Greek

This past summer, I memorized Romans 8 with some brothers from my church. One verse in particular grabbed my attention: Romans 8:37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. The phrase more than conquerors was peculiar to me. So I dug into the ancient koine Greek: hypernikōmen. It’s a mash-up of the words hyper and nikōmen. Hyper is the same prefix we use in English (think hyperactive versus hypo) so it means super or over or excessive....

Confession Romans 12:9 says: “Let love be genuine” or, as some translations put it, “Let love be without hypocrisy.” Last year, on a family trip to Greece, I found myself wandering the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. One exhibit caught my attention: an ancient Greek theatrical mask, its smile grotesque and exaggerated, almost silly. But what really struck me was the label beside it: “Hypokritēs”. This is the very root of our English word hypocrisy....