MA in Christian leadership; MA in clinical mental health counseling; master of theological studies; master of theology; doctor of ministry
• Online programs: Yes
• Tuition: $595/credit for MDiv/MA/MTS; $889 for ThM
• Founded: 1876

Calvin Theological Seminary began as The Theological School for the training of ministers in the Christian Reformed Church. Calvin College (later Calvin University) became a distinct institution governed by a separate board in 1991.

7. Covenant Theological Seminary, St. Louis, MO

• Denomination: Presbyterian Church in America
• Confessional standard: The Westminster Standards
• Accreditation: Higher Learning Commission (HLC), Association of Theological Schools (ATS); MA in counseling accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP)
• Enrollment: 550
• Degree programs: master of divinity; MA in counseling; MA in biblical and theological studies; MA in ministry; MA in theological studies; master of theology; doctor of ministry
• Online programs: Yes
• Founded: 1956

Covenant Theological Seminary began as the ministerial training institution of the Bible Presbyterian Church in 1956 and originally shared its campus with Covenant College. Through a series of denominational mergers, the seminary came to be affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in America in 1982.

8. Erskine Theological Seminary, Due West, SC

• Denomination: Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church
• Confessional standard: The Westminster Standards
• Accreditation: Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC), and the Association of Theological Schools (ATS)
• Enrollment: 118
• Degree programs: master of divinity; master of practical ministry; MA in theological studies; master of theology; doctor of ministry
• Online programs: Yes
• Tuition: $550/credit master’s-level; $600/credit ThM and DMin
• Founded: 1837

Erskine Theological Seminary was established by the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church in 1837 for the preparation of ARP ministers. It merged with Erskine College and the Woman’s College of Due West in 1927, and serves as the college’s graduate theological school.

9. Knox Theological Seminary, Fort Lauderdale, FL

• Denomination: not denominationally affiliated
• Confessional standard: The Westminster Standards
• Accreditation: The Association of Theological Schools (ATS)
• Enrollment: 141
• Degree programs: master of divinity; MA in Christian and Classical studies; MA in biblical and theological studies; doctor of ministry
• Online programs: Yes
• Tuition: $670/credit for master’s-level; $755/credit for DMin
• Founded: 1989

Knox Theological Seminary, named after Scottish Reformer John Knox, was founded by Dr. D. James Kennedy under the oversight of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, a congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America.

10. Mid-America Reformed Seminary, Dyer, IN

• Denomination: not denominationally affiliated
• Confessional standard: The Three Forms of Unity and the Westminster Standards
• Accreditation: The Association of Theological Schools (ATS)
• Enrollment: 32
• Degree programs: master of divinity; master of theological studies
• Online programs: N/A
• Tuition: $290/credit
• Founded: 1981

Organized at an O’Hare Airport hotel in 1981, Mid-America Reformed Seminary operated in Orange City, Iowa, until 1995, when it moved to its campus in Dyer, Indiana, a suburb of Chicago. Because of its commitment to personal formation, the seminary intentionally limits enrollment.

11. Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, MI

• Denomination: Heritage Reformed Congregations
• Confessional standard: The Three Forms of Unity and the Westminster Standards
• Accreditation: The Association of Theological Schools (ATS)
• Enrollment: 501
• Degree programs: master of divinity; master of arts in biblical counseling; master of arts in religion; master of theology; doctor of ministry; doctor of philosophy
• Online programs: Yes
• Tuition: $275/credit for master’s-level, including ThM; $325/credit for DMin
• Founded: 1995

PRTS began under the leadership of Joel Beeke in 1995 when the seminary admitted four students from the Heritage Reformed Congregations. Its first class graduated in 1998, and the seminary moved to its present location in 2004.

12. Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Pittsburgh, PA

• Denomination: Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America
• Confessional standard: The Westminster Standards and the Testimony of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America
• Accreditation: Association of Theological Schools (ATS)
• Enrollment: 91
• Degree programs: master of divinity; master of theological studies; doctor of ministry
• Online programs: some courses available.
• Tuition: $16,830/year (15 hours per quarter)
• Founded: 1810

The oldest of the seminaries on this list, Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary initially moved to wherever its professor served as a pastor: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Coldenham, New York; Northwood and Cincinnati, Ohio, and finally, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The seminary moved to its present location in 1923.

13. Reformed Theological Seminary

• Locations: Jackson, MS; Orlando, FL; Charlotte, NC; Washington, DC; Atlanta, GA; Houston, TX; Dallas, TX; New York City, NY; Sao Paulo, Brazil
• Denomination: not denominationally affiliated
• Confessional standard: The Westminster Standards
• Accreditation: Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC); the Association of Theological Schools (ATS); MA in counseling accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs
• Enrollment: 1,022
• Degree programs: master of divinity; MA in biblical studies; MA in theological studies; MA in religion; MA in counseling; MA in Christian counseling; master of theology; doctor of ministry²⁴⁶
• Online programs: yes
• Tuition: $654/credit for master’s-level; $695/credit for ThM and DMin
• Founded: 1966

In response to concern over theological liberalism in the southern Presbyterian church and its theological institutions, Reformed Theological Seminary was established in Jackson, Mississippi, to prepare ministers committed to the inerrancy of Scripture and Reformed theology as articulated in The Westminster Standards. The seminary became a multi-campus institution in 1989 with the formation of a second campus in Orlando. It has since expanded to include multiple campuses and online programs.

14. Westminster Seminary California, Escondido, CA

• Denomination: not denominationally affiliated
• Confessional standard: The Three Forms of Unity and The Westminster Standards
• Accreditation: Accrediting Commission for Senior Colleges and Universities of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) and the Association of Theological Schools (ATS)
• Enrollment: 108
• Degree programs: master of divinity; MA in biblical studies; MA in theological studies; MA in historical theology
• Online programs: N/A
• Tuition: $570/credit
• Founded: 1980

Founded in 1980 as a branch campus of Westminster Theological Seminary to serve students in the Western United States, the seminary became fully independent in 1982.

15. Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, PA

• Denomination: not denominationally affiliated
• Confessional standard: The Westminster Standards
• Accreditation: Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) and the Association of Theological Schools (ATS)
• Enrollment: 1,183
• Degree programs: master of divinity; MA in religion; MA in theological studies; MA in counseling; master of theology; doctor of ministry; doctor of philosophy
• Online programs: yes
• Tuition: $53,000/year for residential MDiv and MAR programs; $675/credit for online and part-time residential students; $3,650/course for DMin; $4,350/course for ThM; $5000/course for PhD
• Founded: 1929

Westminster Theological Seminary was founded in 1929 when a group of professors exited Princeton Seminary over concerns of theological liberalism. J. Gresham Machen, John Murray, Cornelius Van Til, and others sought to preserve historic Reformed theology, continuing ministerial preparation in the spirit of Old Princeton.

