The apostle James, in James 3:5, writes about the destructive influence of the human tongue:
5 So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! 6 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. 7 For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, 8 but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.
Richard Gaffin of Westminster Seminary comments:
This is strong language . . . about human language. The conflagration of communication that James sketches so severely is one of communication processes gone awry, perverted and in confusion, become harmful and destructive, because they are more than just tinged with hell-fire. We dare not shy away from such a depiction, for it does not take great imaging ability or much power of imagination to recognize here the malevolent potential of our own time, with its undeniably marvelous technologies, the potential for nothing less than media mayhem, a mayhem of mega proportions. . . .
The human tongue—with all the media possibilities it symbolizes, with the varie means of communication it embodies—has become an instrument of distortion, or perversion and degradation, of destruction. The gift of the tongue, this God-given gift, is a gift that has been prostituted—massively, thoroughly.
Gaffin then turns toward Christ as the remedy for the sickness of our perverted tongue:
Here, finally, is a tongue, the Gospel writers tell us, that speaks “words of grace” (Luke 4:22, my trans.), “words of eternal life” (John 6:68), and, in that declaration that is so compelling, he claims for his disciples, “You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you” (John 15:3). Finally, there is a word that meets our deepest and most desperate need, our need to be clean from our sin and all of its debilitating consequences, a word with power to cleanse, with a detergency strong enough to restore the image we bear to its full luster, and so, to strip away the impurities that pollute our communication at every level and in every form.
(Richard Gaffin, “Speech and the Image of God,” in The Pattern of Sound Doctrine: Systematic Theology at the Westminster Seminaries, Essays in Honor of Robert B. Strimple (2004), p. 185, 187, 188.)
