Category Archives: Words
Understanding Spoken Words in the Bible! Elijah’s Words and Prayer for Rain! Part 11
(Ver 1.3) Today is Part 11 of a series of very advanced lessons on Understanding Spoken Words in the Bible. You may have noticed if you read my Bible lessons that I teach a lot on this subject and one reason is that the Bible says a lot about this subject. I figured out that any subject that God emphasizes this much must be an important one for me to learn about and to know. Therefore, I spend a lot of time looking at these verses on this subject and they have shocked me into changing what I say dramatically. If you understand this subject just a little bit you will know this is true for you also. I will warn you that today’s lesson is potentially very advanced and only for mature spiritual Christians. This is because the topics and things said may be hard to swallow for younger immature Christians. So please judge yourself before you continue reading this Bible lesson. If you are not comfortable with controversial topics then please just go read someone else’s blog for today. If you have never studied this series of lessons on Spoken Words, I would strongly suggest that you go back to “Part 1” and start your reading there first.
When you study the Bible, you do not read but 1 chapter in Genesis and you can see that God speaks words in order to create our world that we live in. At least seven times in this chapter of Genesis it says “And God said” and God would say something and then shortly it would come to pass. It is interesting to note and to analyze what God said and then to see who He was speaking it to. Did you ever realize that in Genesis 1 you cannot find where it says that God was ever speaking to anyone in particular? In other words God was not speaking to someone specifically in a conversation like we have them between ourselves. God would speak words directed at no one but a problem that He perceived and then things would change based upon what He said. Therefore, no one had to hear God’s words spoken for them to be effective and to cause something to change. It’s kind of like the old saying if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? According to what the Bible says, the tree heard it even if no one else did. For example, God would look at the darkness that covered the earth and say “Light Be” and then light was. So obviously the darkness heard what God said even though we did not. So we learn from this that your words have the same potential and they do not have to be directed at or heard by anyone in order to effect changes in your personal world. God spoke the answer before the problem and then the answer was made manifest. Read Genesis 1 and see what God says “Let there be light”, “Let there be a firmament”, “Let the waters be divided”, “Let the earth bring forth grass” and on and on. Every one of these cases represents a problem followed by a spoken solution. This is a concept taught in the Bible where God describes as “calling those things that be not as though they were”. Do you understand this concept? If you do not understand this concept you should go and read Roman 4:17 and the surrounding verses to see what God says about this subject of speaking words before you see them happen. The concept of calling for what is not seen is exactly what God did in Genesis 1. God saw there was no light and said there was light and then the light came in. You can see this principle demonstrated in Genesis 1:3, 1:6, 1:9, 1:11, 1:14, 1:20 and 1:24. It is a very powerful lesson from God being given to us. God plainly sets us an example of what we should be following in the world today. Then in Genesis 1:26, God said “Let us make man in our image and after our likeness and let them have dominion…”. So if God said this, did this happen like the other 7 times God said? You can clearly see that everything God said in Genesis 1 came to pass exactly like he declared it, so these words spoken about man would be no different. If man was designed by God to be like God, then we would have to be open to operate like God does. We of course do not always have to believe this, but this is usually just because we have not been taught these concepts from the pulpit.
Today’s lesson is concerning prayer and spoken words; their relationship and their essential unified association to each other. It is usually self-evident to most people that prayer should involve speaking words to God. When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray like John taught his disciples, Jesus gave them some example words to speak to God. Many times people take this example prayer that some call the “Lord’s Prayer” and just parrot the words back up to God like this is being effective. However, this was not what Jesus was teaching us to do. You can teach any parrot to say these words and that would not be praying at all. God is not stupid; He has heard these words before, so these words are not intended to replace your words that you normally speak. Also, Jesus taught more than one set of verses on the subject of prayer so we must try to put all of them together and then learn from them all. Here is something else that Jesus said about prayer:
Mat 6:7 But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.
As you can see Jesus says for us not to be vain in repeating the same words over and over to God thinking that we will be heard. This verse implies that it matters what we say in prayer. If you pray the Lord’s Prayer repeatedly in your prayer life, are you not being vainly repetitive? So that sounds like a problem to me. Do not use a model prayer as the only basis for what you pray. You may certainly at first use this prayer as a model construction for your prayer and then change it to your own words. The Lord’s Prayer starts with praise to God and the acknowledgment to who God is and then the prayer asks for God’s will to be done in the earth. Finally, the prayer gets to us asking for what we need in our lives and the forgiveness of our sins is one thing that we should ask for. But then you should also understand that this prayer was taught to the disciples before Jesus died on the cross. Therefore, this was a model of an Old Testament prayer to God and not necessarily a New Testament prayer to God. For example, Jesus said to pray that the Kingdom of God be established in the earth; and guess what the Kingdom of God is inside of me right here and right now, so this prayer has been answered, so why would I pray that again? I’m smart enough to know that the Kingdom of God has come inside of me already so I do not need to ask for this to happen again. If God has already fulfilled it, then you do not need to pray for what has already occurred. Do you understand this? You might can pray that the kingdom of God be expanded and grow, but technically speaking Jesus never taught us to pray that sinners would get saved. The only verse that I have found about praying for sinners in the Bible is when Jesus tells His disciples to “Pray the Lord of the Harvest to send forth laborers into His harvest”. This is the salvation principle of God sending sowers, a preacher or worker to speak the truth in love to an unsaved person so that they can hear and believe in Jesus and then be saved. So prayer is an awesome subject to study in the Bible and we will get to more of this subject later. But, today I want to speak on specifically about spoken words in relation to prayer. You cannot technically pray without using words, but we also speak words all day long and how do these words affect what we pray?
I cannot find anywhere in the Bible where God honors silence or silent prayer. In fact when I was studying about angels it would appear that the scripture says if the man would have been silent, the angels would not have been sent. You can read this in Daniel very clearly. Daniel prayed to God and fasted for 21 days until the angel of God finally showed up with the answer to his prayer. So Daniel’s silence would have resulted in no angels being sent, the angel Gabriel told Daniel for your words I was sent (Dan 10:12). This is a problem in many religious circles where they hold a moment of silence for some individual that maybe has just died. This might be considered giving someone respect or honor but your silence is doing no good other than that. What if when Jesus went to the tomb of Lazarus and stood before it in a moment of silence and then left? Would Lazarus had been raised from the dead? No, I do not believe that he would have. So we can then see what Jesus did to cause Lazarus to be raised, can’t we? Jesus makes the statement to God, “I thank thee that you have heard me”. Jesus implies something that is very important to our lesson today, and that is God is listening to your words. You then see Jesus speaking to the dead man and calling his name “Lazarus come forth”. Was Jesus calling Lazarus alive with his mouth and the words that just came out? So silence would not have brought the answer to Lazarus. To give honor or respect to someone is probably not a bad thing to do, but it will not change the situation. It is like here in the south when we see a funeral procession going by we normally pull over in our cars and stop out of respect for those who are driving by. This is a common practice in the southern parts of the United States and I believe it promotes an attitude of Christian love towards those who have just lost someone from this world, so I believe it is a positive thing to continue doing even though there are no Bible verses that say to do this.
Jas 5:16 Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.
This is one of my key Bible verses today that introduces the rest of the subject of prayer to come. You can clearly see that God is instructing us to pray and not just for ourselves. This verse ends in the statement that the prayers of a righteous man or woman have great power in them. Because Christians do not believe this, they do not do it. Many times it is a self-image problem; they do not feel like they are righteous enough to ask God to do anything. Fortunately for us it is not our righteousness that we are depending on; if it was we would all be in trouble. It is the righteousness of Jesus Christ that permits us to come boldly before the throne of God without guilt or shame (Heb 4:16). So here is the next verse that follows this one about your prayer:
Jas 5:17 Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain: and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months.
So here I go today with the basics on this lesson about prayer and words. As you can read in this verse, God says that Elijah was a man just like one of us. What people should understand is that the people that God uses in the Bible were not special or different or unique in their appearance, characteristics, problems, situations, challenges or life’s little nuances from us today. Too many Christians think in the terms that prophets like Elijah possessed something special that we do not have that allowed him to accomplish great things in the Bible that we simply cannot do. However, that is certainly not what this verse is saying, is it? Elijah according to God and James who is writing this account is said to have prayed to God and this caused it not to rain on the earth for a period of 42 months. This is actually a very interesting statement that God makes to us, since if you have ever read the story of Elijah you can’t find where Elijah ever prayed this in a way that we would call prayer. So what is God trying to teach us from this statement? I believe God is saying sometimes we need to expand our definition of what prayer is.
Jas 5:18 And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit.
So here is another verse that says Elijah prayed and God caused it to rain again. We have now seen two verses that said Elijah prayed and God answered the prayers because they were effective. It sounds like to me that this would be a good subject to go back into the Old Testament and see what God says to us about how Elijah accomplished these miracles of no rain and then rain again. You can find this story of Elijah starting in chapter 17 of 1 Kings:
1Ki 17:1 And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the inhabitants of Gilead, said unto Ahab, As the LORD God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.
Here is the beginning of some words that Elijah spoke that almost floored me. This is the exact same Elijah that James wrote about so get that first and foremost into your head. Then realize that this verse is the very first verse in the Bible that mentions the name of Elijah. So therefore, we can conclude that there are no prayers of Elijah to God that are mentioned in the Bible up to this point. So we have a major problem that needs a resolution; either God did not record Elijah’s prayer in the Bible or Elijah did not pray the way that we would consider prayer to be performed. I personally believe the second is true and God gave us the exact information in the Bible that we needed to know to learn about what prayer is and what prayer is not. Remember what Jesus said “Father I thank thee that you heard me”. Do you think that God was listening to the words that Elijah said to Ahab? Let’s reexamine what Elijah says; God tells us that Elijah was speaking to Ahab and Elijah said “The Rain will obey my Words!” I know this was my paraphrase of what he said, but it is very close to exactly what He says to Ahab. I mean did you see it? Elijah had to believe something in order for him to make this kind of statement; the drought had not started yet so these words could be considered to be a prophetic prediction of something that has not occurred. Or as we have seen in Genesis 1, John 11 and Romans 4, it could be that Elijah was calling those things that be not as though they were. We of course know that Elijah was a prophet of God, but remember what James said, the New Testament says Elijah was man just like one of us. In other words what Elijah did, we can do. Wow, I don’t know if you believe that or not, but I do. I know that just blows the minds of religious people to think this way, but I’m just reading the Bible.
In reading this chapter of 1 Kings you can see that God speaks to Elijah and tells him what to do only after he has spoken to Ahab. God tells Elijah to go to a brook where God will sustain him and Elijah goes there and stays until the brook dries up for a lack of rain on the earth. God then tells Elijah to go to a city where a widow woman has been commanded by God to provide for him. The widow is obedient and God blesses her and even when her son dies, the prophet of God raises the child back to life. So God is definitely heavily involved in this chapter of the Bible and this is how this chapter ends:
1Ki 17:24 And the woman said to Elijah, Now by this I know that thou art a man of God, and that the word of the LORD in thy mouth is truth.
The Widow woman says “The Words of the Lord in your mouth are true”. It is very interesting to see what this woman saw and says. Keep in mind that James said this was a man like us, and then reread this chapter with this in mind, looking for what he says. Are the words that come out of your mouth, can they be considered the truth of God’s Word? The words that you speak, will a stranger woman that you just met see that they are the words of God? Your words that you speak are much more important than you can possibly imagine. I believe your words help to identify you.
1Ki 18:1 And it came to pass after many days, that the word of the LORD came to Elijah in the third year, saying, Go, shew thyself unto Ahab; and I will send rain upon the earth.
Here is the first time that God tells Elijah to go back to Ahab and tell him that it will rain again. You cannot find where Elijah asked God to do this, can you? This appears to be a God initiated conversation and not Elijah’s prayer for God to send rain, doesn’t it? So how did God tell Elijah this? Was it some loud audible voice from heaven or is this not how God speaks to you? God only spoke to me once in an audible voice so I believe this is not how God normally speaks to His people in the earth. Every other time that God speaks to me it has been as a still small voice in my spirit and I believe this is how God spoke to Elijah in telling him what to do also. Otherwise God is doing something different or something special for Elijah that he doesn’t do for us today and this is not what James told us in the New Testament. It is also special to note and to understand that prayer is not about just you speaking to God. If you are the only one speaking in a prayer conversation with the Almighty then you have a major problem on your hands. You should be quiet enough to let God speak back to you since He is so much smarter than you are. It would be much more valuable to hear what God says at prayer time than for Him to hear what you have to say constantly. Do you understand this concept of listening in prayer? Just pay attention and give God the opportunity to speak, you might be shocked at what He says for you to do.
1Ki 18:41 And Elijah said unto Ahab, Get thee up, eat and drink; for there is a sound of abundance of rain.
In this chapter of 1 Kings, Elijah goes to king Ahab after God told him it was going to rain and makes some more statements that are absolutely faith based words. In this chapter Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal to a Godly duel of power exhibitions and demonstrations. This was an exhibited display of the confidence that Elijah had in his God’s ability. Why were there 450 prophets of Baal in the camp of Israel? Why did Israel put any of their confidence in these false religions and religious leaders? That is a very good question to consider! In this chapter Elijah calls down the fire of God to consume the sacrifices that were drowned in water first. Keep in mind we have just had a drought of over 3 years long and Elijah is pouring water on his altar. Does this sound like the actions of a man in a drought? Here we see in chapter 17 that Elijah told the king that it will not rain for my words and then in chapter 18 and verse 41 Elijah says that he hears the sound of the abundance of rain. Yet it has not rained a drop in over 3 years. Is this a problem? Or can you see that what Elijah is doing is what God did in Genesis 1? I’m going to ask you this more than once today; are you a man or a woman that is also like Elijah? You should really read James 5 a few hundred times before you answer that question.
1Ki 18:43 And said to his servant, Go up now, look toward the sea. And he went up, and looked, and said, There is nothing. And he said, Go again seven times.
These lessons found in the life of Elijah are very profound. Elijah told Ahab there was a sound of rain when there was no rain. Then Elijah tells his servant to go and look for the rain and the servant comes back and reports he did not find any rain and Elijah tells him to go and look seven more times. What is Elijah doing? Is there anything that you should learn when faced with a drought in your life?
1Ki 18:44 And it came to pass at the seventh time, that he said, Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand. And he said, Go up, say unto Ahab, Prepare thy chariot, and get thee down, that the rain stop thee not.
So the seventh time the servant went to look to the sea, he comes back to Elijah and tells him that he saw a small cloud coming out of the sea. Do you understand how rain is formed? These are the water cycles of the earth’s evaporation from the seas that forms clouds and then the weather patterns that carries this moisture in the atmosphere to then fall back down to the earth as rain? Here we have Elijah knowing how this weather phenomenon works before there were any modern weather forecasters. What was Elijah doing? Do you remember what Elijah said in 1 Kings 17:1? Elijah told the king that the rain would obey his words. Elijah said that it would not rain for these years until he said it would rain. The prophets of Baal and the things that God did to them were some of the reasons that Elijah could make these claims that God could back his words, but this is the lesson that Elijah and God is trying to teach us today. I believe that this lesson applies to us in the modern world. Elijah said he heard rain when there was not rain then said go and look for the rain until they say a cloud form.
1Ki 18:45 And it came to pass in the mean while, that the heaven was black with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain. And Ahab rode, and went to Jezreel.
So what is God trying to say to us? Elijah said it would not rain and it did not rain, Elijah then said it would rain and it did rain a bunch. I did not see one time in these two chapters of 1 Kings, where it said Elijah prayed for no rain or rain. Only James calls what Elijah did prayer and that is a very profound revelation. I only saw one time where it could be implied that Elijah may have asked God for rain and this was in verse 42:
1Ki 18:42 So Ahab went up to eat and to drink. And Elijah went up to the top of Carmel; and he cast himself down upon the earth, and put his face between his knees,
You can clearly see in this verse that Elijah assumed a position of humility and this is associated with an attitude of prayerful inclination towards God. However, I’m going to be really picky and tell you that it does not say Elijah prayed and it does not give us any words of prayer that Elijah said to God. So what do we do with this lack of information? We can assume that Elijah prayed and God thought that this prayer was not important enough to include in the Bible or we can assume that Elijah didn’t pray like we think of prayer and then we have to go back to James and figure out how did James know that Elijah did pray since God does not say he did in 1 Kings? Did James assume like others or did God teach James a greater definition of what prayer was? You also have to understand that God told Elijah that it was going to rain in 1 King 18:1 so why pray for what God has already said will happen. Do you understand this concept? I believe that these two chapters of 1 Kings should expand our definition of what prayer is in the eyes of God. Your words are heard by God and then God uses these to fulfill what you have said. I know that does not go over big with everyone, but I believe this is what God is saying.
