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Jimmy Akin delivers an eye-opening inductive Bible study! He meticulously examines every single Bible verse containing the phrase “word of God” (nearly 50!) and uncovers a shocking truth: Scripture never uses the phrase to mean the Bible itself. Instead, it overwhelmingly refers to divine revelation through preaching, prophecy, commands, and Jesus himself. Prepare for a game-changing perspective on a term you thought you knew! Don’t miss this deep-dive revelation.
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
Today, we’re going to do an inductive Bible study on the word of God!
But . . . what is an inductive Bible study?
And . . . what is the word of God?
Let’s get into it!
* * *
Howdy, folks!
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“Inductive Bible Study”?
The first question you may have today is, “What is an inductive Bible study?”
Well, the term is used different ways by different people, but here I’m going to tell you how I’m using the term.
Bible studies are commonly divided into two main categories: Deductive Bible Studies and Inductive Bible Studies.
Deductive reasoning is when you move from the general to the specific, like if you say:
Deductive Reasoning
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
“All men are mortal” is a general statement, and “Socrates is a man” is a specific statement because it is about a specific man.
Inductive reasoning goes the other way around, from the specific to the general, like if you say:
Inductive Reasoning
Socrates is a mortal.
Plato is a mortal.
Aristotle is a mortal.
And you propose Therefore, all men are mortal.
With inductive reasoning, you look at a bunch of specific instances to build up to a general conclusion.
Applying these principles to Bible study, a deductive one—sometimes called a synthetic or topical study—is one where you know the general conclusion you are going to reach and then look at specific verses to prove it.
For example, if you want to do a Bible study showing your students that God is eternal, you might go to passages you know in advance say that God
- was present in the beginning,
- that say he is eternal or immortal,
- or that he is from everlasting to everlasting,
- and that he is the first and the last
On the other hand, in an inductive Bible study you start by looking at specific passages and build up to a general conclusion.
They could be passages in the same book—like doing a verse-by-verse study of the Gospel of Matthew from beginning to end.
Or they could be verses that are on the same topic—like going through every verse in the Bible that mentions animals.
Or they could be verses that use the same word or phrase—like going through every verse in the Bible that mentions the word “faith.”
A key difference between the two is that deductive Bible studies are usually used to demonstrate something you already believe.
While inductive Bible studies tend to be used to do research—either research on something you don’t know yet or at least research to check something you believe and see if it’s true.
Well, today we’re going to be doing an inductive Bible study on the word of God.
“The Word of God”?
Now, you may be saying, “Wait. Aren’t all Bible studies done on the word of God?”
In a sense yes, but that’s not the sense I mean.
What we’re going to be doing is looking at how the Bible uses the phrase “word of God.”
In other words, we’re going to be looking at how Scripture understands this term.
Recently, I’ve discussed a number of terms that are used differently in the Bible than they are in later theology.
And that’s okay, because language changes over time, so it’s okay for words to change meaning.
But you have to be aware of that fact and keep an eye on it, because if you don’t, you’ll start reading current theological uses back onto biblical texts and misunderstand them.
One term that is used differently in the Bible than it often is in theology today is the phrase “word of God.”
Today, this term is used in different ways by different Christian communities.
For example, the unofficial glossary of the Catechism of the Catholic Church defines the word of God as, “The entire content of [divine] revelation as contained in the Holy Bible and proclaimed in the Church.”
Paragraph 81 of the Catechism further explains that,
Sacred Scripture is the speech of God as it is put down in writing under the breath of the Holy Spirit.”
And [Holy] Tradition transmits in its entirety the Word of God which has been entrusted to the apostles by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit.
In Protestant circles, the phrase “word of God” has a similar but more restricted usage.
Protestants typically exclude Tradition from the word of God—at least today—and use the phrase “word of God” as a synonym for Scripture.
The impact of this Protestant usage on the English-speaking internet is clear.
If you ask Google, “What is the word of God?”, it may tell you “The word of God primarily refers to the Bible.”
And to confirm the Protestant source of this understanding, it may go on to tell you that a key aspect of the word of God is the Bible or written word consisting of 66 books, which is the Protestant understanding of how many books are in the biblical canon.
It’s thus no surprise when we find Protestant speakers using the term “word of God” when they mean “Bible.”
But the thing is, this understanding of the phrase “word of God” is much harder to find in Scripture than our Protestant friends commonly recognize.
Are there any passages where Scripture uses the phrase this way?
Let’s do our Bible study and find out.
Thinking Through Options
As a first step, it will be useful to think through some options about what the phrase “word of God” might mean so that we’re aware of possibilities and don’t miss them when we encounter them.
If you think about the phrase “word of God,” it could mean a number of things.
The “of God” part tells you that the word in question is linked to God—it’s either a word that comes from him or is about him.
The more ambiguous part is the term “word” itself. That can mean a number of things, some of which are rather surprising.
- Incarnate Word
For example, at the beginning of his Gospel, John the Evangelist says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Here he is speaking of the pre-incarnate Christ, the second Person of the Trinity, who took on flesh and became man.
So, we have Jesus himself as God’s incarnate word.
- Creative Word
When John says that, he is deliberately echoing Genesis 1, where we read that God said, “Let there be light!” and there was light.
This is a metaphor, since God doesn’t literally use sound waves in the air to create things.
In fact, at the first moment of creation there wouldn’t have been any air to send sound waves through.
