At a recent family get together I was introduced to a game called Bananagrams.
In some ways it’s a lot like Scrabble, but plays a lot faster. Everyone works with as many as 21 letter tiles of their own and tries to create their own connected words at the same time with a simple set of rules. No paper or pencil is needed. No clock. The first player to use all of the letters first wins the hand.
Am reminded that in a game like Scrabble or Bananagrams we approach words creatively for our own competitive purposes in an attempt “to win” rather than to clarify meaning.
But as we all know,away from the game, words can have serious life and death implications.
As we saw in our last conversation, words (like evil) have a breadth of meaning that can only be determined by their usage in immediate and broader usage.
Other examples of terms that need to be understood in context include life-defining words like “faith”, “saved”, and “justified.”
As language reference books show, “faith” can mean either “belief or trust” or it can mean “faithfulness,” depending on the context. “Saved” can refer to different parts of the “salvation” journey, including initial “once-for-all” salvation, or it can refer to “rescue” from physical danger, or from the immediate consequences of ongoing sin. “Justified” can also mean either “justified” “once-and-for-all” before God, or it can refer to being “declared right” before others (in the sense of adding visible confirmation to a salvation past that has already been determined).
Recognizing such breadth of meanings can help us explain the different ways in which Paul and James used these words with different purposes of emphasis.
When, in another letter, Paul warns about those who use arguments about words to create a following for themselves (1Tim 6:4) he is reminding us about a danger of misused language.
Without Christ-like love and the right kind of humility the best of words can be used in ways that are misleading or inappropriate by reason of double-meaning, sexual innuendo, or logical assumption.
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