So how do you apply this story of Elijah to us today? I believe that it crosses over into many things that we do in many ways. A couple of years ago the region of the country where I lived was going through a drought situation that was becoming significantly greater. Over the course of a few months, the lake levels had dropped lower than they had been since I lived here. Water rationing was mandatory and you could not water you grass or outdoor plants, wash your cars or do things to waste water. It was getting crazy here so I finally decided to do something about it. That sounds pretty arrogant doesn’t it? That statement makes me sound like I am God or something. However, I learned from the story of Elijah the principles given to us from James that I could do what Elijah did. So one day during the drought I looked out at the clear blue sky and started talking to the weather patterns, jet streams, pressure zones and the climatological situations to change in order to bring us rain on my house and city. So did it change overnight? Like the story of Elijah I went out and looked at the sky several times before it finally rained but then the drought was over and it rained a bunch. You see I believed the Word of God was true and that what God said Elijah did, I could do. I never prayed a prayer and asked God to send rain; I only looked out at the problem and spoke to it to change to bring me rain. You of course could say that this was just an amazing coincidence that I did what I did at just the right time before it rained or you can look at the Bible and declare with me that God is not a liar. After over 3 years of no rain Elijah said he heard the sound of an abundance of rain and after a few more days it occurred. So either what happened to Elijah was an amazing coincidence also or you are just stupid and don’t want to see what God is saying in the Bible to us. Here is a verse found in the Bible that directly applies to what we just read about in the life of Elijah:
Mar 11:23 For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.
Jesus makes a radical statement here that most religious people readily reject. Jesus says if you speak to a mountain and believe what you say will come to pass, it will happen. So is speaking to rain any different than speaking to a mountain? Are they not both inanimate objects without the ears for hearing? However Jesus clearly implies that they can hear in this verse found in Mark. This is a paradox of Biblical proportions. You see if you are a commander in the army and issue an order you just expect it to be obeyed and carried out. This is the same type of reasoning that Jesus is giving to us in this verse in Mark 11:23. Jesus is implying that the mountain is waiting for an order to obey in order to be moved. If no order is given, then no movement is made. If you speak to it and tell it to go and believe what you say will happen, then Jesus clearly said the order will be carried out. You are not concerned with how it is carried out, only the fact that it happens like you said. Mountains can be symbolic representations of problems in your life, even like a real drought. Can you see how this verse applies to what Elijah said in 1 Kings? Everything that Elijah said was what happened in the earth, because he believed it would happen. Elijah obviously believed in his words and they came to pass just as he had spoken. God called this prayer in James 5 and you should understand this drastically changes what we should be saying in our daily lives. Too many Christians pray and ask God for help and then go around speaking the opposite of what they prayed. It would sound like to me based upon what we learned from Elijah that these words cancel each other out. If you pray for God to help pay your bills and then look at your bills and say I can’t pay you, then you have canceled your prayer out. What we have learned in the story of Elijah is God’s definition of prayer is much greater than our definition of prayer. Your words of prayer could be the words that you speak to a king in the earth and tell him that it will not rain for your words. These are powerful concepts that are being transferred to us from God and if you get a hold of them they will change what comes out of your mouth. So I’ll end this lesson with this question again; Are you like an Elijah? God Bless!
Understanding the Power of the Spoken Word in the Bible! Keeping Your Mouth Pure!
(Ver 1.1) Today is “Part 10” in a series of lessons on spoken words found in the Bible. If you have not read this series from the beginning I would suggest that you go and start with “Part 1”. Truly one of the most important subjects found in the Bible is the power of spoken words. God clearly created everything that we can see in our world by His spoken words and the Bible says in this same chapter of Genesis 1 that God made man in His image and after His likeness. So man possesses the same capabilities and characteristics that God possesses in of course a controlled set of circumstances and in a more limited capacity. In other words we are not going to go out and create any new worlds like God did with just our words. But, that does not mean we do not control our personal view of this world with our words. I guess most Christians just ignore verses in the Bible about this subject and refuse to believe them and that is very unfortunate for them, because God’s Words are still true and they work for them or against them whether they understand them or not. It is very much like the laws of gravity. I do not fully understand the law of gravity, but I know enough to cooperate with it so that I do not fall off of a cliff and hurt myself. I could spend a lot of time on this subject and probably will, but today I’m going to start in an O.T. book of the Bible that is not widely taught from by many preachers. This is the book of Ecclesiastes and we will read in chapter 5.
Ecc 5:1 Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God, and be more ready to hear, than to give the sacrifice of fools: for they consider not that they do evil.
Here we have a verse that is easily misunderstood and ignored by Christians. What is the primary subject of this verse? This verse is primarily about your personal relationship with God. But, it also has some very important instructions given to us concerning our relationship with God. Did you notice what this verse says? It says it is better to listen than to speak when holding a conversation with God. Why would this be important? Did you know that you cannot learn anything or even hear anything important if you are the one doing the talking? You might think that you know something worthy of God’s time and ear, but God clearly says that you do not. What is the “Sacrifice of Fools”? If you study the Bible you can see that God says the words that we speak to God in praise are called the sacrifice of our lips to Him (Heb 13:15). So what is the opposite of the sacrifice of praise to God? I believe the opposite would be you speaking the words of self-exaltation, or any words promoting something other than God. In other words stating with your opinion or your personal thoughts and ideas of what the truth is to you, these would be the words of a fool according to God. That is one of the primary reasons that I do not watch much reality TV on our channels here in America. These are the words of fools who do not understand that what they are saying is evil. Isn’t that what God just said in this verse? Here is a very good definition of what is evil in the eyes of God. These are people speaking things without any basis of factual information or knowledge of the truth? These are empty words from people with empty minds. These are fools in the eyes of God. God clearly tells us as Christians we should be swift to hear and slow to speak (Jas 1:19). So this verse has some very important instructions given by the inspiration of God for us and we can learn from them or we can choose to ignore them like many do. These are strong words from a strong God and it gets even better than that, read this next verse:
Ecc 5:2 Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to utter any thing before God: for God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few.
Wow, it is so incredible what the Bible says, isn’t it? God implies that He hears every word that you speak and in fact in previous lessons on this subject you might recall that I taught that we will all give an account for every idle word that we have spoken according to Jesus himself (Mat 12:36). This verse starts with do not be “rash” with your mouth! Did you know that you can be rash with your mouth? In previous lessons on words I taught on the sword of your mouth being able to cut two ways; either blessing someone or cursing someone. This is the power that you have in your mouth according to the Bible. You should always speak blessings over your children and encourage them with your words. There are many children in our world that have never heard their parents say they were proud of them. There are many children in the world that have never been told that they have great potential to do great things in the world. These are the children that have been cursed by their parents saying they are stupid, dumb and incapable of anything positive. These would be examples of “rash” words being spoken in the world.
The next statement in this verse demonstrates an old principle that I have previously taught on in the series. This part of the verse says let not your heart be hasty to utter, say, speak, declare, etc.! Wow, again did you understand the connection? The words that we speak came out of us from the abundance of the understanding in our hearts (spirit) (Mat 12:34). This is again why it is better to listen to God and allow Him to speak, since His understanding is infinitely greater than yours. This is a very important principle being given to us. The words that you speak come from what you have deposited in your spirit. So if you do not like what you are saying you are in need of a heart transplant, spiritually speaking of course. Jesus you might recall said “The words that I speak to you, they are spirit…” (John 6:63). If Jesus’ words were spirit, then guess what your words are also spirit, just understand the difference that many times your words are coming from an ignorant spirit and most definitely are not the words of an unlimited knowing Spirit like God. I say that but you can change that by learning to speak the written words of God and that makes your words seem wiser even if you do not yet fully understand the full meanings. Finally this verse again confirms that it is best for us if we let our words be few when speaking to God. This is always a good idea whenever dealing with anyone in the world. If you are the one doing all of the talking then you will never learn anything new. So being a good listener is the key to learning the truth. I’m going to skip down to verses 4 and 5 for my next point on spoken words:
Ecc 5:4 When thou vowest a vow unto God, defer not to pay it; for he hath no pleasure in fools: pay that which thou hast vowed.
Ecc 5:5 Better is it that thou shouldest not vow, than that thou shouldest vow and not pay.
These are very important concepts to learn from concerning your spoken words. God is giving us a very specific principle in these two verses. What is that principle? It is to say what you mean and then for you to literally do what you say! In other words don’t tell someone I’ll meet you at 2:00 in the board room and never show up. What does that make you if you say one thing and then do something else? It is called being a liar and that is not a positive characteristic for anyone in the eyes of God. In these two verses it very clearly says that it is better for you to not say anything than it is for you to say something and to never do it. The example given is clearly about your money. If you tell God you are going to give Him something and then you never do it then you have made yourself a fool in the eyes of God. This is a very important life lesson. I worked with a man who would tell people I’ll have that for you tomorrow and something would always happen and he never could fulfill what he promised. The character of that man was now in question by everyone and everyone soon learned that you could not depend on anything that he said. People need to be able to place their confidence in your spoken words. If God said “I will do this for you” and then never did it, what would that make God’s character like? That would not be good for God’s reputation would it? If you cannot backup your words with your actions then you need to shut up and stay quiet. It is much better to be perceived as an ignorant man then it is to open your mouth and prove it to everyone. Here is another verse that speaks to us along these lines of our actions
1Jn 4:20 If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?
Is God talking about your words and your actions in this verse? You bet He is! If a man says “I love you God” but yet treats everyone in the world with contempt, God says that man is a liar. A liar is someone who speaks words and then does not follow through with the effort to make them happen or to display them to others. There is a direct connection between your words and your actions so learn the lesson of God and see what He says. You should learn from God’s Word that He is faithful to perform what He has promised because God’s character is never in question.
Ecc 5:6 Suffer not thy mouth to cause thy flesh to sin; neither say thou before the angel, that it was an error: wherefore should God be angry at thy voice, and destroy the work of thine hands?
Here we have another verse that declares the importance of your words. Did you know your mouth is what causes your flesh to sin? If you did not know this then you just learned something very important today. Your mouth is connected to your spirit and your spirit is the eternal part of you that will be judged someday by God. God does not judge your flesh, get it? Did you know that you are not a body? Your body is the flesh and bone house of your spirit so your flesh is not responsible for your sin, you are! Here we have a principle being given to us and it has far reaching consequences. How are people saved? This is not a trick question, but one that most Christians cannot answer correctly. People are saved by their words that they speak. If you read Romans 10 you will see the connection between your words and salvation. If you confess the “Lord Jesus” with your mouth and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dean, you shall be saved! Here is the heart and mouth connection being given to us again in relationship to being saved. So what is the opposite of being saved? It still involves a heart and mouth connection but it is the complete opposite of those words found in Romans 10. Instead of Jesus being your Lord, you think that you are the lord of your life and do not require anyone else. So you think wrong and speak wrong and thus are not saved. People like this are deceived by Satan who is really in control of their lives and he is their lord whether they believe it or not.
If you have been reading my series of lessons on angels you already understand a little bit about the importance of words spoken and angels doing, working or being sent by God to help you. So what is the connection of this verse with the previous two about vowing to God? Why does it say you are speaking to your angel? Have you ever seen an angel and have you talked with one? Most of us have not so this verse implies that angels are listening to your words the same as God is listening to your words. So you cannot say “I vow to God” and then say “Oh, I made a mistake” and expect God or the angels to help you. If you say something you always have the choice of whether or not you will do it. God will not force you to do anything. However, this verse in context with the others that we just read about words clearly tells us that your voice can cause God to become very angry with you and He can “destroy” the work of your hands. The work of your hands is the job that you do to make money, your business, your employer, your income producer, etc. God can bless this or God can cause it to fail and it is clearly linked to your mouth in determining which one God will do. If you do not understand this you need to study the Bible a lot more and learn how to be blessed by God.
So today I took you through 5 or 6 verses found in Ecclesiastes about spoken words and their connection to your relationship with God as well as showing you the need to aligning your words to your actions for the continued blessings of God to come upon you and overtake you. What you say has more bearings on what you get out of life than anything else that you do here. Learn today to be quick to hear from God and slow to speak so that you can continue to learn from Him. Let your words be few in general to everyone, unless you are told to speak to people and say something from God like I was today. I pray that you will continue in the Word of God and continue to be led by the Spirit of God in everything that you do. God Bless!
If you would like to continue reading this series of lesson on spoken words in the Bible you can continue with “Part 11“.
Understanding God’s Spiritual Power and the Power of Spirits!
(Ver 1.1) Today is the next lesson, “Part 9” in the series on understanding the Bible subject of spoken words. If you have not read this series from the beginning you should go and start reading with “Part 1“. Most Christians possess the belief that God is omnipotent. “Omnipotent is a theological term that is technically not found in the English translation of the KJV Bible. However the word “Almighty” (H7706, G3841) is found in the KJV Bible and it means “omnipotent. The word “Almighty” appears some 57 times in the KJV Bible with only 10 occurrences appearing in the New Testament and 9 of these are found in the book of Revelation. It appears to me that God emphasized His power and ability more directly in the Old Testament and has given the subject less emphasis in the New Testament based upon His word selection and distribution. The 9 instances of “Almighty” in Revelation seem to be related with God’s sovereign ability to execute judgment. Judgment is not a predominate theme of the New Testament except when you come to the book of Revelation. I did not say that you cannot find judgment in the N.T., I just said it was not the dominate theme of the church age. If you recall when Jesus was walking the earth, people brought a woman to Jesus who was caught in the act of adultery and Jesus’ response should have been that of a judge according to the law; however Jesus was mercy driven with compassion and told those who were without sin, to cast the first stone. However, did you ever think that the only one without sin in this group was Jesus and that He should have been the first one to cast the first stone, but did not? The mercy of God is a much greater predominate theme in the N.T. than the judgment of God. But that is another different subject to discuss at another time. Today we are talking about the subject of spiritual power and the power of spirits. Let’s look at the “Power” of God first. Does God have ALL Power?
2Co 6:18 And will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.
The Greek word G3841 translated as “Almighty” is a word meaning “all powerful” or “omnipotent”. God has the power, strength and ability to do anything. The power of God is massively demonstrated throughout the Old Testament. From the creation account in Genesis 1 all the way to the flood of Noah, to the scattering of people at the tower of Babel, to the demonstration of power before Pharaoh in Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea, to the miracles in the wilderness. There are just too many examples found in the Bible to list them all. So we can easily understand that God has great and awesome power. But, does God hold “ALL” power? That was my question originally. Meaning ONLY God has any power? A lot of religious people think in these terms and miss what the Bible says on the subject.
Let me introduce you to a new concept and another term used to describe nature and character of God other than as the “Almighty”. This new term that I will show you is used in the KJV Bible approximately 48 times; again 38 times in the Old Testament and only 10 times in the New Testament. This term or name of God reveals Him to be the “Most High God”.
Gen 14:18 And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine: and he was the priest of the most high God.
Reading this verse we can clearly see that God is described as being “Supreme”. Meaning among spirits there is none greater or more powerful than He is. God is at the top of the spiritual food chain, proverbially speaking. What do we learn from reading this verse? If there is a “Most High God”, then there are other gods that are below him in rank, power and ability. That statement might get some people upset at me, but yet I’m just reading the Bible and seeing what is written there. Can you understand what was said by God? You do understand that the author of the Bible does not need to qualify the name “God” with the adjective modifier of “Most High” if there are no other gods that exist? It only takes limited basic logic and very simple reasoning to see what God says in this verse. Of course some will try to say that God is the only “True God” and all of the others are just false imaginary gods. However, the title “True God” is also found in the Bible and it is a different Hebrew word than “Most High”:
Jer 10:10 But the LORD is the true God he is the living God, and an everlasting king: at his wrath the earth shall tremble, and the nations shall not be able to abide his indignation.
We can clearly see that the LORD is called the “True God”. So we can automatically conclude that there are also false imaginary gods that also exist. But this verse also claims God is the “Living God” meaning these false imaginary gods are only defined as those that are dead or have no life in them. A false god would be like when people in the world worship idols, the objects made by the hands of man. These idols are “false and dead gods” and they have no power on the earth whatsoever. Another example of a false god would be like those found in mythology. False, gods like Atlas, Hermes, Mercury and etc. These are gods made up in the minds of men that do not have any basis for existence. So what we have learned is that there are several different types of gods in the world. We created the following list diagram explaining what we have just learned with our God on left and others mentioned or implied on the right.
| Biblical Title of God | Antonym Opposite |
| Almighty God | Limited god |
| True God | False god |
| Living God | Dead god |
| Most High God | Lesser god |
So what is my point? Where am I going with all of this? What I want you to see and learn is there are other gods in the world other than our Almighty God. I am not talking about Greek mythology or Roman mythology or any other kind of imaginary, fictitious of mythological deity powers. What I am about to show you are created spiritual beings in the Bible that God has called other types of “gods”. You can clearly see these gods exist by the implications that we have just read in the Bible from the names given to us by our God. Here is a N.T. verse that you should be aware of, but I’ll remind you of it:
2Co 4:4 In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.
