What is the difference between logos and rhema in the Bible?
Both Greek words translate the Hebrew 'dabar' (word) and are used for God's speech in Scripture — logos tends toward the word as meaning or message, rhema toward the word as spoken utterance with immediate effect. Hebrews uses rhema specifically when describing the word that frames creation and upholds the universe.
Both Greek words translate the Hebrew dabar (word) and are used for God's speech in Scripture — logos tends toward the word as meaning or message, rhema toward the word as spoken utterance with immediate effect. Hebrews uses rhema specifically when describing the word that frames creation and upholds the universe.
This distinction comes up because the New Testament uses both terms for God's word, and people sometimes wonder if there's a significant theological gap between them. There is a difference in emphasis, but it's easy to overstate.
The Hebrew background matters most. Both Greek words are translation choices for the same Hebrew root — dabar (דָּבָר, H1697), which means both "word" and "thing/event." When the Jewish Greek translation (the Septuagint) translated Psalm 33:6 — "By the word of YHWH the heavens were made" — it used logos (G3056). When it translated Isaiah 55:11 — "My word that goes out from my mouth shall accomplish that which I purpose" — it used rhema (G4487). Same Hebrew original, two different Greek choices.
John reaches for logos when he says "In the beginning was the Word" (John 1:1) — the Word who is the eternal Son, the one on the "being" side of existence, not the "becoming" side. That's the grand, cosmic sense of the word as divine reason and self-expression.
Hebrews reaches for rhema in two key places. In Hebrews 1:3, the Son is "upholding all things by the word (rhēmati, G4487) of his power." In Hebrews 11:3, "the ages were framed by the word (rhēmati) of God." In both cases, rhema is the instrument — the dative of means — emphasizing the spoken utterance as the active, productive force. It's not that logos couldn't carry this sense; it's that the writer of Hebrews chose rhema specifically in the sustaining-creation passages.
"By faith we understand that the ages were framed by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible." — Hebrews 11:3
The practical upshot: when Scripture says the universe was made and is upheld by God's word, it means his actual living speech — not an impersonal principle, not a force, but the voice of a Person who spoke things into being and continues to speak them into being-ness right now.
For how rhema connects to logos, the Hebrew dabar, and the full creation-sustaining pattern, see Upheld by His Word.
Did the 2022 Nobel Prize disprove materialism? What does this mean for the Bible?
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics didn't prove God, but it did rule out 'local realism' — the assumption that matter exists independently and locally, which had been the default secular picture since Newton. The Bible never needed that picture, and its claims about creation and sustaining hold on their own ground.
Does the Bible say God sustains the universe right now — not just at creation?
Yes, and the grammar of the original languages makes it unambiguous — across Hebrew and Greek, across eight centuries of writing, whenever Scripture describes God's relationship to the created order, it uses the ongoing present tense, never a completed past.
What does Colossians 1:17 mean by 'in him all things hold together'?
It means Christ is the reason the created order has coherence — everything that exists is held in a state of structured togetherness in him, not as an abstract principle but as an active, ongoing relationship.
What does Hebrews 1:3 mean by 'upholding all things'?
It means the Son is actively holding the universe in existence right now — not that he wound it up and stepped back, but that he is the ongoing reason everything continues to be.