What to look for in a Reformed or Presbyterian school

You should consider the following when considering which Reformed or Presbyterian school would best equip you for your calling:

1. Degree programs

For colleges and universities, does the school offer your desired program of study? How many courses are available to choose from within your desired major? Some colleges and universities offer greater selection and specialization than others within a field of study.

For seminaries, what is the makeup and curriculum of the program? For example, not all MDiv degrees are equal: some meet the ATS-required minimum of 72 credits, while many Reformed MDiv degrees offer 100+ credits. Does it include a solid combination of biblical studies (including Greek and Hebrew), systematic theology, and pastoral theology (preaching, evangelism, missions, counseling, etc.)?

2. Theological commitments

All of these colleges, universities, and seminaries fall into the evangelical sphere of the Reformed and Presbyterian world, but that does not mean that their theological approach is identical. Consider which best fits your theological commitments and—especially if preparing for pastoral ministry—denominational requirements.

3. Faculty

Consider who teaches at the institution. How many faculty members teach in the program in which you’re interested? Do their areas of interest and expertise align with yours, and have they demonstrated scholarship in those areas? If you plan to take online classes, are they taught by the school’s regular faculty or by someone else?

4. Enrollment

Inquire how many students are enrolled in your desired program and modality. The numbers cited above are accurate, but they include students in all programs, whether they are enrolled online or residentially.

5. Alumni

Who are some of the school’s alumni? Do they represent the kind of person you want to be shaped into?

6. Cost and financial aid

The list above demonstrates that schools assess different levels of tuition. Weigh affordability, but take into account the financial assistance available: a school with a higher published tuition rate may actually be more affordable after scholarships and grants are applied.

7. Accreditation

Accreditation makes good schools better by ensuring they hold themselves to a high standard within the commitments of their mission.

All the schools above hold institutional accreditation that is recognized by the US Department of Education. If you are going into a professional field like counseling or engineering, you’ll also want to ensure that the degree holds appropriate programmatic accreditation (e.g., CACREP for licensed mental health counseling, ABET for engineering). Appropriate accreditation provides assurance that your degree will be recognized as meeting educational requirements for licensure or for admission into higher-level academic programs.

8. Local churches

When considering any college, university, or seminary, you should give significant consideration to churches in the area. Is there a congregation that will minister faithfully to you, and where you can commit yourself to worship and service?

Conclusion

Reformed and Presbyterian schools prepare students for a variety of callings in service to Christ and his church, approaching education from a Reformed theological perspective that is grounded in Scripture. You don’t necessarily have to be a member of a Reformed church to attend a Reformed or Presbyterian school: If you want to engage in a deep study of Scripture, desire a stronger grasp of theology, and seek to be equipped to serve the triune God in all of life, then you can benefit from enrolling.

Editor’s note (November 3, 2026): An earlier version of this article reversed the annual tuition figures for Covenant College and Erskine College. We have corrected the error.

Share your thoughts

What are the top Presbyterian or Reformed schools? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

David Veldkamp’s suggested books on Reformed theology and education

• Brock, Frank. An Educated Choice: Advice for Parents of College-Bound Students. Baker, 2002.
• Lucas, Sean Michael. On Being Presbyterian. P&R, 2006.
• VanDixhoorn, Chad. Confessing the Faith: A Reader’s Guide to the Westminster Confession of Faith. Banner of Truth, 2014.

Related content

• What Is Reformed Theology? Its Roots, Core Beliefs & Key Leaders
• What Is Presbyterianism? Its History, Theology & Practices
• What Is Calvinism—and What Is It Not? A Simple Explanation
• 25 Reformed Theology Books Everyone Should Know
• What Are the Main Presbyterian & Reformed Denominations?

Contemporary theological—and even political—debates often center on the relationship between national Israel and the church. While vital, these discussions belong to a much broader motif: the identity and development of the people of God across Scripture. Biblical theology traces this overarching theme across redemptive history, revealing how God forms, redeems, and dwells with his covenant community throughout the narrative of Scripture.²⁴⁷

In this article, we will trace how this central theme unfolds, moving from Adam and creation to Abraham and his promised offspring, through the nation of Israel and its Davidic hope, to its culmination in Christ and his church.

The people of God from creation to Israel

Adam, multiplication, and the promised seed

In terms of historical progression, the story of the people of God and humanity begins with creation. The case can be made, however, that the theme of the people of God begins before time, when God, who is eternal, self-sufficient, and who has life and fullness in himself (aseity), decrees there will be a people, chosen by the Father, redeemed by the Son as the appointed covenant mediator, and the recipients of the applied work of Christ by the Holy Spirit. These particular people are objects of grace. The “covenant of redemption” (pactum salutis) or eternal decree (John 6:37–40; Eph 1:4–14; 2 Tim 1:9; Titus 1:2) is worked out through history as God redeems a people for himself for his own glory and pleasure.

At creation, God made mankind in his own image and likeness, signifying their intrinsic value and their representative role over creation as royal sons and daughters. Adam is made to have dominion over the created order, and he is to extend the boundaries of the garden—God’s presence, rule, glory—to the ends of the earth.

Adam is the son of God (Luke 3:38; Gen 5:1–3), and it is here that the seed or offspring theme begins (and takes on further development after the fall with the conflict between the seed of the woman and seed of the serpent; Gen 3:15). Associated with the theme of blessing (Gen 1:28), Adam is to be fruitful and to multiply.

Adam, as the image of God, the offspring of God, is the covenantal head of humanity and functions as a prophet, priest, and king.

• As God’s vice-regent, Adam is to extend God’s rule by subduing the earth. His royal role is exemplified by naming the animals (Gen 2:19–20; cf. Ps 8:3–6).
• As a priest, Adam is to keep and cultivate the garden of Eden (Gen 2:15; see also Num 3:7–8), serving in the garden sanctuary/temple, ministering in the presence of God.
• Adam also has a prophetic role, receiving God’s word in the form of commands and warnings in Genesis 2:16–17. Prophets share God’s word to others, and so Adam is to communicate God’s revelation to Eve and their children.

