Aren't good words wonderful?

The Author of words, the architect of all language, the Speaker, indeed the Word Itself, is God.

This is not an easy thing to understand because most people consider words as primarily a means of making contact. Like a bridge, words are thought to transfer information back and forth between parties.  Words provide a link and therefore serve essentially as a tool.  A word is just a gismo.

Not so. 

God does not simply make contact via words.  He creates.   By being Who He is we live.  And this is more profound than we can understand except by faith.

Let me illustrate this way.  Almost fifty years ago, in October 1962, a nuclear disaster was narrowly averted.  We know it as the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The Soviet Union had secretly placed rockets armed with atomic warheads on the doorstep of America pointed at us.  President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev played a dangerous game of brinksmanship, and only later did anyone know how razor close the world came to nuclear war.

Lack of the right words nearly killed us.  No clear communication bridge existed between Moscow and Washington.  Only later, in June, 1963, was a "Memorandum of Understanding Regarding the Establishment of a Direct Communications Line" signed in Geneva.  The two super powers now installed the "hot line" to prevent misunderstanding or conflicting information in future crisis situations.

But the "hot line" did not make us friends.  The two countries continued to operate independently.  Both were powers.  Each had their own language, and each used their own words to contact and contend with the other side.

It is not like that with God and us.

This world of mankind does not operate independently of God.  We are not a self-sufficient society where it would be nice to have God as a friend, but it isn't all that essential as long as we don't come to blows.  We are not a power which can establish a peace pact with God on our own word and just continue to co-exist under some mutual understanding or truce.

God's Word and man's word are not equivalent. His Word is not simply an apparatus for getting us information about what's happening on the other side so we don't step on His toes or provoke Him into some kind of response.  Sinners live with a false belief that if only the tension between God's Word and ours can be kept from escalating into outright conflict, that will suffice.  Keep in reserve the "hot line" of prayer for crisis moments.  Don't do anything too provocative.  Regard God's Word as his own thingamabob but not critically important on our side as long as we make sense out of our own thinking, etc., etc.

Such ideas must be thoroughly rejected because they ignore the true situation.  The fall into sin and man's idolatry and rebellion severed us from God.  It was a complete break, a rejection and complete contradiction of God's Word. 

The Fall into sin was not a re-positioning.  It was separation, a divorce, an amputation, a death. 

With an amputation, there aren't a few covert nerve endings that still remain which can send signals back and forth or a few tendons tugging on each other from one side to the other.  It is dead like the sheared branch separated from the vine. 

"Your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear." (Isaiah 59:2)  Therefore, it's not enough simply to "contact" the severed limb.

We Christians live, not because God contacted us to see if we were open to talks.  He didn't set up a Geneva-styled discussion about how we could foster better relations or start understanding each other.  God expected nothing from us because of the sins of the whole world.  We have no word for Him, nothing to say.

It was the creative power of God's own Word - God Himself who united what had been separated.  No thanks to us.  It is He alone who gives us something to say, something to confess, a Word to preach and teach.

It is Jesus Christ the righteous. the propitiation for our sins, who has removed the cleavage between God and man.  His atonement for our sins removed the separation, the enmity, and the death.  He drew us to Himself, and the Word He is brings into us life and peace.

"In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them." (2 Cor. 5:19)  God reconciled us.  This was no joint venture to which we sent diplomats to hammer out an agreeable concord.  It was God speaking and acting for us in pure mercy.

It was God's act.  By giving His own Son to redeem us from sin, taking the curse on Himself, and not only pointing but firing the missiles of divine wrath into the heart of His own Son, you and I become not just aware of God but united with Him.  Christ didn't just contact us; He recreated us.

This atonement in Christ is brought home to each of us through the "word of reconciliation" (2 Co 5:18-20; Col. 1:21), the Gospel of the cross of Christ.

It is this we celebrate in His Word and Sacraments.  Holy Communion is not having a contact with God once in a while.  It is the continual nourishment of the life He has brought to us.  Absolution isn't a memorandum from a diplomatic pouch needing to be deciphered through our own analysis.  God says what He means: I forgive you for the sake of My Son!

Aren't His words wonderful?  And isn't the Author and architect of language, the Speaker who pronounces us forgiven, truly the convergence of every good word when he says, "We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world."