August 1, 2024 - Good Morning! It's Thursday, August 1.
What word is found the greatest number of times in the Bible? Well, that's kind of a challenging question to answer. First, you have to take out all those little words like "the" or "and", words that are important grammatically, but not important spiritually. Then, you have to take into consideration all the different translations and paraphrases and versions of the Bible that are available to us today. Like any endeavor that deals with information - more data doesn't always give you more truth.
And so, with all of that in mind, here's a fairly accurate list of the top five words in the Word.
1 Lord
2 God
3 Man
4 Israel
5 People
The word "Lord" in the Old Testament is most often used as a substitute word for the name of God - YHWH. Theologians call this name "The Tetragrammaton". We often pronounce it Yahweh, but the Israelite people felt that this name was too holy to pronounce. And so, instead, they substituted the Hebrew word "Adonai", which our modern English translations express as LORD - written in small caps.
In the New Testament, Jesus is referred to, and refers to Himself, by many different names. Here's just a few of them.
Christ / Messiah / Master / Savior / Son of God / Son of Man / Son of David / Son of Joseph / Lamb of God / King of the Jews / Light of the World / Rabbi / Teacher / etc. etc. etc.
But over 250 times, Jesus is called simply . . . "Lord".
Perhaps this word study can be an encouragement to us today. As we focus on this first place word, may we give the Lord first place in our hearts.
Meet you back here tomorrow,
Bro. David
dmathis@fbccenter.org
