The Sense of the Word

  I want to thank all of you that, as you read these devotions, you automatically make the corrections that are necessary. Fort he most part, you are able to correct the words that are not spelled correctly or the repeated words that are out of place and eventually, you come to the true sense of what I have written. I know I don't make it easy for you to do so. Reading my devotions could be compared to reading the vanity plates on automobiles. Eventually, you get the meaning. Getting the true sense or the meaning of a passage of Scripture was not always the easiest thing to do even in the history of the Israelites. Nehemiah 8:8 says, “So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.”

       The Israelites had been in captivity for 70 years, living in a land and culture quite the opposite of their own. At the time of the writing of Nehemiah, the people had mostly forgotten their own culture and found themselves not understanding what was being read from the Hebrew scriptures. Ezra was getting ready to read from the Word of God but the people were going to have a hard time getting the sense of the word so men were used to act as translators between the reading of Ezra and the hearing of the people. After they heard the translation of the Word, then they could understand and get the true meaning of what was being said. When we look at the characteristics of God, or to look at His “attributes” we see that He is all powerful, all knowing and all present among other things. His knowledge surpasses ours in such a magnitude that we cannot even begin to comprehend His knowledge and power in all things. He could have written the Bible in such a way that we would never understand it, but He didn't. All of the words are simple and clear. Even the Hebrew language is very close to that which it was in the days of Nehemiah. It has been said that Jeremiah or Isaiah could walk the streets of Jerusalem today and be understood and to understand what was being said. Fortunately for us, the Bible is easy to understand, to get the meaning of it without having to look up every word in a dictionary. We can rightly say, “If God didn't mean what He said by what He said, then why didn't He say what He meant?” The fact is, He did say what He meant to say and the meaning is always clear. When a matter is said to be sin, it is sin. When Jesus told Nicodemus that he had to be born again, guess what? He had to be born again. When Paul quoted the Old Testament and said that “all have sinned” guess what? All have sinned. The meaning and the sense of the Word is plain and we are without excuse. We can take the simplest of verses and understand what they mean by taking them as they are written such as John 3:16. What is so hard to understand? Praise God today for the fact that He has given us His Word written in a way that we can clearly understand what it means. Many times, I come to the end of a matter and simply say, “God said it.” “I believe it.” “That settles it.”