So who blinded the minds of all those that believe not in this world? This verse is not speaking of humans since they are the ones that have their minds blinded. No this verse is speaking of another spiritual power that exists in the world. This spiritual power is Satan and he is called the “god of this world”. This Greek word translated as “god” in this verse means “deity”. It can also mean “supreme”. This word occurs over 1000 times in the N.T. and is most often used for references to our God. For example in Matthew 1:23 where Jesus is described as “Emanuel” translated as “God” with us it contains the same Greek word. However, in 2 Cor 4:4 we have a new mystery being stated using the same Greek word in reference to Satan. Who gave Satan this title? Or did he steal it from someone? If Satan is called a god by the Most High God, do you accept it? In other words is God a liar? You see that is the problem with many Christians, they do not know that Satan exists and who he is. So if Satan is a god, what type of god would he be? He is not the “Most High”, nor is he the “Almighty God”. I cannot call him the “True God” either. He is certainly alive so he might fall into the living god category. It really depends upon your definition of death. Satan is not a physical being so he cannot die naturally. If you do not know it, you cannot kill a spiritual being or cause them to cease to exist. But, yet the Bible does talk about a “spiritual death” which can be defined as a separation from God. I believe that Satan is now and has been separated from God ever since the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Bible tells us that if Satan would have known what was going to happen to himself, he would not have crucified the Lord of Glory (1 Cor 2:8).
Is Satan a lesser god than the Almighty God, I believe he is definitely on a lower spiritual plane than God Almighty. Satan is not omnipotent, and he is not omniscient, and neither is he omnipresent. So Satan qualifies as both a “lesser god” and a “limited god”. So the question arises does this god Satan have any power? I had one reader tell me that he didn’t think anyone could create anything other than the Most High God. God is the only being that has the power of creation. I’m not sure if I agree with that statement totally. Where in the Bible does it say that only God can create anything? If you know of a Bible verse like that I would be very pleased if you would share it with me. Also, please do not assume that I am saying anything that I have not said. God Almighty is the creator of everything that we see around us in our world. But, many people think that Satan has no power to do anything and that is just not what the Bible says. At least 3 times in Revelation the beast, the false prophet and Satan are stated as having done “miracles” (Rev 13:14, Rev 16:14, Rev 19,20). A miracle is defined as a “supernatural” sign and wonder. That tells me that Satan has significant abilities that he has not fully demonstrated to us. That tells me that Satan is not powerless. I learned a lot from what Jesus taught about Satan:
Luk 10:19 Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the pwer of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.
Apparently Jesus did not think that Satan had no power either. There are two words in this verse, both translated as “power” but they are dramatically different Greek words. The first word translated as “power” (G1849) was spoken to us (the church) and it means spiritual “Authority”. Jesus gave the Church legal jurisdiction over Satan (serpent) and the rest of his demons (scorpions). The second word (G1411) translated as “power” is in direct reference to a symbolic serpent and some symbolic scorpions. These are the symbolic representations for the enemy of the church called Satan and his demons. This word for “power” means “miraculous power” or the “ability to do supernatural miracles”. So what is a miracle? A miracle would be anything that occurs that is not of the ordinary course of nature. If you scrape your leg and it bleeds, it will heal in the ordinary course of time and nature. However, if you lost your leg in a motorcycle accident and it grew back from a stump that is a miracle. So according to Jesus, Satan is capable of doing supernatural miracles. So do you understand that a spiritual being like Satan has a miracle working type of power? Jesus told us in John 10:10 that the thief came not but for to kill steal and to destroy. The thief is again a reference to “Satan”. To have power to kill and destroy something is the opposite power of giving life and creating new things. So does Satan have spiritual power and ability to do something supernatural in our world? I believe that the Bible says that he does. God’s word at the very least implies that Satan has great power in the spiritual realm. However, He is still well under the level of the Most High God in power and ability.
Then there are other references in the Bible that says people are gods. Jesus looked at the Jews in John 10:34 and said “is it not written in your law that I said ye are gods”? Jesus was quoting a scripture verse written in the O.T. in Psalm 82:6 where God told them they were gods. People in the church today struggle with believing that concept. Does man have the power and ability to do things in the spiritual realm or are we just limited to the natural realm? We understand from Genesis 1:26, that man was created in the image and in the likeness of the Most High God. If we were created to be like God Almighty that would mean that we had the similar features and characteristics that God had. If God had all power, we must have been created with the likeness of this power on a lower scale. You might call us gods of a lesser power. Here is another verse found in Psalms that speaks about the creation of man:
Psa 8:5 For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.
As you can see, this verse places man in certain spiritual rank and position of ability. However, the translators really dis a very poor job with this verse ignoring what the original Hebrew language said. The translators did not believe that man had any spiritual significance. You see the Hebrew word (H430) translated as “angels” in this verse is the Hebrew name for God called “Elohiym”. This is the name of the Supreme God used in the O.T. Bible over 2000 times, and it is translated as “God” the majority of the time. What we discover from reading this verse, is that man (Adam) was created to be a little lower than the Supreme Most High God. That does not sound like anyone with No power or ability.
We are children of the Most High but not of the same ability to create worlds, planets and universes. One of our greatest weaknesses is that we lack the knowledge. While knowledge has increased rapidly in these last days that we live in, the ability of man to create real life in a test tube has not even come close to God’s knowledge. Man can create robots and simulated life but, we are not God and cannot create a human body. So man has creative power in a very limited form. Man can write new songs, books and create new movies. While all of these acts demonstrate God’s ability in us, we are still not anywhere close to God’s ability. We are lords, gods, and kings; we recognize our position but do not exalt ourselves above that position. We recognize that we have power, but note the fact that we are NOT all powerful. We can see ourselves as being so valuable to God that He came to purchase us with His own life and blood. We can therefore know that we are not worthless, we are not powerless and that we have great value to God. Knowing who you are and who you are not is very critical to knowing God. Recognizing your correct position in the spiritual food chain is critical for you to know your purpose in life. To know that you are not a nobody, while you recognize that you are also not the Most High.
So who knows how many religious people I have offended by telling the truth. If you are offended I’m sorry, but get over it and learn. We have learned from the words of God in the Bible that there are other spiritual beings in the Bible that are called gods. These spiritual beings have some power or limited power below the scale of the Most High God who holds Supreme Power. But, what is power? How does God define power in the Bible? To our natural minds power is simply someone’s strength and ability to use it. Naturally speaking the bigger your muscles are the stronger you are in this realm and this feature makes others think of you as being more powerful. Take the example of Olympic weight lifting. The strongest man can lift the greatest weight over his head. The winner is the one that lifts the most. That feat makes him the strongest man of the strong. That was a sports analogy of power. But, this is not what God says is power in the spiritual realm. What gives a spiritual being power?
Heb 1:3 Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high;
You can read this verse and totally miss what God is saying. In this verse, God is informing us that His Word is His Power. The Word of God = the Power of God. Many modern Bible translations mix the words up in this verse and translate it as God’s “powerful word” or “mighty word”. However, if that is what God wanted to say he would have written it that way. God is not stupid; people are just ignorant and come up with these incorrect translations. The “Word” of His “Power” is exactly what God wanted you to see. This informs us that ALL of God’s power is in His Word. If you translate it the wrong way it only says God word has some of His power and this means that there is other power somewhere else not in His word. So if God’s Words are His Power, what are words? Words are thoughts, ideas, knowledge, understanding and wisdom expressed in a spoken language. I hope that you understand these basic concepts. To say that God is the Most High God would inform us that God holds ultimate knowledge, understanding and wisdom above all other spiritual creatures.
In the book of Revelation, Jesus is described 5 times as a being with a “sharp two-edged sword” coming out of his mouth (Rev 1:16, Rev 2:12, Rev 2:16, Rev 19:15, Rev 19:21). In Bible days when this was written, the sword was the weapon of war and wielded much power and strength by the one that was using it. It would be like someone with an AK-47 rifle today. These verses found in Revelation again confirm and demonstrate the location of the “Power” of God as being in His mouth and His spoken words. In Revelation 19:15 Jesus uses this sword to smite the nations that oppose him. In a recent news article I heard about a group of militia in some state that was arming themselves to help God fight the coming anti-Christ. I just laughed at their ignorance. Your little AR-15 will be no match for the Sword of God. What we have discovered is that God’s word is where His power is located and we can clearly understand this by reading Genesis 1 to observe how the world was created. In Genesis 1, God saw a problem, God said the solution and then the solution was. It is just very basic to conclude that it was the act of God speaking that released God’s power to create. I hope that you understand those concepts because I am not going to explain them in more depth today. Let’s move on to see what God says about this power in other verses in the Bible:
Heb 4:12 For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
Now we learn some new concepts. The sword of God’s mouth is not all of the swords that exist in the spiritual realm. If God’s sword is more powerful and sharper than all the rest, that makes God’s Sword the Sword Almighty, and the Most High Sword. But, do you see that there is more than one sword in the world? That is telling us that Satan has a sword coming out of his mouth, you have a sword coming out of your mouth and I have a sword coming out of my mouth. That implies power of a lesser or limited capacity. These are all just simple concepts, derived from reading the Bible. If you recall in Isaiah 14:13 Satan uses the sword of his mouth to say the following “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God; I will sit…” and on I could go. Satan was wielding his power and making great plans to raise himself up to the Most High level.
But, God wielded His sword and said “Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit”. Whose sword is sharper? Whose sword is greater? Whose sword will prevail in the end? These are valuable lessons for your life. Humble yourself and do not allow pride to exalt your own power, ability or knowledge to cause you to think that you can also be like the Most High.
If you would like to continue reading about the power of words you can go to “Part 10“.
O Lord, Guard The Door of My Mouth!
(Ver 1.3) This is now “Part 8” in a series of lessons about spoken words. If you have not read this series from the beginning I would suggest that you go and start with “Part 1“. Did you ever realize that your mouth was an opening to your spirit? You are a spirit being that lives in a physical body. Your physical body has doors and windows that allow your spirit to express itself and to learn new things. Your ears are a window to sounds, words and things to hear from God with. Your eyes are also windows for light, to observe and see things that are around you. These are one way gates into your spirit. But, your mouth is a two way gate that breaths air in and exhales air out. Your mouth also takes in natural food and drink for the nourishment of your physical body. But, the most important thing that your mouth does is speak words that originate from your spirit. Your mouth is the only exit for spiritual expression that you have. Your spoken words are the keys to everything that you do in this world. I will go a step further and tell you that your spoken words are the keys to everything that happens to you in this world. For example, your spoken words will become the key to your salvation or your damnation to hell. You may not understand that statement but it is based upon scripture and how God designed the process to work. Let’s start the Bible study by confirming that your words are the spiritual expression made manifest in this world:
Mat 15:18 But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man.
As you can clearly see from what Jesus teaches us, the words of your mouth are an extension of your spirit. Whenever the Bible talks about your heart, it is usually a figurative meaning referring to your internal spirit. The spirit of your being is the innermost real you that will live forever and I hope you understand this. The heart of a man is similar to the heart of a tree or the heart of an apple. The term is used to describe the center inner core of the object and that is the unseen spirit of the human in God’s triune design. Let’s look at another important verse that Jesus speaks on this subject of words originating from the human spirit:
Joh 6:63 It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.
Jesus again tells us where words come from. The Spirit of God that was inside of Jesus’ body produced the words that gave us life. Jesus clearly tells us that it is the spirit that causes the flesh to live. He then says that His words are this Spirit! What we learn from what Jesus was teaching is that every person has a spirit and this unseen spirit is expressed in the spoken words coming from out mouth in our world. The only difference between our words and God’s Words, are His words are based upon infinite knowledge, understanding and wisdom and ours are too often just baseless ramblings built upon our own extraordinary ignorance. Let’s continue researching the connection between the spirit and the mouth, because God says in the mouth of 2 or 3 witnesses let every word be established (Mat 18:16):
2Th 2:8 And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the SPIRIT OF HIS MOUTH, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming:
In this verse in 2 Thessalonians, God says that Jesus will do something with the Spirit of His Mouth that will consume the wicked. What do you think this is? Do you think that Jesus will breath fire like a dragon or are you smart enough to know that God just has to say a couple of words and whatever He says happens. What we learn from this verse is further conformations of spoken words being directly connected to spirits. Spoken word are not really just a connection to the spirit but more the displayed expression of the spirit. Technically speaking spoken words and spirits are one in the same in the eyes of God. God’s words are God and God is His Word (John 1:1).
Mat 12:34 O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.
As you can read again, Jesus connects the heart/spirit of man to the spoken words of a man. Jesus speaking to the Jews, says how can you speak anything good? You have to have good in your spirit before you speak anything good from your lips. Jesus is implying that we can speak something good, but first we have to deposit something good in us in abundance. These are verses that demonstrate to us that man was made in the image and likeness of God. Jesus clearly links us to be like God in this capacity. Our words are linked to our spirit, just as His words were linked to His Spirit.
I have been doing a series of lessons on the spoken words coming from your mouth. We have learned from God’s word that we can curse people with our words and we can bless people with our words. We can speak good things and we can speak evil things. We can proclaim the truth and we can speak lies. The mouth is a weapon of incredible potential that we can do great good with or create great harm to ourselves and others. The same mouth has the potential to achieve great good in the world as well as great deception. That is why the Bible writes us a verse of prayer that asks God to place a guard at the door of our mouths. If you go to Europe and other places where they have palaces, the occupants are many times protected from the evil of others on the outside by placing guards at the gates of entrance or exit. This is not what the Bible is saying but the concepts are still applicable. Let’s start by reading the verse that reveals our mouth to be a door in need of a guard:
Psa 141:3 Set a watch, O LORD, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips.
A watch is someone who stays up to guard an entrance of a city. In Bible days a city would have great walls around it and they would place men on top of the walls during the day and night to watch for danger. Their job was to stay awake during those specific hours and to keep vigilant watch for any approaching danger. When danger was observed, the watchman would sound an alarm to wake the city to counter the impending danger. While you might try to apply this to the verse in Psalms, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense in that regard. You might need to watch what you eat occasionally, but God is speaking more about spiritual things that you need to keep a watch on than any natural things that are trying to enter in your body. Let’s get one more witness to the fact that our mouth is a gate before we continue:
Mic 7:5 Trust ye not in a friend, put ye not confidence in a guide: keep the doors of thy mouth from her that lieth in thy bosom.
What we have is another verse found in the Bible that says your mouth is a gate. A gate is a door or entrance to a realm that you either want to keep people out of, or keep things within. You never design a building without doors, otherwise you can’t go in and you can’t get out. So what is God trying to keep from exiting your mouth by placing His guard upon it? Why would it be bad for you if something came out that shouldn’t come out? That is an amazing question to ponder! If your wrong spoken words had no consequences attached to them, it really would not matter if we had a guard, would it? However, God is implying that your words have great consequences positive or negatively upon your life and that is a potentially bad thing for you if you do not understand the concepts being revealed by God.
Pro 6:2 Thou art snared with the words of thy mouth, thou art taken with the words of thy mouth.
When you learn to see what the Bible says, you become infinitely more aware of what you say. According to God, the words of your mouth can cause you to become a captive of your enemy. A snare is a trap. A trap is a deceptive device that renders you a captive. As you can clearly read in this verse, God says that you are “taken” (caught in a pit) by the words of your mouth. These have to be wrong negative spoken words or that would mean that any words spoken could be a pitfall for us. That statement would also indicate by the law of antithesis that you can be “freed” by the right words of your mouth. The things the Bible says about your words are some of the strongest warnings that God gives us in the Bible. It is so obvious to me that many people do not heed the warning of God and speak some crazy things. People let words come out of their mouths that I’m sure must cause God to cringe with disappointment.
Pro 18:21 Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.
God declares that your tongue has power. If you refuse to see this or to ignore it, does it cause it not to be true? If you do not believe in gravity, would that affect the law of gravity if you wanted to jump off a tall building? Of course it does not, you are still going die. Your wrong belief never overrides the truth. The same is true of ignorance, your ignoarce of the law does not affect your punishment for the violation of that law. So when God says that Death or Life is in the power of the tongue, does that make it not true, if you do not believe it? Again it does not! What God is revealing to us is that we have been given choices to make. What we achieve in life or that which happens to us in this life is determined by the choices that we made and words that we have spoken. Obviously many people do not believe this and they can’t figure out why things have happened in their life. Some think it is just bad karma, bad luck, or possibly just amazing coincidences or accidents that occur in their lives. Maybe you can discover a Bible verse that says that, but so far I have not found any.
