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Acronymity: The Hidden Meaning of Scripture

Click here to read 2 Corinthians 1 on BibleGateway.com


“…there is nothing written between the lines and nothing you can’t understand. – Corinthians 1:13

Computer programmers are notorious for their love of acronyms. Every time some new idea shows up, we* have to put it in acrynomical terms (no, I don’t care if it’s not a word). Is this because they are too lazy to say the whole phrase? Nay, nay I say. It’s to make the work seem more mysterious and exotic. “I’m an SEO strategist and engineer” sounds way cooler than “I try to get my links to the top of Google.” Gotta make that resume sparkle.

To be fair, programmers are a hilarious lot, at least in their own minds. So, instead of reminding the team to “Create, read, update, and delete,” they’ll say “Don’t forget the CRUD today,” and then laugh and snort, because all programmers are required to be nerds from 80s movies. I don’t make the rules.

As acronyms become more ubiquitous (yes, that one actually is a word), and it becomes harder and harder to keep track of them all, programmers start to find the humor in the acronym itself. My personal favorite example of this is the “recursive acronym.” For example, PHP stands for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor,” and GNU is “GNU’s Not Unix.” The acronym doesn’t stand for anything, except for the acronym itself. The ”secret” meaning is right there on the surface. Stop looking deeper.

THE BIBLE CODE

This is why I get amused every time someone comes up with a “secret” new message in the Bible. “Do you know what Ezra REALLY means? Do you see the pattern in every 37th letter?” My friends, it is true there are some deeper truths in Scripture that take some time to pull out, but try to keep in mind the things we already know:

Love God.
Love Neighbor (and Enemy)
Give to the poor
Follow Jesus’ commands

The hidden message of the Bible is this: God loves you and He wants to spend eternity with you. Yes, it’s true He may use different ways of communicating it. If I love someone, I might send them love notes with metaphors, I might buy them presents that refence something personal between us, I might write poems or tell stories or even tell others how much I love them.

But changing the method doesn’t change the message: I love you.

THE NOT-SO-SECRET

We don’t have to look for the hidden meaning all the time. Sometimes, it’s staring us right in our bespectacled faces, straightening our pocket protectors, and reminding us that even our little cubicle empires, God loves us.

It’s the GLU that binds us to Him.
(I just can’t help myself.)

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*Yes, “we.” I am one of the chosen.