Adam and Eve’s disobedience and fall are catastrophic, rupturing their relationship with God and resulting in curses and death, including exile from Eden and from God’s presence. In a post-fall world, the seed/offspring theme now features two distinct lines: there is the seed of the woman, a people who receive God’s grace and forgiveness tied to the promised, singular “seed of the woman,” a deliverer who will undo the curse and obey God perfectly (Gen 3:15; 5:29; 22:17–18; 24:60; 49:8–12), and the seed of the serpent, a people marked by rebellion, rejecting and opposing the Lord God and his offspring.²⁴⁸

The image of God is marred and defaced but not lost. The aftermath of the fall reveals that faith marks the people of God as they look to the Lord and his promises (e.g., Eve in Gen 4:1; Abel in Gen 4:4; Heb 11:4).

Later Adam-like characters appear, recapitulating Adam’s role and status. The seed of the woman is a typological pattern and develops in the lives of Seth, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and eventually Israel.²⁴⁹ These ectypes or installments of Adam foreshadow the singular seed or last Adam, the Christ.

For example, after the flood, a form of de-creation, humanity restarts with Noah. Noah and his family live in a kind of re-creation as God sustains the creation order and structures but now in view of sin. The Noahic covenant continues the creation covenant, stressing that humans will fulfill Adam’s image-son role (Gen 9:1–17), however much Noah’s disobedience reveals he is not the seed of promise (Gen 9:18–28). Nevertheless, God’s command to Adam to “be fruitful and multiply” and his blessing to Noah is reiterated (Gen 9:1, 7; cf. Gen 1:28). God’s promises, including the seed/offspring theme, continues through Noah and his son, Shem.

Abraham and the promise of offspring

The people of God theme takes on a particular and universal outlook with Abraham and the Abrahamic covenant.

Once again, as with Adam, God blesses Abraham (Gen 12:1–3) and the calling to “fruitfulness” and “multiplication” are repeated (Gen 17:2, 6). God’s covenant with Abraham features four elements:

1. Abraham’s offspring will be innumerable as the dust of earth (Gen 13:16; 28:14) and the stars of the sky (Gen 15:5; 22:17; 26:4),
2. Abraham will become a great and special nation to God (Gen 12:2),
3. Abraham’s descendants are promised the land of Canaan (Gen 12:7; 13:15; 15:18; 17:8; 22:17; 24:7; etc.), just as Adam was given a place (the garden of Eden), and
4. Abraham and his seed are the means by which all the families or nations of the earth will be blessed (Gen 12:3; 17:4–6; 18:18; 22:18; Gal 3:8; etc.).

Once again, a defining characteristic of the people of God is faith in the Lord and his promises, just as Abraham is a man of faith (Gal 3:9).

God’s response after the judgement on the “kingdom” of man, Babel (Gen 11), is his saving initiative in Abraham. Adam’s role, the promised seed, and God’s plan for creation will be fulfilled in Abraham and his seed.

At this point in the storyline of Scripture, we observe multiple aspects to the offspring/seed of Abraham.

1. Abraham has some biological offspring who are not part of the special, natural progeny who receive the covenant promises. Ishmael and the sons of Keturah (Gen 25:1–4), for example, are physical descendants of Abraham, but not part of the special, biological offspring of promise. The Abrahamic promises, the seed theme, will pass on to Isaac, not Ishmael, and to Jacob, not Esau.
2. Abraham’s special biological offspring (through Isaac, Jacob) will become a great nation (Israel) and will inhabit the promised land (Gen 17:7; 35:12).
3. But at another level, this great nation is not an end to itself, it will be the means whereby a singular offspring/seed will come to fulfill Adam’s role, overcome the curse, and bring about true fruitfulness and blessing. The use of singular pronouns and verbs in Genesis 22:17–18 and 24:60 (cf. Gen 3:15; זֶרַע [“seed”] can function as a collective singular noun) draw attention to this special, singular, and third offspring of Abraham. This “seed” will inherit the “gates of his enemies”—a place far more expansive than the promised land of Canaan (cf. Rom 4:13; Matt 5:5; Heb 11:13–16). Moreover, this special, singular offspring of Abraham will fulfill Adam’s commission to extend God’s rule, the kingdom of God, to the ends of the earth.
4. Therefore, within the narrative of Genesis itself, the Abrahamic promises present Abraham as the head of a single nation but also look forward to him becoming the father of a multitude of nations. God’s blessings reach out to all nations and, in view of the promised seed of the woman (Gen 3:15), indicate that these blessings to the nations will be fulfilled through a singular, special offspring of Abraham (Gen 17:4–6; 49:8, 10; Ps 72:17; Isa 9:6; Gal 3:16). There is a sense then of a fourth seed as Abraham’s fatherhood encompasses people from different tribes and nations who follow in the footsteps of Abraham’s faith, who likewise depend on God’s provision for sin (Gen 22:8). Those blessed in Abraham become spiritual offspring of Abraham (Eph 2:11–21; Gal 3:26–29).

Israel as offspring of Abraham and a corporate Adam

The themes of blessing, fruitfulness, multiplication, and seed/offspring move from Adam to Noah, to Abraham, and then to Isaac and Jacob (Gen 26:2–4, 24; 28:3–4, 13–15). Notably, it is Jacob who is renamed “Israel” (Gen 32:28), and his twelve sons become the twelve tribes of Israel.

Through the exodus and the establishment of the Mosaic/Sinai covenant, the nation of Israel takes center stage. Indeed, the first stage of the Abrahamic covenant—Abraham having a great name and being made a great nation—arrives in the formation of Israel, the corporate seed of Abraham (Ps 105:6; Isa 41:8; 51:2; Jer 33:26). The people of God, first associated with the patriarchs, now takes on a national, corporate dimension.

Moreover, the nation of Israel also takes on the status and roles of Adam. Israel, like Adam, is called God’s son (Exod 4:22; Deut 14:1; Jer 31:20) and considered the children of God (Isa 1:2, 4; Hos 1:10; 11:1). The themes of blessing, fruitfulness, and multiplication move from Adam to the patriarchs and continue in and through Israel (see Gen 17:2; 28:3; 35:11; 47:27; 48:3–4; Exod 1:7; Lev 26:9; Deut 7:13; 30:9; Ps 107:38; Isa 51:2). God’s presence was manifested to Adam in the garden and similarly, but in a mediated way, God’s dwelling presence is manifested to Israel also through the mobile tabernacle and later in the Jerusalem temple. Israel is a corporate Adam.