So if God wants you to pray and ask Him to put a guard on your mouth, what is He trying to keep you from saying? It could be just simply that you should say only good things to people, good things about people and not to speak negatively about others and that is certainly applicable. However, God seems to indicate from the verses that we have studied today that there is much more to it than that in the Bible. If you can be taken captive or a prisoner just by your wrong spoken words or even die because of your words of death, would it be important not to speak those words that cause those negative results? I believe that it is entirely meaningful given the verses that we have just studied. So a watch on the gate of your mouth is not a physical guard to keep things out. I believe it is a spiritual guard that keeps you from harming yourself and others that you live with speaking words with negative consequences. What about your children, for example. If your words can affect you they can also affect your family and those that you are responsible for. Only you can allow God to place a guard on your mouth. God will not violate your rights or your will. God will also not force you into saying anything correctly. As you learn to cooperate with God, you will learn more about how the words of your mouth have great significance and are very important to keep under control. You should go and review the book of James and see what God says about the tongue and how important it is to manage.
If you would like to continue reading this series of lessons on spoken words, you can go to “Part 9“.
A No Fault Religion! A Blameless Sinner Theology!
(Ver 1.1) This is now “Part 7” in a series of lessons on spoken words. If you have not read this series from the beginning I would suggest that you go and start reading with “Part 1“. Man is guilty of one very poor behavior trait that is a major short coming in everyone’s life at some point. It would seem that people like to think that no matter what happens to them or how bad the results, it was not their fault! We have all been faced with the reality of doing something wrong and then being faced with the consequences and suddenly we come up with all kinds of reasoning, excuses and blame shifting of why we did what we did. People would much rather shift the blame to someone else, either God or their spouse, or their children or maybe their boss, or maybe those in authority, or whoever is just available or present. It was because of this reason or that reason, or it was their fault. It would seem to me that people want a God and a religion that alleviates them from any personal responsibility or even accountability to what transpires in their lives. I call this the popular modern “No Fault” Religion, and the “God of the Blameless Sinner Theology” philosophy. If you do not realize it, this is not what the Bible says, it is nothing that Jesus ever taught, nor is it something that you can correctly interpret from the Bible. Let me give you a definition for the term “No Fault” that we have in the world found in the insurance business:
NO FAULT: in which a claimant is compensated for actual economic loss without blame being assigned to a particular party; in which neither party is assigned blame
A “no fault” policy is one that allows for compensation regardless of who’s is said to be at fault. In other words no one gets the blame, no one holds any responsibility in any matter and everything is put back to the way it was before it all happened with no admissions of guilt. This concept has crept into the human life of reasoning and even into Christian theology. In the legal court system they have developed a Latin term that gives some people an alternative way to plead their case. This term is called “Nolo Contendere” and it neither declares your innocence or your guilt, but shifts the responsibility to the judge to decide. In other words the person pleading this way in court neither admits quilt nor declares their innocence. They are in effect saying it was not my fault, I hold no responsibility in this matter. This is just another example of the “No Fault” Religious Philosophy that has been growing in prevalence in the church. However, we need to learn what God says about the situation and our responsibility in every matter and then you will see there is a major difference with God’s approach.
I want to start by giving you an example of this behavior found in the Bible. In the book of Genesis, God puts man in the garden. God tells the man that he can eat from every tree but one. Satan comes along and deceives Eve into eating and then Adam follows her example, and they both are now hiding out in the garden of Eden from God. God calls out to Adam and Adam reluctantly answers. Adam tells God he was afraid and hid himself because he was naked. God then asks him directly, “Did you eat from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from”. This is Adam’s modern theological response to God’s question:
Gen 3:12 And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.
Adam obviously shifts the responsibility of his actions to his wife. In other words if God had not given me this woman, I would not have been in this situation. The ultimate responsibility was being shifted to everyone, but Adam. Adam took no responsibility for anything that he had done. It is a classic example, of the philosophy of a “No Fault Religion”! Adam says I did it, but it was not my fault. Isn’t it funny how people do this still today? God then asks the woman in the garden, “What is this that you have done?” and again we see the classic “No Fault Religion” response of the woman:
Gen 3:13 And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
Eve immediately passes the buck to the serpent, it was the serpent’s fault and not mine. If it were not for the serpent, I would not have been deceived. It was his fault and not mine. In this story, suddenly God stops asking questions when he comes to the serpent. It seems God’s is tired of hearing people pass the buck and He starts telling each of them the consequences of their actions. God names a list of things that will happen to each party involved and suddenly there is no more to say. So was it anybody’s else’s fault that each did what they did? Or was this just man’s attempt to shift the responsibility off of them to someone else? Normally this is exactly the motivation for this act of selfishness. If Adam and Eve had not been caught red handed, figuratively speaking, they would have probably never had admitted to doing anything. However, once confronted with overwhelming evidence people immediately start by shifting the focus to someone else to get the judge’s eyes off of them, or so they hope.
In some recent news article in America, I ran across this attitude still being used today. In a local story in one of our surrounding cities, a woman took a gun, that looked like a real handgun and robbed a drug store and got several illegal pills. The woman then calls her mother and tells her what she has done and that she plans on killing herself with the pills by overdosing on them. A few minutes later, her car is spotted by the police and they surround her. After all she had just committed an armed robbery. The woman’s mother had called 911 to report the situation and tell them that the gun that she had was only a BB gun and not a real gun, so please don’t shoot her. Before the police could get this information, the woman gets out of her car and points her real looking gun at the police officers. The officers had no choice but to shoot her. So now the family of the woman gets on the local news and starts shifting all of the blame of everything that happened to the police. They should have known better than to kill an unarmed woman. They should have handled the situation differently. Do you see the pattern of what the family was saying? Was it all the policemen’s fault for protecting themselves and the safety of others and for killing this woman unnecessarily? Does this woman have any responsibility in what happened? Obviously NOT according to her family! Does the family have any responsibility of not recognizing the signs of depression or suicidal changes in this woman’s behavior, Obviously NOT according to the family. According to the family, nobody is to blame except the ones that shot her and that is crazy thinking. I do not understand how people can come to these conclusions and how the news media can even report them as legitimate pieces of news. We live in a crazy world that has things completely backwards.
Let me give you another example, of stupid behavior and thinking. It seems that the family of Michael Jackson is now suing in civil court the doctor that allegedly administered the drugs that killed their relative Michael Jackson. Isn’t it amazing that if Michael had no money that he would not have been able to pay a doctor for dangerous prescription drugs. I do not attempt to justify what the doctor did, however it was not entirely the doctor’s fault. Michael Jackson was a addicted to drugs. He thought that he needed them to perform and that he needed them to sleep. Do you think if there was no doctor present in the house, that Michael would still be alive today? I do not know, but yet do you think that it was just the doctor’s fault and Michael held no responsibility to what happened to him? In my opinion, I would say Michael holds more of the responsibility than anyone else, but his family obviously does not agree with that reasoning.
How can people get any more stupid and still be alive? Do people have any responsibility in what happens to them? Does the Bible say it is not your fault that you are in the mess that you are in right now? Does the Bible put all of the blame for everything that happens to you on Adam, Satan or someone else? Did Jesus ever heal someone and tell them, I’m so sorry this happened, it was just not your fault that this happened to you? If you search and actually read and see what the Bible says on the subject, you will find that is just not the case. People actually hold more of the responsibility of what happens to them, than anyone would care to admit. Let’s see what Jesus said in one example:
Joh 5:14 Afterward Jesus findeth him in the temple, and said unto him, Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.
Jesus after healing this man in John 5, told him “I’m sorry this happened to you, I know it was just not your fault!” No, Jesus did not say this, did He? Jesus actually warns this man that what you do affects what you get in life. Jesus tells the man very clearly NOT to go and intentionally sin again, or his sins would allow or cause something worse to potentially happen to him. There is a clear implication that what happened to him was caused by something that he had previously done in the first place. Isn’t that what Jesus said? What we see in the Bible is a Spiritual Law being spoken of. Many Christians are not familiar with this Spiritual Law even though it governs their daily lives, 24×7. Here is the Spiritual Law that Jesus was talking about:
Gal 6:7 Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.
This is a broad statement with broad implications and consequences attached to it. These are the words of the Living God and He tells us very clearly that He will not be mocked! What does it mean to mock? What is mocking? Jesus was mocked at His trial and even as He hung on the cross, the Bible says. The Bible says that Jesus endured words from people saying “Hail the King of the Jews”. To mock someone or something means to ridicule them, slander them, make fun of them, speak words out of your mouth that are the opposite of praise! It can also be the way you say it, that makes it disrespectful. You could say something good in a sarcastic way and this could be mocking someone. It would seem to me that God is at the very least referring to what people say in Galatians 6:7. Isn’t that what God is talking about in this verse? God gives us a farming principle and an agricultural law in direct relationship to what people say. God tells us very clearly that whatever we plant, that is what we harvest in life. You can apply this to things we do, but primarily God is talking about your words. If you read the Gospels you will find that Jesus talks a lot about farming principles, crops and agricultural things like that. However, Jesus was not a literal natural farmer and he was not talking about natural things at all. Jesus was discussing spiritual things in relationship to natural things that we could observe and understand. Do you realize that it is almost impossible for God to discuss spiritual things with people who barely know anything about natural things? In one of the parables that Jesus reveals to the people, he discusses the Sower and the soil. In this parable the soil was of course, the hearts of men. Then the seeds that were planted in this soil were the “Words of God”. We are taught that God’s words are seeds that produce the good harvests in our life.
Did you know if God’s words are the positive seeds, then every other person’s words are also seeds and they can become negative seeds if they are opposite to what was spoken by God? Man was created in the image and likeness of God. Meaning that man was an exact duplication of the God kind of being! The angels of God could look at Adam and recognize God’s spiritual DNA. We were not created on the same level or at the same capacity as God’s ability, but that does not mean we have no power to control what happens in our lives. What is a seed? Have you ever planted a real natural seed in the soil and watered it and watched it develop over time and grow? A seed is a self contained system that has propagative properties to produce postive or negative things. A seed holds properties to replicate it’s kind and produce more of its species. Seeds rarely work by themselves and are dependent upon other factors. Correct soil, light, temperature and water are just a few of the dependencies that many seeds require. All of this is very similar to e the place of words in the world. People say things constantly and most of them they do not mean or even believe will happen. People say “that just kills me”, “I laughed until I died”, “You gave me a heart attack”, and other crazy sayings. If people’s words would suddenly come true, most of the time none of us would be here right now.
If words are seeds that people plant, and these seeds produce crops in your life then what have you been planting? Can you look back on things that you have said in the past and see anything about what you have and are experiencing right now? Maybe, yes and maybe no? Nevertheless, the Bible if you study it correctly never alleviates you from any responsibility. If you die and go to hell, you will not be able to plead it was not my fault. You hold great amounts of responsibility to what happens in your life. If you turn down the wrong street at the wrong time, if you choose to take a flight that will crash, if you go to the wrong side of town, if you eat the wrong foods, if you drink the wrong drinks, if you buy the wrong drugs, if take the wrong drugs or if you do whatever. You see what you choose to do in life matters. Where you choose to go in life matters. Who you associate with in life matters. Who your friends are in life matters. What you eat matters. What you drive matters. Where you walk matters. Where you go to church matters. I’ll go further than that, and say what you think also matters. What you say matters. Your decisions and choices in life ALL have consequences attached to them. Wise choices come only from knowing God and His Word and poor choices come from listening to Satan. The Bible says that those who are led by the Spirit of God they are the sons of God. That also means that there are plenty of those who are not being led by the Spirit of God and they therefore make bad choices in life. Jesus told us that wide is the path to destruction and narrow is the path that leads us to salvation, peace and safety. Now realize that God has set the choices in front of you and you are the one making the choices for your life. If you don’t like what you are reaping right now look back and see what you have been planting! Then change what you plant!
If you would like to continue reading this series of lessons on spoken words you can go to “Part 8“.
God’s Word Based System! Are ALL Spoken Words Prophetic?
(Ver 1.1) Today will be another lesson (Part 6) from the Bible on the spoken words of God and man. If you have not read this series from the beginning I would suggest that you go and start reading with “Part 1“. As we read the Bible we can clearly see that God assigned certain men in the Bible with a gift of “prophecy”. These men were called the “Prophets” of God and they wrote vast amounts of scriptures about future events. So a prophetic word is one that could be taken as a future prediction of events to come. I’m really not a big fan of that definition of Prophecy. You see you can very easily confuse the words of “Nostradamus” as being future predictions, but did they come from God? Were they “Prophetic” or were they just someone writing down random thoughts of what they think will happen? I personally do not think they were prophetic or from God. Here is what I believe about prophecy and the realm of time. I believe that God lives outside of the limitation of time and space. The Bible says “In the beginning, God created….”. So we know before the beginning of time and space, God already existed. I believe that God can see all of humanity in a single view from start to end. The Bible says “I make known the end from the beginning”. Therefore, I believe that when God showed men in the Bible what to write about concerning future events, in the eyes of God, they had already happened from God’s perspective and God was just reporting what happened, before it actually happens in our time line. This is of course very difficult to comprehend how this is possible, yet men like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein probably could better see it with many of the things that they have written about, to name a couple of modern day people who think outside of the box. So God’s prophecies are not predictions of things that might happen, they are just news reports of things that have already happened on our timeline. This is of course not predestination either. God did not cause all of them to happen, many times God just knew what men would do and used that for His purpose and plan. There is a major difference in the two perspectives of Prophecy. Every day, economists and people on Wall Street predict where the market is going based upon world events and factors that they observe around them. However, many, many times they are totally wrong so what they say did not come from God and was not prophetic and God did not perform what they said to fulfill it.
The complexities of the Bible are so huge that this is a very difficult subject to teach on. There are many factors and dependencies that we need to be aware of that it is impossible to teach on everything at once. Right now I am primarily concerned with the subject of Spoken Words so that will be my main focus of the rest of this lesson.
A while back I wrote a blog on “Speak to your Rock” and then I wrote a follow-up to that about “Idle Words“. At the very least, it would appear that God is trying to teach men, that what they say has significance to what happens in their lives. So I had a reader ask me this question, “Are words spoken by people prophetic because God showed them what will happen and therefore, they speak it and then it comes to pass in their lives”? Today’s blog will be an attempt to answer this question and hopefully explain what I meant in the other blogs that preceded this one on Spoken Words.
We can clearly see that every word spoken by people does not immediately happen to them. I believe this is by God’s design, if things happened exactly like people say, very few would have made it past a very young age. You see we have many people who say things out of ignorance and they generally do not mean a thing. You have many other people in the world who lie and these words generally do not mean anything. You have many other people who say things as a joke to be funny and these generally don’t mean anything either. Then there are words of slang that have crept into our mainstream that say the opposite than what they normally mean. Michael Jackson use to say “Ilm Bad” when he really meant “I’m Good”. There are just too many examples of people saying things that never happen so how do you balance that with other specific examples of men and women who have said something and it actually happens, exactly like they said? Was it a coincidence or an accident or was it something greater? In one blog I told you about Elvis Presley who was heard more than once to say that he would never out live his mother’s age when she died. Elvis died in 1977 at the age of 42, His mother had died in 1958 at the age of 46. So did what Elvis say cause what happened to him, or was it just a prediction that accidently occurred? You have to at least think about it and see that it is pretty amazing. I also gave you another example of my personal grandmother. She was getting older and did not like to drive her car in traffic. She was over heard by some other family members to say that “Some crazy driver would be the death of me”. One day as she was leaving one of her son’s houses and on the way back home, she pulled out in front of a couple of teenagers who were racing on the street where they should not have been. They broad sided my grandmother’s car and she was killed instantly. So again, we have to ask the question, did what she say cause it to happen or was it just an amazing coincidence? I could give you more examples like these, but I think we should shift focus to the Bible and see what we can find there about this subject. What the Bible says is far more important than any personal testimonies of people you cannot verify what they said.
In the O.T. in the book of Numbers chapter 13, God gives us an example that is very profound and has great significance to our current subject of spoken words. In this chapter, God tells Moses to send out 12 spies into the land that He has given to them. Their job is to look at the land and see if it is good and come back and report it to the people. Moses chooses 12 men, one from each of the tribes of Israel and they go and spy out the land. They then return to make their report back to the people after 40 days bringing large clusters of grapes. The twelve spies were divided into two groups. Ten said that there are strong people and walled cities. Two of them Joshua and Caleb said, “Let’s go up and take it, we are well able”. But, the ten said “We are not able, for they are stronger than we are”. The ten spies said “We are but grasshoppers in their eyes”. The ten spies stir up the majority of the people to believe they were unable to take the land that God had given to them. As a result of the “Evil Report” they began to say “Let’s go back to Egypt, and it would be better to die in the wilderness”.
