The twelve men came back into the camp at Kadesh after forty days away, and the whole of Israel came out to see them. Two of them were carrying a pole on their shoulders, and hanging from the pole was a single cluster of grapes so heavy that it took two grown men to bear it. Others carried pomegranates and figs. Children ran alongside. People who had eaten nothing but manna for more than a year stared at the fruit.
The land God had promised was real. It was even better than they had hoped. “Surely it floweth with milk and honey; and this is the fruit of it” (Numbers 13:27), the spies said, and the crowd must have murmured with excitement.
Then came the next word. Nevertheless. The people who lived there were strong. The cities were walled and very great. They had seen the sons of Anak, the giants. The mood in the camp shifted. You could feel it go cold.
One of the twelve, a man named Caleb, tried to stop the slide. He stilled the people and said, in effect, “Let us go up at once. We are well able.” But ten other voices drowned him out. Their report grew darker as they spoke. The land eats its inhabitants. The men there are giants. “We were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight” (Numbers 13:33).
That night, Scripture says, “all the congregation lifted up their voice, and cried; and the people wept that night” (Numbers 14:1). By morning they were talking about choosing a new leader to take them back to Egypt. By the afternoon they were ready to stone Caleb and Joshua.
A whole generation turned back from the edge of the promise. Not because of the giants. Because of a report. Words shaped by fear spread through a camp of perhaps two million people in a single night, and they did not recover.
This article is about the power of words, and about the difference between speech that is governed by fear and speech that is aligned with grace.
Death and life in the tongue
The book of Proverbs puts the matter starkly:
A man’s belly shall be satisfied with the fruit of his mouth; and with the increase of his lips shall he be filled. Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.
“Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” Solomon is telling us something true about how God made the world and how human beings live in it. Words carry weight. They build or they destroy. A man’s belly, the proverb says, is filled with the fruit of his mouth. What you say, you eventually eat.
Think of how this works in ordinary life. A father who tells his son every week that he will never amount to anything is planting something that will grow. A wife who speaks respect to her husband in front of the children is building something that will stand. A pastor who keeps telling his congregation that the economy will destroy them all is shaping how two hundred families face Monday morning. A friend who says, “I believe God has His hand on you,” on the night you wanted to give up, may change the direction of your life.
I hold this conviction strongly, and I believe Scripture does too. Your words are not neutral. God spoke the world into being, and He made us in His image as speaking creatures. When believers speak in agreement with God’s Word, something of His life is released through them. When we speak death, despair and fear, we take part in what we describe, and we will eat that fruit.
At the same time, we need to understand this rightly. The power of the tongue is not a kind of magic, in which words automatically create outcomes regardless of God or truth. The ten spies did not fail because they said the wrong syllables. Their words revealed and spread an unbelief that was already in their hearts. The writer to the Hebrews explains what really happened at Kadesh: “So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief” (Hebrews 3:19). Their words were the fruit of that unbelief, and the means by which it infected everyone else.
PunchlineSo the deeper question for us is, “What is shaping my words? Fear, or the grace and truth of God?”
What the ten spies actually said
It helps to look closely at the report, because it is more subtle than it first appears:
And Caleb stilled the people before Moses, and said, Let us go up at once, and possess it; for we are well able to overcome it. But the men that went up with him said, We be not able to go up against the people; for they are stronger than we. And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had searched unto the children of Israel, saying, The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature. And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.
Notice that much of what the ten spies said was factually accurate. The land really did flow with milk and honey. The cities really were walled. The sons of Anak really were large. Caleb did not dispute any of that. He had seen the same giants and the same walls.
The difference lay in the conclusion, and in who was left out of the picture. The ten said, “We be not able to go up against the people; for they are stronger than we.” They measured the giants against themselves. God did not appear anywhere in their calculation. Caleb measured the giants against the God who had brought them out of Egypt, split the Red Sea and fed them every morning from heaven.
Then the ten went further. Scripture says, “they brought up an evil report of the land” (Numbers 13:32). The Hebrew word suggests a slanderous report, a story told in a way designed to defame. They began to exaggerate. The land became one that “eateth up the inhabitants thereof.” All the people became giants. Fear always enlarges the threat.
