The oracles of God

Paul asks a question in Romans and answers it with a single noun, and the noun is worth a day.

They have been entrusted with the very words of God.

The Greek is logia — the plural of a diminutive of logos. Older English renders it the oracles of God, and the word in classical Greek meant a divine utterance, the kind of thing people traveled to Delphi to obtain.

The New Testament takes that vocabulary and attaches it to a book.

And the verb Paul uses is the important one: entrusted. They were not awarded the Scriptures. They were made trustees of them.

That word decides how the whole sentence lands.

Paul has just spent two chapters dismantling any claim to advantage — and then says there is a great advantage after all, and it is custodial. They were handed something to keep for somebody else.

Which is why the very next sentence is about failure: what if some did not believe? Will their unbelief nullify God’s faithfulness? Not at all. The trust was kept even when the trustees were unfaithful, and Paul says so plainly.

The word turns up three more times, and each use adds something.

The elementary principles of God’s word — the first logia. This is the milk-and-solid-food passage from Week Six, and the writer says they need someone to teach them the ABCs of the oracles again.

If anyone speaks, he should speak as one conveying the words of God. That is a standard for anyone who opens their mouth in a church — not that every sentence is Scripture, but that a man speaking should sound like someone handling something entrusted.

And Stephen, in the speech from Week Nine, says Moses received living oracles to pass on to us. Living, again — the word from Hebrews 4:12.

And the custodial sense has an edge that is easy to miss. A trustee has no authority to revise what he holds, and no credit for having produced it. Paul’s point in Romans is that Israel’s great advantage was also Israel’s great accountability, which is the argument he has been building since chapter 2.

Four uses, one shape. Something divine, in words, handed to people who did not generate it, to be kept and passed on intact.

Logion appears four times in the New Testament: Acts 7:38, Romans 3:2, Hebrews 5:12, and 1 Peter 4:11. In the Greek Old Testament it renders Hebrew words for God’s sayings, including imrah from last week — so the vocabulary chain runs from the Hebrew promise word through the Greek translation into Paul’s argument.

The word also carries a technical use outside Scripture for a collection of an authoritative teacher’s sayings, which is why early Christian writers use it of collections of Jesus’ words. Papias’ lost work was titled an exposition of the logia of the Lord.

Note that Paul’s answer in Romans 3:2 is first of all — implying a list that he never finishes, because he immediately turns to the objection about unbelief. He returns to the advantages in Romans 9:4–5 and gives the full list there: the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the law, the temple worship, the promises, the patriarchs, and the Messiah.

The word for entrusted is the passive of pisteuo, the ordinary verb for believing or trusting. To be entrusted with something is, grammatically, to be believed in. Paul uses the same construction of himself being entrusted with the gospel.

Paul says something structurally identical about himself elsewhere: we speak as those approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, not trying to please men but God, who tests our hearts. Being entrusted, in his vocabulary, always brings an audience with it.

Look it upG3051 λόγιον logion, oracle, utterance · G4100 πιστεύω pisteuo, to believe, entrust · G4747 στοιχεῖον stoicheion, elementary principle · G3049 λόγιος logios, learned, eloquent

Where this touchesRomans 3:1–4; 9:4–5 · Acts 7:38 (Week Nine, Day One) · Hebrews 5:11–14 (Week Six, Day Two) · 1 Peter 4:10–11 · 1 Timothy 6:20. The earlier word studies were dabar, theopneustos, logos, torah, graphe, emeth, amen, the messenger formula, sepher, edut and imrah.