Interpretation Matters Series Part 4

If you know me, you’re probably not shocked that I’m something of a grammar nerd. I want you to be a grammar nerd, too! OK, you don’t have to be a grammar nerd, but you do need grammar to study the Bible. Grammar is powerful. Slowing down to analyze grammar takes you deeper into a passage and aids accurate interpretation. After all, a passage can’t mean something that the grammar doesn’t support. And when God wrote the Bible, he lovingly adhered to the rules of grammar so we could understand what he wrote.

Consider the most famous verse in the Bible, John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life” (NASB). You’d never understand it if God had written “That he his gave only Son begotten, but eternal have life, for so loved the world God, that perish whoever shall believes in him not.” Even Yoda has better grammar. So let’s examine John 3:16 as a case study for using some of the most common and helpful grammatical tools.

Subjects and Verbs

Subjects and verbs are the engine that drive a sentence. The subject performs the action, and the verb is that action. What are the subjects and verbs in John 3:16? Let’s show them in a chart, a simple tool you can use to organize grammatical data.

Subjects	Verbs
God	Loved
	Gave
Whoever	Believes
	Shall not perish
	Have

Now we know the actors and actions, but this data raises other questions. What did God love? What did he give? What should people believe? What will they have? To find the answers, we need to go on an object hunt.

Objects

A direct object receives the verb’s action. An indirect object is the noun that the action is done to or for. A prepositional object completes the thought of a preposition (see below).

Peeking through the word foliage of John 3:16, we spy three direct objects. God loved “the world,” and he gave “his only begotten Son.” Whoever believes will have “eternal life.” There are zero indirect objects, but there is one prepositional object: “him.” That alone is worth a million years of praise! God loved this broken, cursed world full of sinners like you and me, and he demonstrated that love by giving us his precious Son. Through faith in him we receive the priceless gift of eternal life.

Now we know the actions performed, who performed them, and what the actions were performed on. Next, we need to know how these pieces logically fit together.

Conjunctions

As the song “Conjunction Junction” reminds us, conjunctions are like couplers that connect sentence parts to show their logical relationships. In John 3:16, there are four conjunctions. The first word, “for,” indicates that John 3:16 gives the cause of John 3:15. It’s important to read the context of a verse in order to understand it accurately.

The second conjunction, “that,” shows how God demonstrates his love, by giving his Son. The third conjunction, “that,” introduces the result of God giving his Son, the possibility of eternal life. Finally, the last conjunction, “but,” contrasts the two eternal destinies: death and life.

Two acronyms can help you remember the most common and important conjunctions. FANBOYS summarizes coordinating conjunctions: For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yes, So. These conjunctions indicate that two sentence parts are equal in rank. SWABI summarizes subordinating conjunctions: since, so that, when, while, where, although, after, as, because, before, if, in case. These conjunctions indicate that one sentence part is dependent on the other.

Prepositions

Prepositions are those little words you probably never notice until one is missing. Then there’s a huge gap in your understanding. Prepositions demonstrate relationships of direction, location, or time; or they introduce an object.

John 3:16 has one preposition, and it’s significant. It’s the tiny word “in.” Without those two letters, we’d wonder, “What should I believe to have eternal life?” We might mistakenly believe that believing anything would save us—have faith in your faith. However, that little word is a spotlight on the Person we trust, the object of our faith. God’s Son Jesus is the one you must personally believe in if you want to escape eternal death and receive eternal life.

What Now?

If you’ve made it this far, you may be bored, apprehensive, or both. That was a lot of information from one verse! What should you do with all this?

First, you’ll see the most immediate benefit from these grammatical tools in passages like the Psalms or New Testament letters. Analyzing grammar is better for slower, deeper study, not for your read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year plan. (However, as you read through the Bible, remember that a passage can’t mean anything that the grammar doesn’t mean.) So, pick a passage, grab a pen and paper, pray, and write down notes on that passage’s grammar. If you want a suggestion, Titus 2:11-14 is a great place to start.

Second, you don’t need to know Greek or Hebrew. We’re blessed with numerous English Bible translations that faithfully reflect the grammar of the original languages. If there’s uncertainty about the Greek or Hebrew grammar of a passage, comparing multiple translations will show you the options, and you can weigh them yourself. You can easily compare translations with tools like Blue Letter Bible, Bible Gateway, or YouVersion.

So, are you a grammar nerd yet? If not, I hope I’ve at least convinced you of the necessity of grammar in Bible study and given you some basic tools to use. Grammar is powerful, and it will make your Bible study powerful, too.