God is a Storyteller. He is telling one massive tale with billions of chapters. He’s telling it right now, in fact. All the pages are in place. The type is set. You and I are words, each with a God-given meaning, role, and sound. Our lives are lettered—spelled out by the sovereign Speaker. On this day, at this moment, we mark our presence in the places God has written us.

The story begins with and revolves around the Storyteller—the Father eternally speaking the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit.

In the beginning was the Word
The Father spoke and Spirit heard.

This is the God who gathered time and space at his feet and began to tell a tale—first to himself and then to listening creatures. It is a living story, an oracle with a heartbeat. There are chapters before and chapters ahead—words that raise the living and judge the dead. I know, it sounds otherworldly. But pinch your skin. You are a word who feels and breathes and thinks and talks. And if you believe in Jesus Christ, God’s Word given for us, then you were there at the beginning in the mind of God (Eph. 1:4). Before you even took a breath, your name was written in divine memory.

Our lives are lettered—spelled out by the sovereign Speaker.

Then came the telling. How can I describe it? When we speak, sound comes out. Two bands of smooth muscle vibrate as the air passes through them, like Moses through the Red Sea. Then we use our mouth, tongue, teeth, and lips to shape the vibrations. Respiration (breath), phonation (sound), and articulation (shaping)—that’s the recipe for our words. We make vibrations. Sometimes, according to the Beach Boys, we even make good ones.

But when God spoke at the dawning of the days, he did not make vibrations (at least, that’s not all he made). He voiced the world. He loosed his trinitarian tongue, and something marvelous emerged: first seconds and centimeters, time and space—an arena. A place came off his lips. He opened his mouth again and out came light: photons radiating from God himself, light from Light. He opened it a third time, and vast space bloomed over ancient waters, with plenty of room for everything: the sky. He did it again, and water pooled together, letting dry patches of earth appear. Then he spoke grass and trees, with wild limbs lifted towards the light in worship. Next he said the stars and sounded the sun.

Then came the real fun: uttering the living and moving things, animate letters to wave and flap and creep. He began in the water: fins and cartilage, scales and spines, gills and tiny hearts that pushed the sacred red through veins and arteries. The myriad of mollusks. The plenteous plankton. He voiced a multi-faceted ecosystem into watery life.

Next were the earth-crawlers. He spoke paws and fur, backbones and bovine, teeth and tendons. Bound by his granted gravity, worms nosed their way through the dark soil, foxes found footing in the golden fields, and ants marched in bark paths along the trunks of trees. God voiced everything that moves on this earth.

Then, as I imagine it, there came this sacred moment—heavy with silence. The Father, Son, and Spirit turned to one another and said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). That’s you. That’s me. God spoke . . . us.  

He made us for gathering.

Why? Why did God start telling a living tale? We don’t know. There’s mystery to every novel. But we do know what he made us for: communion. He made us to live and move and have our being with him and in him (Acts 17:28). He made us for gathering.

That was the great beginning of our spoken world, a beginning still carried along by the voice of God. All that God spoke at creation he continues to uphold by the word of his power (Heb. 1:3). God never stops speaking. Never. As N. D. Wilson wrote, “The world cannot exist apart from the voice of God. It is the voicings of God.”

Poets and novelists seem to have the greatest success in drawing our eyes to the beautiful mystery of a voiced creation. My favorite book from The Chronicles of Narniais The Magician’s Nephew. I love a great beginning, that wondrous place where power has a pulse you can put your thumb on. For the beginnings of Narnia, that pulse is strong, and it comes through song. Digory, the main character, and a cab-horse named Strawberry stand amidst the mesmerizing beauty. Listen in.

A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from which direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it. The horse seemed to like it too; he gave the sort of whinny a horse would give if, after years of being a cab-horse, it found itself back in the old field where it had played as a foal, and saw someone whom it remembered and loved coming across the field to bring it a lump of sugar. (Chap. 8)

In the realm of Narnia, Aslan sings a world into motion; in our earthly realm, God’s speaks one. Can you feel the majesty of the mystery? But the truth is that God has always been speaking—always. That’s the message of Scripture. Genesis tells us God spoke creation, but John tells us God was always speaking to himself. He was always declaring the Word in the hearing of the Holy Spirit. God sang himself long before Walt Whitman had the idea.

