Word Count Versus Importance

I've been looking at the concept of meditation, from a Christian perspective, not an Eastern mystic kind of thing. I read a book which had a chapter on meditation and how important it is as a Christian Discipline to bring you closer to God. It was very inspirational, and I've taken some baby steps in this area, but I wanted to do a Bible study on the topic before reaching any definite conclusions based on this author's work. So I started to look up the Hebrew and Greek words which can be translated "meditate." Turns out there are several. That's not so bad, but the hard part is that they can all be translated in other ways depending on the context. Since my Hebrew and Greek aren't nearly good enough to make informed decisions about usage on that level, I decided to back up and just do a survey of the English usage of meditate, meditation, etc. I might not squeeze every possible drop of knowledge out of such a study, but I figured it would give me a good overview. So it turns out in the HCSB there are 20 places where you find variations on the word meditate. Most of these are in the Psalms. Most of these are in Psalm 119. I started thinking, wait, if this is such an important topic, why is it so scarce in Scripture, and used only once in the New Testament?!

I was beginning to think, maybe this author is off base. Maybe meditation is a minor aspect of seeking God. Then, as a test, I did a search for the word "study," and its variants. I didn't get 20 hits. I got fewer. Way fewer. I got 5.

That's it. Five hits for "study." Now I think we can all agree that studying the Word of God is important. And meditation is used 4 times as often in the Bible. Now that doesn't prove that meditation is essential to seeking God. But it does lay to rest any concerns I had that importance is automatically related to the number of times the word is used in the Bible!

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