By Jerry Bullock
Daily Record Columnist
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One of my favorite Bible stories is the story of the Tower of Babel. This was just another time when man got so full of himself he thought he was equal to God. They decided to build a tower that would reach into heaven. If you remember the story you will remember that God intervened and mixed up their languages so that they could not understand each other. The foreman could not understand the workers and the workers could not understand the foremen, so the tower was abandoned. It never made it all the way to God.
The only problem is that every race and every creed starts out to build its own Tower of Babel. Language, more than any other skill, separates man as a unique individual in God’s creation. Oh, I know dolphins have a method of speech, orangutans have been taught to use a small vocabulary, and even ants, if you watch them as they scurry to and fro, stop and chat when they meet. The movie “Antz” gave the little critters a reputation for wisdom. I have to question that; not long ago I left a sack of Amdro partially open on my front porch. A couple of days later I followed a string of ants as they carefully carried the poison away grain by grain out of the sack.
I pictured in my mind a stern old general ant back at the anthill getting the report from a young lieutenant ant. I can hear the general say, “You did what!?”
Let’s just say I have a love affair with words. I guess I have had it all my life. Without words there would be music but no songs. There would be no poems. There would be no books to read and no interesting conversations to have. What a dark world it would be. Words are long or short; standing alone they may mean nothing but strung together like a necklace of pearls they tell the greatest story ever told. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son…”
We have fun with words like “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” and “the time has come the walrus said to speak of many things of ships and shoes and sealing wax…” What would Ernest Hemingway have done without words, or Rodgers and Hammerstein and of course we cannot forget Shakespeare.
Words can build, words can destroy; words can please and words can anger, words can make strangers out of lovers. Words are powerful. Who has not heard it said, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” Who has not learned that indeed words can break hearts?
In the years leading up to the American Revolution in 1776 it was the words of Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Richard Henry Lee, and the unforgettable Patrick Henry, when he said, “Give me liberty or give me death,” that gave birth to a nation.
Almost every definable group has its own language. Christianity no less than any other group. I sometimes think it is the greatest hindrance to our witness to others. What does it mean to be “born again” or to ask “Jesus to come into our hearts”? We need to couch our testimony in the language of the day so that our Tower of Babel will not stand in the way of someone’s salvation.
One final bit of advice, as Brother Dave Gardner always said, “You don’t have to worry about what you say if you worry about what you think; because you got to think it to say it.”
Jerry Bullock has written his weekly column for the Daily Record for more than 20 years. Jerry is a retired Air Force colonel, an ordained Baptist minister, professional counselor, military historian, speaker, and writer. He is a native Texan tracing his Texas roots to the days of the Republic.
