Things I Think…

1. I sometimes lament the lack of engagement and comments here…until I read the comments on other sites and social media. Many , if not most of the comments I see on X and other sites are full of hate and vitriol spewed by people who appear to be trying to demonstrate that they have recently learned profanity…a situation that I would never tolerate here…

2. While these commenters ruin the reasons to even participate in social media, they raise bigger concerns in my mind…one, is that there are people that are that angry walking about anonymously, and secondly, the kind of world that these people are building…

3. While I do not believe that Genesis 1-11 are historical truth, they do contain truths that are inspired. One of those truths is that God created through speech…

Then God said, “Let there be….,”

I wonder if we’re doing some “creating” of our own…

4. My thesis is this: if we’re made in the image of a God who speaks worlds into being, our words carry a derivative version of that same power. Not creation from nothing, but real formation — of relationships, of reputations, of communities, of the inner life of the person on the receiving end….

5. That’s why the wisdom literature treats speech as load-bearing rather than incidental. Proverbs 18:21 — “death and life are in the power of the tongue” — isn’t metaphorical flourish; Hebrew wisdom thought held that blessing and cursing actually worked , it wasn’t just expressive. You see this demonstrated in stories like Balaam being hired specifically to curse Israel (Numbers 22-24), on the assumption that the words themselves would do damage regardless of the speaker’s private feelings…

6. James 3 picks up the same logic for the early church: the tongue is small but can set a forest ablaze, and it’s uniquely two-faced — “with it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.” James’s point is that cursing a person made in God’s image is a strange kind of self-contradiction if you’re also claiming to worship that God. That’s a sharp lens for X specifically — a platform where people quote scripture in their bio and then curse strangers in the replies…

7. Jesus’s teaching pushes further than most people expect: in Matthew 5:22, he equates contemptuous speech (“You fool!”) with the same moral register as murder — not identical in consequence, but rooted in the same posture of the heart, contempt for a person’s worth. Matthew 12:36 adds a final-accounting dimension: “for every careless word people speak, they will give an account.” The theology isn’t really about etiquette. It’s a claim that speech is one of the primary places where love of neighbor either happens or fails to happen…

8. If one were to visit the part of this site where moderated comments are stored, you would wonder how I’m still standing from the curses delivered… because of theological differences or caring about people that some people don’t, and of course, political mayhem…

9. I submit that in some ways all this vitriol is creating a world within a world…a world where it is a short distance from trying to harm people with words in cyberspace to feeling justified to harm them in everyday life…not just in rare attempts to assassinate political figures but to make the lives of clerks, nurses, doctors and others who serve us socially so miserable they can’t bear serving us anymore…and creating a world where it’s not worth going outside of one’s bubble anymore…

10. Well, at least I don’t feel so bad about the lack of comments now…but I am examining my own heart, cause there are always things I want to say…that I aught not…go and do likewise…