Word Challenge

A couple weeks ago, my friend asked me what the word "pastor" meant to me. I gave a rather lengthy explanation before I settled on a simple, one-word description: shepherd. Then, without offering his own definition, he encouraged me to seek out God's meaning for the word shepherd, as found in scripture. Here's what I found. It seems that shepherd is an office reserved for God. Ezekiel 34 and John 10 make it pretty clear that men do not have what it takes to fulfill this important position. And as far as pastor is concerned, I settled on "custodian of the church" after I read the passage where Jesus promises to give Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven and to build his church upon him. (Matthew 16:18-19) Whether I have completely nailed these words according to their actual meaning is not as important as the fact that I am closer to God's meaning than my own.

But what about so many other words? How do we get closer to God's definitions for words?

To begin with, we need to familiarize ourselves with a good concordance. The friend who suggested that I seek out God's meaning also said that if he could only have two books, they would be a Bible and a concordance. A concordance is a tool for searching the text of the Bible according to the appearance of words. For example, when I began searching for "shepherd," I simply looked up the word, and it showed me all of the places where the word appears in the Bible. By looking at the verses containing the word, I can begin to dig into God's word, praying for a deeper understanding of its meaning. Additionally, some concordances will offer a Hebrew and Greek dictionary, indicating the original form of the word alongside each of the entries.

Here are some resources to get you started:

BibleTab.com This is an online Bible search tool, similar to BibleGateway.com One additional feature is that it has a concordance which lists the translations in which your word is found as well as a dicitonary.

Eliyah.com This is a completely online Strong's King James Concordance with Hebrew and Greek Lexicon.