And fear always shrinks the self. “We were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” Look at the order. First they saw themselves as grasshoppers. Then they assumed everyone else saw them that way too. They never asked the giants what they thought. Forty years later, Rahab in Jericho would tell two other spies that the inhabitants of the land had been terrified of Israel the whole time (Joshua 2:9-11). The grasshopper picture was entirely self-made. Fear had rewritten their identity.
Joshua and Caleb answered the people with a different kind of speech:
And Joshua the son of Nun, and Caleb the son of Jephunneh, which were of them that searched the land, rent their clothes: And they spake unto all the company of the children of Israel, saying, The land, which we passed through to search it, is an exceeding good land. If the LORD delight in us, then he will bring us into this land, and give it us; a land which floweth with milk and honey. Only rebel not ye against the LORD , neither fear ye the people of the land; for they are bread for us: their defence is departed from them, and the LORD is with us: fear them not.
“If the LORD delight in us, then he will bring us into this land.” “Their defence is departed from them, and the LORD is with us: fear them not.” They spoke the same facts about walls and giants, and then they spoke the larger fact: the Lord is with us. That is what it means for words to align with grace. Grace does not deny the giants. It refuses to leave God out of the description.
God’s verdict on that night is sobering. “As truly as I live, saith the LORD, as ye have spoken in mine ears, so will I do to you” (Numbers 14:28). They had said, “would God we had died in this wilderness!” (Numbers 14:2), and that is what happened. They had said their children would become prey, and God answered, “But your little ones, which ye said should be a prey, them will I bring in” (Numbers 14:31). The very children they had used as an excuse for fear were the ones who inherited the promise.
And Caleb? God said, “But my servant Caleb, because he had another spirit with him, and hath followed me fully, him will I bring into the land whereinto he went” (Numbers 14:24). Another spirit. His words came from a different place.
NuggetGrace does not deny the giants. It refuses to leave God out of the description.
Fear can be brought into prayer
Now we must be careful, because some believers have taken the lesson of the spies and concluded that they must never admit to being afraid. If death and life are in the tongue, they reason, then saying “I am frightened” might bring disaster. So they hide their fear from God, from their friends and even from themselves.
The Psalms show us a better way:
What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee. In God I will praise his word, in God I have put my trust; I will not fear what flesh can do unto me.
David wrote this psalm when the Philistines had seized him in Gath. He was in real danger. And he says, “What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.” He admits the fear. He names the time when it comes. And then, in that very time, he directs his trust toward God.
Notice that he does not wait for the fear to disappear before he trusts. Trust is practised at the moment fear appears. A few verses later he says to God, “put thou my tears into thy bottle” (Psalm 56:8). Tears and confidence appear in the same conversation. The Word gives us room to tell the truth about our need while directing our hope toward the Lord.
This matters because an honest acknowledgement of fear to God is not a sovereign command over the future. When you say, “Father, I am afraid of this test result,” you are praying. That is a world away from the ten spies, who never brought their fear to God at all. They broadcast it through the camp as a settled conclusion.
So say, “Father, I am afraid.” Then stay before Him long enough to receive the truth that answers the fear. The Lord is with us. Fear them not. Let your fear become the doorway to a prayer.
The same care should shape how we respond to others. A frightened child needs protection and patient truth before anything else. A distressed adult may need someone to listen before offering a correction. We must not teach people that concealment is the highest form of faith. Words that are aligned with grace actually become more honest, because they no longer have to protect a false appearance of being unshakeable.
The words you speak about yourself
Fear has a particular voice when it speaks about us. It speaks in sweeping sentences. I always ruin things. Nothing good will ever come from me. I am useless. This always happens to me. One wrong decision becomes a verdict on the whole person, and by the time the sentence has been repeated a few times, a single failure has become an account of an entire future.
PunchlineThat is exactly the grasshopper sentence. We were in our own sight as grasshoppers. It is an identity statement produced by fear.
Grace gives you different words, because grace has given you a different identity. Paul writes, “For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear” (Romans 8:15). He tells Timothy that God has given us a spirit “of power, and of love, and of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7). You are a child of God. The Spirit of adoption is in you, crying “Abba, Father.” That truth has the right to shape the sentences you say about yourself.
This does not mean pretending you never fail. Grace gives us reason to speak more truthfully, not less. You may have done wrong and need to repent. You also belong to Christ and have real help for change. The gospel does not make you choose between acknowledging the conduct and receiving hope.
