Lesson 5 | Vocab

Paying Attention to God


To scorn the hard mental work of reading and thinking about what we read is an assault on God’s methods of incarnation and inspiration. We believe that God humbled himself not only in the incarnation of the Son, but also in the inspiration of the Scriptures. The manger and the Cross were not sensational. Neither is grammar and syntax. But that is how God has chosen to reveal himself. A poor Jewish peasant and a prepositional phrase have this in common, that they are both human and both ordinary. That the poor peasant was God and the prepositional phrase is the Word of God does not change this fact. Therefore, if God humbled himself to take on human flesh and to speak human language, woe to us if we arrogantly presume to ignore the humanity of Christ and the grammar of Scripture. —John Piper, The Pleasures of God (Colorado Springs, CO: Multnomah Books, 1991, 2000), 293.

[G]rammar matters because God chose to reveal himself to us with grammar. So paying attention to grammar is a way to pay attention to God. The more accurately you understand grammar, the more accurately you can understand God. —Andy Naselli, How to Understand and Apply the New Testament: Twelve Steps from Exegesis to Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2017), 82.

Your focus on memorizing vocabulary words, and on retaining verb forms and noun charts, has one end: knowing and glorifying God through Jesus Christ, revealed in his written Word. Keeping this end in mind will cheer your heart when it is discouraged, and strengthen your mental muscles when they are tired. We pray that God gives you grace to pursue him through the rest of your time in this course, and for years afterward.

Greek IV