Journey With the Wordنموونە

DAY 4: The Arrow and the Lamb

Every person on earth was created to reflect God’s glory. That means that in every culture and language of the world, God reveals Himself to people in different ways. Justin is fascinated by languages and discovered truths about God through different languages. Here’s his story:

I love languages. I love that God saw fit to create every language in the world and that each of the 7,000 languages reflects His glory and plan in a unique way.

In 2 Kings 17, a priest is sent back to the people living in Bethel to teach them how they should fear the Lord because they were being eaten by lions. The Hebrew word for “teach” is yara, the same root for the verb “to shoot arrows.”

So somewhere in the Hebrew language, there was an idea that to learn something you became an arrow that hit your target—that the teacher was an archer and the target was the lesson. Such a beautiful illustration!

Now that I know this connection between arrows and teaching, it sheds a new revelation to the words of the prophet Isaiah for me. “The Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name. He made my mouth like a sharp sword; in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow; in his quiver he hid me away” (Isaiah 49:1b-2, ESV). 

God revealed another gift in language to me when my wife and I served in China for many years. We loved learning the language. I vividly remember learning the Chinese word for “righteous.”

Chinese is based on characters, and so to learn the word “righteous,” we had to first learn the two foundational characters for “me” and for “lamb.” The character for “me” is the symbol of a hand holding a spear, and the character for “lamb” is … well, a symbol of a lamb. So then if you want to write the word for “righteous,” you put the character for “lamb” on top of the character for “me.” 

Are you telling me the word for “righteous” in the Chinese language is “the lamb over me?” Yes! Revelation 5:9 says worthy is the Lamb who was slain, “for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation … ” (ESV) 

Amen! 

Points to Ponder:

• What’s something you learned in church or through a Bible study about God’s Word that you didn’t know before?
• How does reading the Bible in different versions and translations help you have a greater understanding of Scripture?