In Numbers 14, Joshua and Caleb try to convince the people that they are able because God is with them and the defense of the inhabitants of the land has departed from them. What can we learn from this lesson found in the Bible? The Bible says these things happened and were recorded to be examples for us, the church. Two spies said “We can do it” and ten spies said “We are not able to do it” and both of these groups of people got exactly what they said. This is a lesson that you should begin to apply to your life and see how it applies to the things that you say. Review what you have said in the past and see if it is not what you are getting right now!
Let’s look at another example of a Bible story, so that in the mouth of two or three witnesses let every word be established. In 1 Samuel 17, the story of David and Goliath is a classic Sunday School story of how God used David to kill the giant Goliath. But, how was God able to do this with David and not with any of the other thousands of soldiers in the army of Israel? What was different about David? If you notice when you read this chapter, David was not afraid of this giant and all the other men in the army were terrified. Does this sound familiar with the story of the 10 spies? Weren’t they all afraid of the giants also? If you read this chapter closely you will also notice exactly what David said that made the difference to allow God to use him and not anyone else.
1Sa 17:37 David said moreover, The LORD that delivered me out of the paw of the lion, and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine. And Saul said unto David, Go, and the LORD be with thee.
This is the beginning of a series of positive things that David says. David has great confidence in God’s ability to deliver. David has great confidence in God’s covenant. David says “God will be with me and deliver me from this Philistine”. Isn’t this like what Joshua and Caleb were saying? Can you tell the difference between a good report and an evil report? Both are spoken words, but one says “I will win” and the other says “I will lose”. Does what you say have any bearing on what God is able to do? If you do not understand that it does, you will forever be deceived into thinking that you have no responsibility in the outcome of your life.
Now let’s examine the real battle of David and Goliath. In Numbers 17:43 Goliath who also has a mouth full of words for Israel, starts to speak to David and asks “Am I a dog that you send out a boy with a staff?” Goliath curses David with his gods and tells David what he is about to do to him and his flesh. Can you see this is the real battle? David could have believed what Goliath said and run back home to watch the sheep and said forget this war stuff. Instead, David says this:
1Sa 17:45 Then said David to the Philistine, Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied.
These are the words that permit God to do mighty things. Because of David’s faith in God and God’s ability to save, David continues to speak and declare the end even before the beginning:
1Sa 17:46 This day will the LORD deliver thee into mine hand; and I will smite thee, and take thine head from thee; and I will give the carcases of the host of the Philistines this day unto the fowls of the air, and to the wild beasts of the earth; that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel.
As you can see David got exactly what He said. The stone left his sling and hit the giant in the only exposed spot on his body that was vulnerable and David ended up taking the giant’s head off with the giant’s own sword. As a result of David’s victory the rest of Israel suddenly got religion and remembered the God of Israel and were not afraid anymore. The army of God was victorious over the Philistines that day because of the words of a shepherd boy who would eventually become King. Did David’s words have anything to do with David becoming King? You bet they did exactly that. There are many Bible lessons that speak of things exactly like this. Because you have never looked for them, does not mean they do not exist.
What you discover by digging deep into the Bible, is that the world is based on a word and faith system. God tells us in the Bible that everything we see was created from things that we cannot see (Heb 11:3), these things that we cannot see are words. The words of God became the things that we see around us. If you look at Genesis 1, you will notice the Bible repeatedly would say “And God Said….”. These words that God spoke originated from God’s Spirit and became the things that we perceive with our natural senses. If Words created our universe that we live in, then Words can still change it. Of course are these changes only limited to God’s Words or does the words of others effect what happens in the world? That is a big question to consider. Many religious people like to think that God controls everything that happens in the world. A huge volcano eruption that was God’s work, so they think. A big hurricane, that was also an act of God, so they think. I guess what we need to figure out is, is this what the Bible says?
Jesus Christ is called the Word of God in Rev 19:13. Then in John 1:1 it says “In the beginning was the Word and the Words was with God and the Word Was God!”. So we cannot separate God from His word, they are said to be one in the same. In John 1:14, it says “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” in speaking of God becoming a man in Jesus of Nazareth. John 1:14 gives us an example of how God’s word, by His Spirit can become something natural and physical. So God is His Word and the Word of God is God! God’s Word can also become a physical something that we can perceive with our senses. So far so good?
Then we see Jesus teaching us a farming lesson in Mark 4. The parable given there is about a farmer who throws seeds into different types of soil and some of the soil produces fruit and some does not. There are numerous symbolisms given to us in this parable, the soil is said to be the hearts of man. The birds of the air are demonic forces that attempt to eat the seed so that it will not produce. Finally, Jesus tells us that the seeds that are being planted are “The Words of God” (Mark 4:14). Now let me ask you a simple question, if God’s words are seeds, are all words that are spoken seeds? Is this possible? If you read another parable you might begin to see that it is entirely possible. In Matthew 13:24, Jesus tells us another parable about the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is like a man who sows good seed in his field…”. Remember the fields are the hearts of men. The Good Seed is the Word of God. What is the opposite of Good Seed, I believe it would be Bad or Evil Seed. Uh Oh, remember the “Evil Report”? So in verse 25 of Matthew 13 Jesus says “an enemy came in and sowed tares among the wheat”. If you read on you find that the tares have become the children of the enemy and the wheat the children of God. Who is the enemy? Satan would qualify as the enemy of God who has sown the bad seed or evil words into the world. So now we have two different kinds of seed being spoken of, one evil and one good. Those from God are good seeds, those from Satan are evil seeds. I hope that you are understanding that people now have a choice of what to speak. They can choose to speak the “good seed” or they can choose to speak the bad or “evil seed”. In Deuteronomy 30:19, God says “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing, therefore choose life that you and your seed may live”. Did you notice the reference to seed again? This is a double reference to two different things simultaneously. Seeds can be your children and seeds can be your words. In this verse this is spoken of in terms of blessing and cursing again and we can see more implied references to your spoken words. Jesus cursed the fig tree and blessed the little children with the same mouth. Jesus gave us object lessons of how a mouth can produce two completely different results based upon the seeds that they sow. One was a blessing to the children and one was a curse to the fig tree. So man can choose to live or die by their spoken words. Is this what the Bible says? If you read in Proverbs you find a very powerful truth being spoken of and it says “Death and Life are in the Power of the Tongue, those that love it shall eat the fruit thereof”. So did you notice what this verse said? It said your tongue has power and your words are the seeds that produce results, either good or bad. Do you understand this?
So words are seeds that are planted in your heart that produces some result or crop in your life. You can plant good seeds from God’s Word or you can plant evil seeds from Satan. The soil of your heart really does not know the difference. Someone asked me if I thought that your words were prophetic? I would ask you, if a farmer planted a field full of corn seed, is that the crop he will harvest in the process of time? Did the farmer prophesy “corn” into existence or was it the fact that he planted the seed and the crop grew up and produced what was put in the soil. So Words are seeds and produce either the good or bad things that were spoken or planted in your heart? I of course oversimplified this lesson because it takes more than just speaking words to get something to happen in your life. Faith must also be present. Faith is the belief and expectation of something or someone that you do not see or feel with your physical senses. You believe in God and that He exists, even though you have never seen Him, that is faith. You believe that Jesus died on the cross for your sins and was raised from the dead, and that is faith, since you were not there to witness it personally.
What people say with their mouths and believe in their hearts, that is what will happen in their life, either positive or negative. It is the law of Faith. Faith always existed in the world from Adam until now. Galatians 3:23 tells us that “Faith was Revealed” in the New Testament, meaning it was present in the Old Testament, but hidden from man and they did not understand it. So the Law of Faith existed when God told Moses to Speak to the Rock and God said that because you did not believe, you will not enter into the promise land. Moses did not believe, that is the opposite of faith. God told Moses what to do and Moses didn’t do it.
This is why God did not reveal the secrets of the Bible to the Old Testament saints. If they would have figured out how spiritual things worked back then, before Jesus came and provided salvation, we could have been in some real big trouble. God is now revealing how spiritual things work in these last days before Jesus comes back. Those who are spiritually mature will be able to see them and understand them, and those who are still childlike will reject them more than likely. I pray that you have understood these Bible verses and the spiritual laws revealed in them and now can apply them to your lives so that you can get Good Results and you and your seed will Live!
If you would like to continue reading this series of lessons on spoken words, you can go to “Part 7“.
Understanding Spoken Words! From the Abundance of the Heart the Mouth Leaks!
This is now Part 5 in a series of lessons about spoken words found in the Bible. If you have not read this series from the beginning I would suggest that you go and start reading from “Part 1“. God woke me up this morning and spoke to me. I read a guy on the internet and he blogged about God being allusive and hidden and so he concluded that God must not exist. A few minutes ago God woke me up in the middle of the night to convey some things to me about spoken words. People who say God does not talk to them do not know how God speaks so they are not listening to what He says. Today I want to discuss spoken words in the context that they are proof that God exists. Have you ever thought or asked yourself why people are communicators? Humans are social creatures that like to talk. Do you think that if no one was there to listen you would talk so much? What if you were on a deserted island and there was no one there to talk to, would you still talk to yourself or to God? Being made in the image and likeness of God we can clearly see that man was made for a purpose. By the design of God, man was made with the ability to communicate with God. God listens to your words no matter where you are or what you say. There is a direct spiritual connection between your mouth and God’s ear. Since there are billions of people on the planet and only one God, I do not know how He keeps track of everyone’s words at the same time, but He does and it must be easy for Him to do. God tells us in Matthew 12:36 that every idle word that we speak, we will give an account of each of them in the day of judgment. So apparently God has some ability to record and recall every word spoken from every human being that has ever been alive on this planet. Being a computer programmer, that is some amazing demonstration of power. That makes Google look like small potatoes. Google over the last 12 years or so has accumulated literally astronomical amounts of data, but this pales in comparison to what God is tracking in heaven.
Just the existence of your mouth and your tongue proves that someone was there to hear you even when you didn’t think that someone was listening. It goes to a simple debatable point that men sometimes try to make about a tree falling in the forest and no one being there to hear it, they always ask does it still make a sound? You see what difference would the sound be if there was no hearers. The sound would be just waves of energy that go nowhere and mean nothing. Atheist have a problem with answering why we are how we are. How we got here and why we have these intelligently designed features like a mouth that communicates with others and ears that have the ability to hear the sounds that others make. Nothing in the world that has any useful purpose got here by chance or accident. It is absolutely STUPID to think that man just evolved into what we are today. There is too much evidence to the contrary.
I have written hundreds of pages and thousands of words on a blog, why? Because someone takes the time to read some of them. Because I write, proves that you are out there reading. This is a very simple concept and a very profound truth. Because we can speak words, proves that God is listening to them. You might not like my logic or you might just ignore my logic, but nevertheless it is based upon truth.
Jesus taught us that our words have a spiritual connection to them. People do not understand this, clearly they are oblivious to the truth. Words spoken are not meaningless or mindless, even though many words are spoken without any thought given to them. This is what Jesus spoke to the Jews one day:
Mat 12:34 O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.
The heart of man, is the spirit of man. If you do not understand this you should study and use your brain to figure it out. Jesus clearly gives us a direct connection of the words that people speak to what they have in their spirits. You could say what comes out of your mouth comes out of your spirit. Jesus tells this group of people because of the evil that they have abundantly in their heart, it is impossible for them to speak anything but evil. Jesus repeats this statement in Luke 6:45. Good men speak good things because it is what they have abundantly in their hearts. Evil men speak evil things, because it is what they have abundantly in their hearts. This is some amazingly important information, yet people generally do not attempt to understand the significance. Here is another set of words spoken by Jesus about His words:
Joh 6:63 It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.
This is again some very significant information about the spiritual realm. The spirit has precedence and dominance over the flesh. The only reason your body is here reading this blog is because your spirit is in your body to give it life. To quicken in the KJV Bible means to “give life to”. Why is this important? It is very important because of how Jesus ends this verse. Jesus said “My Words are spirit and life”. Jesus was informing us where the words came from, that He spoke. His words were from God’s mouth and God’s Spirit. Because God put abundantly good things into the heart of Jesus, Jesus was able to speak good things that caused people to live. You cannot separate God from His Word. You cannot separate the Word of God from God either. Both of these are the same person. God’s words are God’s Spirit!
So what does all of this have to do with you and I? If you can agree with these things that I have said from the Bible. How do they apply to the here and now? Since you were made in the image and likeness of God, you can easily make some assumptions that if God’s words are His Spirit, then your words are your spirit. After all that is what Jesus said, from the abundance of what you have in your spirit, your mouth speaks. Jesus is described in the Bible as having the “Sword of the Spirit” coming out of His mouth. This is just another way to say what Jesus said in John 6:63. The sword of God’s sprit is His spoken words. The sword of your spirit is also the words of your spirit and what is abundantly in it. Many people in the world, utter curse words and blaspheme God’s name in every other sentence. This represents what they have abundantly in their hearts. Whatever you have abundantly in your heart is what will leak out of your mouth, this is a law of God and the way things work and connect to the spiritual realm from the natural realm and vice versa. Your mouth produces words that originated from the spiritual realm. These words are a result of whatever you put in your spirit, good or bad. In Proverbs God said this:
Pro 18:21 Death and Life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.
Those are some of the strongest words found in the Bible about the words that come out of your mouth. This verse in Proverbs tells you very clearly that your tongue has power and as a result of what you say, you either live or you die. Please keep this in mind and learn what God is trying to get you to see. God Bless!
If you would like to continue reading this series of lessons on spoken words, you can continue with “Part 6“.
Blessings and Cursing from the Same Mouth, This Ought Not to Be!
(Ver 1.2) This is now Part 4 in the series of very important lessons on spoken words found in the Bible. If you have not read this series from the beginning I would suggest that you go and start reading with “Part 1“. The Bible contains some of the strongest language on what people say. Either Christians are not aware of this or they simply ignore it and pretend that it does not apply to them. God says in His Word that it is impossible for Him to lie. We can obviously see that with men and women in the world this is entirely possible. In my earlier blogs on spoken words I talked about the sword of your mouth and how it cuts two ways. A double edged sword proceeding out of your mouths, is a symbolic representation that tells us words have spiritual power. You can speak good things or you can speak evil things. Speaking evil things is much more than just speaking lies, as well as speaking good things is more than just speaking the truth. There is an established precedence in the Bible that spoken words establish blessings and in the opposite realm spoken words can also establish curses. Today I will explore this subject in more depth. Let me give you my foundational scripture reference s from the Book of James, let’s read them carefully:
Jas 3:8 But the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.
Jas 3:9 Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God.
Jas 3:10 Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be.
You can clearly see that God is talking about your mouth, your tongue and the words that they produce. It is mentioned in verse 8, with the concept of the tongue being a potential poisonous serpent. That does not sound good, does it? Then in verse 10 it says your tongue can produce both blessings and curses. What are the blessings and cursing that this tongue produces? We are not talking about curse words, those 4 letter words that mature Christians do not normally say, although these could be a small part of what God is talking about. Let’s get a Bible example of cursing something. In the book of Mark, Jesus is visiting Jerusalem and traveling in and out of the city. One day Jesus on his walk, views a fig tree and walks up to it and finding no fruit on it, Jesus does the following:
Mar 11:14 And Jesus answered and said unto it, No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever. And his disciples heard it.
Many people read these stories in the Bible, but ignore the point that is being made. Was the words of Jesus a blessing to the tree or a cursing to the tree? Jesus looks at the fig tree and does not find any fruit on it. I do not believe that Jesus is angry at the tree, but I do believe that He chooses to use the barren fruitless fig tree to demonstrate a very powerful spiritual life and death lesson to His disciples. Jesus does not pray, or ask anyone else to do anything. Jesus simply looks at the tree and speaks words directly to it. Please notice that these words were not positive. The negative words were directed only at the bare fig tree, but they were loud enough for everyone near Him to hear them. The next day Jesus and the same disciples are passing back by the same fig tree and Peter stops everyone and says this:
Mar 11:21 And Peter calling to remembrance saith unto him, Master, behold, the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.
