The Power of Words

 ‘The pen is mightier than the sword.’

attrib. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1803-1873

The words that a pen writes or that a mouth speaks are indeed powerful, but they are a gift from God.  As with all gifts, they bring with them responsibility in their use: St James, for example, charges us to be careful what we say (Jas. 3:1-6).  We should choose our words wisely, lest we cause offence or do unintended damage.

In the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ Jesus develops the thinking behind the Ten Commandments, and at Matt. 5:34-37 we find a comment about ‘You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain (Ex. 20:7)’.  Jesus warns us against making extravagant undertakings and sealing them by invoking God’s name.  If we do so, we have to keep those promises – if they prove to be things we can’t manage, the result is that we are guilty of sin.  It’s far safer, Jesus advises, not to make oaths at all, but simply say ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

Sometimes we say things because we’ve always done so, without appreciating exactly what they mean.  The origin of an expression can be lost behind the frequency and thoughtlessness of its use.  How often, I wonder, does an atheist take leave of someone by saying ‘goodbye’?  Does he really hope that God (in whom he doesn’t believe) will be with his friend? 

The meaning of words can change over the course of time, too.  Few churches nowadays use the sixteenth century phrases of the Apostles’ Creed, and express belief in a God who will come to judge the ‘quick and the dead’.  To us, ‘quick’ means swift in motion, fleet of foot, or perhaps capable of prompt reactions.  When it was first translated into English, ‘quick’ was simply the opposite to ‘dead’, and many people now prefer to replace it in this context by ‘living’.  I must mention too the dramatic increase in ‘issues’ these days.  Far from being confined to something that comes out, like blood or a magazine, today’s ‘issues’ seem to have extinguished ‘matters’, ‘topics’, ‘factors’, ‘contentions’, ‘difficulties ‘and, most of all, ‘problems’.  Have people just become too lazy to be specific about what it is they’re discussing?

I was at a Christian gathering earlier this year where someone told a story of conversion to faith, saying, ‘... and then he got saved.’  It grated at the time, and after a little thought I realised why.  It was the same form of words that would be used of a shopping expedition: ‘he got cereal and then he got butter and milk.’  The implication was that the man had done this himself, in his own power; to any non-believer present it would have suggested that this was actually something that a man could achieve for himself.  A better expression would have been ‘he was saved,’ correctly allowing credit elsewhere for the fact of his salvation. 

As the football season begins, I recall an apocryphal graffito that adorned a ‘Jesus Saves’ sign: ‘... but Satan nets the rebound!’  We must always be aware of the rebounds, those times where the Evil One is only too ready to take advantage of our mistakes.  So let’s resolve now to ‘engage brain before opening mouth’; remember that ‘CARELESS talk costs lives souls’