The tongue, so tiny, is immensely powerful. It is indeed mightier than generals and their armies. It can fuel our lives so that they become fiery furnaces, or it can cool our lives with the soothing wind of the Spirit. It can be forged by hell or it can be a tool of heaven. Offered to God on the altar, the tongue has awesome power for good.

Destructive Power

James’s principal concern in the third chapter of his epistle is with the destructive power of the tongue, and this produces a most provocative statement: “How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell” (James 3:5–6). The tongue has awesome potential for harm, as the forest fire analogy suggests. As the story goes, on Sunday evening, October 8, 1871, poor Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over the lantern as she was being milked, starting the Great Chicago Fire. That disaster blackened three and one-half miles of the city, destroying over seventeen thousand buildings before it was checked by gunpowder explosions on the south line of the fire. The fire lasted two days and cost over 250 lives.

But ironically, that was not the greatest inferno in the Midwest that year. Historians tell us that on the same day that dry autumn a spark ignited a raging fire in the North Woods of Wisconsin, a blaze that burned for an entire month, taking more lives than the Chicago Fire. A veritable firestorm destroyed billions of yards of precious timber—all from one spark!

The tongue has that scope of inflammatory power in human relationships, and James is saying that those who misuse the tongue are guilty of spiritual arson. A mere spark from an ill-spoken word can produce a firestorm that annihilates everyone it touches. Furthermore, because the tongue is a “a world of unrighteousness,” it contains and conveys all the world system’s wickedness. It is party to every evil there is and actively intrudes its evil into our lives.

What is the effect of the tongue’s cosmic wickedness? “The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life” (James 3:6). “Course of life” is literally “the wheel of our genesis,” with “genesis” referring to our human life or existence.1 What an apt description of human experience! About nine-tenths of the flames we experience in our lives come from the tongue.

Having grabbed our imaginations with his graphic language, James adds the final touch: “and set on fire by hell.” Here the language means continually set on fire. James uses the same word for hell that his brother Jesus used—“gehenna.” It is derived from the name of the perpetually burning garbage dump outside Jerusalem, a place of fire and filth where, as Jesus said, “their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:47).

Can anyone miss the point? The uncontrolled tongue has a direct pipeline to hell! Fueled by hell, it burns our lives with its filthy fires. But it is also, as John Calvin says, an “instrument for catching, encouraging, and increasing the fires of hell.”2

Five Forms of Verbal Cyanide

Significantly, James does not tell us how the tongue’s destructive power is manifested in human speech. He knows that the spiritual mind, informed by the Scriptures, will have no problem in making the connections.

1. Gossip

The tongue’s destructive power in gossip leads the list, of course. A physician in a Midwestern city was a victim of a disgruntled patient who tried to ruin him professionally through rumor, and almost did. Several years later the gossiper had a change of heart and wrote the doctor asking his forgiveness, and he forgave her. But there was no way she could erase the story, nor could he. As Solomon wisely observed, “The words of a whisperer are like delicious morsels; they go down into the inner parts of the body” (Prov. 18:8).

Gossip is greedily picked up and stored away by the hearers like tasty tidbits. Vigorous denial by the doctor would only bring more suspicion—“He protests too much!” The damage was done. Thereafter the innocent doctor would always look into certain people’s eyes and wonder if they had heard the story—and if they believed it. Gossip often veils itself in acceptable conventions such as “Have you heard . . . ?” or “Did you know . . . ?” or “They tell me . . . ,” or “Keep this to yourself, but . . . ,” or “I do not believe it is true, but I heard that . . . ,” or “I wouldn’t tell you, except that I know it will go no further.” Of course, the most infamous such rationalization in Christian circles is “I am telling you this so you can pray.” This seems so pious, but the heart that feeds on hearing evil reports is a tool of hell, and it leaves flaming fires in its wake. Oh, the heartache that comes from the tongue.

2. Innuendo

A cousin of gossip is innuendo. Consider the ship’s first mate who after a drunken binge was written up by the captain on the ship’s log: “Mate drunk today.” The mate’s revenge? Some months later he surreptitiously wrote on his own entry, “Captain sober today.” So it goes with the word unsaid, the awkward silence, the raised eyebrows, the quizzical look—all freighted with the misery of hell.

3. Flattery

Gossip involves saying behind a person’s back what you would never say to his or her face. Flattery means saying to a person’s face what you would never say behind his or her back. The Scriptures warn us repeatedly against flatterers, for they are destructive people who carry a legion of unwholesome motives: “A man who flatters his neighbor spreads a net for his feet” (Prov. 29:5)

Read More