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.