The Arsonist and the Assassin Text: Proverbs 16:28
Introduction: Words as Weapons
We live in a talkative age, an age drowning in words. We text, we post, we comment, we broadcast our every fleeting thought to the world as though it were golden. But in our torrent of communication, we have forgotten a fundamental biblical truth: words have weight. Words do things. Words are not harmless little puffs of air; they are either instruments of creation and blessing, or they are weapons of mass destruction. God spoke, and the universe leaped into existence. The serpent spoke, and paradise was lost. The stakes could not be higher.
The book of Proverbs is intensely practical about this reality. It does not treat sins of the tongue as minor infractions, as unfortunate slips of etiquette. It treats them as high crimes against the created order, as treason against the God who is the Word. Our text today isolates two particularly destructive agents in this war of words: the perverse man who starts fires and the whisperer who assassinates friendships. These are not two different people, but rather two tactics employed by the same kind of corrupt heart.
We must understand that what the Bible describes here is not simply "being negative" or "saying unkind things." It is describing a spiritual pathology, a deep-seated perversion of the soul that manifests itself in verbal sabotage. This is spiritual warfare conducted with syllables and sentences. The perverse man and the whisperer are foot soldiers of the Accuser, Satan, whose native tongue is the lie. Their goal, whether they consciously know it or not, is to dismantle the peace, trust, and fellowship that God designed for human community. They are agents of chaos, seeking to drag God's orderly world back into a state of tohu wa-bohu, formless and void, through the poison of their speech.
And so, we must approach this text with the gravity it deserves. This is not a quaint piece of fireside wisdom. It is a field manual for identifying and resisting a deadly enemy that seeks to infiltrate our homes, our friendships, and most especially, our churches.
The Text
A perverse man spreads strife,
And a whisperer separates close companions.
(Proverbs 16:28 LSB)
The Fire-Starter (v. 28a)
The first half of the verse identifies the source of the problem:
"A perverse man spreads strife..." (Proverbs 16:28a)
The key to understanding this is the word "perverse." The Hebrew here points to something that is twisted, distorted, turned aside from the straight path. This is not a man who simply has a bad day or occasionally misspeaks. This is a man whose entire orientation is bent away from God's reality. His thinking is crooked, his desires are crooked, and therefore his speech is crooked. He sees the world through a warped lens of envy, bitterness, pride, and malice. He is the opposite of the man described in Psalm 1, who delights in the law of the Lord. This man delights in crookedness.
And what does this internal perversion produce? It "spreads strife." He is a sower of discord. The image is agricultural. He goes out into the field of a family, a church, or a community, and he deliberately broadcasts seeds of conflict. He is a spiritual arsonist. He looks for dry tinder, a small misunderstanding, a minor offense, and he applies the spark of his twisted words until a relational wildfire is raging. He doesn't seek peace; he feeds on conflict. Strife is his native element.
How does he do this? He might use exaggeration, twisting a small fault into a monstrous crime. He might use insinuation, planting a seed of doubt with a carefully phrased question. "I'm not saying he's lazy, but have you noticed who always leaves first?" He might play the victim, misrepresenting events to rally people to his own bitter cause. He is a master of framing the narrative in a way that makes conflict inevitable. He thrives in the chaos he creates because it validates the twisted world inside his own heart. A man of peace is a threat to him, because peace exposes his perversion for what it is.
This is why the New Testament lists strife and dissensions alongside things like idolatry and sorcery as works of the flesh (Galatians 5:20). To sow strife is to do the devil's work. It is an attempt to de-create God's work of building a people for Himself, a people marked by unity and love. The perverse man is an anti-creator, a demolitions expert in the kingdom of God.
The Friendship-Assassin (v. 28b)
The second half of the verse gives us the specific methodology of this perverse man, his preferred weapon.
"...And a whisperer separates close companions." (Proverbs 16:28b LSB)
Here the arsonist becomes an assassin. The "whisperer" is the tale-bearer, the gossip. The word in Hebrew has the sense of murmuring or muttering. It is speech that is done in secret, in corners, away from the ear of the person being discussed. It is inherently cowardly. The whisperer would never say to a man's face what he will gladly say behind his back.
And what is the effect of this whispering? It "separates close companions." It targets the most precious of human bonds. The word for "close companions" here can even mean a chief, a leader, or the closest of allies. The whisperer drives a wedge into the heart of deep friendships, marriages, and church covenants. He is a relational terrorist.
His weapon is the secret report, the morsel of "information" that sounds so juicy and important. "I probably shouldn't tell you this, but you deserve to know..." And with that phrase, the poison is injected. He shares a truth out of context, or a half-truth, or an outright lie, but he does it under the guise of concern. This is what makes the whisperer so deadly. He often cloaks his malice in the language of piety. He is not "gossiping," you see, he is "sharing a prayer request." He is not slandering, he is "processing" his concerns with a trusted friend.
This whispering works by destroying trust. Once the seed of suspicion is planted in a friend's mind, everything the other friend does is interpreted through that new, dark filter. The whisperer murders relationships by making one friend believe the worst about the other. He takes two people who loved and trusted each other and turns them into strangers, or worse, enemies. And he often walks away with clean hands, watching the destruction from a distance, having set the whole thing in motion with a few well-placed, cowardly words.
We must have a zero-tolerance policy for this kind of talk. When someone comes to you with a whisper about another, you have a duty to stop it cold. You must ask them, "Have you spoken to the person about this directly? Why are you telling me?" An angry face drives away a backbiting tongue (Proverbs 25:23). We are to be extinguishers of these fires, not amplifiers.
The Gospel Cure for a Poisoned Tongue
So, what is the answer to this perverse man, this whisperer? Is it just to try harder to be nice? Is it to bite our tongues and follow a set of rules? No, the problem is far deeper than that. The problem, as Jesus said, is not what goes into a man but what comes out of him, for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks (Matthew 12:34).
The perverse man speaks perversity because his heart is perverse. The whisperer assassinates relationships because he has murder in his heart. The only cure for a corrupt heart is a new heart. The only cure for a perverse man is to be born again.
The gospel is the ultimate answer to the sin of the tongue because it deals with the root of the problem. First, the gospel confronts us with the ultimate Slanderer, Satan, who accused Job before God, and who accuses us before God day and night. And it confronts us with our own guilt. We have all participated in this kind of talk. We have all been the whisperer. We have all spread strife. Our words have condemned us.
But then the gospel shows us the ultimate Word, Jesus Christ, the Logos made flesh. He is the one who never spoke a perverse word, who never whispered a slander. And yet, He was slandered, accused, and condemned by the false testimony of perverse men. The lies of men sent the Truth Himself to the cross.
And on that cross, He took the judgment for all our wicked words. He absorbed the strife we created. He died to reconcile us, who were enemies of God, making us close companions of the Father. He takes our perverse, twisted hearts and gives us new hearts, hearts that love the truth, hearts that desire peace, hearts that want to build up rather than tear down.
The Christian, therefore, is one who has been re-tuned. Our speech is to be the opposite of the whisperer's. Where he separates, we are to be peacemakers. Where he spreads strife, we are to spread the gospel of reconciliation. Our words are no longer to be weapons for the Accuser, but instruments for the Redeemer. God gives us His Holy Spirit so that we might bear His fruit, and that fruit includes peace, patience, kindness, and goodness (Galatians 5:22-23). A heart filled with that Spirit cannot, for long, be a source of perverse strife and whispered poison. The gospel changes what we love, and therefore, it changes what we say.