So Christians and Jews have always recognized that the Bible sometimes speaks of God’s word as a creative force.
III. Revelation
However, most of the time, when humans use words, they do so to communicate—they reveal their minds to each other.
Consequently, the word of God could be anything that God reveals—anything God says would be an item of revelation.
And the Bible might have passages that simply conceptualize God’s word as revelation, without further specifying it in any way.
- Revelation by Content
On the other hand, a biblical author might conceptualize the word of God in a narrower way, based on some quality the revelation had—like what content it has.
- Command
For example, God’s revelation might take the form of a command, like when God says, “Honor your father and mother.”
- Prediction (Promise, Warning)
Alternately, it might take the form of a prediction—something that will happen in the future, especially if things keep going as they are.
For example, God might reveal a promise about the future, like when he tells David that he will have an everlasting house that comes from him.
Or God might reveal a warning, like when God says that if the Israelites don’t stop worshipping idols, disaster will happen.
- Revelation by Transmission
On the other hand, a biblical author might conceptualize the word of God not based on its content but on another characteristic—like how the revelation was transmitted.
- Arrival to Revelator
The first moment in the transmission of revelation is when it arrives at the revelator but before he has transmitted it to anyone else.
This is like when a prophet sees a vision or hears God’s voice but hasn’t told anyone yet.
- Announcement by Revelator
The next moment in the transmission of revelation is when the person who receives the information announces it to someone else.
Like when a prophet tells others about the vision he has seen or the voice he has heard.
- Preaching by Post-Revelator
After the revelation has been received, it may be further distributed by others.
This is like when the disciples of Jesus preach the Christian message based on what Jesus revealed.
- Reception by Audience
The final stage of the transmission of revelation is when it has been received by its audience.
This is like when the first Christian converts heard the preaching of the apostles, believed God’s revelation, and received it into their hearts.
- Writing by Revelator
Alternately, instead of communicating the revelation orally, the receiver might write it down and publish it in written form.
This is like when the authors of the New Testament write letters that are divinely inspired.
You can thus see that there are a bunch of different ways that the phrase “word of God” can be conceptualized.
As we go through the passages where this phrase is used in the Bible, keep these different meanings in mind, and we’ll see which ones are actually used in Scripture.
Now, I should point out that these categories are not always mutually exclusive.
For example, a biblical author might be conceptualizing God’s word as both a prediction and an oral revelation—like when Nathan the prophet reveals the promise of the kings that will come from David and does so in oral rather than written form.
However, here we’re especially interested in the mode of transmission rather than the content of the revelation, so that is what we’ll ordinarily focus on.
And we’ll only look at content when that element is clearly in the foreground.
Written Revelation
The category we are most interested in is written revelation, because that is what Scripture is.
So if you want to say that the Bible uses the phrase “word of God” to mean Scripture, you’ll need to find places where it’s conceptualizing the word of God primarily as written revelation and not as something else.
A good test for this is whether you could take the phrase “word of God” and substitute a phrase indicating written revelation like:
- Scripture
- Bible
- Book of Scripture
- Book of the Bible
- Passage of Scripture
- Passage of the Bible, or even just
- Written Revelation
If you can’t substitute a phrase like that without changing the meaning of the passage—or if the statement makes less sense with a phrase like that plugged in—that’s a sign that the phrase “word of God” is being conceptualized in a different way.
Most of the time, though, we won’t need to use this test, because the text or its context will make it obvious how the phrase is being conceptualized without having to make a substitution.
The “Word of God” in Scripture
There are just under 50 occurrences of the phrase “word of God” in Scripture, though precisely how many will depend on the translation you read.
What we’re going to do in this episode is go through all of them and see how they are being used.
We’ll start with a list of all the references, and as we go through it and find verses that use the phrase “word of God” as a reference to something other than the Bible, we’ll remove them from the list.
We’ll then see how many verses there are in Scripture that can be shown to use “word of God” as a synonym for the Bible.
Yes, going through fifty verses will take a bit of time, but that’s what serious Bible scholars—and serious Bible students—need to do sometimes.
As we’ll see, many of these verses won’t take very long to deal with, I’ll be here to help you as we do this Bible study, and you can always go through the episode at double speed or something.
Now, when I first conducted this Bible study, I did so by going through the verses and classifying them in the order that they appear in the Bible, but here I’ve sequenced them into categories so that we don’t have to constantly jump back and forth between categories in this episode, which should make it a little easier.
However, we will be covering all the passages that use the phrase “word of God.”
God’s Incarnate Word
We’ll start at the top of our category list with references that everybody agrees refer to Jesus as God’s incarnate word.
There are a number of passages like this, but they don’t all use the phrase “word of God.”
The one that does is Revelation 19:13, which describes Jesus as follows:
Revelation 19:13
And [Jesus] was dressed in an outer garment dipped in blood, and his name is called the Word of God.
So here the word of God refers to Jesus, not to the Bible.
We can thus eliminate Revelation 19:13 from our list of references to the word of God.
God’s Creative Word
Now we’ll move to references that everybody agrees refer to God’s creative word. These don’t include Genesis itself because the phrase “word of God” isn’t used there.
However, in Hebrews 11:3, we read:
Hebrews 11:3
By faith we understand the worlds were created by the word of God, in order that what is seen did not come into existence from what is visible.
And in 2 Peter 3:5, we read:
2 Peter 3:5
For when [scoffers] maintain this, it escapes their notice that the heavens existed long ago and the earth held together out of water and through water by the word of God.
