WORDWISE (August 04, 2023)

Hot words, cold words. 

Red words, blue words. 

My words, your words.  

Old words, new words.   

Every day we arrange the 25,000 words we know in unique and highly personalized combinations. With words, we express deep sorrow and loss, as well as shining hope and love. We describe the past with words that show how different it was from our day, and we even invent new words to imagine futures for which no current words will do. 

Words are the building blocks of thought; the scribbled bits of genius on a page; the last, despairing expressions of those who have lost hope.  

And so, among the many figures in the mind of God, He entered human experience through the very language we employ: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen His glory, the glory as of a Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).  

In Jesus are united the two great words we find impossible to keep together—“grace” and “truth.” In God’s unbounded vocabulary, we can be both fully known and fully loved.  And He always has the last word. 

So we stay in “grace and truth.” -Bill Knott