Peter tells Jesus, that the fig tree which He had cursed was dead. Jesus had just spoken negative words to something inanimate and living and Peter remembered it and called it speaking a curse. Notice that Jesus did not dispute it or deny it. The definition of this word “cursed” in the Strong’s means to “doom” and to “execrate”. To speak words that have a very negative effect on something is a better definition of the word. Jesus spoke some very simple words and said “No man eat fruit from you hereafter forever” and that resulted in the tree dying within 24 hours. Of course Jesus was God and this does not apply to you and me, and if you think that is true then you are wrong. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that God came to the earth in His omnipotent Godhead powers. In fact if we study and search the Bible we will find the opposite being taught to us. In Acts 10:38 it says God had to anoint Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost power to do miracles. If Jesus was God in full power of the Godhead, Jesus would not need to be anointed by God, would he? Then in Hebrews 2:17 it says Jesus was made like us, his brothers. Jesus was a natural man and the Son of God at the same time. Jesus Christ the God Man became like the rest of us and chooses to become like one of His creations:
Php 2:7 But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:
Php 2:8 And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
These two verses in Philippians are very interesting. The term that Jesus “made of himself no reputation”, can be taken as He removed or separated Himself from His Deity power. Think about the “reputation of God” and then compare that with the reputation of Jesus Christ (the Anointed). These verses tell us very clearly that God became like a man. He looked like a man, he walked like a man, he talked like a man, he got tired like a man, he slept like a man, he ate like a man and went to the bathroom like a man. If God was here in his full deity power, you would not see some of the things that we see in the Bible. Jesus got hungry and thirsty, Jesus slept, Jesus wept, I mean look at the characteristics of God and see how they change in the life of Jesus Christ. While hanging on the cross Jesus said “I thirst”. Would God in his omnipotent power ever be thirsty? If Jesus Christ was here in the full deity power of the Almighty it would have been impossible to kill him physically, yet we see Jesus dying on a cross. Then there is the temptation of Jesus in the Gospels that I mentioned in the last lesson in this series. Jesus fasts for 40 days so he is obviously hungry and weak physically. Satan tries to get Jesus to do something simple for an Almighty God to do, by turning stones into bread. This is not something that is hard for God to do, is it? Why is this consider a temptation to God the omnipotent? It would only be a temptation if God had stripped himself of his deity power and was here on the earth operating within the limitations and constraints, like a normal human male. Do you understand this?
Heb 4:15 For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.
How is it even possible to tempt an omniscient God? A God who knows everything is unable to be tested or tried like a human yet that is what this verse said happened. Therefore, we cannot believe Jesus was God in His full deity abilities or this would invalidate the truth found here in Hebrews 4:15. If God is God and has the power and ability to create whatever He wants, whenever He wants how is it possible to ever tempt Him? You see in this verse in Hebrews it clearly says that Jesus can identify with how we feel. Because He was tempted in the exact same way that we are tempted, yet He did not sin. Was it possible for Jesus to sin? If it was not possible for Jesus to sin, it would not be a temptation to Him. If He was here as God, it would have been impossible to tempt Jesus with anything. Do people understand that Jesus was tempted in every way just like we are? How is this even possible if He is here in His Omnipotent Glorious Ability? Obviously it is not possible, so what does that teach us?
There are just so many references in the Bible to the man Jesus Christ not being in His omnipotent Godhead power that I cannot give you them all. I will give you another couple of examples of Jesus healing the sick. Was there anything that hindered or kept Jesus from healing anybody? You see if Jesus was God in his omnipotent power, no one would ever not get healed, if that is what God wanted to do. Do you agree? However, we find some conflicts with this thinking in the scriptures. If you read the 6th chapter of Mark you find some very interesting things occur. Jesus is visiting his hometown and place where he was raised as a child. But, when Jesus tries to heal people there, this is what the Bible says:
Mar 6:5 And he could there do no mighty work, save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk, and healed them.
So it did not say that Jesus would not heal anybody, it said He could not heal anybody. A mighty work is easy by any of God’s omnipotent standards, yet Jesus is unable to do anything mighty here, so obviously we have a situation that is very hard to explain away. Either Jesus was not operating in His Godhead Omnipotent power or there is a force greater than God that kept him from it. What do you think it was? I do not believe there is any force greater than God’s power so Jesus must have made the decision not to use this power. There are many other scriptures that you should take note of, but I will stop there for now.
The Jewish O.T. Bible says “God is not a man” (Num 23:19), therefore, the majority of the Jews did not recognize Him when He became a man in Jesus. Today we have the same foolish philosophy and reasoning in the reverse being projected that says Jesus was God in His full deity power and this is how He did all the miraculous things that He did. People put God in their religious box and expect Him to abide by their rules and this is a major mistake. Is God still God? If God chooses to do something different than what you like to think about on how God is supposed to act, can He only do that? If God wants to come to earth in the form of a man without using His deity powers in manifestation, can God do that? Is it legal? Is it even possible? I believe it was God’s choice to what He did and how He does it without our input or consultation. Obviously we need to realize that we have a lot to learn.
So let’s explore the flip side of the coin and look at the blessings. A blessing like a curse is a word based expression that someone speaks out of their mouth that results in a positive outcome. There are a lot of examples of this in the Bible and I will give you only a few of them:
Gen 1:22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
There is an established pattern of words of blessings found in this verse in Genesis. Can you see how these words contrast with the example that Jesus showed the disciples when speaking a curse to the fig tree? By the law of first reference also called the law of first mention, we can discover that Spoken words from God can contain blessings. Blessing are what I will call “word containers” filled with love, favor, goodness and mercy within them. The words of curses that Jesus spoke were containers filled with poison. Uh oh. I believe we are now learning something very profound.
If God would have said nothing, there would have been no blessing from Him given even if He thought great thoughts about them. What we should realize is that silence is not always a blessing. I just like to call silence “Empty” buckets waiting to be filled. In many service times in churches people stand up for a moment of silence, thinking they are paying honor or respect to someone or something. I have not found a Bible verse to confirm this practice, have you? Could silence be something that Satan wants us to do instead of speaking a blessing over them? Could this silence simply be those empty containers awaiting to be filled with a positive expression? I believe that we can learn a very valuable spiritual lesson from this verse in Genesis. God speaks positive words as full containers of blessing to His children and the result was a positive God given outcome that occurred in their lives or we could also say this was God’s vision of possibility that was being transferred to his creation. I believe that this was the establishment of the spiritual law of either Blessings and Curses from spoken word containers being taught to us. God was teaching Adam and Eve by His awesome example, however, I’m not really sure if they got it.
Let’s move into the 27th chapter of Genesis and see the story of Isaac and his son Jacob. We know that Jacob became the Father of the natural nation of Israel. But, how did this occur, since he was not the firstborn son of Isaac? If you recall the story, I’ll shorten it in order to get to the part I need to get to. Jacob got Esau to sell his birth right for a meal. Later, Jacob’s mother helps Jacob implement a plan to get the blessing from his father Isaac. Isaac comes to his father when he was very old and he brings him a meal and some drink. Jacob is also dressed like Esau and smells like Esau.
Gen 27:23 And he discerned him not, because his hands were hairy, as his brother Esau’s hands: so he blessed him.
Isaac is tricked into blessing the younger son Jacob, thinking that he is blessing Esau.
Gen 27:27 And he came near, and kissed him: and he smelled the smell of his raiment, and blessed him, and said, See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the LORD hath blessed:
This is the beginning of the blessing, but not the end of it. What we again see is the established pattern of God being passed down upon the generations. Just as God blessed Adam and Eve with His words, Jacob is now getting the words of blessings of his father.
Gen 27:28 Therefore God give thee of the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine:
Gen 27:29 Let people serve thee, and nations bow down to thee: be lord over thy brethren, and let thy mother’s sons bow down to thee: cursed be every one that curseth thee, and blessed be he that blesseth thee.
Jacob receives the words of blessings from his father Isaac. Jacob then goes out with the blessing and his brother Esau comes in from hunting and asking for the blessing. But, Isaac is very surprised saying “who are you”? Who was it that I blessed earlier?
Gen 27:33 And Isaac trembled very exceedingly, and said, Who? where is he that hath taken venison, and brought it me, and I have eaten of all before thou camest, and have blessed him? yea, and he shall be blessed.
If you read this carefully you will discover a principle, it is not as easy to take back your words after they have already been spoken. There are just a lot of Christians who do not have a clue what I just said and how it applies to them. If they say something by mistake they simply think it is OK to start over and do it again. It’s funny Isaac did not take this position or attitude. Isaac knew what was done was done. The blessing was given and it would not be taken back. Like I have said before, your words have more power and significance than you can imagine.
Gen 27:34 And when Esau heard the words of his father, he cried with a great and exceeding bitter cry, and said unto his father, Bless me, even me also, O my father.
Esau pleads with his father for him to bless him also. But, Isaac says that it is too late:
Gen 27:35 And he said, Thy brother came with subtilty, and hath taken away thy blessing.
This chapter in Genesis contains some amazing information, if you learn to apply it to your life in the here and now. Words are significantly powerful and can bless others, transfer blessings, transfer authority and ownership, and they are a legal contract in the eyes of God. Like Isaac you should learn to be a man or woman of your word, stand up and stand behind your words. Mean what you say and only say what you mean. Esau did not get a blessing from his father, because the blessing had already been given to Jacob. This represents character and moral fiber that few have in our world today.
There are just so many stories in the Bible about the blessings of God, I’ll just give you one more example from the O.T. This next story is also from Genesis and occurs in the 48th chapter. Joseph brings his two sons to Israel to be blessed. Israel is presented the sons with the older son on his right hand and the younger son on his left hand. The older son is expected to receive the Right Hand of blessing and the younger the Left Hand of blessing. But, Israel crosses his hands over and speaks the blessing upon his grandsons. Again we see a principle that Words are the mechanism of blessing containers being transferred upon these children. But, the hands are also being placed here with great significance and meaning.
Gen 48:20 And he blessed them that day, saying, In thee shall Israel bless, saying, God make thee as Ephraim and as Manasseh: and he set Ephraim before Manasseh.
Joseph was not happy that his younger son got Israel’s right hand blessing. So there must have been meaning and significance to what happened. If it did not mean anything, it would not have mattered would it? The right hand of blessing is intended for the older son and Israel gave it to the younger. The net result was the younger son became a greater people in the eyes of God. So what you do and what you say matters and makes a difference in the life’s of your children. Learn the lessons from the Bible of the power of the blessing and then learn not to curse your children with your the words of your mouth and they will achieve and rise to level of what you have spoken over them. Words are seeds that grow in young hearts. If you tell your children they are nothing and nobody good, that is exactly what they become.
Mar 10:16 And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them.
People while Jesus walked the face of the earth realized the potential for the blessing still existed. People would bring their little children to Jesus for Him to bless them. There were those who tried to stop people from bringing their children to Jesus, but Jesus rebuked them and told them not to do this. Jesus said this is a spiritual law and a foundational way of the Kingdom of Heaven. To touch someone and speak positive words of blessings has a benefit that you probably do not fully understand. Children today are growing up and their parents put curses upon them rather than blessings. As a result the children grow up cursed. Your children will live up to your words, either positive or negative. What you transfer into them, is what they will achieve to. What you speak over them, is what they will become. It is a spiritual law found in the Bible.
If you like to continue reading this series of lessons on spoken words, you can go to “Part 5“.
The Sword of Our Mouth! Our Words Cut Two Different Ways!
(Ver 2.0) I have taught on this subject of the significance of the spoken words of our mouth a couple of times now. Today’s lesson will be Part 3 in the series and I will be talking about something that is completely new and different to many Christians. However, if you haven’t read this series from the beginning I would suggest that you go back and start with “Part 1“. This lesson will be focused upon God’s usage of the symbolic nature of a “double edged sword” to describe spoken words. If you have read through the Bible you should already be aware of how God teaches us very clearly that Jesus has a double-edged sword coming out of His mouth. We will see verses in this lesson that describe Jesus is able to destroy those who oppose Him with this symbolic sword. This double-edged sword is widely accepted by theologians as a figurative representation of the power of God’s word spoken. If we do not understand this concept, I will attempt to expound next in this lesson on this subject to clarify it and to help us better understand the concept of the power of spoken of words. Let’s start by reading some foundational verses found in Revelation:
Rev 19:21 And the remnant were slain with the sword of him that sat upon the horse, which sword proceeded out of his mouth: and all the fowls were filled with their flesh.
God is truly an awesome God! It shocked me a while back when I heard about a group of people in the U.S. that were getting together to form a militia to help God fight the coming Anti-Christ. They were gathering guns and ammo like it would be useful to God’s victory over evil. Where do people get these types of foolish ideas? I really have no clue. These people obviously do not know God, the Bible or understand the omnipotent power of God. This verse in Revelation 19 reveals to us that the LORD Jesus will be sitting on a white horse and He will be able to kill everyone opposing Him, simply by speaking some choice directed words at them. That is a clear example of the power of God in action. God says something and then it happens. Pretty awesome, isn’t it? You can learn concept this from reading the Bible starting in Genesis 1 and going all the way through to Revelation 22. God’s spoken words will always prevail and will always come to pass. Let’s examine some additional verses because the Bible instructs us to establish every truth in the mouth of two or three witnesses (Mat 18:16):
Rev 2:12 And to the angel of the church in Pergamos write; These things saith he which hath the sharp sword with two edges;
Rev 2:16 Repent; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will fight against them with the sword1 of my mouth.
Jesus speaking to the church in Pergamos, warns them to change or else they will also see the sword of His mouth come against them. We can easily understand that God is a Spirit (John 4:24) and that God is not talking about a literal physical sword coming out of the mouth of Jesus. 
We must therefore, conclude that this described sword is a symbolic representative for the spiritual force that exists in the power of God’s Spoken Word. I really hope that you understand this concept. Did you notice that God says this figurative sword has two edges? Two edges describes a weapon that can cut in either of the two directions depending upon which way a person swings it. Two edges could could also symbolically mean something else. The words of our mouth can be a blessing to someone or a curse to someone. There exists two possible realms of opposing types of words in the world. In the last Bible lesson we observed two types called “idle” or “lazy” words versus “working” and “productive” words. But there are others like “good” words or “bad/evil” words, “positive” words or “negative” words and words of “blessings” or words of “cursing”. All of these are examples of a sword that can be used for two different purposes.
I find it fascinating that the English word “sword” is the letter “S” followed by word “word”. I believe the letter “S” can stand for “Spirit” and we will learn more about this very soon. The power of any sword or spoken word is always the same. It is non-existent until used or spoken. Therefore the power of any weapon will forever be dependent upon the directed purpose of the user. In much the same way how a natural gun is used in the hands of the shooter, a spiritual weapon can be used for two completely different purposes. The natural gun can be used as a positive weapon to help feed or protect people or as a negative weapon to hurt or rob from people. These are parallel truths concerning the words of our mouth. What I would like to do is give some additional scriptures that help to confirm what I have just said so let’s take a look at these:
2Th 2:8 And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming:
God is speaking prophetically in this verse about the coming events in Revelation. The wicked one described here is the future antichrist who will soon be revealed. The double edge sword we read about in Revelation in the mouth of Jesus is now called something completely new and different in this verse. The symbolic double-edged sword of Revelation is now defined to be the “Spirit of His Mouth”. This is still the same equivalent description of God’s Spoken Word that is infinitely powerful. God’s spoken word has ALL of the ability to destroy or literally consume anyone who is opposing Him. Do you understand that God’s spoken words are His Spiritual Power released? This is an awesome revelation of something that is found within the character and nature of God the Almighty. God is often described in the Bible to be omnipotent, but what is that makes God this way is what we will explore now:
Joh 6:63 It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.
You can see a second confirmation that the Spoken Words of God are Spirit! This verse was Jesus speaking to us and He says that His words are this Spirit that quickens. To quicken is an old English term that means to give life to us. God’s words are declared to be a force of life to us. Because of what God has spoken to us we can live. Now recall, what we previously read in Revelation. In those verses God states His spoken Words are something that produces death. These represent the same spiritual power directed two different ways for two different purposes. This is an example of a double-edged sword. A knife can be used to kill someone or it can be used to save someone’s life if used in a wise knowledgeable way by a surgeon. Wow, these are very important lessons to learn and apply to our spoken words.
You will notice if you study the Bible, that Jesus chose His words very carefully and never shot off His mouth with random thoughts. His words were always focused, directed and had a purpose. Much of what Jesus said to people were words recorded by the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament. In John 12:49 Jesus said He was told what to speak by His Father in heaven. How many of us can say that? How many of our words come from the God in heaven? We should learn to become more like Jesus because, God’s words were always active, relevant and important. Now let’s look at what the Bible says about the Power of God?
Heb 1:3 Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high;
We can now see and learn from another verse about the Word of God. This time God reveals to us that “All” of His Power is in His Word. The Greek written here does not say “His powerful Word” it says “The Word of His Power” and that makes a huge difference. Some translators tried to change the meaning to “powerful” word but the KJV Bible stayed true to the original Greek and preserved it as an accurate truth. Here is the difference, does God’s Word have power or is it His Power? Can we try to think why this is important? If God said I am LOVE it would be completely different than Him saying I have love. I believe this principle is what God was saying to us in Hebrews 1:3 to His spoken Word. I believe that God is attempting to give us a revelation that His Word is His Power and His Power is His Word.
