A Different Sense

“No one has ever seen God.” “I saw the Lord.” Put those two sentences on a slide and you have a contradiction poster. Leave them in their books and you have two uses of see.

This type is about sense, what the word is doing in this sentence.

What the habit is

A list takes a word in its most wooden sense, finds another verse where the same English word is doing other work, and calls the pair a crash.

Common overloaded words:

• See / appear: with the eyes; in a vision; in the sense of grasping who God is.
• Repent: God “relenting” of a threatened judgment is not God discovering He was wrong about Himself.
• Hate: covenant rejection (“Esau I hated”) is not the same sentence as “love your enemy.”
• All / none / never: often scoped to the point being made, not a metaphysical census.
• Die / sleep / perish: physical death, spiritual death, the end of a line.

Why it is not a contradiction

Words live in sentences. “God is light” and “God dwells in thick darkness” are not two weather reports. They are two ways of saying He is holy, and that He both reveals and hides.

If sense A and sense B can both be true of the same God, the same event, or the same word in two genres, you do not have a contradiction. You have vocabulary.

How to test an item

1. What would this word mean to the first readers of this book?
2. Is the writer using ordinary stretch, such as idiom, covenant speech, or prophetic contrast?
3. Does the surrounding paragraph already limit the scope (“no one has seen God” in the sense John means)?

Where this type shows up

The specific pairs live in one catalog: Supposed Contradictions. Search that catalog for “seen,” “repent,” Esau, or Paul and James. Each item stamps this type when it is the right tool.

When an argument quietly switches the sense of a word partway through, that is the fallacy called Equivocation.

The kinds side by side: Contradictions.