The Matthew 28:19 Project

When you read your Bible and listen to sermons preached from the Word of God, you sometimes learn things you didn’t even know. For example, I knew that God created Heaven and the Earth; it says so in Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” I didn’t realize that it was Jesus who brought about God’s creation of Heaven and the Earth. The Bible also confirms this! Everything was made through Jesus, and without Him, nothing would be made. Who knew? Well, you probably knew this, but I didn’t. But it says it right there in John 1:3: “All things were made through Him, and without Him, nothing was made that was made.”

Here is something else I didn’t realize until last year, when I was listening to a sermon by Dr. Jeremiah and learned that when the Angel of the Lord is mentioned in the Old Testament, it is the preincarnate Jesus. Meaning, this is Jesus before He came to the earth as a human being. He has been there since the very beginning.  John tells us in John 1:2 that Jesus was “with God in the beginning.” Jesus himself said in Revelation 22:13 that He is the “Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.”

Dr. Jeremiah likes to say that you may know about Jesus, but do you really know Jesus? I think I can say the same about the scripture. I know the scripture, but do I really know the scripture? For instance, I knew these verses, but I didn’t truly understand their meaning until I started reading, studying, and listening to sermons.

Did you know that sometimes non-believers are more like servants to God than His own believers? I didn’t realize this until a couple of months ago when I was doing my daily readings and devotionals. I’m currently reading through the Old Testament, and I’ve noticed that often God uses evil people to fulfill His purpose. For example, in the book of Jeremiah, the prophet Jeremiah kept warning the people of Judah that God was angry with them because of their idol worship and their refusal to follow His commands. Jeremiah kept warning them that God would destroy everything they knew, but they didn’t listen. King Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, came and destroyed Jerusalem and then Judah. He took most of the inhabitants captive. King Nebuchadnezzar wasn’t a follower of God, but he was a servant of God because God used him to serve His purpose.

Something else I’ve learned, which I hadn’t realized before, is how much of our everyday conversation comes from biblical scriptures. For example, I discovered while reading the book of Job that the phrase “by the skin of my teeth” actually originates from the Bible! It comes from Job 19:20, where Job was going through a tough time and lamented, “I am nothing but skin and bones; I have escaped only by the skin of my teeth.” Am I the only one who didn’t know that expression came from the book of Job?

I recently said that I didn’t understand how someone could fail to see the writing on the wall when it was clear an event he should have anticipated was coming. It’s a phrase we all use at some point about things in our lives that should have been obvious but weren’t. I just learned where this expression originated, and once again, I’m discovering something new about the Bible! It comes from the book of Daniel, where King Belshazzar was hosting a feast when “suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand in the royal palace. The king watched the hand as it wrote.” (Daniel 5:5) I missed this detail during my reading of Daniel last year, so I can’t wait until we get to this part in the Bible Recap plan I’m doing. It should be coming up pretty soon based on where we are in the timeline. I think this chapter will be really interesting to read.

Another common phrase I recently encountered was “eat, drink, and be merry.” Solomon discussed this in Ecclesiastes 8:15. “So I commended enjoyment, because a man has nothing better under the sun than to eat, drink, and be merry; for this will remain with him in his labor all the days of his life which God gives him under the sun.” He’s just telling us to appreciate all the things that God has given us.

I missed the expression, “drop in a bucket,” when I was reading through Isaiah a couple of weeks ago. I came across it tonight while reading something else. I don’t think I say that much, or it would have stood out to me. “Behold, the nations are as a drop in a bucket, and are counted as the small dust on the scales; Look, He lifts up the isles as a very little thing.” (Isaiah 40:15)

There are a lot more common everyday expressions that we use that have come from the Bible. Isn’t it amazing how much of God’s word has influenced our day-to-day conversations? And, the best part of all is that most people do not even know that they are just repeating scriptures. God sure is sneaky like that!

The more I read and study the Bible, the more things I accepted on faith or believed because they were in the Bible start to become clear to me. I am beginning to understand what I’m reading, and I have a better grasp of the meaning behind the scripture. This definitely makes reading and studying the Bible more enjoyable!