Additionally, Adam’s original roles as prophet, priest, and king are exemplified within Israel’s leadership structure.

• Provisions are made for kings ruling over Israel (Deut 17:14–20), but in a broader sense Israel was to have dominion by subduing the promised land and ruling over her enemies.
• While the priestly class would arise from the line of Aaron, broadly Israel was to be a priestly nation, being ceremonially clean, devoted to the Lord, and possessing a holy land fit for God’s dwelling in their midst (Exod 15:15–17). Israel’s corporate calling is to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation (Exod 19:6).
• Adam’s prophetic role is recapitulated as Israel received God’s Word and Mosaic/Sinai law-covenant to be an obedient and covenant-keeping people so that they may be a light to the nations (Deut 4:5–8; 26:16–19; 2 Kgs 19:19; Isa 37:20).

Rather than resembling the pagan nations and their wicked practices, Israel was to be separate, devoted, and holy to the Lord, demonstrating steadfast faith and love. Israel was to further distinguish themselves from the gentiles through circumcision, Sabbath, and food laws. The whole sacrificial system was to remind the people of God that without the shedding of blood there could be no forgiveness or atonement for sin. The locus of the people of God at this stage of redemptive history is the nation of Israel, and Israel will be the channel for the blessings to the nations. The fact that gentiles such as Rahab (and presumably her family; Josh 2) and Ruth (Ruth 1:16–17) became part of the nation of Israel preview the Abrahamic blessings to the nations. Ultimately, the means of resolving the problem of sin and death caused by the first Adam comes through Israel.

Through the Old Testament (OT), Israel’s benefits and privileges as the people of God are clear:²⁵⁰ They receive the oracles and covenants of God (Exod 2:23–25; 6:1–8; Rom 3:1–2; 9:4–5); Israel is God’s treasured possession (Deut 7:6) and the elect, covenant nation based solely on God’s sovereign choice (Deut 4:37; 7:7; 10:15; Jer 33:24). Israel’s covenantal relationship to God is pictured with nuptial imagery as Israel is called the wife or bride of Yahweh (Isa 54:5; Jer 2:2; 31:32). They are also his flock and the Lord is their shepherd (Ezek 34; Ps 77:20; Isa 40:11; Ps 100:3).

Yet, while Israel is called to worship God alone, to exclusively serve him as God’s servant, the nation proves repeatedly that while they may be Abraham’s natural, special offspring corporately, many Israelites are not Abraham’s offspring spiritually.

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Exile, the Davidic covenant, and Israel’s restoration

Throughout the rest of the OT, Israel fails to live up to her calling as the chosen people of God. Rebellion, idolatry, and faithlessness characterize much of Israel’s history. On the one hand, Israel did become a great nation, numbered as the stars of heaven (Deut 1:10; 10:22; 1 Chron 27:23; Neh 9:23), the sand on the sea (1 Kgs 4:20), and as the dust of the earth (2 Chron 1:9). Under Joshua’s leadership, they did occupy the promised land (Josh 11:23; 14:15; 21:43–45; 23:14–15), and to a greater degree during Solomon’s reign (1 Kgs 4:21; cf. 4:24–25). However, Israel was wayward. The book of Judges depicts Israel doing whatever was right in their own eyes. Later, during the history of the united and divided monarchies, the people of Israel continue to swerve from following Yahweh and prove to be covenant breakers and transgressors of the law.

The result was covenant curses rather than covenant blessings. On account of their brazen disregard for God and his law, Israel (Northern Kingdom) and Judah (Southern Kingdom) were handed over to the Assyrians and Babylonians. The latter exile featured the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.

Despite Israel’s history of failure, hope remains. The Balaam oracles (Num 22–24) present Israel in language reminiscent of Eden and the exodus (Num 24:5–6) and reaffirm the Abrahamic promise of blessing and cursing (Num 24:9; 23:8; cf. Gen 12:3) and the promise of the seed/offspring (Num 23:10; cf. Gen 12:2; 13:16; 28:14). According to Balaam, the last days will feature an individual Israelite seed who will become exalted, exert universal rule, and triumph over his enemies (Num 24:7–9, 17–19; cf. Gen 12:3; 27:29; 49:9–10).

This future hope ties in with the rise of David to the throne. David and the Davidic covenant mark a significant development in the storyline of the Bible and the people of God. The Adamic themes of blessing and fruitfulness, the Abrahamic promises, the covenant obedience and loyalty that is to be reflected in the image of God, the seed who crushes the head of the serpent and brings renewal, narrow down to a Davidic son and royal representative. Scripture presents David as another Adam, an individual who embodies and represents Israel, for he also is a son of God (2 Sam 7:14), a prophet, priest, and most importantly a king who will have an everlasting dynasty.²⁵¹ Moreover, there is a tight relationship between the Abrahamic and the Davidic covenants, as the Abrahamic promises move through the nation of Israel to this royal Davidic son, for a kingdom will be established for David’s “seed” (2 Sam 7:12; 1 Chron 17:11–14; Ps 89:3–4, 28, 36; cf. 132:10–12; Jer 33:21). The great name and nation promised to Abraham are directed through David (2 Sam 7:9; 1 Chron 17:8; cf. Gen 12:2), as are the promises of place/land (2 Sam 7:10; cf. Gen 12:7; 15:18; 17:8; Deut 11:24). Additionally, David observes that this covenant is a charter for humanity (2 Sam 7:19),²⁵² indicating that a future Davidic king will mediate the blessings to the nations and establish God’s rule over the world through his obedience, and therefore fulfill Adam’s commission in the garden (cf. Ps 89:23–29; 110:1–7). A future Davidic king will be the special, singular offspring of Abraham and the seed of the woman.

Unfortunately, the Davidic kings also failed. The law-covenant held the promise of life (Lev 18:5), but the Davidic kings did not keep the law. They trusted in other gods and were captive to their own sin. Some reform efforts did occur under Davidic kings such as Asa, Hezekiah, and Josiah, but generally the kings led Israel and Judah to disobedience and idolatry.

