I referred to the Greek word plouton (or more accurately, ploutos, πλοῦτος, both translated typically as "riches" or "wealth"), and made an association to Pluto and Ploutos, the Roman and Greek gods of wealth.
The cultural shift in the reference to Pluto as an association to a Greek word - has been a gadfly for me.
Was I incorrect in making the association at all? Wouldn't Ploutos - the Greek reference, not the Roman - be the right reference to use?
What's the value of a word study? Should it be how people study Scripture?
Well... my thought is that word studies are a useful tool, but that this tool should be one among many. You shouldn't feel you have to rely on word studies to learn God's Will.
In fact, I'll go one further: if a word study is required to understand a passage, then you're being informed incorrectly.
The class focused on 4:19:
And my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus. (NIV)
The teacher asserted that this verse was used to justify a "prosperity gospel," in that people asserted that "all your needs" was the same as "all your wants." I never really thought of this verse in terms of a prosperity gospel, so I was arriving at it with what I thought were neutral biases - and wanted to find out more about what the words being used were, since translations seem odd to me when they're so easily misapplied.
