The Right Tool for the Job

This picks up the question the last post left open — When Words Move.

Out here I’m always saying it: the right tool for the job. When you use tools every day, quality matters — and having the right one matters more. But I know the back of that saying just as well. I’ll be in the middle of some small job and need a hammer, and the hammer’s out in the shed, a hundred feet off. So instead of making the walk, I grab what’s in reach — the ratchet — and beat on the thing with that. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes the shape’s wrong, it skips off the target, and catches the knuckles of the hand holding the work. Wrong tool for the job — and somebody bleeds for it.

We do the very same thing with words. Last time we said language drifts; the obvious answer is that we have tools for that now — concordances, lexicons, software — so can’t we just look up what a word meant and be done? We can. The tools are real, and they’re good. The only question is whether we’re asking them to do the job they’re actually built for.

I went looking, for years. And the first thing to say is that the concordance is a giftAmong the most loaded terms in Christian vocabulary — claimed so thoroughly by one side of the Law vs Grace debate that using it tends to import the entire framework rather than the underlying reality. The Greek charis — favor, gift freely given — is worth examining directly rather than through the accumulated weight of the English word. Synonyms: charis, favor, gift. See Nowhere on That Spectrum More: it let me see every place a word is used at once, and watchIn plain English, to observe means to see attentively — to give careful, focused attention to something. This is precisely what the Hebrew shamar points at: watchful, protective attention toward something valued. In religious usage, particularly in the Church of God tradition, "observe" has been reduced to performing an external requirement. The original sense — attentive seeing that allows something to reveal itself — is what the feasts and sabbath are actually asking for. Synonyms: shamar, keep, watch, guard. More how Scripture itself handles it. That is its job, and it does it beautifully.

But I didn’t stop there. I went after definitions — pinning each word to a meaning, building the meanings into a system. And somewhere in there it quit being reading and became an endless chase. Every definition is made of more words, and those words need defining too; you go in circles and never touch the ground. Worse: the little glosses in the back of the concordance aren’t neutral. They hand you a verdict.

Watch one word do it.

Take lust. Your ear already has a verdict on it — something sinful, probably sexual. But it’s one Greek word, epithumia, and here is where the same translators placed it:

With desire I have desired to eat this passoverThe LORD's Passover, kept on Nisan 14 (Lev 23:5): the lamb slain and its blood marking the houses spared in Egypt (Ex 12). The New Testament presents Christ as the Passover lamb (1 Cor 5:7), making it the opening act of the feast year. Synonyms: Pesach. See Was the Passover a Sin Offering? — at the Cross More with you.— Luke 22:15

That is Jesus speaking. The word is epithumia.

having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ— Philippians 1:23

That is Paul. The same word.

the lust of the flesh— 1 John 2:16

The same word again.

So it isn’t that the word is clean in one place and filthy in another. Epithumia simply means a strong desire — a reaching for something. The translators wrote “desire” when it reached toward ChristNot a surname but a title: the Greek Christos, rendering the Hebrew Mashiach (Messiah) — "the Anointed." The anointing that set apart Israel's kings, priests, and prophets all converges on the one person it was pointing to. Synonyms: Messiah, Anointed, the Anointed One, Mashiach, Christos. See also: Logos More and “lust” when it reached toward the flesh. The word never carried the morality. The morality was in what the desire was set on. When your eye lands on “lust” and your mind hands you “sin” before you’ve even thought — that verdict was added: by the object in the text, and by the centuries in your ear. Not by the word.

But notice what just happened. The word didn’t give up its meaning to a definition. It gave it up to its use — to watching where it actually falls across the text. That is a different thing entirely from looking it up. One hands you a verdict to memorize; the other makes you look.

And that is the quiet reason the chase never ends: the meaning was never in the words, waiting to be extracted. Words point; they are not the thing they point to. You could hand every definition ever written to the most powerful machine ever built, and the answers still would not fall out — because they were never sitting in the definitions.

The concordance is the right tool for one job — showing you where a word lives, every place it falls. It is the wrong tool for another — telling you what it means. Reach for it to do the second, and it does just what the ratchet does: it skips off the thing it was never shaped to hit, and leaves you holding a verdict it was never built to give.

So the question the last post left open does have an answer — just not the one we were hoping for. No, we can’t only look it up. The meaning comes the slower way: watching how a word is used, across the whole, until it shows itself.

See also: The Law Was Always Pointing — the same method, worked out on a single word: fulfill.