Nevertheless, God will fulfill his purposes and promises, and through his prophetic messengers he projects hope in the aftermath of exile. Israel’s future restoration and return from exile is tied to the prophecy of the new covenant (Jer 31:29–40; Ezek 36:22–38; 37:11–28) and the coming of a faithful, true Davidic king. This messiah figure is known as the servant of the Lord, who identifies with Israel (Isa 7:14; 9:6–7; 11:1–10; 42:1–9; 49:1–13; 50:4–11; 52:13–53:12; 55:3; 61:1–3; Jer 23:5–6; 33:14–26; Ezek 34:23–24; 37:24–28; Dan 7:11–14). This coming king will ratify the new covenant and usher in God’s saving reign among the nations, providing for the full forgiveness of sins through his atoning work (Isa 52:13–53:12) and producing an obedient people who have the law written on their hearts. This future Davidic king will be anointed with the Spirit to deliver Israel and be a witness to the nations, and he will pour out the promised Holy Spirit on God’s people, another significant feature of Israel’s restoration hopes (e.g., Isa 32:15–18; 44:3–5; 59:21; Ezek 36:26–30; 37:1–14; Joel 2:28—3:3; Zech 12:10).

How are Israel’s restoration promises important for understanding the people of God? Again, there are glimpses in Israel’s history of gentiles being counted among God’s people by joining the nation of Israel and sharing Abraham’s faith (e.g., Rahab, Ruth). The eschatological vision of the Latter Prophets reveal that Israel’s future restoration is integrated with the ingathering of the nations—the incorporation of gentiles into a restored Israel, becoming part of the latter-day people of God, the new covenant community. The coming Davidic king and servant will be a light to the nations and “a covenant for the people” (Isa 42:6–7; 49:6, 8). The scope of his work includes not just a reconciled remnant from Israel but also the salvation of people among the nations. This suffering servant/Israel makes atonement for the many, bearing the transgressions of many nations (Isa 52:14; 53:11). Based on his sacrificial work, he will have spiritual offspring (Isa 53:10–11; cf. 45:25; 59:21) and generate priestly servants (Isa 54:17; cf. 61:6), among whom are covenant-faithful foreigners (Isa 56:1–8). Paul Williamson correctly observes that “gentiles in the eschaton will be considered part of true Israel (Ps 87) and faithful servants of Yahweh (Isa 56:6–7)—even in the most consecrated role imaginable: priests and Levites (see 66:20–21).”²⁵³ Similar hopes of gentile incorporation into the end-time people of God are expressed in other prophetic writings (see Jer 3:16–4:4; Amos 9:11–15; Mic 4:1–3; Zech 8:7–8, 20–23). Harkening back to the garden of Eden (Isa 51:2–3; Ezek 36:35, 47:1–12; Joel 2:3; Zech 14:8–11), the dwelling of God’s people in God’s place, there is prophetic hope of how the promised land will one day expand well beyond Palestine. Such is fitting for the universal rule of the Davidic son of God, for he will fulfill his mission of expanding the presence of God to the ends of the earth and will extend the Abrahamic blessings to the nations by enlarging the Abrahamic tent (cf. Gen 15:18 and Ps 72:8; Ps 72:9–17; cf. Gen 28:14 and Isa 54:1–3).

In summary, Israel as a nation is the people of God but a mixed community of believers and unbelievers. However, this chosen nation is the means that the promised “seed of the woman” (Gen 3:15), the virgin-conceived child (Isa 7:14), would come to reverse the effects of the fall and triumph over the serpent.

Jesus: last Adam, seed of Abraham, and true Israel

The story of the people of God continues in the New Testament but is now centered on the birth and arrival of the promised king. The eternal Son of God takes on a full humanity, becoming the incarnate Lord, Immanuel (“God with us”). Jesus is the king of the Jews (Mic 5:2; Mark 15:2, 9, 12) and Lord over all. Jesus is the royal deliverer of and through Israel, the seed of the woman who saves his people from their sins (Matt 1:21). The return from exile, the new exodus, and the new covenant promises all arrive with the coming of Christ.

Further, notice how the themes associated with the people of God, the nation of Israel, come to fruition and fulfillment in Jesus.

1. Jesus is the last Adam, the first man of the new creation

In Adam all are cursed and die, but under Christ’s covenant headship is life, grace, justification, righteousness, and new creation (Rom 5:12–21; 1 Cor 15:21–23, 45). Adam had failed to take dominion, but Jesus is the eschatological Son of Man (Dan 7:13–14) and he inaugurates the kingdom of God and takes dominion through his suffering, death, and ascension (cf. Dan 7:14, 27 and Matt 26:64; 28:18–20; John 1:51; 12:23; Acts 7:55–56). In Jesus we have the true image of God (Col 1:15; Heb 2:5–18). In Jesus we see what true humanity is supposed to be: loving God and loving neighbor, exemplifying faithfulness and obedience to God, exuding true worship of God in every way, and living without sin.

2. Jesus is the true singular offspring/seed of Abraham

He fulfills the Abrahamic covenant (Gal 3–4; esp. 3:13–18, 22; Acts 3:25–26; Rom 4:13–17; cf. John 8:56, 58). Luke presents the birth of Jesus as the fulfillment of God’s promises to Abraham (Luke 1:54–55, 72–73). The promises of offspring, land, and blessings to the nations come about in Jesus. Abraham’s family and true children, the genuine people of God, are those in union with Christ (Rom 2:25–29; 4:9–22; Gal 3:6–9, 26–29; Heb 2:14–18). The promised land comes over in the NT in themes of inheritance and a new heaven and earth, but even here the promise hinges on the person and work of Christ (Gal 3:18; Rom 4:13; Matt 5:5; Heb 4:1–11; 11:8–16; 1 Pet 1:4; Eph 1:11; 6:3).

3. Jesus is the true Israel who fulfills the role, calling, and vocation of national Israel

Israel, as another Adam, is God’s son (Exod 4:22), and yet Israel’s sonship and exodus point forward typologically. For example, Matthew 2:15 cites Hosea 11:1 to show that Jesus is the true son of Israel and that the return from exile commences in his own exodus from Egypt. Moreover, Jesus embodies Israel as the “beloved son” in his baptism and reception of the Holy Spirit (Matt 3:15–17; Luke 3:21–22). The temptation narrative (Matt 4:1–11) also signifies that Jesus is the obedient son and representative of Israel, for he rebuffs Satan’s temptations, successively recapitulating Israel’s wilderness wanderings. Israel is God’s “firstborn son,” echoing Isaac’s status over his older brother Ishmael, but this anticipates Jesus, the true Israelite to whom the status of “firstborn of all creation” and “firstborn from the dead” belongs (Col 1:15, 18).

