Happy Summer. 🙂

You can usually tell when our family has wrapped up home-school because I write more. With less teaching, I clean, organize, study, and write. That may not be as much the case this year. Summer is the busiest season at camps, and we need workers. I have been helping some in the camp kitchen, and I will fill in wherever I can when possible.

I would like to do something new here on the blog. I am going to share a video (below), showing you how to use the concordance and lexicon on blueletterbible.org. My daughter Lilly was a junior at North Central University last year, and she took a class in biblical exegesis. (According to the Anchor Bible Dictionary,” exegesis is the process of careful, analytical study of biblical passages undertaken in order to produce useful interpretations of those passages.  Ideally, exegesis involves the analysis of the biblical text in the language of its original or earliest available form.”) She had to write a a paper on a chosen bible passage over Easter and asked me to help her unpack it. She was required to site a minimum number of sources, but I was shocked that the class had not taught her how to use Strong’s Concordance or a lexicon!

Why should you want to know how to use these tools? Because they will help you study and understand scripture with the Holy Spirit’s help. In Acts 17:10-11, Paul talked about teaching a group of people called the Bereans. “The brothers immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea, and when they arrived they went into the Jewish synagogue. Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.” The Bereans didn’t have the New Testament, but they did have the Old Testament scriptures. They compared everything Paul and Silas taught them to the scriptures, knowing that God does not contradict His word. The Bereans did not accept any teaching that did not agree with what God had already given them, and we should be the same way.

There are a lot of wonderful teachers out there, but no one knows everything. There are times that teachers may communicate something they don’t fully understand or misunderstand, and then there are false teachers. Teachers are held to a stricter standard than the average person because what they teach steers people’s beliefs, however, individuals also have a responsibility to check what they are told. Even concordances, which can help us understand scripture, can be colored by the author’s experiences and understanding. We should all study our Bibles for ourselves, not just rely on Sunday sermons or podcasts, and we should ask God to teach us what He means. When we hear a teaching on a particular passage, it can forever influence the way we read and understand that passage. We should seek a thorough understanding because there are times that the passage means something different or something more than a human teacher has shared, and we need to be open to God’s instruction in order to apply it to our lives.

So what is a concordance and a lexicon? A concordance is like a glossary of all the words in the Bible. Strong’s Concordance assigns a number to each word, so you can look them up by number or by word. It tells you what the original word was in the Hebrew or the Greek and how to pronounce that word. Then it lists every passage where that word is used. If you want to learn more about grace, you can look it up and you will find the Greek word “charis” (my daughter’s name) and every place where that word is used so you can read those verses. A lexicon is more like a dictionary. It tells you all of the different ways the word has been interpreted and how it is used. Using this tool can blow scripture open for you.

Please watch the video below for a little tour of these tools, and we will use them to unpack Psalm 46:10.

“He says, ‘Be still and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.'”

I did notice that the video appears small. It was taken using my phone. Please expand your screen to see the detail needed to see how to navigate blueletterbible’s web site. The text might not be crystal, but you can see how the web site is layed out. And, please, share in the comments if this tool helps you understand this passage, and share your experience for others to learn from you!

Image by Beth Thomas from Pixabay.