Preface

This book was years in the making. It is the culmination of studies that produced hundreds of blog posts and YouTube videos on nearly every biblical subject imaginable. I did not begin those studies intending to write a dictionary of symbols. I was usually trying to answer one question, solve one apparent contradiction, or understand one passage that did not fit what I had been taught.

Over time, I became intimately familiar with the way the Bible consistently and reliably shares symbols, metaphors, and typology from Genesis to Revelation. Each study revealed more symbolic words, more connections, and a little more of the language holding it all together. Eventually I realized I no longer read Scripture the way I once had. The Bible had acquired a vocabulary, and passages that once seemed unrelated had started speaking to one another.

I would hear people sing songs built from scriptural words and symbols without realizing how much they were saying. A familiar line about a lamb, a mountain, a sea, a name, a garment, or a light could carry an entire chain of passages behind it. The words were familiar, yet much of their language had gone unheard.

Many Christians know in principle that the Bible is full of symbolism, but that is like knowing in principle that the ocean is full of water. The fact is obvious; the depth is another matter. This book documents 168 symbolic and internally defined words found throughout Scripture. Some have meanings widely recognized in Christian teaching. Others are richer than they are commonly taught, and some familiar church words take on a sharply different—or even opposite—meaning when Scripture is compared with Scripture.

Even 168 is not the end of it. There are dozens more symbols I could not fit into this book, and every one of them opens into still more passages. John ended his Gospel by saying that if everything Jesus did were written, “even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written” (John 21:25). I have come to suspect something similar about all the layers of Scripture if they were ever fully expounded.

The process behind these studies is repeatable. Gather the passages, let the clearer uses define the difficult ones, look for the second and third witness, and keep testing until the definition holds everywhere it appears. The same process has uncovered connections I had never seen discussed despite searching every resource I could find. New ones still turn up often enough to remind me how much remains buried in plain sight. This book is my attempt to share both the discoveries and the process that produced them.

As we study Scripture together, we will visit 64 of its 66 books and nearly 700 chapters. The range is not there to make the book look thorough. It is there because Scripture is connected, and the same consistent message keeps rising through all of it: “Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man” (Ecclesiastes 12:13).

The hardest part of writing it was the old problem of the chicken and the egg: which symbol comes first? The language is interconnected. A chapter may need a symbol whose full case cannot be made until much later, while that later chapter depends on words introduced earlier. There is no perfectly straight path through a web. Some meanings therefore have to be introduced provisionally and tested as the evidence accumulates. I do not ask you to accept them because I wrote them; I ask you to remember them long enough to see whether Scripture proves them.

This book is for those who take seriously the command to meditate on his word, but do not know where to start. The real discovery is that the starting point does not matter nearly as much as I once thought. Apply the method, follow the words Scripture uses to define one another, and the Bible will organically guide you into the rest of the Bible. One passage leads to another, then another, until what began as a study of a single word has carried you through books you may never have thought to connect.

The book begins with the method demonstrated, then applies it to doctrine, the point of it all, the calendar, and prophecy. After that come deeper studies of symbols such as the mountain, the trees, the sea, garments, and the bow—words used throughout the earlier chapters whose full depth deserves room of its own. The Glossary closes the book, but it is not an afterthought. It is a tool for learning the Bible’s symbolic language: something to read, revisit, and become familiar with until these words begin to call their other witnesses to mind whenever you encounter them.

Symbols and Glossary. Words Scripture defines are set in a distinct style — like mountain or bread — wherever they carry that defined meaning. The Glossary gives each symbol’s meaning, defining verse, and proving chapter; its italic see lines point from the short entry to the fuller argument.

Scripture. This book quotes well-known English translations such as the KJV and NKJV, choosing whichever best carries the passage in context. The source is identified when it matters, but no English translation is treated as the interpretive starting point; Scripture is. Where the chosen translation obscures a key word, I use a more literal rendering and say so, sometimes going beneath English to Hebrew or Greek, including unpointed Hebrew consonants where a second meaning stands inside the first.

The Scripture Index. Every cited passage appears in the Scripture Index at the back, with each page where this book discusses it.

Editions and App. This book is offered in print and as a free digital edition. In digital editions, every symbol links to the Glossary, and each Glossary see line links to the chapter that proves it. The integrated Bible application at TimeTested.Bible links every verse and citation to Scripture and includes my other books, such as Time Tested Tradition. However you read, the method is one: let Scripture define its own words — line upon line, precept upon precept.

Enough about this book. Let’s get to the meat.