SPEAK, HEAR, THINK

• I recently read an interesting article HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?  by Lera Boroditsky which I think is very timely and important.

• Language doesn’t just express thought, it can also influence it. Purify the language, and you can help purify thoughts and actions.
• When one person speaks to another, the process generally goes like this: The speaker thinks a thought, then moves their tongue and lips in certain ways while exhaling and resonating their vocal cords. The listener’s ear detects these sound waves, and his brain converts them into a thought very similar to the thought of the speaker. Humans transmit intricate ideas to one another through exchanges like this.
• Human beings speak about 6,700 different languages, each with its unique traits, vocabulary choices, patterns, sentence structures and sounds.
• The language that a person speaks determines more than just the sounds he makes to refer to certain things. Linguists have discovered that the specific language a person speaks actually influences the way they see the world, how they think and what they do.
• Our thoughts affect our languages, and our languages affect our thoughts. How we use our languages not only limits us but also corrupts us.
• All languages have peculiarities of expression, exceptions to rules, grammatical oddities, peculiar idioms, misnomers, pagan/heathen terms, superstitions, etc. In addition to making languages hard to learn languages entrenched false concepts and cause misunderstandings.

Gen 2:19  And out of the ground the Lord God formed every [wild] beast and living creature of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them; and whatever Adam called every living creature, that was its name.

• The Creator of human beings is the Creator of human languages.
• God gave the first man not only the ability to understand and speak a language, but also the ability to create new words. This expandable God-given language was pure.
• But after Adam and Eve chose to reject God and yield to Satan’s influence instead, as shown in Genesis 3, they not only continued expanding the language’s vocabulary but they also began corrupting it.

2 Cor 4:4  For the god of this world has blinded the unbelievers' minds [that they should not discern the truth], preventing them from seeing the illuminating light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ (the Messiah), Who is the Image and Likeness of God. 

Eph 2:2  In which at one time you walked [habitually]. You were following the course and fashion of this world [were under the sway of the tendency of this present age], following the prince of the power of the air. [You were obedient to and under the control of] the [demon] spirit that still constantly works in the sons of disobedience [the careless, the rebellious, and the unbelieving, who go against the purposes of God]. 

• This powerful spirit being is the original perverter of human thought and language. He infects people’s thinking with his own toxicity by “broadcasting” it wordlessly to us. Satan transmits through the air attitudes, impulses, desires of vanity, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, competition, rebellion against authority, hatred, etc.

Jer 17:9  The heart is deceitful above all things, and it is exceedingly perverse and corrupt and severely, mortally sick! Who can know it [perceive, understand, be acquainted with his own heart and mind]?

Mat 12:34-35  You offspring of vipers! How can you speak good things when you are evil (wicked)? For out of the fullness (the overflow, the superabundance) of the heart the mouth speaks. The good man from his inner good treasure flings forth good things, and the evil man out of his inner evil storehouse flings forth evil things. 

·       For approximately the next 1,700 years after Adam and Eve yielded to Satan’s corrosive influence, all of humanity continued to speak and to increasingly corrupt this same original language. Genesis 11:1 notes that at the end of that era, THE whole earth was of one language and of one accent and mode of expression. Everyone was still speaking the language God had given Adam, but it had become rife with corruption, reflecting evils in thought and action.

·The main population gathered at this time somewhere in the area that is now Iraq, and began collaborating on a huge project motivated by an evil purpose. They built a tower and thought they could live their lives as they pleased, rejecting God’s authority and law just as Adam and Eve had, and still avoid the punishment (Gen 11:2-4). The tower of Babel was a type of humanity’s attitude toward God throughout our history.

·In response, God did something ingenious. He took the gift of language, the ability to share and unify thoughts, and abruptly divided it. This immediately divided the people into separate groups.

·That day, God created perhaps dozens of language groups as He “confound[ed] their language” so they were unable to “understand one another’s speech” (Gen 11:7). This was the origin of the parent languages that have resulted in the 6,700 different languages spoken today.

·This did not result in people repenting toward God. But it did slow their project of open rebellion toward God that would have quickly led to self-destruction. 

·Generation after generation, mankind corrupted those languages more and more, bringing us to the present with each one filled with perversions, vagaries and impurities.

·But the Bible shows that there is a time on the horizon when language will be purified and unified once again!

Zeph 3:9  For then [changing their impure language] I will give to the people a clear and pure speech from pure lips, that they may all call upon the name of the Lord, to serve Him with one unanimous consent and one united shoulder [bearing the yoke of the Lord]. 

·This is when God will undo the language divisions. With His Holy Spirit, He will undo the evils that human beings have embedded in their communications. God will give all human beings one unifying language, and it will be pure and the pure language will play a part in purifying the peoples’ thinking.

·A different language means a different culture, different music, different habits, different education, different values and standards, and a whole different approach to life.

·People will use Holy Spirit and the pure language to understand the beauty of God’s way and the world around them and to share that understanding with others in vivid color, in precise detail, and most importantly in Truth.

·Learning to speak—and think—the universal pure language will help people be upright, highly capable individuals. It will help men and women mature into deep thinkers who are stable, understanding and joyous. It will help them remain law-loving individuals living lives of peace, accomplishment and fulfillment.

·Changing the language will require thorough reeducation not only of vocabulary and grammar, but of thought itself. The educating and reeducating of the world will be one of the most important tasks the Sons of God have in establishing the Kingdom of God upon the earth.

·In the present world, full of linguistic corruption and confusion and with so many language traits that twist our thoughts, it is difficult to imagine that pure language being universally spoken around the world. But the Bible makes clear that the dawning of that age of pure speech and of a whole different approach to life is as near as our thoughts and words.