So compare two sentences. I am hopeless and nothing will ever change. And: I answered my wife harshly this morning. I need to apologise and ask God to help me with my temper. The second sentence is more honest, because it is specific. It is also more hopeful, because it leaves room for repentance and change. The first sentence sounds humble, but it is actually a way of avoiding the real work of repair. If you are hopeless, there is no point apologising. Fear’s sweeping verdicts often protect us from the specific obedience grace is asking for.
Or consider a man I know who lost his job. The situation was serious. The family needed to make immediate changes. Fear wanted him to come home and say, “We are finished. We will lose the house. The children will have to leave school.” But that was not true, and saying it would have filled the house with panic. Grace did not ask him to pretend either. It did not require him to announce that God would give him a better job by the end of the month, because God had not told him that.
What he actually said to his family was something like this: “I have lost my job. Things will be tight for a while, and we will all need to make some changes. But God has not stopped being our Father, and we are going to pray about this together and trust Him.” Then they prayed. That kind of speech is useful because people can respond to it. Accurate information allows responsible action. Hope gives courage for the action. Exaggeration may get attention, but it makes the next decision harder to judge wisely.
Words that minister grace
When Paul describes the new life in Christ, he spends a remarkable amount of time on speech:
Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers. And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.
“Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth.” The word corrupt in the Greek is the word used for rotten fruit or fish that has gone bad. Jesus uses the same word for the corrupt tree that brings forth evil fruit (Matthew 7:17). Paul is saying: do not let anything rotten come out of your mouth. Words that are rotten spread decay in the people who hear them.
Instead, speak “that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers.” Edifying means building up, the way a builder raises a house. And the goal is to minister grace to those who hear. Your words can actually carry grace into another person’s life. That is an extraordinary privilege.
This gives us a practical test that goes deeper than whether a sentence sounds positive. Is it true? Is it needed? Will it help the person who hears it respond well? A flattering lie may sound pleasant while harming the listener. A careful correction may be uncomfortable while serving genuine love.
It also helps us examine why we are speaking. Fear often seeks immediate relief for the speaker. We exaggerate a problem to make others respond quickly. We accuse someone before checking what actually happened. We forward the alarming WhatsApp message without asking whether it is true. The sentence releases pressure from us while placing confusion or injury on the hearer. That is precisely what the ten spies did. Their report relieved their own fear by spreading it.
Grace gives room to pause. We can ask a question before assigning a motive. We can choose a private conversation instead of a public correction. We can tell the truth without adding the detail that merely humiliates.
Correction is not excluded. Sometimes a person needs to hear that a decision is dishonest or harmful. The question is how the truth can be delivered faithfully and usefully. Pleasant words that conceal danger do not become gracious just because they avoid discomfort.
And notice what comes in the middle of the passage: “And grieve not the holy Spirit of God.” Paul places that warning right between corrupt speech and bitterness, wrath and evil speaking. The Holy Spirit is grieved by rotten words. Then the passage ends with the foundation for all gracious speech: “forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” We speak grace because we have received it.
Seasoned with salt
Paul gives a similar instruction to the Colossians, this time about how we speak to people outside the church:
Walk in wisdom toward them that are without, redeeming the time. Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.
“Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt.” Grace is the dominant note. Alway. Not only on Sundays, not only when we feel kind, not only with people who agree with us.
Grace is also seasoned with salt. In the ancient world, as in many Nigerian kitchens today, salt did two things. It preserved food from going bad, and it gave food flavour. Gracious speech has substance. It keeps things from rotting. It makes the truth palatable without diluting it.
And Paul gives the purpose: “that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.” Every man. Different people need different answers. The colleague who mocks your faith at lunch needs a different word from the neighbour whose child is in hospital. Gracious speech pays attention to the person in front of you. It is the opposite of fear, which tends to repeat the same anxious script to everyone.
There will also be times when grace needs to correct our own words. I spoke unfairly. I gave you an impression I cannot support. I should have listened before answering. Those sentences restore credibility, because the speaker is no longer asking every conversation to defend a flawless image. A believer who can say “I was wrong” is a believer whose “God is faithful” will be taken seriously.
The wisdom from above
James is perhaps the most searching writer in the New Testament on the subject of the tongue. He says it is like a small bit that turns a horse, a small rudder that steers a great ship, a small spark that sets a whole forest alight. And he names the problem honestly: “Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be” (James 3:10).
