What is the Word of God?

Most of us have a cookbook or twelve on the shelf that we have never actually cooked from.

We bought it with good intentions. Or, as is the case with most of mine, we received it as a gift from someone who thought we'd really like some of the recipes inside.

We may have even read it cover to cover, at least flipped through it, letting our mouth water a little bit at the photographs. We may have considered cooking a few of them up.

For whatever reason we didn't. Maybe it took longer than we had to cook at the moment we were looking, we dog-eared the page, then forgot about it. More likely, there were a few ingredients there we didn't have, so we figured we'd need to pick things up at the grocery store first. But again, we forgot about it. So the meal never got cooked.

A recipe that is only read is not a meal. It will not give us any nourishment. It stays in the realm of ideas, and ideas, however beautiful, do not fill a hungry stomach.

Something similar can happen with the Word of God.

We can read it, study it, underline it, and quote it, and still leave it on the shelf. The Word remains an idea. And Scripture is quite clear that this is not what the Word is for.

 

The Word as an Event

So what is the “Word of God”?

Many of us instinctively answer, “the Bible,” and rightly so. But it's not only the Bible.

Scripture itself uses the phrase in a far richer way. The Word is first of all a Person. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1).

The Word is also what Jesus speaks, and Jesus is what the Father speaks. The Word is the very source of everything that exists. When I build something, I need a bunch of tools. I need my hands, and several hours of labor. In Genesis, God does not build the world with His hands; He speaks it into existence. "Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light" (Genesis 1:3).

The Hebrew language helps us here. The word most often translated as "word" is dabar. It means “word,” but it also means “thing” or “deed.”

For the Hebrew mind, a word was never merely a sound or a thought. It was an event. To speak was to act.

This is exemplified in the words of Isaiah, "so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it" (Isaiah 55:11).

God’s Word does things. It does not merely describe reality; it creates it.

This is why the climax of John’s prologue is so awesome: "And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14).

The eternal Word did not remain an idea in the mind of God. He took on muscle and bone, hunger and fatigue, tears and blood.

He became touchable.

The whole direction of God’s speech finds its climax in His Word becoming flesh, toward embodiment, toward a Word you can see, encounter, even hold.

 

The Incarnation Continues in Us

But this mystery does not end in the Incarnation. This is something we often miss, but if you keep reading in the New Testament it's clear. The Incarnation was not meant to stop with Jesus.

The New Testament insists that the Word is still becoming flesh, in us. .

Consider how Paul describes Baptism: "As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ" (Galatians 3:27). We have not merely been taught about Christ. We have been clothed with Him, wrapped in Him, taken up into His life.

Consider how Paul says: "it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Galatians 2:20).

Honestly, if we did not really understand this, it would sound like madness. The idea of another living inside of me would be diagnosable in our modern world.

But it's not a mental disease. It's the reality of who we were always meant to become. It's not an aberration of the human being to become united with our God in this way. It is precisely the reason for which we were made.

Notice the phrase “in the flesh.” Paul is not describing a spiritual sentiment. So often people today talk about being "spiritual," and by that they usually mean they float around with a lot of lofty ideas. That's not the kind of spirituality that Paul is talking about. He's talking about a spirituality rooted in the Spirit who makes us His dwelling, the very way the Spirit came upon Christ, at the Incarnation, when the Spirit overshadowed a virgin in Nazareth; when the Spirit overshadowed Him at his baptism by John in the Jordan.

Paul is saying that the risen Christ now lives a human life through Paul’s body, Paul’s hands, Paul’s voice. The Word has been made flesh in him.

How does this happen? Through death. Paul is explicit that Baptism is a participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus: "Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life" (Romans 6:4).

The Word takes flesh in us the same way it took flesh in Him: by way of the Cross. Something in us must die so that His life can live. The grain of wheat falls into the ground. The old self is buried. And what rises is not merely a better version of us, but Christ Himself, living in and through us.

This is why there is no room in the Kingdom for a Word that stays an idea.

Jesus said as much. "Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock" (Matthew 7:24).

Hearing alone builds nothing.