The Isaianic servant, discussed above, who is called “Israel” and yet restores Israel, who proclaims justice and freedom from sin, and who is a light to the nations, is none other than Jesus Christ. The pattern of servanthood, stretching from Moses to David, characterizing Israel and in general the people of God, is now fulfilled in Jesus (Acts 3:13, 26; 4:27, 30; cf. Luke 1:69; Heb 3:5–6). Jesus is the light to the nations (Luke 2:32; Acts 26:23), the one who releases captives and proclaims good news (Luke 4:16–21; cf. Isa 61:1–2; 58:6). Jesus is the suffering servant and fulfills the servant’s (Israel’s) mission by his atoning death (Isa 53; cf. John 1:29; Rom 4:23–25; 8:32; Gal 1:4; 1 Pet 1:19; Heb 5:5–10; 7:12–8:12).

Jesus is the ultimate prophet, priest, and king, which look back to Israel and Adam.

• As the Word and final disclosure of God, Jesus is the ultimate prophet (John 1:1–18; Heb 1:1–3).
• Tied to his role as the suffering servant, Jesus is the great high priest, the fulfillment of the temple (Matt 12:6; John 2:19–22; 4:20–24; Heb 10:19–22), and through his work on the cross he brings to an end the Passover, the sacrificial system, and the Levitical priesthood (e.g., 1 Cor 5:7; John 1:29, 36; 19:36; 1 Pet 1:19; Heb 5:5–10; 7:12–8:6; 9:1–10:22).
• The Davidic covenant climaxes in Jesus. The kingdom of God arrives in Jesus’s ministry and, via his death and resurrection, Jesus is now seated as the Davidic king, enthroned upon his ascension (Luke 1:31–33; Acts 2:32–36; Eph 1:9–10; Phil 2:9–11; cf. Ps 2 in Acts 4:25–26; 13:33; Heb 1:5; 5:5; note also Rom 1:3–4).

Jesus is also the true vine, unlike the fruitless vine of Israel (John 15:1–6; Ps 80:8–18). The end times project a healthy, fertile vine (Jer 31:5; 32:15; Hos 14:4–9) tied to Israel’s restoration hopes that will spring up through a royal, messianic figure or “Son of Man” (see Ps 80:8, 14, 15, 17). Jesus is the Messiah, but he is also the vine (John 15), representing Israel, and truly produces fruit-bearing branches. The theme of fruitfulness continues, and that fruit can only come if one abides in Christ (John 15:5).

4. Christ fulfills all the biblical covenants

Jesus is the last Adam and first man of the new creation, which goes back to the creation and the Noahic covenants, and explains how Jesus fulfills the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants. But Israel’s national covenant (Mosaic or Sinaitic) is also fulfilled in Christ (Matt 5:17–20). Through his obedience and priestly work (see Heb 7:11–12), the law-covenant reaches it goal and end (Rom 10:4; 1 Cor 9:20–21; Gal 3:15–4:7). Furthermore, the new covenant prophecies are crucial for Israel’s restoration and the hope of a transformed people of God. Jesus ratifies the new covenant through his atoning sacrifice (Matt 26:28; Mark 14:24; Luke 22:20; Rom 11:27; 1 Cor 11:25; Heb 7:22; 8:6–13; 9:15–18; 10:15–22). The coming of the Holy Spirit, a new covenant prophecy to Israel (Ezek 36:27; 37:14; Zech 4:6; Joel 2:28–32) is fulfilled when Jesus pours out the Spirit on his people (Luke 3:16–17; John 7:28–39; 20:21–23; Acts 2; 10:44–48; Gal 3:1–6; Eph 1:13–14). The new covenant people of God are now sealed and indwelled by the Holy Spirit in a way that the OT saints were not.

The church: the new covenant people of God

How are we to understand the people of God in light of the coming of Christ? While the OT culminates in Christ, the story of the people of God continues and takes shape for both Jews and gentiles. Jesus establishes his church comprised of all those who are his followers and disciples, a people united to him by faith.

The coming of Christ marks a significant shift in redemptive history as the church is the end-time people of God (1 Cor 10:11), the heavenly, Spirit-empowered, new covenant community (Eph 2:5–6; Col 1:12–14; Heb 12:22–24). The church is God’s new creation (2 Cor 5:17; Gal 6:15) and new humanity in Christ (Eph 2:15).²⁵⁴ The church is multiethnic and transnational, unlike Israel of the OT, and while some in Israel were not truly spiritual offspring of Abraham, every new covenant believer has the law written on the heart. The church, then, is not equivalent to Israel, but indirectly related to Israel and recipients of Israel’s Old Testament promises and hopes through Jesus.

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The NT unpacks the new covenant people of God in a variety of ways.

1. The twelve disciples symbolize the twelve tribes of Israel and represent the remnant, the renewed Israel reconstituted around Jesus

Jesus’s selection of twelve disciples is not arbitrary. These twelve apostles are sent to the lost sheep of Israel (Matt 10:5–15). The gospel goes out to national Israel. Jewish people first. In the missionary activity in the book of Acts, with Pentecost and the coming of the Spirit, the disciples’ gospel proclamation moves from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria, indicating the restoration and reconstitution of geographical Israel (cf. Acts 8:1–25), and then proceeds to the outcasts (Acts 8:26–40; cf. Isa 56:3, 5) and the gentiles (Acts 10). The kingdom of God has arrived in Jesus, and kingdom citizens are being formed by those who receive and embrace Christ, whether Jew or gentile.

2. Many of the descriptions and characteristics of OT Israel are now applied to the church

But the comparison is not in a one-to-one fashion or in a manner of simple replacement. An escalation has occurred with the people of God, and this fact is all bound up with the coming of Christ.

• Israel is the “assembly” of the Lord in the OT (Deut 4:10; 9:10; 1 Chron 28:8), and this term is applied to the church in Christ (Matt 16:18; 1 Cor 11:18).
• Israel is the flock and sheep of Yahweh, but with Jesus, he is the good shepherd (John 10) who lays down his life for his sheep, his followers (John 10:11, 14–16). The OT prophecy of a new David coming to shepherd and rescue the flock (Ezek 34:10–16, 23–25) has come to pass and consists of a messianic, multiethnic flock (John 10:16, 26).
• Israel was the bride of Yahweh (Jer 2:2; Hos 2:14–20), but now in Christ, the church is the Lord’s bride (2 Cor 11:2; Eph 5:32) through union with Christ.
• Israel went through the exodus but the church is the people of the new exodus. For example, 1 Peter 2 applies Exodus 19:6 to the church. According to Peter, through the new exodus in Christ (Isa 43:20–21; Hos 2:15, 23; cf. Exod 19:1–6), the church is the fulfillment of OT Israel in being the elect race, holy nation, and the people (1 Pet 2:9–10; cf. Deut 4:20; 14:2; Heb 2:7; 4:9) set aside for God’s special possession. The church is now God’s people (1 Pet 2:10) because of their faith-union with the eschatological cornerstone that has been laid in Zion (Ps 2:6), Jesus Christ.²⁵⁵

