“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep. While a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’ and there was light … and God saw that the light was good” (Genesis 1:1-4)
Genesis … the beginning. In Hebrew, it is the first word of the Bible.
And how did creation start?
Words.
God spoke, “Let there be light” … and there was light.
To me, the writers of the Bible had to be inspired. None of us were there when God created the universe and all the life within it. We know that it had to have a beginning. We know that the power and the person to create such a universe and fill it with life had to be, well, immense … intelligent far beyond our comprehension … powerful beyond imagination … and very, very, very creative. All this didn’t just pop into existence. Too much thought had to go into it. Creation is too precise, too beautiful, too interconnected, to just be a random accident or a series of random accidents.
“Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our own image, according to our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). So …. Let’s go on the basis that this true. Right now, there’s a voice in your head. We call it “thought” or “thinking.” Right now that voice is talking to you. It’s saying things. You are having a complete conversation without moving your mouth. Maybe you’re thinking … talking to yourself … about what I’m saying right now. Maybe the voice in your head is wondering where I’m going with all this … or it’s wondering when I’m going to shut up … or who’s going to win the Super Bowl … or planning out the rest of your day. Right now, there is an invisible voice inside your talking to you, just as I have a voice talking inside my head right now wondering if I’ve lost you already.
We have this voice inside our heads and it starts talking to us the minute we open our eyes and it keeps talking all day until we go to sleep … and maybe keeps on talking even when we’re asleep. I don’t know because I’m, well, asleep. Something’s going on when we sleep because we dream, which is cool. How nice of God to play movies in our heads while we sleep for seven or eight hours? Some of those dreams seem pretty real, amen? And sometimes we’re the stars in our own nocturnal movies.
How often do you think about that voice? How often are you aware of it? I mean, that voice talks to you all the time but when was the last time you were “aware” of it? What does it sound like? I assume it sounds like me because it is in my heard, but I really don’t know what it sounds like because I’ve never heard it with my hears … just with my mind. I imagine it can be like hearing a recording of my voice. My voice never sounds anything like what I think I sound like. Maybe it’s the same with the voice inside my head.
Where do all these non-stop “thoughts” come from? “Well, Pastor, they come from my brain … duh!” Okay … but where inside your brain do they come from? Is your “mind” a thing? A place? Is it just your brain “talking” to you? How? It has no mouth, throat, tongue. Do these thoughts come from God? Or some “unseen” place where thoughts are born … “generated”? Nobody here is sitting here with a blank mind. Not one of us is here thinking nothing. All our minds are thinking right now … and these thoughts come from a “formless void” … some place dark and deep … beyond our consciousness. They come out of that darkness, that place and become “conscious” … they become real … and we can say and picture an infinite number of things.
In other words, we can “create” with our minds as God creates with His mind. And we can make the things that we think of, the things we picture with our minds, real. Remember our discussion on temptation two weeks ago. Sin doesn’t just happen … it starts with a what? A thought. And that thought leads to action.
God created the universe with His mind and then He let those thoughts out … He spoke … “Let there be” … and it happened … it was created. And then He created us and He gave us this power … the power to have thoughts … the power to express our thoughts … to share our thoughts. “Then the Lord said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make Him a helper as his partner. So out of the ground the Lord formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was it’s name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field” (Genesis 2:18-20). Giving the creatures, the plants, the celestial bodies names … the beginning of communication. When I say “tiger” you picture a tiger. When I say lizard,” you know what I mean.
I know that some animals can communicate their feelings through actions and expressions, but they don’t “talk” … not like we do! Monkeys and apes may have some primitive hand signals and gestures, grunts and facial expressions, body language as a way of “communicating.” They say that whales and dolphins “talk” … but they don’t write poems or novels that we know of. In fact, they have no system of writing at all. We are the only creatures who do. We are the only creatures that have such magnificent, rich complex systems for communication with one another.
The English language contains about a million words. A million words … all of them made up of a combination of 26 letters. Say them with me: a, b, c, d, e ….” But that’s not the only alphabet in the world. The Russian alphabet has 33 letters. The Arabic alphabet has 32 letters but looks nothing like ours. And the Chinese … they have 26 letters but use a completely different system of pictures for whole words. I think that Arabic and Chinese are a combination of “letter” and art. We human beings speak over 7,000 different languages and dialects. The Biblical writers explains this diversity in Genesis 11:
“Now the whole earth had one language and few words. And as men migrated in the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’ And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men had built. And the Lord said, ‘Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will not be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech” (Genesis 11:1-7).
Communication. The writers of Genesis were aware of the power of speech … and so was Jesus’ half-brother, James. They were not only aware of the power of speech but it’s divine nature as well. “Who is wise among you?” James asks. “Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom” (James 3:13).
Do you know the difference between knowledge and wisdom? Knowledge is man-made. Wisdom is from God. In verses 11 through 17, James makes this distinction: “But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of energy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.”
