Remind them of these things, and solemnly charge them in the presence of God not to wrangle about words, which is useless and leads to the ruin of the hearers. (Second Timothy 2:14)
Many of us pastors have trouble staying out of the ditches and onto the road.
A scholar friend says, “Truth is a ridge on either side of which are vast chasms to be avoided at all cost.” One side is called liberalism, the other legalism. Rigid fundamentalism on the right, worldly compromise on the left. In between is the road. The way. It’s narrow.
Truth always is.
It’s one thing to love word-study and to delight in finding a particular word in Scripture that yields a well-spring of insights and applications, but a far different thing to fight over the meaning of some obscure Greek word.
First Timothy 6:4 warns God’s leaders about “word-battles” or “word-wrangling.” The idea is “constant striving” and “chronic disagreement.” The Greek word is disparatribai, a double compound word which means “constant contention, incessant wrangling or strife.”
Then, in Second Timothy 2:14 Paul uses a different word, logomachia, which we are told means “fighting with words.” The NASB translators made it “word-wrangling,” which I like.
The image of wrangling suggests a cowboy roping a dogie, jumping off his horse, and wrestling the animal to the ground.