Both of these passages refer to the power of God’s creative word in the world and are not references to the Bible itself.
There’s also 1 Timothy 4:5. Here, Paul says that every food created by God is good and is made holy by the word of God and prayer.
This is one of the more confusing references to the word of God in the Bible, and scholars are not at all certain how it is to be understood. There are multiple proposals.
Perhaps the most likely one is that the phrase “word of God” is being understood as God’s creative word, because Paul has just said that every food created by God is good.
So the food can be made holy both by God creating it good and by the prayer by which we receive it in thanksgiving.
However, it’s clear that “word of God” is not being used as a synonym for Scripture here, because the Bible does not make foods holy.
The Jewish Scriptures—which were what was most commonly understood as Scripture when this letter was written—most especially did not do so, as they declared many foods to be unclean for Jews.
Some have proposed that maybe early Christians read Scripture passages when they prayed over their food, but there are multiple problems with that.
First, we have no evidence that they did this.
Second, since every aspect of a book had to be produced by hand—including the paper and the ink—books were fantastically expensive in the ancient world.
A single copy of the Gospel of Matthew would cost you the equivalent of $4,000, so ordinary people didn’t have their own copies of the books of the Bible.
And the overwhelming majority of people—including in the Christian community—were illiterate and couldn’t have read such passages in their homes.
So this is not a plausible suggestion.
The interpretation of 1 Timothy 4:5 as God’s creative word is more likely, and so we can eliminate these three verses from our list.
Revelation as Such
Our next category is where Scripture understands the word of God as revelation, considered as such.
A passage that does this is Proverbs 30:5, which says:
Proverbs 30:5
Every word of God is flawless; he is a shield for him who takes refuge in him.
The key clue we need for our purposes is the fact this passage says that every word of God is flawless.
In the age when Proverbs was written, those words included the ones you could get by inquiring of the Lord, such as through a prophet.
So here it is clear that the words of God are not limited to what is found in Scripture.
The most logical way to understand Proverbs 30:5 is thus that the word of God refers to any revelation that comes from God.
We come now to Hebrews 4:12—a verse that is a favorite in the Protestant community.
The reason is that it praises the word of God—it says very impressive things about it—but it’s a metaphor and doesn’t give you much information to figure out how the phrase is being used.
Consequently, Protestant preachers can pour their own content into the phrase, and their audiences will just assume that it’s talking about the Bible.
It’s also very muscular in their expression, and it compares the word of God to a sword, so that makes it popular.
Hebrews 4:12
For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any double-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, both joints and marrow, and able to judge the reflections and thoughts of the heart.
In Hebrews 4:12, the author says that the word of God is living and active and sharper than any double-edged sword.
If you treat the phrase “word of God” as a synonym for the Bible, you can imagine how popular that will make this passage in Protestant preaching.
The Bible is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword! Yeah! That’ll preach, brother! That’ll preach!
But if we’re not cheerleading and trying to take an objective look at this passage, is that what the author was actually trying to say?
It’s clear that the author is conceptualizing the word of God as divine revelation in this passage, but is he narrowing it down more than that—to just Scripture?
One indication that he isn’t doing that is the context of this verse. Just before it, the author warned his listeners not to fall into a pattern of disobedience.
And just after it, he warns the audience that no creature is hidden from the sight of God, and we must give an account to him.
So here the metaphor is being used to conceive of the word of God as a tool that God uses in evaluating our moral performance.
The author is warning the audience that the word of God will discern their deepest motives. That’s why he says that it is able to judge the reflections and thoughts of the heart.
But Scripture doesn’t do that. Scripture is words on a page.
Here, God’s word is best understood as divine revelation itself, because it doesn’t matter whether a revelation is written down or not.
God will still hold us morally accountable for obeying it.
This was particularly so in the apostolic age, when the Protestant idea that all divine revelation was written down was undreamed of.
We thus see that Hebrews 4:12 is not using the phrase “word of God” as a synonym for Scripture but for divine revelation in general—like Proverbs 30:5—and we can eliminate it from our list.
Revelation as Prediction
We now come to the category where a sacred writer is conceptualizing revelation by its content, and first we will consider whether there are any passages where an author thinks of revelation as a prediction—such as either a promise or a warning.
In Romans 9:6 Paul has been discussing how he has unceasing anguish in his heart because of his fellow countrymen—the Jewish people—and how he could even wish he was cut off from Christ on their account.
He also lists a bunch of benefits the Jewish people have had—the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the temple service, the promises, the patriarchs, and even Jesus Christ himself.
He then says, “But it is not as if the word of God had failed.” In saying this, it’s clear that he is referring to some previous revelation that has come from God—a prediction or promise about Israel—that you might think has failed because of the current status of the Jewish people.
But it isn’t clear what revelation he is thinking of. Is it a prediction or a promise that all Israel will be saved? Or that it will embrace the Christ? Or that it will always be God’s people? Or that it will come into God’s kingdom?
It’s not clear.
Paul does not identify any passage of Scripture as containing this revelation, and scholars have not been able to identify one, either.
Paul does go on to cite several passages of Scripture to argue that the word of God has not failed, but that’s not the same thing.
Just because you can use different passages of Scripture to argue that the word of God has not failed does not tell you what the word of God in question is.
So what we can say about Romans 9:6 is that Paul is using the phrase “word of God” to refer to a promise or prediction God made about Israel.