Therefore, we cannot separate God the omnipotent from His omnipotent Word or we could say His Word is God (John 1:1)! This is why John 6:63 said the Words that Jesus spoke to us were from God’s Spirit and they contain His life giving Power for those who received them. Always remember that God’s Words are Spirit! God’s Words are Life! God’s Words are His Power! As we have seen before they are also a weapon against His enemies. So we can all begin to understand that the Spoken Words of God can give life to some that will receive them and can take life away from others who do not accept the free gift of salvation. That is the nature of a double=edged sword. One aspect and application is always positive and the other is very negative. That was a summary of several foundational truths that the Bible teaches us about the Word of God and the Sword of the Spirit.
So how does this apply to us? What good does all of this information do me? Are there any benefits to speaking God’s Word for me? In other words what’s in this lesson for me? We all know that God is all powerful, so how does this power help me? Start by asking yourself this question. Why did God give us a huge book of His Written HOLY Words? Does the written Word of God have any visible power rising out from the pages? Obviously not! Therefore, these written words can only help me if I can learn to speak them. I beleive that only by learning to believer and speak His Word will it ever help us. I beleive this is “one” of the main reasons why God gave us His written Word. God gave us His Word so that we can put it in our minds (Eph 4:23). He also gave us the Word so that we could put it in our hearts (spirits) to believe it. Finally, I believe that He gave us His Word so that we can now choose to put it in our mouths to speak it (Mat 12:34).
Heb 4:12 For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than ANY two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of( soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
Let me introduce you to a hidden secret, in the Bible it says God is not the only one with a “two-edged” sword in his mouth. In fact we do not have to think very hard or for very long before we figure out that every created human in the world can open their mouth and speak words either positive or negative. This also includes other created spiritual beings like angels, demons and Satan. All of these beings were created with mouths which emit words that come from their spirits (Mat 12:34). But, this verse in Hebrews says plainly that God’s sword is sharper and more powerful than any of the others that might exist. This verse clearly informs us that the other mouths have power in them, but implies that they are in a limited capacity compared to God’s spoken Words. Do you get this concept?
If man was made in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26), like the Bible clearly says we were, and if God’s Words are sharp and powerful, then our words must have a limited resemblance to His. But, here is the major part of God’s contribution to man, God gave us His spoken words written in a book form in order to permit us to put them in our mouth to speak them. And the Bible says that God watches over His word to perform it (Jer 1:12). Wow, I hope you understand what I just said. The implications are far reaching if you can accept it and believe it.
Eph 6:17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God:
In Ephesians chapter 6, God commands the church to put on the armor of God. 
Each of the armor pieces described to us is a symbolic representation of a spiritual truth of the completed freely given work of God to and for humans. In fact every piece of armor is something that God has already provided to us freely. It is now up to us to make the freewill choice to take each item and put it on. This aromor included the Shield of Faith, the Breastplate of Righteousness, the Belt of Truth, the Helmet of Salvation, and the Shoes of Peace. God is telling the church that there is a spiritual war and we must get ready for it. So far all of the weapons of armor that I just mentioned were defensive types of weapons to keep us safe from the blows of the enemy Satan. But, then in verse 17 of Ephesians 6, God finally tells the church to take the “Sword of the Spirit”, which is directly defined to be “the Word of God”. How is this Sword of the Spirit going to help us? I believe very firmly that we now have the direct implied connection to our mouths! Can’t you see this? The only way that we can use the Spiritual Sword of the Word of God against an unseen spiritual enemy to our advantage is to speak it. Leaving the Bible on our coffee tables will do nothing to keep the devil out of our houses. This is a very powerful, spiritual Bible law being revealed to us. What you say is far more important than what you can possibly imagine or know right now. Take a look at this verse in Isaiah:
Isa 59:21 As for me, this is my covenant with them, saith the LORD; My spirit that is upon thee, and my words which I have put in thy mouth, shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed, nor out of the mouth of thy seed’s seed, saith the LORD, from henceforth and for ever.
God is prophesying an awesome new covenant reality that is now established with us in the church and God says that He will put His Spirit upon us and His Words in our mouth. Can you see the direct connection between our mouths speaking His spoken words with His Spirit?
God literally says that these words will not depart from our mouths, nor from the mouths of our seed. Who are those called the Seed of Abraham? We in the church are the seed of Abraham (Gal 3:29)! Who is the Seed of the Woman? You probably do not know this, but Jesus was the chosen Seed and we the church are in that Seed of the Woman (Rev 12:17). God’s Word will not depart from our mouths and we will overcome Satan by His Blood and His Word that He has given to Us (Rev 12:11)! I taught you earlier that this was a Biblical Spiritual Law being revealed to us. Let’s look at an Old Testament example of this.
Jos 1:8 This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.
The lessons found in the Bible through intense study are usually very deep and complex and have many hidden truths associated within them. Because we do not understand them completely we can easily just read over a truth and not grasp that these words apply to us and what we should be doing today. Here in the book of Joshua God uncovers the secret to a human’s success on this planet. It is a basic spiritual principle and law that is not very difficult to follow if we can understand it. God tells Joshua that He should speak His word both Day and Night. We could say that means constantly and continually or every waking moment. God was teaching Joshua about the Sword of the Spirit that will cause him to be a great success in this world. But, there is also an implied opposite truth found in this verse. God says by impled antithesis that if we do not speak the Word of God we will not be a success. Do we want to be prosperous and successful in life or dismal disappointed failure? God is telling us how to do both, right here! We have to make the choice. We are not forced to do either but usually being passive results in failure and this is many people’s wrong defaulted selection.
Remember when Jesus was tempted by Satan in Luke 4:1-13? Three times the enemy came to tempt him into a subtle trick. But, here is the lesson learned from this example. Every time the enemy Satan came with a temptation, Jesus brought out the Sword of the Spirit called the Word of God and said “IT IS WRITTEN”. Wow, that is extraordinarily critical to learn from and apply to what Satan does to us. You see the Bible says that Jesus was tempted the very same way that we are tempted (Heb 4:15). But, He was wise enough to use the sword correctly as a living example. I pray that this will be a benefit in your life today.
I guess I have gone long enough in this lesson and given you plenty of new things to think about. The sword of your mouth is either going to be a blessing or a curse to you and to those you direct it at. While your negative words will never be able to put a curse on me, they will cause curses to come upon you and your children. What we say is so completely important that it cannot be emphasized enough for us to think before we speak. If we do not have a Bible verse that backs up what we are about to say, we probably should not say it.
If you would like to continue reading this series of lessons on spoken words you can go to “Part 4“.
Speak to Your Rock! Pt 2 – Do Idle Words Keep You Out of The Promise Land?
(Ver 1.6) Today is the second lesson on the subject of the significance of our spoken words. I know this is a very controversial subject and one that many Christians do now subscribe to believe in. However, regardless of what we believe about it, our beliefs do not change what God and the Bible says and the results that we get from the God’s established Spiritual Laws that are found within the Bible. In the last lesson on this subject, we learned about “Why Moses Didn’t Enter Into Promise Land”. God said it was because of Moses’ unbelief, He told him that he would not be able to lead God’s people into the promised land that He had already given to them. Unbelief is one of a Christian’s greatest enemies in receiving a promise from God. This can include the unbelief of what the Bible says or the unbelief of what the Spirit of God is leading us to do. It could even be the unbelief of what a Bible teacher teaches us from the Bible. I am not saying that I am anything important personally in you hearing from God, unless I say what the Bible says and that should make what is said important. All we need to do is read the Bible and see what it says and then believe it, to see that what is written is true or not (Acts 17:11). People should recognize that there are crazy people on the internet doing the same thing that I am doing to help people, many automatically discount what is said as being the same crazy ramblings. By automatically dismissing what someone says, many people at times miss what God had wanted them to know. Not everyone on the internet is crazy, and some of them have some very profound deep things to teach if we are open to them. Learn to judge every teacher by the Word of God and remain open and prepared to change your thinking and beliefs. God is doing some really great things in the world today and those who are open to them will enjoy their benefits. If you would like to read this series from the beginning, I would suggest that you go back and start with “Part 1“.
So today I want to discuss more about the Bible topic of “Spoken Words”! But not just any spoken words, let’s talk about those that Jesus called “Idle Words”. What are “Idle Words”? Let’s start by reading the lesson’s foundation Bible verse.
Mat 12:36 But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.
Wow! That is an amazingly strong statement from Jesus. Jesus is obviously directing our attention at our spoken words. But, not just any spoken word, but rather one specific type. God tells us personally that the “idle words” that we speak will be judged by God on judgment day. I mean that could be a very scary statement for some people to even think about. Obviously I can see too many people do not believe what Jesus said or either they do not understand what the verse means. Otherwise, they would probably keep silent more often. 
In today’s world idle words are all around us, on our cell phones, on our tablets in our emails, on internet websites, on Facebook and Twitter on TV, on radio, raining down from our satellites, printed in our magazines, news papers and fictional books. I mean we are bombarded by idle words coming at us from a multitude of different ways. How many of these text messages that we get or send can be considered idle words? Try to examine your Facebook experience and see how many words are crossing your path that can be called idle words. I know of some people and I won’t mention any names that appear like they are never quiet. To hold a phone conversation with them is impossible, because they are the only one speaking and you just have time to say “yea” or “uh?” occasionally. Some people spend hours and hours on the phone talking to everybody about everything. How many of these kind of people do you know? I pray that you are not one of them. It would appear on judgment day that we may have to sit or stand around and listen to everything that people said on this earth for a very long time. Doesn’t that sound fun? No! I do not think any of us will be very happy on judgment day.
I am generally a quiet person. It has been my personality to listen more than to speak. If you knew me, I believe that you would agree. I know many Other people are different, I know that and I do not fault them for being different. But, nevertheless I believe we need to learn what the Bible says about the definition of “Idle Words”. These are the words that God says we will personally have to account for, so what are they? It would appear that we need to learn to avoid these types of “idle words” like the plague. But that can only begin with us first learning about what they are. Here is the definition of the word from Strong’s:
G692
From G1 (as a negative particle) and G2041; inactive, that is, unemployed; (by implication) lazy, useless: – barren, idle, slow.
The concepts given to us in the Bible can so easily go over our heads. Because we don’t understand them, we may simply ignore them. This Greek word G692 means “unemployed” or “inactive”. That is a concept that most Christians do not have a clue what it means. The Greek word is the combination of the negative particle combine with the Greek word G2041 that literally means to work or toil.
I’m not going to do any jokes right here either, because that would be an example of more idle words. You see idle words are contrasted to be opposite to “employed” words “productive” words, “active” words or “working” words. These are all employment, work and job related terminologies but now they are being related to us in association to what we speak. God is saying that our words ought to be working for us and not just be idle or lazy. What we should learn are working words change things. God used His working words to change darkness to light in Genesis 1. Does God expect us to do the same? The answer is Yes! So how do we get our words work for us? 
Working words are a concept found in the Bible word “edification”, where we use our words to build up like as in a construction project. In the last lesson about Moses’ big mistake, God told Moses to Speak to the Rock and this is an example of working words. Instead of obeying Moses spoke to the people and called them rebellious. God said to Moses to speak to the Rock and get the answer and instead Moses spoke the problem and did not enter into the Promise Land. If you did not read this lesson you should, it is one of the best ones that God has given to me up to this time. What Moses did was an example of “Idle Unemployed Words”. Instead of using his words to work for him and get the answer, Moses spoke the problem and failed to enter into the promise land.
So we can start to understand now that God says every, lazy, idle, useless, unemployed, inactive,and non-constructive word that we speak we will be judged for all of them. How many words in the course of day do we “employ” that are “productive” to get good “results”? The clear implication to this verse is for us to change what we say to words that “work” for us! As Christians we should become aware of the words that we speak. We should think about what we say before we say it. Just because a thought comes into our mind, that doesn’t mean that we should speak it out. This is a common trick of the devil. Satan gives people thoughts in an attempt to get them to speak them out. Why is this so important for Satan to do this? Believe it or not your spoken words gives Satan entrance to come in and kill steal and destroy from you.
People do not understand what God said in Numbers 14:28, that whatever I hear you say that is what I will do to you. People do not realize that God is listening to what they say. People do not realize that God does to them whatever comes out of their mouths good or evil. That is very strong! Many times people like to think that God is in complete and total control of everything that happens to them. In their thinking they do not believe that they have anything to do with what happens in their lives. 
They believe that it was either bad luck, or just a coincidence, or an accident or just an unfortunate set of circumstances that they are faced with. But, God has established and given to us spiritual laws in the Bible and this is one of them that every believer needs to grasp immediately. You can very easily discount what God says and what the Bible says. But, if you do that it still does not mean that what happened to you is not something that you at least contributed to making it happen.
Let me give you another New Testament verse that repeats what Numbers 14:28 says. This is a Bible verse that is obviously very controversial and hard for many believers to grasp and believe. This verse is found in Mark chapter 11:
Mar 11:23 For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.
Jesus gives us the spiritual definition of Numbers 14:28 and clarifies a few details that were not clearly given to Moses. Many times we will learn that God teaches things in progressive stages. He will give us a little bit in one place and let us take it in in small parts and then He will give us a little bit more as we are able to chew and swallow it. This way we are not overwhelmed or choked with too much of the new Words of God. Paul taught this way also. Paul told some I wanted to feed you meat but you were unable to partake and I fed you just soft milk (1 Cor 3:2). So God teaches us a few meaty things in Mark 11:23 about how the spiritual law of spoken words work. I guess I should start by giving you the context of this verse in Mark 11. Jesus was traveling through the countryside and He sees a fig tree with leafs on it. Jesus then goes up to the fig tree looking for figs to eat. Finding none, Jesus speaks to the fig tree to curse it and the disciples heard Him. The next day they all walk by the same fig tree. Suddenly one of the disciples notices that the tree was withered and dried up from the roots upward. So what was Jesus doing? Was Jesus just mad or upset at the tree because it didn’t have any fruit on it? No, I do not think so. Was Jesus showing off and saying to them “look what I can do and not you”? No, I do not think so. Did Jesus say “This happened because I’m God and you are not”? Again, No, I don’t think so. Or was Jesus teaching them and all of us an object lesson on the spiritual law of spoken words? I believe that Jesus was telling them a spiritual secret and demonstrating the spiritual law of spoken words to His disciples so that they would learn a valuable lesson in life. You’ll have to make up your own mind in what you believe and figure it out if Jesus was talking to you also. I would personally pray and ask Him to show you what it means. Jesus is no respecter of persons and what He did for one he will do for everyone.
You can see that a “disciple” of Christ is a word that means a student, a learner, a pupil. Are you one of these? Maybe you think you know everything and you are the master? If you do you are in trouble and being covered and blinded by your ignorance. If you are a Christian you must be a Christ follower forever, a student of Christ forever, or in other words His disciple forever. Only He knows everything and we don’t. So whatever Jesus says to Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, I believe He is talking to you and I also! Please do not think that you know more than they do. Learn what Jesus was trying to teach them and we will become what He wanted us to become, more like Him.
So what was the lesson of Mark 11:23? Jesus told them and us that if we would speak to the mountain and believe that what we say would happen, we would get exactly what we say. There are so many lessons to learn from this one verse that I cannot teach them all, nor do I claim to know them all. A mountain is a symbolic representation of a negative situation or set of circumstances that we are facing, possibly an obstacle, either physical, mental, spiritual, financial or whatever we are faced with that appears to be a challenge. Jesus told us to speak to it and tell it to be removed and it would obey us, if we believe. Why is it necessary for us to both speak and believe? What we say and what we believe represents us putting our faith to work. That is the opposite of being idle or unemployed. All people both speak and believe either positively or negatively about things that around them. They either speak an expect good things to happen or speak and expect bad things to happen to them. Speaking and believing involves a decision that we make that even though the problem looks big and impossible to move, Jesus said that it would have to obey us and what we said to it would have to be done!
How many Christians believe this truth? I can see there are a growing number, are you one of them. If you are not one of the ones that believes the LORD JESUS then begin to notice what you say and believe and see if it is not what you get eventually. This principle works for you or against in the positive or the negative, because it is a spiritual law! I know this boggles the minds of religious unbeliever who do not believe what Jesus said. You see I did not write these verses in the Bible, I’m just a news reporter doing my best to show them to you with a greater emphasis of importance. These verses have been in the Bible for hundreds of years and people have just ignored them. We are responsible for the information that they say and how they apply to our life. God told Moses in Numbers that the Rock would obey his spoken working words, but Moses spoke to the people and called them “rebels”. God told him his words would bring the answer and he ended up enlarging the problem. Moses didn’t believe God and didn’t enter into the promise land and this is definitely a lesson for us all today.
