What God’s voice does, God does. God’s speaking and acting are equated!
God’s words have a power enormously beyond our own. We humans may say, “Let there be light in this house,” but then we have to press a switch or light a candle. Our words need actions behind them, otherwise, they can’t achieve their purpose. God’s words, however, cannot fail their purposes because, for God, speaking and acting are the same thing. The God of the Bible is a God who “by his very nature, acts through speaking.”
To say that God’s word goes out to do something is the same as to say God has gone out to do something. “Verbal actions are a kind of extension of himself.”
If God’s words are his personal, active presence, then to put our trust in God’s words is to put our trust in God.
God’s words are identical with his actions:
Genesis 1:3: And God said, “Let there be light,’ and there was light.” God did not first speak and then go ahead to do what he said he would do. His word itself brought the light about.
When God names someone, his very word also constitutes the person. When he renamed Abram to be Abraham “father of a multitude” that word made the aged man and his wife biologically and spiritually capable of being the ancestors of a whole race (Genesis 17:5).
Psalm 29: “The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars; the Lord breaks in pieces the cedars of Lebanon. The voice of the Lord shakes the desert, the Lord shakes the Desert of Kadesh” (Psalms 29:5, 8).
Isaiah 55:10–11: As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.
How are we to receive God’s words?
They come to us in the Scripture. The Bible says that God put his words in the mouths of the prophets (Deuteronomy–20; Jeremiah 1:9–10). Once a prophet received God’s words, they were written down and can effectively be read as God’s speech when the prophet is not present or even after he is dead (Jeremiah 36:1–32).
The Bible, then, is God’s Word written, and it remains God’s Word when we read it today.
God acts through his words, the Word is “alive and active” (Hebrews 4:12), and therefore the way to have God dynamically active in our lives is through the Bible. To understand the Scripture is not simply to get information about God. If read with trust and faith, the Bible is the way to actually hear God speaking (acting in our lives).