Every one of us is by nature in conversation with God because we are the conversation of God.

You want to know who God is? God is a being who ceaselessly speaks—before, during, and after our lives. That’s how he made and upholds the entire world—through his mysterious and richly personal words. Every time we forget this, we lose the magic of being alive. When we are most faithfully human, we most willingly worship. We radiate awe because we are worded, and so is everything else. We should all be able to resonate with Wilson when he says,

I look around at the stuff of the world and I ask myself what it is made of. Words. Magic words. Words spoken by the Infinite, words so potent, spoken by One so potent that they have weight and mass and flavor. They are real. They have taken on flesh and dwelt among us. They are us.

Yes, they are. You and I live lettered lives. We are words, and we live in a worded world. Every one of us is tied to divine voicings. Every one of us is by nature in conversation with God because we are the conversation of God. And he is always calling us to himself, always beckoning us to his beauty. As Adam McHugh put it, “we live in a universe with a face, a place of communion and conversation and intimacy.”

Words and Presence

Why should any of this matter to us as we go through our daily grind? If we truly want a thriving relationship with God, if we want to enjoy his presence, we need to start by grasping the truth that God’s presence is always offered to us through his speech. And that is the case because of who God is: He is the God who speaks.

This truth surfaces all throughout Scripture, but we overlook it so easily. Did you ever realize, for instance, that all of God’s promises to be with his people come through words? “Of course,” we think. “How else would promises come?” But there’s more to it: God’s worded promises of presence reveal that he is already there. His words confirm the reality. When God says to Noah or Abraham or Isaac or Jacob that he will establish his covenant with them, it’s established. It’s already there, because God is already there. The words confirm what is already true. When he says to Abraham, “my covenant is with you” (Gen. 17:4), it’s a done deal. God’s covenant is with Abraham because God is already there. When he says to Isaac, “Fear not, for I am with you” (Gen. 26:24), he is already present. He’s not arriving late on the scene like a disheveled parent. He is present before he speaks. God’s words are like a banner hanging above a city that he has already built. And so all throughout Scripture, the words of God mark the previously established presence of God. They are his presence. He is always with his words.

Think about what this means. Whenever we meet God’s word, we meet him. And that’s because his words cannot be detached from him. Why not? Ultimately, it’s because the Word is the second person of the Trinity. God’s words in history always stand upon the Word in eternity. Little words rest on the Great Word. That is why, as Vern Poythress writes,

The word of God manifests the presence of God. The presence of God is made strikingly evident by the fact that God’s word has the attributes of God. It has divine power, or omnipotence, as is evident from its power to bring forth created things that match its specification. It has divine wisdom, as is evident from the wisdom displayed in the completed creation. It has divine goodness, as is evident from the goodness of the created product (Gen. 1:31). God’s word shows us God. To put it another way, the word of God is God speaking, not a “something” detached and unrelated to God himself.

In short, God’s presence is always offered through his speech. It could be the speech of his created world, which he spoke into being and sustains by the word of his power (Gen. 1:1; Heb. 1:3)—a world that now “speaks” back to us about the character of God (Ps. 19:1–3; Rom. 1:20). I call this creation speech. Or it could be the special, saving speech of God in the Bible, which cuts us to the core and shows what’s really inside us (Heb. 4:12). I call this special speech. But both are a matter of God speaking, of God revealing himself. God shows he is present in the world and in our own lives by speaking. He is the sovereign Storyteller.

Above all, this means that God is present through his words, and we are meant to lean on them. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But the simplicity of that truth runs deep, like a waterway cutting through the rock to our measureless bottom. It addresses our most meaningful questions. Am I alone? Why am I here? Why do I feel gratitude or joy or anger or anxiety? How am I supposed to treat other people? Why do I keep chasing after things that disappoint me? How do I change? All of these questions and many more relate in some way to the presence of the Storytelling God.

Where are you in that story right now? What’s the conflict? What are your fatal flaws as a character? Where are you seeking redemption? What seems insurmountable? Don’t for a moment act as if you’re on your own, as if it’s all up to you. You and I are being written . . . right now.

It’s best we commune with the Storyteller.