Let’s look at some more example verses with the Greek word G692 translated as “idle” just to obtain a greater subject knowledge. This Greek word occurs only in 6 verses and is only used 8 times in the N.T. Jesus used this word in describing the man in the parable that went out to hire workers in his field. He goes to men and asks them why are you idle? They answer no one has hired us and then they go to work for the man. It is self-evident what the word means by studying this parable in Matthew 20:1-6. Not working is the definition of “idle”. Therefore, here is another verse in the N.T. that contains this same word:
2Pe 1:8 For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Greek word for “Idle” is found in this verse in 2 Peter 1:8. However, it was translated as “barren” in this verse. “barren” might mean the basic same thing as inactive or unproductive. But, I believe that God is seeking that we should avoid this situation of unemployed word from occurring in our life. I know it does not directly say “words” in this verse, but think about what the verse is saying, “in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus”? Isn’t that words? Isn’t “knowledge” obtained by words and we can’t say anything unless we have knowledge to do so” Also it would seem that “Idle” could be considered to be synonymous to being “unfruitful”. God is telling us in this verse in 2 Peter that we should not be either of these. You see to be “barren” can also mean to not bear any fruit. Jesus cursed the fig tree in Mark 11 because it was barren. Do you think he was symbolically giving us some valuable clues to spiritual things? It is also interesting to see the context of this verse. Let’s look back at a preceding verse:
2Pe 1:4 Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.
The promised land, symbolically represents these “exceeding great and precious promises” that God has given to us in His word. As this verse says, that these promises have already been given, we are now required to possess them. To become a partaker is the same as to become a possessor. God had given Moses and Israel the promise land and told them to “partake” of it. They did not believe God and therefore failed to obtain what was freely given. The promise land represents the blessings of God. The promises of God also represent the blessings of God. Because Moses did not believe he remained in the curses in the wilderness and died there. This is a powerful type and shadow of what we have facing us today. There are giants in our spiritual promise land today trying to intimidate us and keep us out of possessing it. How do we do this? We speak only words that are “useful”, “employed”, “working”, “productive”, “active”, “positive” and “fruitful” words. Then we avoid all spoken words that are “idle”, “unproductive”, “inactive”, “negative” and “unfruitful” words. This is the lesson of Moses found in Numbers 14 and Jesus and the fig tree in Mark 11. These are the words of Jesus found in Matthew. Avoid these “Idle Words” and you will be very glad when it comes to the judgment day and you have a much better opportunity to possess the promises of God in your life today. Thank you for studying the Bible on this website and please leave a comment if you would like to share your experiences in this area of life. God Bless!
If you would like to continue to read this series of lessons on spoken words, you can go to “Part 3“.
Speak To Your Rock! Why Moses Didn’t Enter into the Promise Land!
(Ver 2.4) If you have ever read my blogs you know that I can be controversial. I say things that are new and different. But, I can only say what God teaches me to say and I have learned that God is different than anyone else I’ve ever met. So if I say what God says to me, it will probably be different than what most men say and teach. Today I want to explore some scriptures that God taught me many years ago. Why didn’t Moses get to enter into the promise land? What kept Moses out from the promised end of God’s plan? The examples written in the Old Testament are there so that we can learn not to repeat the same mistakes that they made. If we can learn these lessons from Moses, I think we can apply them to our situations today. We have a better covenant, established upon better promises, yet we do not possess them automatically. Even though God had already given the children of Israel the Promised Land, they were required to do something to possess it. This is an extremely valuable natural typology of a pattern that is repeated in the spiritual realm for the church. So let’s examine what kept Moses out of possessing God’s Promised Land.
I want to examine verses in the book of Numbers. In chapter 20 of Numbers, Moses has a big problem again. He is attempting to lead the people of Israel through a desert, there is little to no water to drink and the people and the animals are all very thirsty. Moses goes to God and asks for help and God responds with a set of specific instructions, so let’s now start reading with what God says to Moses in the desert.
Num 20:8 Take the rod, and gather thou the assembly together, thou, and Aaron thy brother, and speak ye unto the rock before their eyes; and it shall give forth his water, and thou shalt bring forth to them water out of the rock: so thou shalt give the congregation and their beasts drink.
God gives Moses a very specific set of instructions with a limited number of steps. These are not complicated steps, but yet people sometimes hear what they want to hear, instead of what God says and that get’s them into trouble in a very big way. As we read through the rest of this chapter we find that Moses did not do what God said to do. Let’s examine carefully the specific set of instructions that God gave:
- Take Your Rod.
- Get Your Brother Aaron.
- Gather the People before the Rock.
- Speak to the Rock.
- Give Everyone a Drink.
Five little things God told Moses to do. There were five little specific steps of instructions from God. Was this complicated? No! Was this different? Yes! God had never given these instructions to Moses before, so maybe Moses had a struggle with them or maybe Moses just assumed he knew what God had said. Maybe he heard in his mind something different? I do not know, I do know that it is interesting that Moses is the one that wrote this book of the Bible and if he made a mistake or didn’t understand it why did he write about his short comings? Interesting question isn’t it? What I learned from observing the instructions of God is that He rarely repeats exactly what He said for you to do before. If God told you to strike the rock last time, then guess what you will probably be doing something different the next time. I’ll talk more about that later. Let’s read through Numbers and examine what Moses did, instead of following God’s instructions:
Num 20:9 And Moses took the rod from before the LORD, as he commanded him.
Num 20:10 And Moses and Aaron gathered the congregation together before the rock, and he said unto them, Hear now, ye rebels; must we fetch you water out of this rock?
Moses makes a great start to obeying God, but a really lousy ending. Let’s examine what Moses did according to these two verses and list the steps that he took:
- Moses Took the Rod.
- Moses Met with His Brother Aaron.
- Moses and Aaron Gathered the People Together Before the Rock.
- Moses Then Said to the People.
The first 3 steps seem to be perfect matches to the instructions that God gave to Moses. So when did God ever tell Moses to say anything to the people? I know that you have to say something to them to gather them or assemble them before the rock, but when did God tell Moses to speak to the people after they were all gathered together? Did God tell Moses to preach to the congregation? Did God say to tell the congregation anything at all? I do not think that He did. This represents the beginning of the downfall of Moses. As soon as you start deviating from the plan of God, you begin to miss it and you fall into disobedience and there is the root of his problem. If we continue reading in the next verse we will see what Moses did next:
Num 20:11 And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their beasts
Did you see what happened next? Let’s continue our list of what Moses did and analyze them to see what they say to us. We are now on step 5 of what Moses did.
5. Moses Lifted His Hand.
6. Moses Smote the Rock.
7. Moses Smote the Rock Again.
8. Moses Gave Everyone a Drink.
You can see that Moses did eight things to God’s 5 step plan of instructions. How many things is that, too many? Of course that is 3 things too many. God never told Moses to raise his hand. God never told Moses to strike the Rock. Why did Moses have to hit the rock twice? I think it was simply because nothing happened the first time Moses hit the rock. I believe that God realized that Moses wasn’t going to follow the plan so He was merciful and gave them water to drink anyway. Moses had to hit the rock twice before anything came out and I bet you that Moses was a little concerned after nothing happened the first time that he struck the Rock. What we must realize is that even though God still gave the people a drink, Moses’ actions taken had grave consequences attached to them. So what was God’s response to Moses and Aaron’s actions taken? Was God pleased? Of course not, God says something that is very profound:
Num 20:12 And the LORD spake unto Moses and Aaron, Because ye believed me not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them.
God reveals the reason Moses struck the rock instead of speaking to the rock, as being a case of his unbelief. Moses apparently had a problem with speaking to an inanimate object and expecting anything to happen from just your spoken words. I’ll bet you a lot of Christians are still like Moses today. God was trying to teach His servant Moses a valuable lesson about the spiritual law of words. Words have authority and power behind them and God was attempting to raise Moses’ expectation level and spiritual awareness. We know that previously in the wilderness that God had told Moses to strike the rock to bring out water for the people, but this time God changed the plan. If you did not realize it, God hardly ever does the same thing twice. By God’s instructions, Moses was supposed to speak to the rock before the people. So while the people were watching, the people would have learned a valuable spiritual lesson also. But, Moses failed and as a result God told him that he would not enter into the Promised Land that he had already given to them. 
That is a sad lesson, but that is not the entire story. You see you have not gotten the symbolism in this story found in Numbers. It is very important to see that this story is covered with types and shadows of spiritual things to come. The children of Israel are a type of the church. Moses and Aaron are types of the leaders in the church. The Rock is a type of Jesus Christ. The Promised Land is a type of the Word of God, the promises of the New Covenant. The wilderness can represent the time of trials or tests in the life of believers. The water is most often representative of the spiritual drink of God’s Word.
1Co 10:4 And did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ.
1Co 10:5 But with many of them God was not well pleased: for they were overthrown in the wilderness.
1Co 10:6 Now these things were our examples, to the intent we should not lust after evil things, as they also lusted.
So what are the lessons that we the church should learn from this one story in the Bible?
Let’s go back through the story again and this time look for the spiritual typology. God tells Moses to take his rod. The rod represents a symbol of power and authority. It can also be a symbol of correction. You can rule with a rod of iron and that would represent a strict control of intolerance or of a swift set of consequences for disobedience. However, God never tells Moses to do anything with this power symbol. God then tells Moses to get with Aaron his brother. I feel like this represents church leadership talking together and working together for a common goal for the good of the people. Then God tells these leaders to gather the people. The people represent the church and they should be meeting together to witness the example of the leadership of God’s plan in order to learn what God is doing. Now, here is the real lesson from the story. I believe that we can see and learn a lot from the next instruction that God gives to Moses. Step 4 God said for the leadership to “speak to the Rock”. What did the Bible say was the Rock? The Rock represents Jesus Christ. So what is Jesus Christ? Jesus Christ is the answer to your every problem. What was Moses’ problem? No water or angry upset rebellious people? Obviously Moses’ problem was his own people. You need to understand this, because it is very important to see. People are the biggest problem in any church. If it weren’t for people, church would be a great place to be. People are the biggest challenge any minister faces. People like to talk, gossip, complain, criticize and many other ungodly things. People will start divisions, confrontations, internal fights, and just complain about anything they think that doesn’t fit with what they want to see happen. People will start petitions, call for church meetings and votes to try to run the show and all along disregard God’s appointed leadership, his anointing, His plans and His purposes. God has placed leadership in the church. Pastors and teachers are called by God and appointed by God to do a specific job in a specific way. Most of the time God deals with the leadership of the church and tells them exactly what to do and say to the people. This is a significant learning point from the patterns found in the story of Moses and the children of Israel. God never addressed the congregation or spoke to anyone in the congregation directly about how to run the the group or what to do. God always went through His chosen leader recognizing spiriutal organization and sturcture. This is how a church is supposed to operate today. In the church it is a little bit different in that God is inside of every believer and He will speak personal direction to each individual believer. However, God still recognizes spiritual order and He will not tell anyone in the church how to run the church other than the pastor.
Where was Moses’ downfall? What was the first thing that Moses did that was not on God’s instruction list of 5 specific steps? If you recall the downfall came when he started talking to the people. This is a critical lesson for preachers as well as for the congregation members to take note of. Here is the principle that Moses failed in. Moses had a problem with the people in that they were thirsty which caused them to be rebellious. Why didn’t Moses just speak to the Rock and get the answer to his problem? Instead of speaking to the Rock and getting the answer, Moses called the people “rebellious rebels”. Here God is trying to teach Moses a lesson concerning a spiritual law of speaking the answer and Moses chooses to speak the problem instead. Wow, did you just hear what I said? That was more than worth your time reading this lesson if just you understood that one very important point. This is a critical lesson to learn and apply to our situations today. God never said to speak to the people, and speaking to the people who were the problem was not going to bring Moses the answer. You know if you tell someone who is a thief that they are a thief, it will never cause them to come up higher and change? If you speak to rebels and say they are rebels, they will never learn to change. Speaking to your problem and saying they are your problem will cause them to continue as they are and they will remain your problem because of your words spoken over them. The people of Israel never learned any lessons from this experience. Moses never learned any lessons either. God told Moses that he was not going to lead the people into the Promised Land because of his unbelief. Moses was probably one of the greatest Old Testament prophets of God and he came far short of the destiny that God had intended for him. Can’t you see how his example of failure applies to you and can it help you not to repeat his mistake? If you can, it will radically change what you say to who and when. Many times it would be better to keep your mouth shut and not say anything than to speak the problem and remain in unbelief and miss out on God’s answer to your problem. God told Moses that if he would only speak to the rock, that the rock would obey his words. That statement boggles most Christian’s religious minds. God will do what I say? If you would only study the Bible and what it says about the words that you speak, you would certainly change many of the things that you say. The problem is that most Christians fall into the same unbelief category and continue to speakto and about their problems. Earlier in the book of Numbers, God revealed two things to Moses and Israel that have a direct bearing on everything that I just said about Moses. You see it would be unjust if God punished Moses for doing something that God had not already told him to do and explained to Moses how things will work. If we go back and read we will discover that God had already given Moses two spiritual laws to learn and to follow. Take a look at what God says in these verses:
Num 6:22 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,
Num 6:23 Speak unto Aaron and unto his sons, saying, On this wise ye shall bless the children of Israel, saying unto them,
Num 6:24 The LORD bless thee, and keep thee:
God taught Moses and Aaron, that they could bless Israel with the words that came out of their mouths. By Moses speaking these positive good words over the people, God was able to bless them and cause them to prosper. As you read down in this chapter, Moses and Aaron are supposed to say several other words of blessing and then in verse 26, God concludes that “I will bless them“. Here is the principle given, you speak blessings and I will bless them! Did you get that concept? That is exactly the opposite of what Moses said and did. Moses looked at the people and called them “Rebels”. Can God bless these words? What you find is that Moses ended up cursing his own people with his words and that is a major problem. God cannot bless Israel because Moses did not follow the instructions of God and the spiriutal laws of God. To emphasize the point even clearer to Moses in couple of chapters God tells him directly something that is very hard to misunderstand:
Num 14:28 Say unto them, As truly as I live, saith the LORD, as ye have spoken in mine ears, so will I do to you:
These words were spoken directly to Moses and Aaron, the leadership of the nation of Israel some 6 chapters earlier than the “speak to the rock” chapter in Numbers 20. God reveals to Moses a spiritual law concerning his words that he speaks. This spiritual law applies across the board to everyone in the congregation as well as the leadership. God tells Moses that I will do whatever you say. This verse tells me that God listens to the words that come out of your mouth. Whatever you say, that is what God will do to you. I know most Christians do not believe this. That just doesn’t make any sense does it? Why would God do that? I do not know, but yet it is exactly what the Bible just said, isn’t it? I guess Christians think these people in the wilderness were different than us today. They were not really examples that we can learn anything from. I guess people do not realize they are our examples and we better learn from their mistakes, or we will be doomed to repeat their failures. There are many other Bible verses that I could go into right here to confirm what I have just said. You can study them for your selves and see if they are there, or you can simply ignore them all and think they do not apply to you. I’ll give you one confirmation to the words that I have just taught on and this is information found in the book of Psalms:
Psa 106:32 They angered him also at the waters of strife, so that it went ill with Moses for their sakes:
Psa 106:33 Because they provoked his spirit, so that he spake unadvisedly with his lips.
As you can read this is God’s commentary on the story of Moses that we just studied. In these verses God tells us that the children of Israel made Moses angry. God calls this the waters of strife. By making Moses angry we are informed that his spirit was provoked to speak unadvisedly with his lips. You can clearly see from this verse that it was what Moses said that was his problem and not his striking the rock. You should learn that what you say is also potentially your greatest problem area and learn to control your tongue even when angry or being upset. You can clearly see a connection of what you say coming from your spirit inside of you. This is an extremely valuable lesson to see and to learn from.
One of the most important subjects in the Bible to study and to understand is that about your spoken words. God tells us that He is listening to what we say and that He will do to us whatever we say. If we speak evil, that is what we will get. If we speak good things, that is also what we will get. Your words only affect your outcome and what you get. Because, the children of Israel, murmured and complained to God about their situation that is what they got. The older generation did not enter into the promise land, except for Joshua and Caleb. What made Joshua and Caleb different? What caused Joshua and Caleb to enter in where the other people their age all died? You should go back and read that story very closely and see what Joshua and Caleb said, when the others said the exact opposite. God did to Joshua and Caleb what they said and the others also got what they said. This is a prevalent reality found throughout the Bible, from cover to cover. You can read practically any story in the Bible and you can observe very closely exactly what they say, then read ahead and see what they got in life. It amazes me when I study the Bible like this and see what God’s response is to what people say. I know there are other spiritual laws in the Bible also; this one is not the only spiritual law that affects what people get in life. But, this one is certainly one of the ones’ that people do not have a clue about. Elvis Presley said he would never live to be older than his mother and he did not. My grandmother said that a crazy driver would be her end and two teenagers racing ran into the side of her car and killed her. If you look at what you have today and analyze it with what you said in the past, it will almost always add up to the same results. Learn to be careful what you say even in jokes. I’ll try to do more lessons on words in other blogs, but I have gone long enough today. God Bless!
If you would like to continue reading this series on words, you can go to “Part 2“.
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