James doesn't pull any punches at all when he speaks about this: "But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves" (James 1:22).

The phrase “deceive themselves” is sobering. A person can know the Bible thoroughly and be entirely self-deceived, because knowing the recipe has been mistaken for eating the meal.

Mary, of course, is the great model of the Word made flesh. When the angel announced God’s plan, she did not respond with theological analysis. She said, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word" (Luke 1:38).

Her “let it be” echoes God’s own “let there be” in Genesis.

She made room in her body for the Word, and the Word took flesh. Jesus later extended this to all of us: "My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it" (Luke 8:21).

To hear and do is to conceive and bear. The Word has a body.

 

Consuming the Passover Meal

So how does this happen? Well, first of all, it is a gift.

We cannot muster up a good "Jesus" inside us through willpower alone, or even by accepting that certain ideas are true. We are given the ingredients, we are given all we need for the meal. In fact, we are actually given the meal. Jesus enacted His very Passover the same way the original Passover was enacted.

With a meal.

And what is often missed, but would be plain to anyone who had celebrated a Passover before, was that the killing of the lamb wasn't the entire thing. The people had to eat the lamb.

In Exodus 12, the sacrifice of the animal, the brushing of its blood on the doorposts, and the consuming of the meat were presented as a single, indivisible command.

An Israelite couldn't simply paint the blood on the doorframe, pat themselves on the back for being protected, and go to bed.

The text completely eliminates the option of personal preference or appetite. You couldn't look at the table and say, "Well, I'm not really hungry," or "I'm not a big fan of lamb, I prefer beef."

In fact, Moses instructed the people to literally calculate the size of the animal based on the stomach capacity of the household: "according to what each can eat you shall make your count for the lamb" (Exodus 12:4). If eating the meat was optional, there would be no need to measure the animal against the appetite of the room. The menu was non-negotiable: a year-old male lamb, roasted over a fire, eaten with unleavened bread and bitter herbs (Exodus 12:5, 8).

You couldn't just take what you wanted and leave the rest, either. God commanded that none of it could remain until morning; anything left over had to be entirely consumed by fire (Exodus 12:10). The act of eating was so central to the covenant that God directly equated the consumption of the meal with the event itself: "In this manner you shall eat it: with your belt fastened, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. And you shall eat it in haste. It is the Lord's Passover" (Exodus 12:11).

To refuse the meal was to refuse the covenant. Later in the Torah, God warns that anyone who fails to keep the Passover—which meant both bringing the offering and eating it—would be "cut off from his people" (Numbers 9:13). You could not participate in the protection of the blood without participating in the meal.

Which brings us right back to the cookbook on the shelf.

Jesus did not come to give us a new set of theological recipes to read, admire, and leave on the coffee table. He is the Lamb of God. When He enacted His new covenant, He didn't just shed His blood for us to analyze from a safe distance. He gave Himself as a meal: "Take, eat; this is my body" (Matthew 26:26).

We are not merely called to read the Word, or even to agree with the Word. We are called to consume it. We are called to take it inside of us, to digest it until His life becomes our life, His muscle and bone animating our own flesh.

In this way, the adage "you are what you eat" becomes true in a way we might not even think about.

 

The Danger of an Unmetabolized Faith

But there's more to this, too. Because God's people didn't always live well as a "Passover people" in the years that followed, did they?

They ate the lamb. They painted the blood. They walked out of Egypt, passed safely through the parted waters of the Red Sea, and watched their oppressors get swallowed by the tide. They were miraculously, undeniably free.

But within a matter of weeks, they were standing in the wilderness, grumbling. They complained about the food and the water. They built a golden calf to worship the moment Moses was out of sight. They even looked back at their bondage with a bizarre nostalgia, longing for the fleshpots of Egypt because the vulnerability of freedom felt too hard.

They had consumed the Passover meal, but they had not let the reality of the Passover consume them. The lamb was in their bellies, but the chains were still wrapped tightly around their hearts. They had the calories for the journey, but they refused to undergo the transformation of becoming a free people.

