QUESTION: Hello Priest, how true is this verse? Death and life are in the power of the tongue; And they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof. Proverbs 18:21?
Julie
RESPONSE: The truth of this text is in its contextual use.
Let me begin from this angle. Life has its source in nothing and in no one but God (at least for us who believe in God). God is the life (John 14:6-7) and he is the one who spoke everything into BEING (Genesis 1). So the power of life is in God and yes in the TONGUE of God…since he SPOKE things into BEING.
Death, on the other hand, is naturally in the power of SIN (not a moral thing but a power that actually causes the immorality we see). That is why the Bible says the sting of Sin is Death (1 Corinthians 15:56) and somewhere else it says the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). So death is in the power of Sin not in the tongue.
The Sociological Power of Words
Now that we have settled that, we need to understand that words are powerful and that is why James chapter 1 warns us against the body organ known as the tongue.
There are many people who have caused revolutions through speeches and many wars have been triggered by words. There are many people who were motivated or demotivated by what someone said to them. Words have that impact on us and that is the miracle of the human invention known as LANGUAGE.
Words have power, that is why we have to be intentional in all that we say. We can manage public perception through programming our communication. Every speaker must understand that they have power over what they utter but not over how they are perceived. It is for this reason, a speaker must tame perception through the words he/she says.
Knowing the impact of words on one’s environment inconvinients speech. When, as a judge, you have two culprits before you: one who said and the other who misunderstood the one who said, you have to handle the speaker with greater accountability than he who misunderstood. This is what James 3:1 (in general application) means when he says: Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, for you know that we who teach shall be judged with greater strictness.
The two Spheres
The power of words lies in two spheres
1. The first is that words are not mere abstract concepts but THINGS. In fact, the Hebrew word for word means a thing. In other words, in the Hebrew ideology, when you say something you have not just set it in motion but rather put it into existence. So when you speak life, you manifest and establish it in a confirmatory sense.
Note, however, that your words do not subject to reality but rather are subject to reality. What I mean here is that when, for instance, you say am rich, your bank account doesn’t change figures just because you said so but rather what you keep telling yourself takes you away from thinking, reasoning and acting otherwise which lead you to behavioural patterns of garnering wealth. That is the power of what you say. Not this pentecostal madness I see of “confess it and get it“. That is Eastern spiritism and the philosophy of the law of attraction.
2. The second sphere in which the power of words lie is in BELIEF. What you say to yourself and what others say to you or speak into your life has its power over based on how much you believe it. If your parent made some strong statements about you, and your future, the strength of those statements lie in the belief, attention and emotional attachment to you attribute to them.
Belief is the vehicle of words that leads their object (person) to the destination they declared. When we believe what God and his true servants have said about us and all his promises, we start acting on them and moving towards the same directions of those words but once we hearken to the devil and his agents and believe them based on what we see or what happens to us henceforth, our compass changes and we move towards the direction of those words.
Whose words will you trust?
Now that is how words have power over us. And the truthfulness of this VERSE (Proverbs 18:21) is in how we use it. If we use it within its context knowing that it is drawn from the wisdom genre of the Bible, then we know that it has an advisory role and not a doctrinal one. We also have to understand that while the power of life is in the hands of GOD and the power of Death is in the power of SIN, we have to always remember that God is sovereign over both life and death, and no matter what they said about you, what God said will eventually stand and be established. And remember, your belief determines your destiny eventually. If you believe your or others’ words about you as opposed to what God says, you will end up at not just the wrong side of history but at the wrong side of the future as well. Believe what God says about you, not what you or others say and what God says doesn’t have to be good, it only has to be God saying it.
God bless you, I invoke Truth, Wisdom and Faith.
Priest M.I.T White (0775822833)
iTiS Well of Worship Fellowship (John 4:24)
Questioning to Believe, Believing to Live
iTiS Well of Worship Fellowship (John 4:24) 