What is God's Word? How do we recognize divine speech? On a literal level, we all have some way of articulating "divinity" and corresponding characteristics. So we say that "truth confirms truth" and "darkness cannot dwell in light". So most people would read the following as appealing to the purest form of monotheistic worship:
Also people hear the speeches of Jesus as righteous morality, and recognize the righteous indignation of Moses and his mottled tribes of Jews. We implicitly are ordering things in terms of a universal sense of right and wrong. Though few people will try to tether all these aspects into a coherent theology, this isn't really necessary. The orientation of the heart towards the LORD our God is what expresses the intention of all actions and is the seed of all behaviour. Our theology is written on our hearts.10 David praised the LORD in the presence of the whole assembly, saying,
"Praise be to you, O LORD,
God of our father Israel,
from everlasting to everlasting.
11 Yours, O LORD, is the greatness and the power
and the glory and the majesty and the splendor,
for everything in heaven and earth is yours.
Yours, O LORD, is the kingdom;
you are exalted as head over all.
12 Wealth and honor come from you;
you are the ruler of all things.
In your hands are strength and power
to exalt and give strength to all.
13 Now, our God, we give you thanks,
and praise your glorious name.
14 "But who am I, and who are my people, that we should be able to give as generously as this? Everything comes from you, and we have given you only what comes from your hand. 15 We are aliens and strangers in your sight, as were all our forefathers. Our days on earth are like a shadow, without hope. 16 O LORD our God, as for all this abundance that we have provided for building you a temple for your Holy Name, it comes from your hand, and all of it belongs to you. 17 I know, my God, that you test the heart and are pleased with integrity. All these things have I given willingly and with honest intent. And now I have seen with joy how willingly your people who are here have given to you. 18 O LORD, God of our fathers Abraham, Isaac and Israel, keep this desire in the hearts of your people forever, and keep their hearts loyal to you. 19 And give my son Solomon the wholehearted devotion to keep your commands, requirements and decrees and to do everything to build the palatial structure for which I have provided."
20 Then David said to the whole assembly, "Praise the LORD your God." So they all praised the LORD, the God of their fathers; they bowed low and fell prostrate before the LORD and the king.
Our nature is earth. We are made of the stuff of this planet. "Stardust" I think it was once (regrettably) termed.
Our thoughts and aspirations are expressed by this earthly stuff. We can plainly see that now. It doesn't help unravel what we are, exactly, since people have generally tackled this subject from a psychological perspective the material explanation has been implied all along. All we can deal with is meaning. Chemicals innately have meaning, because we recognize meaning (even when we imagine something unreal). And we are earth.So our hearts and our earthly bodies are the only available channels for perceiving God's "Word". Even to begin to unravel what is meant by that epithet we have to explore the psychology of semetic tribes for about three thousand years. At least we know for certain that God's word will affect our sense of self in relation to the world around us. And it will speak the truth. Those are minimum requirements, I think most of us would agree. God's Word is an ordering of truth that conforms to reality and also conforms us to a truer sense of real things like: morality, existence, worship, recreation, family, war, justice, etc. People have always sought God's Word functionally to be the revelation of who or what they ought to be.
The medium of "Word" implies a literal and emotional/psychological (ironic) under/overtone. A double message. The letter of the law and the spirit of the law. This is what is achieved in "great" literature. And why do we recognize these works except that they express to us the experience of being what we are meant to be. Because that's ultimately what we are all revolving around: as a consequence of being earth that thinks, we are bound by wondering what that means. That's literally what is the case. All thought is sprung from self-recognizance.
So God's Word, if it is to be worthy of praise, indeed to embody praise of The Most High, will necessarily speak only the truth and be able to convey this both literally and emotionally (to the mind and to the heart, to the letter of the law and the spirit of the law) and it will reveal to us our Way of Life.
We may have to quibble about what these definitions mean precisely, but I think if we were to aspire to represent the fullness of humanity in a literal fashion we have to aim to represent the duality of our existence: account for the range of experience and offer emotional counsel to find a center/peace/unity/justification/foundation amidst our experience. The necessary consequence of being aware of ourselves is to be confounded by the lack of awareness of what we ought to be doing and to be inspired by the freedom this entails. God's Word is what we reflect upon when we want to know what this "being human" relies upon and aspires to.
Don't you wonder why God favoured the prophets from semetic lands to convey pure monotheistic worship to the people of the earth? Or, put differently, don't you wonder why religious affectation has preserved specific prophetic legacies? It isn't just pure chance. Human civilization is too frivolous, even when it is very conservative, for it just to be a coincidence that the Jews were able to preserve their ideals of monotheism amidst their pagan surroundings. I am not even speaking of "divine intervention" as if I am implying some direct hand of God action (I'm not denying it either, it just isn't a factor in my argument). I mean that the ideas themselves and the language to convey it were the same soil from which civilization springs. The semetic languages brought meaning to the world in a profound way. People experiencing the inception of written thought were first beginning to manipulate the reflexive "I/thou" in an external manner. There is evidence that this profoundly changes conscious perception of the self and surroundings.
To name something - for it to be conceived of literally - was for it to begin its existence. Before this it was meaninglessness - pure blackness. It could not be represented in thought, it could only be experienced. That's the nature of word.
So the form of language is directly connected to self-recognizance. To tie this back into the preservation of semetic languages, we recognize in them the ability to structure the letter and spirit of the law as necessary consequences of one another. By this I mean that emotional tethers are...essentially...hyperlinked into the text in a literal capacity. Our hearts connect the words that our mind recognizes are related. In this way the spirit of the law is embodied in the letter of the law. That's how metaphor is construed. In english, metaphor is much more often only represented ironically. As the english language became more articulate, this became less of an impediment. But that same capacity is available is a more rudimentary manner in the semetic language group. Of course, that rudimentary nature is also the power. It's much more profound to allude to rather than to expound. That's the key to emotionally charging the text. The degree to which that is accomplished should be a strong indicator of God's Word. Not the only indicator, but the lack of this feature is detrimental.
A prophet of God won't necessarily be constrained by semetic speech. God's Word is expressed in many many forms. But the prophetic tradition that has been sketched down in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim texts is in agreement about the meaning of prophecy - to call people into a proper relationship with their Creator. We are all here to explore the meaning of our existence. That is necessarily how we function. We are earth, that is our nature. So we function within the Way of Life that has been decreed on Earth. Our place and our purpose, with respect to our surroundings, is to be at peace with it. Life has not persisted in some form or other for four billion years because it is in disharmony as a whole. The message is that we cannot stand outside of Unity for long before our iniquity destroys us. That is what God's Word necessarily reveals through the prophets. It is what is tethered through the speech of prophecy. We are to recognize our place in the earth on a literal and emotional/spiritual level. That is what made the tribes of semetic language so successful on Earth, because they were quite literally more in tune with God's Word. Of course "chance" has a lot to do with it (God's "Will", so to speak...and I do speak that way, but I am only observing the function here, not the intention). But truth confirms truth and light is distinct from darkness. The words of the prophets of Israel rings true to this day for a reason. ...and most of us don't even have that tether to the emotional core.
What do you think we would find if we looked for it?
Peace,
-sgttomas
I read a story to my son that included this kind of truth, and he said, "I understood that. I just can't explain what I understood." Pretty profound for a 10-year-old, methinks. 
