Not God’s
Poem
It’s absolutely atrocious. That
even respected Christian teachers are saying garbage like this:
Ephesians 2:10 says we are God’s workmanship.
The Greek is poiema. And this is where we get our
English word “poem”.
So some teachers are saying that this verse
says “You are God’s poem.”
That is an absolute travesty. It is not true.
It is an abominable translation.
English didn’t even exist when this ancient
Greek was written. It is illogical to take the meaning of a modern word in a
different language, regardless of where it came from and then use that meaning
to translate the original language.
In ancient Greek poiema
means the end result of some work (from the verb “to work” poieo). Basically
workmanship, handiwork, something like that.
In modern English the derived word came to
mean a poem.
But it is completely illogical to say that the
original Greek author or his readers would even consider that this was the
meaning of that word.
In English we have “white shirt”. In Japanese
they have the word ワイシャツ (waishatsu)
which they took from our “white shirt”.
In Japanese it means a business shirt, like
the millions of office workers wear to work daily in Japan. But here’s
something interesting. In Japan it doesn’t have to be white.
You could have a pink business shirt and it’s
still called ワイシャツ(waishatsu). Originally, when the word was first
adopted, all office workers wore white business shirts, so it made sense to
adopt those English words.
But that meaning has been lost and now the color is irrelevant. Now in Japanese, it only matters if
it’s a business shirt or not.
Clearly it is ridiculous to say that when
someone says in English “I see you are wearing a white shirt” that because in
Japanese it could be a pink business shirt, that the
English speaker really means that you may be wearing a pink shirt.
That’s absurd.
But it’s the same logic that let’s
these teachers say today that Ephesians 2:10 is saying that you are God’s poem.
We need to be very careful when we try
to change the meaning of the Bible. Even if we mean well.
Even if what we say may actually also be true. If the
original language doesn’t say it, then neither should we when we translate it.
And we certainly shouldn’t be using
the meanings of modern English words derived from those languages as if they
had anything to do with the original meaning.
In some way of thinking, we may be
God’s poem, but certainly Ephesians 2:10 does not say
so.