God Speaks Your Language
“Trash bag”, I repeated. “You know, trash bag.” The store clerk stared blankly at me. We had just moved to England, and were trying to set up our house, but as hard as we searched we could not find trash bags. Then the lightbulb went off in the store clerk’s eyes – “Ah, you mean rubbish sacks!” In the six months since moving to the UK, we have had countless experiences like this one. Undoubtedly, we think we have the right word to universally describe an item or phenomenon, but over and over we find that our terms are neither right, nor universally understood.
There was once an American man stationed in Italy whose mother came to visit him. Upon seeing the signs in Italian, she exclaimed “How difficult it must be for them to take all the real words and translate them into Italian to put on the signs. Why don’t they just use the real word for ‘street’ instead of ‘strada “?
Often, we think of the way God speaks just like this woman thought of English. We assume that God’s “first language” is tenth-grade, 21st century American English and that in order to speak to anyone but me and people whose minds work exactly like mine, he has to “translate.” Francis Chan captures this sentiment in his book Until Unity:
About a year ago, I was speaking to a friend who is a special needs teacher. He has a heart to reach his students with the gospel. He shared that, for a while, he wrestled with wondering how the gospel could be communicated to and accepted by kids who are nonverbal. But then God opened his eyes to see the foolishness of that kind of thinking. Did he think God didn’t have to stoop down too far to accommodate his own intelligence level? How could we possibly think that God can’t accommodate people without some of the capabilities we have, as though we’re somehow on a “closer level” to God? As though God could make the jump down to my level of intelligence but others are too much of a stretch? How disgustingly arrogant that is! I was so convicted by this truth. Somehow, in my imagination, I had been thinking of God communicating with the heavenly beings in English at my level of comprehension. The truth is that God probably communicates in a mode that I can barely fathom.
What good news it is that God’s first language isn’t high school or college-level English, but that he has humbled himself to communicate with someone like me. His thoughts are truly higher than ours (Isaiah 55) – they are as high above ours as the heavens are above the earth. And yet, he has emptied himself and taken on our form as humans, relating with humanity rather than holding tight to his equality with God (Philippians 2).
What hope we have in knowing that God would stoop down to communicate with you and me, because it reminds us that he can – and does – speak the language of everyone – whether they be deaf, nonverbal, or even…British. :)
By: Amberle Brown, Co-Founder of The Banquet Network