Back in high school I took a journalism class that nourished my love for writing. Our teacher repeated several basic principles again and again such as, “Don’t use words that tell me. Use words that show me.”
He wanted us to select words that were bursting with visuals, putting an emphasis on choosing good verbs. “If you pick the right verb, you can cut out all the extra words, which enhances the reading.”
After that I watched for interesting verbs in my school books and noticed how they livened up a paragraph. And then one day I decided to check the verbs God used in his book.
No doubt an English language version of Scripture doesn’t give proper credit to the way God originally breathed life into the words of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, and some of his brilliance has been lost to us in translation. But as I read my copy of the Bible, one thing was certain:
God loves verbs.
In doing a quick study of the 100 most often-used verbs in the Bible, I saw that he ignored the writing principle (in relation to verbs) that I was taught in my journalism class. Instead he kept things simple and easy to understand: come; remain; hear; turn; meet; confess; rejoice.
And here are a few more off that list of 100: give; guard; stand; see; deliver; find; love. Studying these verbs reveals something special about God-the-Author. These action words are person-to-person: humanity to humanity, and divinity to humanity. They describe a wide variety of actions that can be taken to have a relationship with him and live our best lives.
And that’s the key: actions. God took the initiative and acted first, then followed that by inviting us to act in response. If we choose not to, we’ll waste his remarkable gifts and promises.
God didn’t write a book with the hope that a clever choice of individual words might pull people in and then hold their attention. He wasn’t interested in producing the perfect “beach read” or a pleasure novel. Instead he wrote out “the words of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15), encouraging us to decide for ourselves whether or not we’ll read them and/or act on them. He used: do; go; choose; serve; remember… words that are clear and simple.
God makes it known in several places in his Bible that this Word is totally complete the way he first wrote it, and nothing needs to be added, subtracted, or altered. My journalism teacher might not have agreed, wanting to circle those simple verbs with his red pencil, but when it comes to perfect communication, I think God would get the A+.
“When you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.” (1 Thessalonians 2:13)