Hi Friend,

When our granddaughter Emma was three she told me that her head hurt. “I throwed up,” she said. “I throwed up twice!” she declared.

She delivered this bit of information with equal amounts of sincerity and enthusiasm and I received it with a mixture of concern and joy. Joy? There was a time when she could not tell us where it hurt. Her parents had to guess if her sickness was the common cold or some dread disease. Information that only she possessed was locked inside a mind that could not communicate.

It was that way for all of us before the gift of language was inculcated into our being. We heard the rest of the world talking. Little by little we comprehended and then we began to express sounds that resembled words. And eventually we crossed the great divide between animal and man. We communicated our ideas to other human beings. And that has made all the difference.

I had a college professor once—head of the Department of Psychology—who taught us that the only difference he could see between humans and animals was the opposable thumbs. I remember wondering at the time how much money I was spending to get this understanding.

Of all the things God created, humans are unique for the ability to speak in a language that conveys meaningful thought. Trees don’t talk to one another. Some have wondered if vegetables feel pain when they are cut from the stalk. If they do, we’ll never know because they can’t tell us. And since the world is what the world is, it is a waste of time to get too caught up in wondering about it.

There was a time that God said “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”  (Gen. 1:26 NIV)

No Constitution or Bill of Rights generated by a congress or assembly of man has ever bestowed such precious gifts on man as this meeting of the family of God. But the tool that enabled the gift to be actualized is the gift of words.

Words convey rights. The mere act of speaking enables those rights to be expressed.

When Moses was dividing the Promised Land among the families of Israel, there were five sisters who came to Moses with a complaint. Their father, a man named Zelophehad, had died and now their family was not being considered among those receiving land. They came to the Tent of Meeting and stood before Moses and the leaders of Israel and said, “Our father died in the desert…Why should our father’s name disappear from his clan because he had no son? Give us property among our father’s relatives.”

Moses brought their case before the Lord and the Lord said to him, “What Zelophehad’s daughters are saying is right. You must certainly give them property as an inheritance …” (Numbers 27:1-7 NIV)  All of this process was determined through words.

When men go to court, words are used to determine the outcome. Animals don’t do that. Dogs haven’t created a legal system to adjudicate injustice. Trees don’t have a court to address the injustice of humans cutting them out of the forest to build a home because trees don’t have a means to speak. Speech conveys a sense of rights. Words separate man from animals.

All of this gives more meaning to John’s statement. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  (John 1:1) The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. (vs 14)

When God made man the governor of the earth, He made it possible through the gift of language. And it begins in the life of each human when a child tells her parents, “My head hurts!”

Until next time,

Jim O’Brien