But he cannot control his own tongue. “But the tongue can no man tame.” Here is the language of helplessness, as in the case of the demoniac in Mark 5:4. Strictly speaking, of course, the tongue is merely the organ of speech, and speech is under the control of the mind. By a bold figure James almost personifies the tongue as a separate personality. “It combines the ferocity of the tiger and the mockery of the ape with the subtlety and venom of the serpent” (Plummer). It is thus the very chimera of wild beasts!
This is the picture of the tongue in its natural state, the tongue of the unregenerate man. The Spirit of God can cleanse a man’s mouth of profanity and unclean speech. “Keep thy tongue from evil, and thy lips from speaking guile” (Psalm 34:13). Paul puts up the bars: “Nor filthiness, nor foolish talking, or jesting, which are not befitting” (Eph. 5:4). Once more he says: “Let no corrupt speech proceed out of your mouth” (4:29). Surely, if one has such an untamable little animal in his mouth as the tongue, he needs to watch it with ceaseless care. The evil of the tongue echoes and re-echoes through a community and often through the ages. The evil slander can never be stopped. The lie is fleet of foot and eludes truth in a race.
“It is a restless evil,” “plague of disorder that it is” (Moffatt), “a disorderly evil” (Hort), iniquitum malum (Vulgate). It is unstable and unreliable, inconsistent and quixotic. It can never be trusted to the full. It will turn on one when off guard, like the lion when the keeper turns his eye away. It can be brought under no rules that will work.
“It is full of deadly poison.” It is “death-bringing” poison like the poison of asps under their lips (Psalm 140:3). “Their poison is like the poison of a serpent: they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear” (Psalm 58:4). The poison of the serpent is deposited in a little pocket under the mouth. So the tongue is charged with the venom of hate, as the serpent with poison. The hiss of the serpent and the hiss of the goose are often reproduced in the sibilant tongue of slander.
Sweet and Bitter Water (3:9-11)
The inconsistency of the conduct of the tongue is graphically portrayed by these verses. Plummer happily terms it “the moral contradictions of the reckless talker.” There is in very truth moral chaos if the Christian does not control his tongue. Inconsistency is not an evil per se. If one is wrong, he ought to be inconsistent enough to change and do right. But it is terrible to see a professing Christian lightly lapse into loose and licentious language. “The fires of Pentecost will not rest where the fires of Gehenna are working” (Plummer).
James had spoken (1:8) of the double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. The tongue with the gift of double-entendre is one of the very worst, for its word passes muster in polite circles and yet carries to the initiated a sinister or salacious meaning. Epictetus (Ench. xxxiii, § 16) says, “But dangerous also is the approach to indecent speaking.” But the double tongue talks one way with one person, another with another; it is the way of hypocrisy, the slick tongue, the oily tongue of the two-faced man whose word cannot be depended upon, whose word is not so good as his bond.
Sirach (5:13) says: “Honor and shame are in talk; and the tongue of man is his fall.” He also has this: “If thou blow the spark, it shall burn; if thou spit upon it, it shall be quenched; and both these come out of thy mouth” (28:12). It looks as if James had seen this passage from the Twelve Patriarchs (Benjamin 6:5): “The good mind hath not two tongues, of blessing and of cursing, of contumely and of honour, of sorrow and of joy, of quietness and of confusion, of hypocrisy and of truth.”
We may omit the inconsistency of “sorrow and of joy,” for that is the lot of all of us, but certainly the tongue must not play the part of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “Therewith bless we the Lord and Father,” the only instance of this precise combination of words in the Bible, expressing God’s power and loving approachableness (cf. Matt. 11:25). The highest function of human speech (Hort) is the praise of God the Father. Note how when Zacharias recovered his speech, he first praised God (Luke 1:64). It is glorious to praise God in prayer, in song, in sermon. “O Lord, open thou my lips; and my mouth shall show forth thy praise” (Psalm 51:15). “Praise ye Jehovah. Praise Jehovah, O my soul. While I live will I praise Jehovah: I will sing praises unto my God while I have any being” (Psalm 146:1 f.).
“Bless, and curse not” (Rom. 12:14). Curse not God in anger or in flippant profanity. The tongue that praises God surely will not profane his name. But curse not men who are made after the likeness of God, those who are like God in their moral and spiritual nature and not like the beasts of the field (Gen. 1:26; 2 Cor. 3:18). And yet, horribile dictu, this is precisely what we do. “Therewith curse we men.” James here includes himself in the common run of humanity.