God and man without words

God created all things simply with words. For example, He said: "Let there be light." And there was light.

Just with words, God brought reality to be.

Except when He created man. In this case, God used the dust of the ground. In other words, God did not use words to create man.

The same with woman: When He created her, God did not use words; He used a rib from Adam.

God created all things with words; but when He created the human being, He did not use words. Unlike the furnishings of nature, we humans came to be without words.

In this difference Robert Meagher sees a similarity between man and God, namely, both exist without beginning in word. Certainly God was not created with words; God is the Un-created; God is the creator of words, not the other way around.

In that man is not created by words; he uniquely bears the image of God. It works in this way:

GOD WAS NOT CREATED BY WORD / man was not created by word

Meagher underlines how this similarity is the basis for man's dominion of the created order: God and man, or God through man, uses words to rule this creation.

This places great weight on what we do and say (or better: what we say and do). What we say with words creates realities.

Are the realities our words create the realities we want to create? Somewhere it says that the tongue is the hardest thing to control.

And somewhere it says of Samuel that none of his words "fell to the ground."

What would it be to live a life in which my words do not fall to the ground? Instead, they create the realities that should be created? My life would look more like Jesus' life.

Jesus the uncreated Word. When He spoke, realities came to be. Even the winds and sea obeyed him.

Logos2Go

Genesis 1.3 Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light.

Genesis 2.7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

Genesis 2.22 Then the rib which the LORD God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man.

1 Samuel 3.19 So Samuel grew, and the LORD was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground.

James 3.7 For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and creature of the sea, is tamed and has been tamed by mankind. But no man can tame the tongue. It is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.

Mark 4.37-41 A great gale arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?" [39] He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Peace! Be still!" Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, "Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?" [41] And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, "Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?"

Robert Meagher, Augustine: On the Inner Life of the Mind (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), 19-28