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Welcome to Day 1539 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomBible Study – Words, Correlation, and Causation – Meditation MondayWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend; I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. This is Day 1539 of our Trek, and it is time for Meditation Monday. Taking time to relax, refocus, and reprioritize our lives is crucial in order to create a living legacy. For you, it may just be time alone for quiet reflection. You may utilize structured meditation practices. In my life, Meditation includes reading and reflecting on God’s Word and in prayer. It is a time to renew my mind, refocus on what is most important, and making sure that I am nurturing my soul, mind, and body. As you come along with me on our trek each Meditation Monday, it is my hope and prayer that you, too, will experience a time for reflection and renewing of your mind.
We are continuing our series this week on Meditation Monday as we focus on Mastering Bible Study through a series of brief insights from Hebrew Scholar, Dr. Michael S. Heiser. Our current insights are focusing on accurately interpreting the Bible. Today let us meditate on:
Bible Study – Words, Correlation, and Causation· Insight Forty-Five: Words Don’t Mean Anything By Themselves
We all know from experience that the words we use can be understood and intended in different ways. No word means the exact same thing every time it’s used. I love my wife, and I love pizza. The pizza really isn’t giving my wife competition for my attention. My emotional attachment to my wife is of a different nature and intensity than my desire for pizza. I can use the word “love” for both.
What helps us so easily parse a difference here? Real-life. Our experiences provide context. Words don’t mean anything in isolation. They can’t mean anything until they are put in context. Context determines word meaning: nothing else does.
For some reason, this obvious truth gets lost for some Bible students who are doing word studies. The process goes something like this: Research tools help us identify the original language word behind an English word that draws our interest in a particular verse. Then we look up that word in a word study dictionary. So far, so good. Here’s where many Bible students go off the tracks. Students often use these dictionaries to discover what a Greek or Hebrew word can mean, latch on to an interesting option, and mine for verses where the word has the meaning we’re looking for. The fact that the word can have a given meaning, and does in other verses, justifies (in their minds) assigning that meaning to the word in the verse under scrutiny.

That isn’t word study. That’s cherry-picking a meaning from a list of possibilities and considering other contexts (other verses) in place of the word’s context in your passage. Seeing that clearly should remind us that a word’s meaning in one instance may be different in another.
Real word studies take time. There is no substitute for discerning the contexts that come to bear on the word you want to study and then, one by one, testing whether other meanings are possible in that same setting. Context makes that determination, not a list of possible meanings in a dictionary.
· Insight Forty-Six: Don’t Confuse Correlation with Causation
Have you ever seen those commercials that string a series of disastrous events together, leading to how buying their product will save you from all the disasters? They’re funny because they exploit connections between seemingly random, unrelated events just to steer you toward a conclusion. As if not...