The problem we have with encouragement gets deeper when we see the depth of what the Bible means. But solutions also start to come into focus.
Now I’m going to do something that I generally try to avoid. I’m going to go back to the original New Testament Greek. I usually try to avoid this for two reasons: One, I know about as much about Greek as you know about Martian, and Two, it tends to be really dry and boring and abstract.
But thanks to some good Bible study helps, I can walk you through some of this, and I think you’ll find it interesting and practical.
There are three to five Greek words that are translated as encourage or encouragement or other variations of the concept, depending on your translation. Two words account for virtually all of those. Their verb forms – to encourage – are paramutheomai and parakaleo. Now, the second one may sound familiar to some of you, and you may even be making the connection – “Oh, that’s where I heard that word before!” Hang on – we’ll get there. Just not yet. But we will – in a future post.
Where we want to start is with the beginnings of both those words: para. I used to think that meant “sorta” – like paramedics are sorta doctors and paramilitary are sorta military. Shows you how dumb I can be.
Para means – to put it really simply – with. And paramedic gives us a really good example of how that prefix works. There are doctors and nurses at the hospital. But paramedics are the ones who come to be with you. It’s not just like you’re walking down the street with someone. It’s not that kind of with. It’s a deliberate with-i-ness – a decision to be alongside you for a specific purpose.
Now, in paramuthia, muthia comes from muthos, which basically means to talk. But it carries the meaning of counseling or advising. This is why this word, paramuthia, is not only translated as encourage, but also as comfort or console, and exhort.
In parakaleo, the kaleo part is actually where we get our English word call. That’s what it means – to call. So this means to call to one’s side, or to call at one’s side. This is also translated as comfort or console, and as exhort. But this word is stronger on the exhortation side, and paramuthia is a softer word, more on the comfort and console side of things.
And now comes a very important translation principal that has everything to do with where we’re going in this study. This can be tough to grasp unless you know a foreign language really well, but it’s crucial to understanding what the Bible really means when it says, Encourage one another.
Here it is: Words don’t translate word-for-word. Words often do not have exact equivalents in other languages. Even concrete words like “wood,” for example. In English, wood means that stuff we get from trees and build stuff from. But it can also be a place with lots of trees. And lumber is a slightly different word, a slightly different concept. But in another language, one word might serve for both wood and lumber, but not for wood as in forest.
It’s even more difficult to find exact translations for abstract words, like love or faith, or in our case, encourage.
What I’m trying to get across here is: What we normally think is that this Greek word, in this context, means exhort, and over here in this other context means encourage, and then over here it means comfort.
And that is wrong.
In one context the best translation to English may be exhort, while in another it may be encourage. But in every context, the original Greek word means all three of those things. There are not exact English translations for paramuthia and parakaleo. They both mean encourage and comfort and exhort, all the time. In English those are three different concepts – but in the original Greek they are one concept.
So if we are going to figure out – and act out – what the Bible means when it says, Encourage one another, we need to find our way to that original concept.