This is the great danger for us, too. It is entirely possible to read the scriptures daily, to sit in the pew every Sunday, and even to step forward and receive the Eucharist—to consume the very Body of Christ—and then walk right out the doors and live as though absolutely nothing has changed.

We can eat the bread of angels and still speak to our families with dripping cruelty. We can consume the Lamb of God and still hoard our wealth, harbor bitter resentments, and relentlessly worship the modern golden calves of status, security, and comfort.

Receiving the Word, whether through the pages of Scripture or the bread of the altar, is not the finish line of the Christian life.

It is the starting line. It is what fuels us for the journey. It is the source of our very strength, in fact, our very being.

When we take Christ into ourselves, we are commissioned to let Him live His life through our own ordinary, physical existence.

The mystery of the Incarnation demands that the Word takes on our muscle, our bone, and our sweat.

 

Uncomfortably Practical

What does that actually look like? It is profoundly, uncomfortably practical.

It means your hands become the hands that carry groceries for a neighbor. Think of that simple gesture. You see your neighbor pull up, a trunk full of groceries, all alone. You walk out and offer to help. It's a small act, but it's filled with great love.

When you see two people in the middle of a conflict, tearing at each other with their words. What if your voice becomes the voice that speaks a word of de-escalation and mercy instead of retaliation?

Your feet become the feet that walk into the messy, inconvenient spaces of someone else's suffering to simply sit with them in the dark.

It means your bank account, your calendar, and your energy are no longer entirely your own, because the One living inside of you is historically notorious for giving everything away.

If the Word is truly becoming flesh in us, it cannot remain a private, spiritualized "inner glow" hidden under a bushel. This little gospel light of mine? Hide it under a bush? Oh, no! There's more wisdom in those pithy little songs we learned as children than we realize.

Jesus took on flesh and got his hands dirty.

The Incarnation was not a convenient or comfortable event for Jesus. He set aside eternal and limitless glory to dwell among us! It will not be convenient of comfortable for us. We will have to get our hands dirty.

But we do it. For the same reason He did it. Because His love lives in us. It is not merely that we are "loved" from the outside, but we are loved from within.

And He bids us to take up our cross and follow. Dying to the old self so that Christ can rise in us means letting go of our fierce demand to be the center of our own universe.

When Paul wrote, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me," he wasn't writing from a quiet, contemplative retreat.

He was writing out of a life of intense, physical mission field—pouring himself out for the churches he planted, walking the dusty roads of the Mediterranean, surviving shipwrecks and beatings, and writing letters of desperate love to broken people.

His theology was not sitting on a shelf. It was walking, breathing, and bleeding.

We are the only body Christ has on earth right now. That is not His abandonment. It is precisely the way He intends to dwell with us.

The world is starved for the reality of God, but people are exhausted by empty ideas, hollow promises, and spiritual concepts. "Spiritual" people quickly bounce from one idea to the next, looking for something real. Desperate for nourishment.

They don't need another theological debate. They don't need another recipe book, full of beautiful and mount-watering photographs, that never get cooked.

They are hungry. They need to see the Word made flesh. They need to bump into Christ when they bump into you.

 

Embodying the Word

So, read Scripture as a summons rather than information.

Let the cross be your paradigm for life. Look for the death hidden in the doing. Usually the Word asks us to let something die: a grudge, a comfort, a need to be right, a fear of what others think, and more often, it's something small, like our convenience.

Do not resist that small death. It is the doorway through which His life enters.

Get your body involved in prayer. Don't just direct your mind, alone. Invite your entire body into the prayer. Kneel. Open your hands, or fold them. There is a reason why posture has always accompanied prayer. We do it not just so that we can keep our hands from fidgeting, to focus our minds. We do it because the entire self prayes.

The Word wants your flesh, not only your thoughts.

Finally, at the end of the day, examine not merely what you believed, or thought about, but what you embodied. Did Christ get to live through your patience, your words, your presence at the dinner table? Where He did, give thanks. Where He did not, ask again, like Mary, “let it be” done unto me according to your Word.

The Word did not become an idea. It became flesh. And it is still becoming flesh in you.