3. The church has a new identity, nature, and newness through Jesus

As the new covenant community, the church is a transformed people, possessing the Holy Spirit, and is now, in Christ, constituted as Abraham’s spiritual seed by exercising a faith like Abraham’s (Gal 3–4; Rom 4). As those indwelled by the Spirit, the theme of fruitfulness now continues in the church as Christians bear the fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22–24; cf. Col 1:10; John 15:16). Further, while OT Israel had the temple, the church is God’s new temple in Christ (1 Cor 6:19; 2 Cor 6:16; Eph 2:21–22; 1 Pet 2:5) and through Christ, they have direct access to the Father as they are already citizens of the heavenly city-temple (Eph 2:18, 19; cf. Phil 3:20; Gal 4:26). The church is the “Israel of God” (Gal 6:16) because they are the people of the new creation (Gal 6:15; 2 Cor 5:17). Therefore, not only is the church the recipient of God’s promises through his grace, but the church is the people of God that remains forever (Rev 21–22). The influx of the nations and their wealth to Israel’s temple is fulfilled (Rev 21:24–26) in the end in the heavenly city where God dwells. Through Christ, the people of God enjoy the tree of life with its fruit, dwelling in the presence of God and the Lamb where death has no place (Rev 22:1–5) and the curse is no more.

Conclusion

The structure of biblical revelation through the unfolding covenants constrains us to see the theme of God’s people moving from Adam and the patriarchs to Israel and finally culminating in Christ and the church. The centrality of Christ is crucial as he shows us with his perfect and sinless life what true humanity is in his worship, devotion, and obedience to the Lord. Israel’s identity, role, and vocation are recapitulated in him. The typological persons, events, and institutions—such as Adam, the seed theme, the nation of Israel, David, the exodus—all find fulfillment in Christ and derivatively in the new covenant community, the people united to Christ by the cross, the church. Those in Christ are children of God through faith, born of God (John 1:12–13), and these saints are more than conquerors through Christ, for nothing can separate them from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Rom 8:37–39).

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Brent Parker’s suggested resources for further study

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The ultimate destination of believers is not our immortal souls experiencing disembodied bliss among the angels in some kind of cloud-like cathedral where we sing “10,000 Reasons” ten thousand times. If that’s your view, then you need to read Revelation 21–22, 2 Peter 3, and finish off with a dose of N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope and God’s Homecoming.

In biblical perspective, the ultimate destiny of God’s people is for God to dwell with them in the new creation, the marriage of the new heavens and new earth, the day when God fills all things in every way (1 Cor 15:28). A place, I imagine, where God’s holiness radiates like the sun, joy fills the atmosphere like oxygen, and wondrous anthems of praise will forever bless and celebrate the Lamb who took away our sins and made all things new.

What will we do there? If the book of Revelation is anything to go by, then worship will be a huge part of life in the new creation. However—and I’m thinking here of children who are terrified that eternity sounds like one long church service—we will do more than worship in song. If we are attentive to the testimony of Scripture, we learn the saints will “reign” with Jesus over the new creation! The people of God in their glorified estate will participate in the exercise of God’s sovereignty over the new creation in order to deal with the unfinished business of the old order and to further the renewal, peace, love, and glory of the new creation.

If this is new to you, it shouldn’t be, since—as we’ll see—this picture of God reigning with or through humans is sown into the biblical picture. It is (almost) everywhere.

Humanity as kings of creation

First, consider Genesis 1, where humans are created to be custodians and curators of creation:

And God said, “Let us make humankind in our image and according to our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of heaven, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every moving thing that moves upon the earth.” So God created humankind in his image, in the likeness of God he created him, male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of heaven, and over every animal that moves upon the earth.” (Gen 1:26–28 LEB)

As I’ve argued elsewhere, the “image of God” is not a quality humans possess. It is rather a royal status given to humans, a calling, with brings with it tasks to fulfill the creation mandate spelled out in Genesis 1:26–28. Humans are God’s image in the way that one might be appointed manager of a Chick-fil-A restaurant. Humans are called to important responsibilities, from farming chickens to cultivating entire ecosystems, as part of our divinely authorized vocation.

As we will see, humanity was made and called to be kings and priests of God’s creation. Even with the fall of humanity into sin and the curse infesting the natural world that the fall introduced, that human vocation has not been lost. Even amidst moral and natural evils, humans are still the caretakers of creation, a role that climaxes in the exalted Jesus, and will be fully and finally perfected in humanity in the new creation.

The idea of the image of God is rehearsed so memorably in Psalm 8:

what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
You have made them a little lower than the angels
and crowned them with glory and honor.
You made them rulers over the works of your hands;
you put everything under their feet:
all flocks and herds,
and the animals of the wild,
the birds in the sky,
and the fish in the sea,
all that swim the paths of the seas. (Ps 8:4–8 NIV)

You see here the same idea. Humans might be lower than the angels in terms of powers and heavenly access, yet they have received a majestic calling to be God’s regents over the world: subduing it, serving it, preserving, protecting it, like a royal family caring for their estate and all its inhabitants.

Israel as a kingdom of priests

What Adam and Eve were in Eden, Israel was meant to be in Canaan: a kingdom of priests (Exod 19:5-6), providing a paradigm of what humanity is supposed to look like before the nations of the world. God’s purposes for humanity were telescoped into and concentrated within Israel. Israel was meant to model, as best they could, what it meant to be in covenant relationship with God, worshipping the creator rather than the creature, even as they cared for the land with law, sabbath, Jubilee, and wisdom.

Israel did not always live up to this paradigm. They often imitated the worst of the nations, and they did not succeed in fulfilling the creation mandate themselves. In fact, it went so bad that much later, after the destruction of the temple and sacking of Jerusalem in AD 70, a Jewish seer would complain to God that Israel was meant to be ruling over the “beasts” (i.e., the pagan nations), and yet it was the beasts who were ruling over Israel.