But we cannot say that he’s using the term as a synonym for Scripture because we can’t even confidently identify what part of Scripture he would be talking about on this interpretation.
We can thus eliminate this passage from our list.
Revelation as Command
What about understanding the word of God as a divine command? Are there any passages where a biblical author does this—without conceptualizing it strictly in terms of what Scripture says?
There are two relevant passages, and they are parallel passages in the Gospels.
In Mark 7, the Pharisees and scribes ask Jesus why his disciples eat with unclean hands instead of according to the tradition of the elders.
Jesus says that they abandon the commandment of God and hold fast to the tradition of men.
Then he says the same thing in another way: that they ignore the commandment of God so that they can keep their tradition.
He then cites two statements from the Law of Moses that he sees as conflicting with their tradition.
The first is from the Ten Commandments, and it is the command to honor your father and mother. This command is found in Exodus 20:12 and in Deuteronomy 5:16.
The second passage Jesus cites says that one who curses his father or mother must certainly die. This command is found in Exodus 21:17 and in Leviticus 20:9.
He then says that they make void the word of God by their tradition.
We find the same story in Matthew 15, only Matthew tells it in fewer words, as usual.
Again, the Pharisees and scribes ask Jesus why his disciples eat with unwashed hands in contrast to the tradition of the elders.
Jesus says that they break the commandment of God because of their tradition.
He cites the same two statements from the Law of Moses—honor your father and mother and whoever curses father or mother must die.
And then he sums up by saying that they make void the word of God by their tradition.
So, how is the word of God being conceptualized in these passages?
Well, the subject of the Pharisees’ tradition of the elders is the key subject that is introduced in both passages.
And in Jesus’ capping summation, their tradition is set in opposition to the word of God.
Previously in the text, the same opposition has been expressed in terms of the tradition of men and God’s command.
Mark has this in two places at the beginning of Jesus’ reply Highlight “the tradition of men” and “your tradition” in Mark and “the commandment of God in both cases.
And Matthew has the same opposition at the beginning of Jesus’ reply also. Highlight “your tradition” and “the commandment of God” in Matthew.
So three times, we have the opposition set up between the commandment of God and the tradition of men, and then we have the opposition rephrased in terms of the word of God and the Pharisees’ tradition.
This tells us that here the word of God is being conceptualized as the commandment of God.
In the middle, we have citations of a pair of statements from Scripture to document what the command of God is. Highlight “honor your father and mother” and “whoever curses father or mother” in both Matthew and Mark.
But these are to document what the command of God is.
The word of God is still being conceptualized as the command of God.
Jesus is saying, “You are breaking the commandment or word of God by your tradition” not “You are breaking Scripture by your tradition.”
The issue is God’s command, not the fact it happens to be recorded in Scripture.
In fact, the Ten Commandments original form was spoken rather than written.
Before the Ten Commandments were written on tablets of stone, Exodus presents them as being spoken to God by Moses.
When the Ten Commandments were first introduced in Exodus 20, the text begins them by saying “And God spoke all these words, saying . . .”
So the commandment of God existed from that point, and if the Pharisees had been around and saying it was okay to give things to the temple instead of honoring your father and mother, Jesus would have accused them of breaking God’s commandment just as much.
Even though none of the books of Scripture had been written yet.
So we can also eliminate these passages from our list.
Revelation Comes to the Revelator
We now begin looking at passages where the biblical authors conceptualize revelation in terms of how it is transmitted.
The first of these categories concerns when revelation comes to the person who will reveal it, even though he hasn’t yet told anybody about it.
In 1 Kings 12:22, a prophet named Shemaiah gets a revelation, and we read:
1 Kings 12:22
Then the word of God came to Shemaiah the man of God, saying . . .
The text then describes a message that Shemaiah is to give the king of Israel.
So here the word of God was the new revelation that Shemaiah was to give.
In 1 Kings 18:31, we have a reference to the biblical patriarch Jacob and an event that happened back in the book of Genesis. We read:
1 Kings 18:31
Elijah took twelve stones according to the number of the tribes of the sons of Jacob, to whom the word of God came, saying, “Israel shall be your name.”
That’s a reference to Genesis 32:28, where Jacob wrestles with the angel, and God gives him the new name “Israel.”
Here the word of God was “Israel shall be your name.” It was a new revelation given orally to Jacob, and centuries later—in 1 Kings—Elijah harkened back to that by setting up twelve stones, one for each of the twelve sons of Jacob.
In 1 Chronicles 17:3, we have another reception of the word of God by a prophet and read:
1 Chronicles 17:3-4
It happened that same night the word of God came to Nathan, saying, “Go and say to David my servant, ‘Thus says Yahweh, “You are not to build a house for me to live in.”
It is thus to be Solomon rather than David who would build the temple, and this word of God was announced orally to David as a new revelation from Nathan the prophet.
Turning the corner into the New Testament, in Luke 3:2 we read:
Luke 3:2
In the time of the high priest Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness.
When it says that the word of God came to John the Baptist in the wilderness, it doesn’t mean he got a brand-new Bible from an Amazon delivery.
This is yet another reference to a prophet receiving new revelation from God that he was to deliver orally.
We can thus eliminate these passages from our list.
Announcement by Revelator
We now turn to passages in which the biblical author conceptualizes the word of God as something announced orally by the one who received a revelation.
