Week 46 Ephesians
I read the last two chapters of Ephesians today.
One of the verses said: let no one deceive you with empty words. It was underlined, so it had made some kind of impression on me before.
Empty words.
When I see a clear glass bottle with nothing inside I say it’s empty. If I tip it over nothing comes out. What value can it offer me? None. So I tend to think that the empty bottle’s contents are just neutral nothingness, value = zero.
But Paul seems to be saying that even though an empty word has nothing it can actually give me, it can take something away. Because an empty word can deceive.
You’d figure that if an empty word’s value is not +100, not +10, not even +1 then its value is zero. But from the sound of it empty words keep heading south past zero into negative country: -1, -10, -100.
It sounds like an empty word can be positively nothing, and negatively something. Floating around in its apparently Neutral Xero-ness it isn’t value-neutral – it’s more like value-negative.
I wonder how many words I hear in a day. Ten thousand? I wonder about estimating their value.
I thought about the serpent sliding into paradise with his empty words. In my bible there are only forty-five of them in Genesis three. Positively empty words, but super-potent in deceptual-izing negative power.
Note: quote from Ephesians 5:6 (NASB)