Some idioms we use are very short: barking up the wrong tree, shooting fish in a barrel, taking candy from a baby, pleading the fifth, and etc. I don’t know how many of these I could cite - certainly dozens, maybe hundreds. In every case, when we hear phrases like this, we usually know what the speaker means to say.
Often, though, we don’t have any idea how a phrase came into use in the first place. For example, why does “put up with” mean “to tolerate”? If a non-English speaking person tries to translate the words put, up, and with, individually, he will still not be able to understand what the English phrase means. It’s just one of those things we say without knowing why we say it.
I came to this realization many years ago, while I was still a teenager. When I was coming out of Ahrens Vocational School in downtown Louisville, KY, there were some Gideons (I didn’t know they were Gideons at the time because I’d never heard of them) on the sidewalk handing out New Testaments to students. I took one.
Even though it was only a NT, this was the first Bible I’d ever owned. My family did have a big Bible but it was more like a table decoration. You know the kind: 5 inches thick, gilded pages, and embossed with “Holy Bible” on the front in Old English font. I remember flipping through that tome but I never actually read it. But now that I had a Bible of my own - one which was pocket sized and more convenient to carry with me - I decided for the first time to start reading it.
The NT starts with Matthew, of course, and as I read it, a strange familiarity began to creep over me. I kind of knew about Jesus -the Savior, He died on a cross, rose from the dead, and all that so that wasn’t new. What struck me the most, though, were the familiar sayings that I’d heard and even used all my life!
I thought it would be interesting to take a minute and consider just a handful of expressions, used in our everyday lives, that are taken straight from the Bible. For the sake of this post, I’m limiting this to examples found in the Gospel of Matthew. Are we ready? Let’s begin:
“Man can’t live on bread alone,” Matthew 4:4
“He’s the salt of the earth,” Matthew 5:13
“He’d give you the shirt off his back,” Matthew 5:40
“He always goes the extra mile,” Matthew 5:41
As weird as it might sound, I had heard all of these expressions before; I just had no idea they were based on Bible verses. Seriously. Looking back now, I laugh at how ignorant I was of Scripture. To me, “going the extra mile” was just another adage similar to, “early to bed and early to rise….” I guess I just assumed someone like Ben Franklin or Mark Twain made it up.
There are many more examples, still. Ronald Reagan called the US a shining “city on a hill”; he took this from Matthew 5:14. Some people believe Abraham Lincoln coined the phrase, “A nation divided against itself cannot stand” but he was actually quoting Jesus in Matthew 12:25.
I’ve seen Bible verses being used (knowingly or unknowingly) in the workplace. When a manager doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing, we might say it’s a case of, “the blind leading the blind” (Matthew 15:14). In a large corporation, sometimes conflicting directives are given to employees and they say, “the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing” (Matthew 6:3).
If we become especially angry with someone, we might say, “I’ll have his head on a platter” (Matthew 14:10-11). If a child says something funny or clever, we might quip, “Out of the mouth of babes….” (Matthew 21:16). When a loved one isn’t living up to his potential, we might tell him, “You’re hiding your light under a bushel” (Matthew 5:15). When someone quits after a long struggle, it might be said, “he gave up the ghost” (Matthew 27:50).
If you’ve been a Christian for a while, you’re probably familiar with all of these verses. However, I’m telling you that, when I was an unbeliever, I was completely oblivious to the source of these common turns of phrase. It was only as I began to read them for myself, that I began to understand how much Christianity had already shaped my understanding of the world.
It wasn’t until a few years later that I became a Christian. Once I became born again, I believe God instilled in me a hunger for His word. It’s like I can never read it, think about it, or talk about it enough. Yet in spite of how much I’ve learned from the Bible, I’m embarrassed by how little I think I know it. Those first few nuggets that caught my eye as an unbeliever, weren’t just expressions. They were a testimony to how rich the Bible is in wisdom and how enduring its advice can be.
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