If I recognize … if I understand that my thoughts … my ability to think, to speak, and to share those thoughts … comes from God, then I should be very careful of how I use it, don’t you think? How many of you use the gift that God gave you to think about the gift that God gave you … the gift of thought. That’s why I love worship music. We sing praises to the One who gave us the ability to create and sing praises to the One who gave us the gift of song … who gave us the ability to make a joyful, meaningful noise and express what’s in our hearts. I mean, that’s totally awesome. No other creature has this ability that I know of.
And yet … how do we treat this gift from God? How do we use it? How do we misuse it? What do we do with “it” … the tongue … the place where thought is verbalized … the place where thought becomes spoken … the place where thought become reality? With the tongue, says James, “we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing … my brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so” (v. 9-10). And then he points out how this contradicts the created order: “Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water? Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs? No more can salt water yield fresh” (v. 11-12).
What he is saying is that when we use our tongues … or our thoughts or our speech … to praise God, to bless others, then we are using speech as God intended it. If our speech is “peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy” (v. 17) it will yield a harvest of righteousness and peace and civility and harmony and love.
It is sad how unthinking and careless and casual we are today with the gift of the tongue. It breaks my heart to see how unthinking and cruel and careless we are with our words. To me, it’s like using this cross here as a door stopper … it works but that’s not its intended use.
Now, James starts out by pointing out a bit of irony. In order to share his thoughts about words and the power of speech, he had to use what? Words! Speech. And words, as James knows, are powerful things. “Not many of you should become teachers” (v. 1). But James is a teacher! The purpose of his letter is to do what? To teach! The underlying goal of his entire letter is to lead … to instruct … to guide his readers and hearers … men and women who were once under his direct pastoral care but are now widely scattered … to full spiritual maturity so that their whole being … without reservation … should be wholly Christ’s. But James knew that he was human and humans can fail, make mistakes … “for all of us make many mistakes” (v. 2) … including the one writing those words.
Teaching in James’ day was not the same as it is today. There were no text books … no lap tops … no internet … most everything had to be passed on orally … by word of mouth. James’ letter was not passed from person to person but from community to community … from one church to another … where it was read out loud … spoken for those who could not read by someone who could read. Teachers like James and Jesus used stories and powerful images to help their followers learn and remember what they had been taught and there are some pretty powerful and memorable images and word pictures highlighting the power of speech in James’ letter.
“If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies” (v. 3). A horses’ bit is about what …. 4 or 5 inches long? A horse is about 900 to 1,200 pounds of sheer muscle … yet a piece of wood about 5 inches long can allow a 180-pound man to control a half-ton animal. James’ example of the bit was something very familiar to him and to his audience. Without direction, a horse could serve no useful purpose to people. It would just go wherever it wants. It is only when a bit is placed in the horse’s mouth that it becomes disciplined and directed … and the horse can’t bridle itself … it must be done by a person. “… a little bit of steel and a thong of leather will hold a fiery steed,” says A.B. Simpson, founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church, “and turn him at the touch of a [child].”
Just as the mouth is the place to control a horse, the mouth is the place to control a person … and a person with an unbridled tongue can serve no useful purpose to God. It has been noted that almost every sin is in some way related to the abuse of the tongue. Like a bridle on a horse, when the tongue is brought under control, the person is brought under control too. The Greek construction in this passage goes way beyond the idea of restraining a horse or a person. I mean, this might seem like a negative image but it is not. The concept of bridling, as James is using it, describes the process of being led and directed toward a positive goal.
James’ next image is that of a ship’s rudder. “Look also at ships, although they are so large and are driven by fierce winds, they are turned by a very small rudder wherever the pilot desires” (v. 4). On May 21, 1941, the “unsinkable” German battleship, the Bismarck, was sighted in the North Atlantic. Immediately, planes and ships from the British Navy sped on the scene. The Bismarck headed toward the German-controlled French coast where it would be safe from attach but then, to the astonishment of all, the massive battleship suddenly swung around and re-entered the area where the British ships were amassed in great strength. At the same time, she began to steer in an erratic zigzag course, which made it easier for the British to overtake her. It turned out that a torpedo had damaged her rudder, and without the rudder’s control, the “unsinkable” Bismarck was sunk.
Again … a positive and negative image. If the rudder had not been damaged, it could have done its job and steered the huge battleship to safety and it would have survived to fight another day. As a rudder controls a ship, says James, so the tongue controls the person. And don’t miss the contrast here. With the horse example, “we” are in control of a powerful animal … but that same power … the power of a rudder … can be used to control us. The tongue may not be very big … smaller than a bit or a rudder … but we should not let its size cause us to underestimate its potential, amen?
Fire is a powerful, scary thing ..,. very destructive and very lethal … especially in James’ day. There were no fire departments, fire engines, fire hydrants, sprinkler systems, or fire detectors … and all it takes to unleash a fire’s full destructive potential is … a spark! But the spark that comes from a tongue is a very special spark and starts no ordinary fire! “The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and it itself set on fire by hell” (v. 6).
