Tons of questions are coming in about something you said in Texas about vocal cords. Joe from Dallas asks, "Could you please expand on your statement from the Linger Conference recently that God has no vocal cords?" Case from Dripping Springs, Texas asks the same thing. So does Dixie, a listener named Jordan, and others.

So what did you mean at the Linger Conference when you said that God has no vocal cords? Jesus said in John 4:24, "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth." And the context of that statement is that he's trying to help the woman at the well disconnect worship from location and buildings.

Like, should we worship in Jerusalem, or should we worship in this mountain? And one of Jesus' responses is, "God is spirit," which means he doesn't have a body, and therefore he doesn't have a location. And he certainly doesn't have any body parts, like vocal cords. And before the Son of God was incarnate, he was not incarnate.

The whole point of the incarnation is that it had to happen. He didn't have a body before. It's terrible to think of God as having a body before the incarnation. So in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God, and then that's John 1.

And then verse 14, "The Word became flesh." All right. At the incarnation, there's this mysterious union between the divine and human nature, and now it is not wrong to say God has a vocal cord, namely Jesus' vocal cords. But that's not what people have in mind when they talk about God speaking to them.

God in his essence has no body, has no vocal cords, and the point of laying stress on it was that when God communicates with the human being audibly, he is using some created agency, some created means, not his own vocal cords. That was the context. People were asking, "Do you ever hear God?" And part of my answer was, "He doesn't have any vocal cords." And they said, "Whoa, I hadn't thought about that answer before." We're not told how God spoke to Adam, Noah, Abraham, the prophets.

We just know God made his meaning plain with words that they discerned as originating in God, and we don't know how it happened. But we do know he doesn't have any vocal cords. Now, one of the reasons, Tony, for saying this is to elevate the scriptures. People have a fascination with voices and a dissatisfaction with the word written.

This is crazy. This is tragic. This is a great ploy of the devil. If all of God's verbal communications are mediated by some created agency, why would we prefer a heard agency over a seen agency? A word sounding in the ear over a word shining in the eye. Why?

It's crazy. Why indeed? Well, God has clearly preferred to communicate in writing to the mass of his people. Hence the law and the prophets in the Old Testament. Hence the gospels and the epistles in the New Testament. God prefers the mass of his children to know him through writing.

And that way is not less direct than if he spoke by some other agency. In fact, if we trust his wisdom that he makes no mistakes, this way of writing, this process of communicating with us, must be the best way to do it, since it's the way he did it.

So instead of craving auditory means, we should cherish the visual means that he has given us that can become auditory means, namely, read the Bible out loud. And you are not only seeing the word of God on the page, but hearing the very word of God. The thing that got the most laughter at this conference out of my mouth was after everybody was talking about hearing the voice of God, I said, you know, if you read the Bible out loud, you're hearing the voice of God.

And everybody laughed and I thought, I hope that laughter is discovery rather than scorn or silliness, because that is absolutely true. If you read the Bible out loud, you are hearing the voice of God, just as much as if he made some bush rattle and a voice come out of the bush, because wood is no superior to black ink on a page.

Yes, good. Thank you, Pastor John. And speaking of vocal cords, the craziness we call March Madness begins tomorrow in Dayton, Ohio. And on the Ask Pastor John podcast, we ask all the questions you want to ask but are afraid to ask, like, Pastor John, what makes March Madness so great?

We will do that tomorrow. I'm your host Tony Reinke. Be sure to fill out that bracket. Thank you. . . .