Then he turns to the source. He contrasts a wisdom that is earthly and full of envy and strife with another kind:
But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace.
“The wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits.” That is a description of what words sound like when they come from heaven. They are pure, without hidden agendas. They make peace. They are gentle. They can be reasoned with. They are full of mercy.
This means we should examine the spirit of our words as well as their vocabulary. Religious language can still carry envy, contempt or the wish to dominate. A sentence does not become gracious just because it contains a Bible verse. And this matters especially in what some believers call declarations made about other people. We are not authorised to curse someone because they have disappointed us or declined an arrangement we wanted. We do not “decree” calamity over a former business partner or a rival in the church. The Lord whose name we confess taught us to bless those who curse us. Our speech remains under His authority.
So choose one ordinary change, rather than a dramatic promise to control every word from now on. Replace an exaggerated prediction with an accurate statement. Bring a fear into prayer before circulating it as a certainty. Offer an apology without a long speech defending why the wrong was understandable. Speak one sentence of genuine encouragement to someone who is about to give up. These may not sound impressive. But they can make a home, a ministry or an office more truthful, and they give grace a voice that people can trust.
Forty-five years after that night at Kadesh, an old man stood in front of Joshua at Gilgal. The wilderness generation was gone. Every one of the ten spies had died. The people who had wept and wanted to go back to Egypt were buried in the sand. Israel was finally in the land, and it was being divided among the tribes.
Caleb was eighty-five. He reminded Joshua of what had happened at Kadesh, and said of his report all those years ago, “I brought him word again as it was in mine heart” (Joshua 14:7). His words had come from a heart that trusted God. And then he made a request:
And now, behold, the LORD hath kept me alive, as he said, these forty and five years, even since the LORD spake this word unto Moses, while the children of Israel wandered in the wilderness: and now, lo, I am this day fourscore and five years old. As yet I am as strong this day as I was in the day that Moses sent me: as my strength was then, even so is my strength now, for war, both to go out, and to come in. Now therefore give me this mountain, whereof the LORD spake in that day; for thou heardest in that day how the Anakims were there, and that the cities were great and fenced: if so be the LORD will be with me, then I shall be able to drive them out, as the LORD said.
“Give me this mountain.” Not a quiet piece of flat land near the river. The hill country of Hebron, where the sons of Anak still lived. The very giants who had terrified the ten. At eighty-five, Caleb asked for the hardest assignment in the land, and he spoke exactly as he had spoken at forty: “if so be the LORD will be with me, then I shall be able to drive them out.”
He had been saying the same thing for forty-five years. Through the whole wilderness, while a generation died around him because of a fearful report, Caleb had kept his words aligned with what God had said. And he went up and took Hebron.
You will face your own Kadesh moments. You will see walls and giants, and fear will offer you its report. It will tell you that you are a grasshopper. It will invite you to spread that report to everyone around you. In those moments, you may tell God honestly that you are afraid. But let the final word on your lips be the word of grace: the Lord is with us. Fear them not.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Which “grasshopper sentences” do you tend to repeat about yourself? Where did they come from?
- What is the difference between telling God honestly that you are afraid and spreading a fearful report to others?
- Think of a recent conversation. Did your words “minister grace unto the hearers”? What would have made them more gracious, or more truthful?
- Where might you need speech that is “seasoned with salt,” with more substance or honesty, rather than simply being pleasant?
- What “mountain” might God be inviting you to speak about with Caleb’s spirit?
This Week
This week, listen carefully to the sentences you say about yourself, your future and other people. Each evening, write down one sentence you spoke that was shaped by fear. Underneath it, write a sentence that tells the same truth but includes God, the way Joshua and Caleb did: “the LORD is with us.” Say the new sentence aloud. Then choose one person each day to whom you will speak a deliberate word of encouragement that ministers grace.
A Prayer
Father, thank You that You have not given me the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. Forgive me for the times my words have spread fear, enlarged the giants and shrunk me into a grasshopper. Forgive me for the rotten words that have grieved Your Holy Spirit and wounded others. Give me another spirit, like Caleb. When I am afraid, teach me to trust You and to say so honestly. Let my speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt. Let my words minister grace to those who hear them. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.