True words...

In the fourth book of the Chronicles of Elantra series, Cast in Fury, Kaylin is just beginning to wrestle with understanding the power (so much more than mere magic) she has been unconsciously using (primarily to heal) and the fact that the marks on her skin are True Words. The two quotes that call to mind my most favorite of Book of Concord sentences are when Kaylin encounters someone (a dragon) speaking the ancient language, the language of her marks. She is trying to describe to her beat partner what she is seeing as the dragon is speaking:

"Nothing like our words, no. We pick and choose. Our whole language is a patchwork quilt. Every word can be jumbled with other words, and we make sentences that we understand—but people sharing them will also understand them, and the understanding won't be the same. This is..."

...

"They are like Barrani names," she whispered, "They don't look like them, but they have that solidity to them. Some sense of a meaning so complete that everyone who *could* understand them at all would understand the same thing. You couldn't lie in a language like that. Because it's what it is, not more, not less." (Michelle Sagara, ch. 21)

The idea of True Words that the author ever so slowly delves into over the course of now 11 books is first visited here. They are words with only one meaning, but a meaning so ... complete ... that trying to put into common language the meaning of one word could take whole paragraphs ... or pages. And, perhaps because of this, True Words are Living and have Power. But Kaylin does not understand that yet.

What fascinates me about this passage is first how Kaylin first describes the language folk use, a language that is, for lack of a better word, flexible. Meaning is made and understood differently using the same words, sometimes from the speaking and other times from the context and still other times from the audience.

One way I look at this is to say that a theologian (or whatever you properly call authors who are writing about the Living Word) can write a book about the Bible. His words may or may not be true. And the meaning a reader takes away from them may or may not be what the author intended. But the actual Scripture in his book is True and Perfect and has but one meaning. Different readers, different writers, different speakers ... it doesn't matter. There is only one meaning to the Word of God, that given to it by its Creator.

Then, Kaylin tries to describe the True Words she was hearing (and seeing formed in the air around the dragon). She couldn't understand the language. She couldn't recognize the words, but she knew they were words and she knew that what they were was words so complete in their meaning that anyone and everyone who read them would only receive one meaning from that encounter.

I deliberately used the word receive, because I think that is what happens when we read, speak, or hear the Living Word. We receive it. We receive its meaning, no matter if we understand it or not (or think we understand it or not).

One of the promises of the Word of God is that it will not return void. Sometimes ... sometimes I wonder if anyone but me really ponders the magnitude of that promise. I wonder because when it comes to comforting the Christian soul, so many folk fall back on their own words or the words of some great Christian scholar or popular Christian author rather than on the Living Word. Folk seem to be saying that, somehow, the Word of God is someone not sufficient to all circumstances, all situations. But it is.

I have been re-reading Michael Card's commentaries on the Gospels.  One of the things I love best about them is Card's repeated emphasis and celebration of the perfection of the Word of God. Every. Single. Word. Is. Perfect.

It is perfect and powerful and performative. What a wild and wondrous sentence Luther penned in the Large Catechism when he wrote:

"For it [the Word] has, and is able to do, all that God is and can do." ~ BOC, LC, IV, 17