We begin with 1 Samuel 9:27, where the prophet Samuel anoints Saul as king of Israel, and we read:
1 Samuel 9:27
As they were going down to the outskirts of the town, Samuel said to Saul, “Tell the servant to pass on before us. When he has passed, you stand here a while, so that I can make known to you the word of God.”
Samuel then anoints Saul with oil and tells him that God has made him king, so here the word of God is the new revelation that Saul is to be king.
Next we turn to 2 Samuel 16:23, where the author tells us how valuable the advice given by a man named Ahithophel was. He says:
2 Samuel 16:23
The counsel that Ahithophel gave in those days was regarded as when a man inquired of the word of God, so all the counsel of Ahithophel was esteemed both by David and by Absalom.
Inquiring of the Lord meant trying to get an answer from God, typically through a prophet or other holy person who would get a new revelation and then tell you the answer orally.
So Ahithophel’s advice about what to do was apparently pretty good if people compared it to getting an answer from the Lord.
In any event, what inquiring of the Lord got you was a new revelation, not Scripture.
Scripture also identifies the preaching of Jesus with the word of God, and since Jesus is God and thus himself a source of divine revelation, these passages also refer to the word of God being announced by the revealer.
Thus, in Luke 5:1, the crowd is pressing around Jesus and hearing the word of God. Since they’re hearing the word of God—rather than reading it—that makes it clear that in this passage the word of God is found in oral preaching.
Another, similar passage is in John 10, only here it is God himself who is both the source of revelation and the one who orally announces it.
In this passage, Jesus’ critics have charged him with blasphemy because he makes himself equal to God, and we read:
John 10:34-36
Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, “You are gods”’? If he called them ‘gods’ to whom the word of God came—and the scripture cannot be broken—do you say about he whom the Father set apart and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?
The passage that Jesus is quoting is Psalm 82, which is a psalm in which God gets up in the assembly of the gods and accuses them of governing unjustly. He then says that although he had previously said, “You are gods,” now they’re going to die like men.
Today you will often hear people say that the gods in this psalm are really human judges, though this is very unlikely to be the case and was always a small minority position in Judaism.
Much more likely, the gods here are the angelic “sons of God” that the Lord put over the nations in Deuteronomy and that we read about in Daniel.
There is also a third interpretation that was held by some Jewish people, which is that the “gods” here are the Israelites at the time they received the Law of Moses. They would have been immortal—like gods—if they had kept the Law, but they broke it and so would die.
Fortunately, for our purposes it doesn’t matter which explanation you like, because the meaning of the phrase “word of God” here is clear. It’s referring to the speech that God just gave the other gods right here in Psalm 82.
It’s referring to what God just said in the Psalm.
I even suspect that Jesus may have been avoiding the issue of how to interpret these gods by referring to them as those to whom the word of God came.
It doesn’t matter whether Jesus’ critics understood them as judges, angels, or ancient Israelites, the word of God had just come to them because God had just spoken to them.
God himself referred to them as “gods,” so it’s obvious that just because someone other than God the Father being called God does not make it blasphemy.
And for our purposes, it’s clear that here the phrase “word of God” is being used to refer to the speech that God himself just made to these “gods” and so just came to them.
It is not a synonym for Scripture, and so we can eliminate these passages from our list.
Preaching by Post-Revelator
Our next category is when the word of God is conceptualized as being orally transmitted—or preached—by someone after the message has already been announced by the one who first revealed it.
This is by far the most common way that the Bible conceptualizes revelation.
In this section, we’ll quickly go through the verses that are most obvious about this and then go back and look at some verses that require a little more thought but still go in this category.
In Luke 8:11, Jesus tells the parable of the sower, and he says that the seed is the word of God.
Since he also says that those beside the path are the ones who have heard—not read—this also shows us that in this passage is found in preaching.
In Acts 4:31, the Christians in Jerusalem begin to speak the word of God with boldness.
In Acts 13:5, Paul and Barnabas proclaim the word of God.
In Acts 13:7, the Roman proconsul wishes to hear the word of God, again indicating preaching.
And in Acts 13:46, Paul and Barnabas tell the Jews in Pisidian Antioch that it was necessary for the word of God to be spoken to them before they began preaching to the gentiles.
Turning to Paul’s letters, in 2 Corinthians 2:17 Paul contrasts his ministry with those who peddle the word of God, and here we know that the word is understood as preaching, because—unlike the peddlers—Paul discusses how he speaks before God in Christ with pure motives.
Similarly, in 2 Corinthians 4:2, he says that Paul has not adulterated the word of God but has made an open proclamation of the truth.
In 1 Thessalonians 2:13, he refers to when the Thessalonians heard the word of God from Paul and his companions.
In 2 Timothy 2:9, Paul says that he is bound as a criminal, but the word of God is not bound, meaning that other people are still out there preaching it.
Turning to the later books of the New Testament, in Hebrews 13:7, the author says that his audience’s leaders spoke the word of God to them, so they preached it.
Now let’s go back and look at some verses that require a little more thought but still ultimately reflect the oral proclamation of a revelation that did not originate with the person making the announcement.
In Acts 6:2, the apostles deal with a complaint that food distribution isn’t being done the right way in the Jerusalem Christian community, and they say, “It is not desirable that we neglect the word of God to serve tables.”
They therefore propose the appointment of seven men to oversee food distribution.
Years ago, when I first encountered this passage and was interpreting the phrase “word of God” through a Protestant lens, I assumed that they were saying they shouldn’t neglect the study of Scripture to serve tables.