The Greek word that James uses for “hell” is “Gehenna.” Gehenna was a valley to the southeast of Jerusalem. It was the place where the bodies of the children were thrown after they were sacrificed to the Babylonian God Moloch. Understandably, the Jews saw it as a cursed place. They not only threw garbage in to it but the bodies of dead animals and unburied criminals who had been executed. It is possible that Jesus’ body might have ended up there if Joseph of Arimathea hadn’t stepped in. The valley became know as the “Valley of Fire” because it was constantly burning. It was a place of fire, impurity, and death. “When the whole body is defiled,” says Bible scholar Spiros Zodhiates, “what good is it but to be thrown on the refuse heap and burned? All evil talk, says James, has its beginning in hell and will cause the whole body, the whole personality, to burn in hell. The fire that we start with our tongues,” says Zodhiates, “has been borrowed from hell and is going to land us and others there.”
“For every species of beast and bird,” James says in verse 7, “of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species. But no one can tame the tongue – a restless evil, full of deadly poison” (v. 7-8). The picture here is that of a poisonous snake whose tongue is never at rest … always darting out, searching for a warm victim and whose fangs are filled with lethal poison for when it finds a suitable victim.
The word that James uses for “poison” also means “arrow.” How often have we used our words … our tongues … to shoot down other people with our poison? Like Paul in Romans 3:13, James maybe referring to Psalm 5: “Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit, The poison of vipers is on their lips” (v. 9).
The tongue is a restless evil. It roams the wilds. It’s quick to defend itself … swift to attack others … anxious to subdue them … always marked by evil. It mimics Satan, who goes to and fro throughout the earth like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour (1st Peter 5:8). Under the lordship and control of Satan, the tongue shares Satan’s tendencies. It has a built in need to guard its own territory, to destroy rivals, to be the king of beasts. Whether suddenly or slowly, life is eaten away and destroyed. Perhaps there is an echo of Genesis 3 there. God spoke the universe into existence and it was good … Satan used his words to deceive and destroy … to bring God’s creation down.
Gossip is saying behind a person’s back what you would never say to their face, and flattery is saying to a person’s face what you would never say behind their back. Pastor and author David Jeremiah calls gossip “the favorite indoor sport of many who call themselves Christians.” Sports writer Morgan Blake gave “gossip” a voice: “I am more deadly than the screaming shell from the howitzer. I win without killing. I tear down homes, break hearts, and wreck lives. I travel on the wings of the wind. I have no regard for truth, no respect for justice, no mercy for the defenseless. My victims are as numerous as the sands of the sea, and often as innocent. I never forget and seldom forgive. My name is Gossip.”
I gossip … I really hate it … I really try not to … but I get sucked in … more than I want to and more than I would like to admit … and I’ve got a million ways to justify it. Gossip, says author Joseph Buhler, “is like a torrent which must and will flow … and the least thing imaginable will give it either this or that direction” – and image that takes us back to the horse without a bit or a ship without a rudder, amen?
I gossip … but I never feel good when I do it. So … how do I bridle my tongue? What words should come out of my mouth and across my lips? These words [Bible] … the words of God! At the very beginning of his letter, James wrote: “In fulfillment of His own purpose He gave us birth by the Word of Truth, so that we could become a kind of first fruit of His creatures” (James 1:18). I may not be the mature Christian that I want to be, but thank God I am not the man I once was either, amen?
Truth in the mind forms truth in the heart … the very think that David prayed for and which he realized would turn into transformed speech. “Then I will teach transgressors Your ways, and sinners will return to You,” David write in Psalm 51. “Deliver me from bloodshed, O God, O God of my salvation and my tongue will sing aloud of Your deliverance. O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare Your praise” ( v. 13-14).
The Lord will not only invigorate the Christian life, but also sustain it. My tongue is constantly being cleansed and transformed by what comes from God’s tongue. As the heart hears with open ears the Word of God again and again, it is renewed and begins to produce a transformed tongue. What happens is this: what comes out of our mouths is more and more determined by what comes out of the mouth of God. The sanctification of the tongue is a work in us that is driven by God coming to us as we hear it and dwells within us as we receive it. As words that have been formed in God’s mouth are digested as the bread of life by us, they being to form our thinking, our affections, and volitions in a wonderful way …
[Serve Communion]
The Lord Jesus came into the world to bear the judgment of God against the sin of our tongues. When he stood before the high priest and the Sanhedrin … when He stood before Herod and the judgment seat of Pontius Pilate, He was silent. Why? He was silent because of every word that proceeded from MY lips … YOUR lips! Because of every word that provided adequate reason for God to damn you and me for all eternity, because you and I have cursed Him or those who are made in His image. He accepted a sentence of death. He bore on His body the sins of my lips … your lips. He hung on the cross for the sins of our tongues.
Do you want to control your tongue better? Then I ask you to pray with me: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner. I thank You that Jesus came and was silent in order that He might bear the penalty of all the misuses of my tongue. In Jesus’ name we pray … and all God’s repentant children with me … amen!
