Have you ever wondered what the Bible would look like if the most common 150 words were ranked, made into different sizes, and arranged together in a huge ‘word cloud’? Well, I hadn’t either until my sister Lisa introduced me to Wordle.net. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should check it out–you just paste in some text, and Wordle automatically creates these really cool ‘word clouds’ based on the relative frequency of the 150 most common words. Then you can mess around with the font and the color until you’re satisfied, and viola! Instant word art!

As you can imagine, it didn’t take me long to start wondering what the Bible would look like if it were “Wordled”. So when I got tired of studying, I fired up my ESV Bible software, copied and pasted the entire Old Testament into the Wordle website to see which words would be the most common. The results were compelling:

By far, the two biggest (most common) words were “Lord” and “shall.” Wow! Sounds like the Law to me! That’s the Old Testament in a nutshell: the Lord revealing his Law to us. (Pretty interesting stuff, huh?) So of course I had to complete the project and make a New Testament Wordle as well. And here it is:

How cool is this??? The focus has shifted entirely away from the Law and turned to God and to the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s the gospel in a nutshell: Jesus fulfilled the Law for us, so we can be free to worship Him. The biggest words are almost readable together: “One Christ, Lord God Jesus.” Now tell me, isn’t this a great summary of the whole New Testament? And isn’t this pretty much the most awesome word cloud possible? (I actually set this image as my computer’s desktop–it just doesn’t get any better than this!)

Happy Sunday!

-Mike