But the evidence does not support that. To anticipate what we’re going to end up concluding in this study, there are 14 passages by Luke—that is to say, in his Gospel and in Acts—where the phrase “word of God” is used.
All of these passages—all 14 of them—use the phrase to refer to something other than Scripture.
In light of Luke demonstrably using the phrase “word of God,” it simply is not credible that he suddenly and unexpectedly uses it to refer to Scripture in Acts 6:2.
The clear sense of the passage is thus that the apostles should not neglect the preaching of the Christian message—the word of God—in order to serve tables.
Later in the book, Acts 18:11 says that Paul stayed in Corinth for a year and a half teaching the word of God.
Obviously, Paul taught the Corinthians the Christian message, which is what he did everywhere, so we can identify the word of God in this passage as the Christian message.
We can further show that this message was not limited to what was in Scripture because this visit happened between December of A.D. 49 and June of A.D. 51, and at this point the New Testament didn’t exist yet.
In fact, what may be the very first book of the New Testament—1 Thessalonians—was written by Paul himself during this period.
So there may not have been even been a single book of the New Testament when Paul began this visit.
As a result, we can be confident that the Christian message—or word of God—that Paul was preaching was not confined to Scripture.
The phrase “word of God” thus is not a synonym for Scripture in this passage.
Now let’s look at material from Paul’s own writings.
In 1 Corinthians 14:36, we find something of a special case. In our current manuscripts, it is preceded by verses 34 and 35, which say that women should not speak—or at least preach or dispute—in church services.
But there is a sudden change of topic here, because prior to that Paul was discussing the exercise of charismatic gifts, and he acknowledged earlier in 1 Corinthians that women can pray and prophesy in church. Then, after verse 35, he shifts back to talking about the exercise of charismatic gifts.
Consequently, many scholars—including some very conservative ones—have proposed that verses 34 and 35 are an interpolation that was not originally in 1 Corinthians, and that verse 36 flows more naturally from verse 33 than the statement about women.
This impacts how we read verse 36. If the statement about women not speaking in church was in the original then Paul was expecting pushback on this point, and so he says “Or has the word of God gone out from you, or has it come to you only?”
On the other hand, if that statement was not in the original, then Paul was expecting pushback on the regulations he had just given about the proper exercise of charismatic gifts in church and that’s why he said “Or has the word of God gone out from you, or has it come to you only?”
Fortunately, we don’t have to settle whether the remark about women was in the original or not, because it won’t affect the outcome.
Paul cannot be using the phrase “word of God” here to refer to Scripture because the Scriptures that existed in Paul’s day—that is to say, the Old Testament—did not contain any regulations either about women speaking in church or about the proper exercise of charismatic gifts.
He is most likely using the phrase to refer to the preaching of the apostolic message in a general sense here.
Either way you go, Paul cannot here be using the phrase “word of God” to mean Scripture.
In Colossians 1:25, Paul says he became a minister for the sake of the Colossians to complete the word of God.
Here Paul is talking about his ministry, and when Paul thinks of his ministry, he thinks of it in terms of preaching. We have multiple passages in which he talks about how God sent him to preach and how he has done so.
What we don’t have are any passages where he says God sent him to write Scripture. It’s true that Paul did write some of Scripture, but he never mentions writing Scripture as one of his ministry goals.
If—in this passage—the word of God did refer to Scripture then Paul would be saying that he is writing Scripture—and particularly the letter to the Colossians since he references his ministry to them—to complete the Bible.
But this conceptualizes the Bible in a way that was foreign to Paul’s age. Like others in the early Church, Paul thought that the Second Coming would occur in his own lifetime, and the idea of the Bible as a closed, fixed collection of books was not something they envisioned.
Much less would Paul think of the letter to the Colossians as completing Scripture. It wasn’t even the last book of the Bible that Paul himself would write. He would go on to write more, like 2 Timothy.
Consequently, in view of how Paul understood his ministry as preaching the word of God, this is how interpreters have seen this passage—as Paul saying he was doing the task he was assigned by working to complete the preaching of the Christian message, including to gentiles like the Colossians.
In Titus 2:5, Paul says to teach young women to act in ways that will not cause the word of God to be slandered.
Here he is thinking of the Christian message not being slandered.
In this age, the overwhelming majority of people were illiterate, and they would not immediately think of the Christian scriptures when thinking of why their wives were acting as they did.
Given the enormous expense of the Scriptures, wives didn’t bring home copies to read them for themselves
Literacy rates were already very low, and women had even lower literacy rates than men did, so their wives had not been reading the Christian scriptures.
Instead, they went to Christian meetings where they heard the Christian message preached, so what Paul is saying is that women should be taught to act in positive ways that will not result in the preached Christian message being slandered.
Turning to the later books of the New Testament, in Hebrew 6:5 the author refers to Christian converts having tasted the good word of God.
In context, the author is illustrating how it’s not a practical possibility to get certain people who have fallen away from the faith to repent and come back.
Of course, if they do repent, God will forgive them—God forgives everyone who repents—but some people had become so hardhearted that it’s very unlikely you’re going to be able to get them to repent, and that’s what the author is talking about.
Since this is the letter to the Hebrews, the author is talking about first century Jews who embraced faith in Christ, and to make his point, the author lists a whole bunch of benefits that these Jews experienced as Christians, only to reject the Christian faith and declare that Jesus was a messianic pretender who deserved to be crucified.
