power, ability, strength
The Greek word dunamis sits at the center of the New Testament's language about God's working in the world. Its most basic meaning is ability or capacity, the raw potential to accomplish something. But the biblical writers push it further than that. Dunamis describes power that breaks through, that overcomes resistance, that produces something that could not have happened without it. It is not merely latent strength sitting still. It is strength in motion, strength that arrives and does something.
When Jesus heals the woman with the issue of blood, he senses that dunamis has gone out from him (Luke 8:46). That framing is striking. The power behaves almost like a substance, something that moves and transfers and works. When Paul writes that the gospel is the dunamis of God for salvation (Romans 1:16), he is saying the message itself carries operative force, not just information but an agent of transformation.
The word also carries weight in its connection to resurrection. Paul prays that the Ephesians would know the surpassing greatness of God's power, the same dunamis that raised Christ from the dead (Ephesians 1:19-20). That is the measuring stick the New Testament keeps returning to. The resurrection is the ceiling of what this word points toward. Every other use of dunamis is understood in that light.
Most of us read the word power in our English Bibles and picture something vague and spiritual, something more feeling than fact. I did for a long time. I treated power as an atmosphere in a worship service, something you sensed or didn't sense. But dunamis is not atmosphere. It is the same category of word as a detonator. It names force that produces actual, measurable change in the physical world. When the New Testament promises you will receive dunamis when the Holy Spirit comes upon you (Acts 1:8), that is not a promise about a feeling. It is a promise about operative capacity for witness and transformation. The stakes of that distinction are not small.
Dunamis derives from the Greek verb dunamai, meaning to be able or to have power. The same root gives us the English words dynamic, dynamite, and dynamo. Related Greek forms include dunatos (powerful, able, possible) and dunateo (to be strong). In the Septuagint, dunamis frequently translates the Hebrew chayil (strength, valor, army) and koach (force, capacity). The semantic family consistently points toward enacted capacity rather than theoretical strength.
Where dunamis appears in Scripture, and why each verse showcases it.
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.
Paul uses dunamis here to describe the gospel itself as an active force, not merely a true message. The word insists the proclamation accomplishes what it announces.
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.
Jesus uses dunamis as a concrete promise before his ascension, tying the Spirit's arrival directly to operative capacity for witness. The power is the means, not the end.
and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places.
Paul stacks dunamis alongside several other power-words here and then anchors the whole cluster in the resurrection, establishing the raised Christ as the defining demonstration of what this word means.
But Jesus said, 'Someone touched me, for I perceive that power has gone out from me.'
The way Jesus speaks of dunamis going out from him treats it as something real that moves, offering one of the most visceral pictures in the Gospels of power as a transferable, active force.
For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
Paul places dunamis in deliberate contrast with human wisdom, insisting that what looks weak and foolish in the cross is in fact the very mechanism of divine power at work.
Words in the same semantic family.
Every video where Adam teaches on this word, in publication order.
This word is studied in depth in the following monthly Bible studies.
