The Power of a Word

...the creator God, though utterly transcendent over and different from the world which he has made, remains present and active within that world, and one of the many ways in which this is so is through his living and active word. This reflects God's own nature on the one hand; it is a natural and normal thing for this God to speak, not some anthropomorphic projection onto a blank deistic screen! On the other hand, it reflects the fact that within God's world, one of the most powerful things human beings, God's image-bearers, can do is to speak. Words change things - through promises, commands, apologies, warnings, declaration of love or of implacable opposition to evil. The notion of "speech-acts", which we referred to already, is fairly new in philosophy. It would not have surprised the ancient Israelite prophets. As Walter Brueggemann put it in his Theology of the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 1997, 146), expounding Psalm 33:6: "The imagery is of a powerful sovereign who utters a decree from the throne, issues a fiat, and in the very utterance the thing is done."

- N.T. Wright, The Last Word, 38,39