Thus he says that they have crucified him again for themselves and held the Son of God up to contempt.
One of the benefits the author mentions these people having had in their Christian phase was having tasted the good word of God.
Okay, well, that’s not the Scriptures as they existed in the first century. As Jews, they already had the Scriptures that existed then. They had the Old Testament, and as Jews who had gone back to Judaism, they didn’t reject that!
What they received as Christians was the Christian message that was orally preached.
That was the good word of God that they rejected when they turned their backs on Jesus and decided he deserved to be crucified as a messianic pretender.
So we see, here again, that the author of Hebrews is using the phrase “word of God” for something other than Scripture.
Here, he means the oral proclamation of the Christian message.
In 1 Peter 1:23, Peter says his readers should love one another because they have been born again through the living and enduring word of God.
Again, because of expense and illiteracy, people rarely became Christians by reading copies of the Scriptures.
Instead, they came to believe the Christian message by hearing it preached, as in Jesus’ parable of the sower.
Peter’s audience thus would understand this passage as referring to the fact they were converted through the preaching of the Christian message and not see this as a reference to the Scriptures.
Finally, in Revelation, John has four passages in which he pairs the word of God with the testimony of Jesus Christ.
In Revelation 1:2, John says he testified about the word of God and about the testimony of Jesus Christ.
In Revelation 1:9, John says that he was on the island of Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony about Jesus.
In Revelation 6:9, he sees the souls of those who had been killed because of the word of God and the testimony they had.
And in Revelation 20:4, he sees the souls of those beheaded because of the testimony about Jesus and because of the word of God.
In these passages, John varies the exact phrasing, but he’s clearly linking the same two concepts. The question is: how are they related?
Many scholars understand the testimony of or about Jesus as a specification of the word of God.
In other words, the word of God is the broader category and the testimony about Jesus belongs to this category.
That fits with the idea of the word of God as the message presented in Christian preaching.
In other words, John is imprisoned—and people were killed—because they proclaimed God’s message generally and about Jesus Christ specifically.
One thing is certain, though, and that is that John is not referring to himself and others handing out copies of the Scriptures to non-Christians.
Because they had to be hand-copied, individual books of Scripture were so expensive that they could not be handed out. As I mentioned, a single copy of the Gospel of Matthew cost the equivalent of $4,000.
So John is referring to himself and delivering the word of God orally, by preaching.
All told, there are 21 verses in this category, making it by far the most common way that the Bible conceptualizes the word of God. It is more often understood as the oral preaching of people who were not the first to receive a revelation, such as when the apostles preached the message of Jesus.
We can thus eliminate all 21 of these verses from our list.
Reception by Audience
We’re getting close to the end of our list of where the Bible uses the phrase “word of God,” and we’ve already shown that the majority of these passages understand it to mean something other than Scripture.
Will we find any passages where the Bible conceptualizes the word of God that way?
We’ll find out!
But first we need to look at one more category—which is where the word of God is conceptualized as revelation that has been received by the audience it was preached to—so that they believed it and hold it in their hearts.
In Luke 8:21, Jesus says that his mother and brothers are those who hear the word of God, so once again hearing indicates preaching.
Similarly, in Luke 11:28, Jesus says blessed are those who hear the word of God and follow it.
In Acts 6:7, Luke says that—as a result of early Christian preaching—the word of God kept spreading.
Here Luke is thinking of the word of God as it has been accepted in the hearts of believers, and so as the number of disciples grows, the word of God in their hearts spreads.
We see a similar reference in Acts 8:14, where after Philip the Evangelist has been preaching the Christian message in Samaria, Luke says that the Samaritans had accepted the word of God—meaning in their hearts.
There’s a parallel in Acts 11:1, where—as a result of Peter’s preaching to the household of the Roman centurion Cornelius—Luke says that those in Judea heard that the Gentiles also had accepted the word of God in their hearts.
And in Acts 12:24, Luke says that the word of God kept on increasing and multiplying in people’s hearts as the Christian faith spread.
Turning to the writings of St. Paul, we come to another verse that is an absolute favorite in the Protestant community.
Like Hebrews 4:12—which we looked at earlier—Ephesians 6:17 praises the word of God, it says very impressive things about it, but it is metaphorical, so it doesn’t give you much information to figure out how the phrase is being used.
As a result, Protestant preachers can pour their own content into the phrase, and their audiences will just assume that they’re talking about the Bible.
Ephesians 6:17 is also very muscular in its expression, and—like Hebrews 4:12—it also compares the word of God to a sword.
All that makes it very popular.
Ephesians 6:17 is part of a whole armor of God passage, in which Paul compares different pieces of a soldier’s gear to spiritual things—the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, and so on.
In the course of that he says to receive helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God.
As before, if you treat the phrase “word of God” as a synonym for the Bible, you can imagine how popular that will make these passages in Protestant preaching.
The Bible is the sword of the Spirit! Yeah! That’ll preach, brother! That’ll preach!
But if we’re not cheerleading and trying to take an objective look at the passage, is that what Paul was actually trying to say?
One thing we can say with confidence is that Paul is envisioning the word of God as divine revelation in this passage, but how is he conceptualizing it?
The key is found in the verb he uses in this verse. He says to receive the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit or word of God.
That suggests that it goes in the category we are presently considering—divine revelation that has been received by the audience.