All this I have spoken before you, O Lord, because you have said that it was for us that you created this world. As for the other nations that have descended from Adam, you have said that they are nothing and that they are like spittle, and you have compared their abundance to a drop from a bucket. And now, O Lord, these nations, which are reputed to be as nothing, domineer over us and devour us. But we your people, whom you have called your firstborn, only begotten, zealous for you, and most dear, have been given into their hands. If the world has indeed been created for us, why do we not possess our world as an inheritance? How long will this be so? (2 Esdras 6:55–59 NRSVue)

This is kind of like saying we are meant to be the zoologists and zookeepers, but the animals have risen up and have taken over the zoo and have stuck us in cages to be tormented!

One like a Son of Man

So what is the solution to this problem? Does God tell humanity that they bombed out on their job, so the vocation of ruling over creation should be given to angels or even ants (after all, ants are industrious rather than indolent; see Prov 6:6)?

No, the solution to this problem is not to abandon the project of Adam’s progeny and the holy nation fulfilling this human vocation to rule righteously on God’s behalf. Rather, what is needed is a new Adam, a renewed Israel, a true humanity who will fulfill this royal and priestly task. Enter Daniel’s Son of Man.

Now Daniel 7 and the Son of Man is a huge hornet’s nest of interpretive debate that I do not want to kick over right now. Suffice to say, Daniel has a vision about four pagan kingdoms who each oppress, afflict, and tear pieces off God’s people (i.e., the saints of the Most High). God’s ultimate answer to them is the “one like a Son of Man,” a heavenly figure with both angelic and human qualities who represents God’s reign, God’s anointed king, and God’s holy people.

The human-like figure approaches the Ancient of Days, then we read:

In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed. (Dan 7:13–14 NIV)

In the interpretation of the vision, we are told:

The four great beasts are four kings that will rise from the earth. But the holy people of the Most High will receive the kingdom and will possess it forever—yes, for ever and ever. (Dan 7:17–18 NIV)

After the fourth beast and the arrogant little horn has been defeated, then:

But the court will sit, and his power [the arrogant horn’s] will be taken away and completely destroyed forever. Then the sovereignty, power and greatness of all the kingdoms under heaven will be handed over to the holy people of the Most High. His kingdom will be an everlasting kingdom, and all rulers will worship and obey him. (Dan 7:26–27 NIV)

The vision promises that despite these pagan kingdoms eating their fill of Israel’s flesh, one day they will be defeated and the heavenly enthronement of the one like a Son of Man will be mirrored in the nations of the world, paying obeisance and obedience to the renewed people of God.

Jesus as the messianic solution

Daniel 7 was given a messianic interpretation in the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran, in the parables of 1 Enoch, and of course in the early church. Many times in his career, Jesus emphasized his “authority” as the “Son of Man” (Matt 9:6; John 5:27) as well as the Son of Man’s enthronement and prerogative to exercise judgment (Matt 16:28; 19:28–30; 24:30; 26:64). Accordingly, in their messianic interpretation of Israel’s Scriptures, the early church identified Jesus as the ultimate king in the manner of Psalm 2 and the ultimate human being in the manner of Psalm 8 (see Heb 1:5; 2:5–9).

Jesus was raised with a glorified physical human body. Not an angelic body, but a human body fit for eternity. Thus, when Jesus is exalted to the right hand of the Father, he does not lay aside his humanity like a person disrobing themselves of a monkey-suit from a Halloween costume party. No, he retains his glorified humanity. Forever.

What this means is big, huge, absolutely astounding. It means that God’s purpose for humanity—to have a human at the helm of the universe, for there to be a faithful human prime minister for cosmic affairs, for there to be a human mediator and regent for the world—is now at last true. Jesus fulfills the human vocation of Genesis 1:26–28 and Psalm 8:6. He is the Son of Man who receives dominion, power, and glory. He is the Davidic king and Melchizedekian high priest who brings order to the world and holiness to creation.

Whereas the first Adam sinned, and consequently sin reigned in death (Rom 5:12), now, because of the obedience of the new Adam, “grace might reign to the life of the age to come, through Jesus the Messiah, our Lord” (Rom 5:21 NTFE).

The church as God’s renewed people

It is in that reign of grace that the church exercises its vocation to reign beside the risen and exalted Lord Jesus.

This is why Jesus implied that his disciples would participate in his messianic reign over a renewed Israel:

Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” (Matt 19:28 NIV)

This “judging” could either be the exercise of judicial authority over Israel or, somewhat like Israel’s famous judges, the leading of the nation in the times ahead. In either case, the disciples will have prominent positions over a restored Israel in the age to come.

It is for such reasons that Paul admonished the Corinthians for squabbling over petty disputes in pagan courts when they are supposed to be readying themselves to preside over a tribunal that will hold fallen angels to account! “Don’t you realize that we will judge angels? So you should surely be able to resolve ordinary disputes in this life” (1 Cor 6:3 NLT).

In Paul’s list of trustworthy sayings for Timothy to remember, he said, “If we endure hardship, we will reign with him” (2 Tim 2:12 NLT).

Turning to the book of Revelation, we see all the above Scriptures, promises, and themes come together. The whole prophecy looks forward to a day when “The world has now become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign forever and ever” (Rev 11:15 NLT). In that reign of Jesus, there is room made for many deputies. In John’s vision of the heavenly worship of the Lamb, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders sing a song praising how Jesus has “made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they will rule on earth” (Rev 5:10 CEB). In the “millennium,” the martyrs “came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years” and “they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years” (Rev 20:4, 6 CSB). Then, in one of the final scenes of the book, as we find descriptions of the new creation, we are told, “Night will be no more; people will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, because the Lord God will give them light, and they will reign forever and ever” (Rev 22:5 CSB).

We will reign with him forever!

Consider what this means.

Eternity will be far more than a hymn-fest. Oh, there will be hymns and songs of praise to our God and his Messiah, but we will do far more than that.

• We will preside in judgment over fallen angels.
• We will be leaders over a renewed people of God.
• We will be kings (and queens) over a new creation and priests over a reconciled universe.

We will be custodians and curators of the new heavens and the new earth, just as God had intended for Adam. This finds its fulfillment in the new Adam who is himself the firstborn of many brothers and sisters. We will participate in the dominion which the exalted Jesus established and perfected, and the church triumphant will reign with her Lord forever. The government of the universe will be upon the shoulders of the Lord Jesus (Isa 9:6), and the burden of such government will be shared with and even delegated to the kingdom of priests who accompany him in his sovereign glory (Exod 19:5; Rev 5:10).

We will be singing in heaven, but we will be singing as we put our shoulder to the wheel of our new creation labors, singing in the reign we share with the Lord Jesus!

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