<p>3:8 <i>But the tongue no one can tame; it is a restless evil, it is full of deadly poison</i>- our pets are more obedient to us than our tongues. The Greek for &quot;mankind&quot; well describes the reasoning ability of our human nature that can apparently tame animal instincts. &quot;Man&quot; alone can imply human, semi-spiritual reasoning- e.g. &quot;I speak (reason) after the manner of men&quot;, or &quot;I am speaking in human terms&quot; (N.I.V.) in Rom. 6:19. &quot;Kind&quot; carries the idea of growth by germination.<br />But rather than being progressively tamed, human nature is in a progressive downward spiral to death if it goes unchecked (1:14,15). The deception of our natural thinking is that to a limited extent it can be spiritually sound: &quot;The Gentiles... do by nature the things contained in the law&quot; (Rom. 2:14), &quot;nature itself&quot; teaches the spiritual principles governing hair length (1 Cor. 11:14). Like James' ecclesia, it is possible to live in the Truth adhering to correct doctrine- &quot;the faith&quot;- and make a half-hearted attempt to develop a spiritual mind to control our actions in our own strength. James argues for a totality of success in our spiritual lives; he is saying that any striving for spiritual development based on our natural reasoning will fail, ultimately, to develop the high standard of being totally spiritual that James is setting. He holds up Abraham and Rahab as examples of those who did reach a certain point of fullness of faith and subsequent justification with God, showing that such a state is not impossible for us. Jude 10,12 describes the Judaizers speaking &quot;great swelling words...which they know naturally&quot; at the communion service (&quot;feast of charity&quot;). This again suggests that James' warning about using natural wisdom- i.e. from within our own nature- to control the ecclesial body and our own lives is aimed at a group of false teachers within the ecclesia who were controlling the ecclesia and encouraging its members to control themselves by relying on the mental abilities of human nature, rather than on the wisdom from the word filling the mind. &quot;But the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison&quot; (v.8).</p><p>The likening of &quot;the tongue&quot; to a deadly snake invites comparison with the serpent in Eden, and therefore with the Judaizers, who &quot;as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty&quot; were enticing Christians away &quot;from the simplicity which is in Christ&quot; by preaching &quot;another Gospel&quot; based on &quot;another Spirit&quot;- i.e. of the human spirit or mind, as opposed to the Holy Spirit which was in the word of the true Gospel (2 Cor. 11:3,4). The serpent in Eden is elsewhere a symbol of the Jewish system. The serpent was to be <i>destroyed</i>, not just tamed, by the seed of the woman. The serpent/ devil being in our natural mind, our tongue must be regarded by us as a rampant snake, seeing that it reflects our thoughts. The following verse 9 contains another allusion to early Genesis. By the tongue, the man made in God's similitude is cursed, due to the serpent's tongue. Through the unbridled tongue and also the influence of the Judaist serpent, the new creation of believers could be cursed, as they can be today too. The tongue cannot be tamed by man; the emphasis being on the word &quot;man&quot;. Yet in 1:26 we saw that the mark of a true believer influenced by the word is that he <i>can </i>bridle his tongue. Thus here James is saying that &quot;no man&quot; in the sense of the natural man, a reliance on human strength, can control the tongue. There must be a connection with the demoniac Legion whom no man could tame (Mk. 5:4)- perhaps in that he also represented the Jewish system. There is also an echo here of Paul's description of how human nature is so impossible for the natural man to control: &quot;The carnal mind... is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be... in my flesh dwelleth no good thing... how to perform that which is good I find not&quot; (Rom. 8:7; 7:18). Thus it is not a question of changing the carnal mind by the strength of the carnal mind; Paul says that is impossible; but of creating a &quot;new man&quot; by a spirit or power of reasoning outside the natural man. If the spirit of man is no use, the only other source of power is God's Holy Spirit. The parallels between the untamable nature of the tongue and that of our evil thinking as described in Romans shows how exactly our words are to be equated with the thinking of our heart. The tongue is &quot;an unruly evil&quot;; Strong defines &quot;unruly&quot; as 'unrestrainable', which fits in with the exposition offered above.</p>