Now, let’s put ourselves in the position of the original audience. Were they supposed to receive physical copies of the Scriptures?
In our day, after the invention of the printing press, Bibles are so cheap that basically everyone can afford them.
But in the first century, written documents were so expensive that only the rich could afford a copy of even one of the Scriptures.
And as we’ve said, the large majority of people were illiterate and couldn’t read them anyway.
So the ordinary member of Paul’s audience would not have received the Scriptures in a physical sense.
What about a mental sense? Could they have memorized the Scriptures that they heard read in church?
No. While there have been rare individuals who have actually memorized the whole Bible, such individuals are extremely rare, and there is no way they would be ordinary members of Paul’s audience.
In the first place, the memory work you need to do to memorize the whole Bible is massive, and you need a personal copy of the Scriptures to do it. Hearing passages read in church won’t work.
In the second place, you need massive amounts of free time to memorize the Scriptures, and an ordinary person has too much going on with earning a living and raising a family.
And in the third place, if there had been an effort to get ordinary Christians to memorize the Scriptures in the early Church, we would have a record of it, and we don’t.
But Paul does expect the ordinary member of his audience to receive the word of God in the sense he is describing. That’s why he makes this a general instruction to everyone who reads or hears Ephesians read.
There is no way he expected the ordinary audience member to physically receive the Scriptures or to memorize them.
On the other hand, if we stop trying to identify the word of God as Scripture here and think about what Christians were actually exposed to—the preaching of the Christian message in church—then they could indeed receive the word of God and use it as the sword of the Spirit to combat erroneous religious ideas.
We thus see that the way the metaphor is structured points away from the idea that the phrase “word of God” is a synonym for Scripture here.
Finally, there is a passage that goes into this category in 1 John, and this one is quite straightforward.
In 1 John 2:14, John tells the young men in his audience that the word of God resides in them, meaning that they have also received the Christian preaching and preserve it in their hearts.
We can thus eliminate these passages from our list.
Revelation as Scripture
This brings us to our last category of passages where a biblical author conceptualizes the word of God as writing by the one who has a received a revelation—in other words, as Scripture.
Now, there is no doubt that we have revelation in written form. Every single book of the Bible is divinely inspired.
The question is whether the Bible ever uses the phrase “word of God” to refer to the Scriptures.
And the answer is . . .
No! We’ve been through the passages where the Bible uses the phrase “word of God,” and none of them refer to Scripture.
We carefully looked at what category they each go into, and the total number that conceptualize the word of God as writing by one who has received revelation is . . . zero.
So the common Protestant idea that the Bible uses the phrase “word of God” to refer to Scripture is just . . . wrong.
The Bible never does that, and so a lot of Protestant preaching that depends on this idea—including some very enthusiastic preaching—is just mistaken.
Once you’ve carefully looked at all the verses where this phrase occurs, it can be really eye-opening.
For example, on the web page of R. C. Sproul’s Ligonier Ministries, it says, “The Bible refers to itself as the Word of God” and then cites 1 Thessalonians 2:13.
Uh . . . no, it doesn’t.
As we saw, 1 Thessalonians 2:13 explicitly refers to Paul’s audience having “heard from us” the word of God.
This passage is understanding the word of God as the oral preaching that Paul gave the Thessalonians in the three weeks that he was able to spend in their city.
So you can’t use this verse to say that the Bible refers to itself as the word of God. That’s not what this verse is doing.
And the same kind of sloppy reasoning is present whenever our Protestant friends try to find prooftexts where the Bible uses the phrase “word of God” to refer to Scripture itself.
The Bible never does that.
Now, as I’ve said, language changes with time, and new uses emerge. So I have no problem if Protestants want to use the phrase “word of God” in their own community to refer to Scripture.
But don’t be a lazy Maisie and force this reading onto the biblical text through inattention.
Of course, Catholics also have their own uses for terms, and the unofficial glossary for the Catechism actually has a pretty good definition for the word of God when it says that it is, “The entire content of [divine] revelation as contained in the Holy Bible and proclaimed in the Church.”
That’s definitely closer to how the Bible itself conceptualizes the word of God—as divine revelation transmitted through more than one means.
Though, as we’ve seen, there are multiple ways the phrase itself is used.
By the way, if you’d like more on this subject, be sure to check out the channel of my colleague Trent Horn.
He has an episode coming out on this subject as well.
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“The Word of God” in Scripture
1 Samuel 9:27
2 Samuel 16:23
1 Kings 12:22
1 Kings 18:31
1 Chronicles 17:3
Proverbs 30:5
Matthew 15:6
Mark 7:13
Luke 3:2
Luke 5:1
Luke 8:11
Luke 8:21
Luke 11:28
John 10:35
Acts 4:31
Acts 6:2
Acts 6:7
Acts 8:14
Acts 11:1
Acts 12:24
Acts 13:5
Acts 13:7
Acts 13:46
Acts 18:11
Romans 9:6
1 Corinthians 14:36
2 Corinthians 2:17
2 Corinthians 4:2
Ephesians 6:17
Colossians 1:25
1 Thessalonians 2:13
1 Timothy 4:5
2 Timothy 2:9
Titus 2:5
Hebrews 4:12
Hebrews 6:5
Hebrews 11:3
Hebrews 13:7
1 Peter 1:23
2 Peter 3:5
1 John 2:14
Revelation 1:2
Revelation 1:9
Revelation 6:9
Revelation 19:13
Revelation 20:4