Here's a different breakdown of how to read the famous Isaiah 9.6 verse:
For a child is born unto us, a son is given unto us, and his government will rest on his shoulders, and he will be called
Wonders/Miracles
Counselor
Warrior
God
Father of Eternity
Commander/Captain/Champion of Peace
I'm not a Hebrew scholar but I understand that there's no punctuation and I've looked at how those words are used in other similar contexts.
But this gives me several new perspectives on the Christ!!
My wife and I recently visited a church for first responders—cops, EMTs, firefighters and so on. The pastor himself a former cop preached from Colossians 3. In this chapter, Paul exhorts Christians to “put to death” sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, covetousness and idolatry. Alright, these are not commonly used words for our usual behavior, so Paul gets more specific: anger, wrath, malice (hatred), slander and obscene talk, lying. We are told to “put off the old self” and “put on the new self.” For the first responders, the pastor said, it means we are to make a deliberate choice to put on the uniform and in terms of our faith and behavior, to put Christ’s image on with compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness (strength under control, as the pastor defined it) and patience, forgiveness and, above all, love “which binds everything in perfect harmony.”
Now I’ve not been a cop. I’ve had to exercise supervision over a homeless crowd, festival crowd and junior high students (perhaps the hardest to restrain). I can only imagine how tough it is: you head off to work with great intentions, putting on Christ’s image; you get to your station; go through debriefing…still bearing Christ’s heart and thinking, “Yes, I can see others as Christ sees them.” And then you hit the streets and you start getting responses from civilians that are not congruent with your intentions. You love them but they view you with fear, suspicion, annoyance, anger, etc.
It’s got to be hard. And so, I really appreciated the pastor applying this scripture to real work life. This is the only sermon I’ve heard (or I’ve forgotten some from way, way, way back before I was heavy into my business career) that dealt with work life. In this blog, I started writing a series trying to do just that: looking at scripture that should influence our business practices. I wrote two group-discussion books on the Sermon of the Mount with a focus on work (Jesus on Monday Morning); the website has a few short videos with each lesson in the first volume.
On a recent Hidden Brain podcast episode, they described the research and application of what our language usage reveals about ourselves. They spent a lot of time talking about pronouns and prepositions. The frequency of I/me/my versus it or we/us reveal some gender and personality differences. Personal pronouns show a desire to be connected with others while inanimate pronouns and passive voice reveal more task-/object-orientation. They found too that people who use I/me/my pronouns 6% of the time (versus a statistically significant lower average of 4%) showed signs of depression. (To be statistically significant at this small difference, there have be many hundreds or thousands of data.)
What was intriguing is how much (again) science might be catching up to the Bible. Christ said, “What comes out of the mouth reveals the heart…” (Matthew 15.18) Likewise, James echoes, “…No one can tame the tongue…from the same mouth come blessing and cursing…Things ought not to be this way. Does a fountain send out from the same opening both fresh and bitter water?…Nor can salt water produce fresh.” (James 3.8-12)
It’s interesting that the analysis of your speech and writing can reveal what you’re thinking, feeling and how much truth-telling and lying you’re doing. Over a period of time, the analysis can determine when your moods or personality inflections occur. (To be clear, the author stipulates his research is diagnostic not prognostic. A person is unable to change their mood or relationships by changing their language; the attempted change just might reveal deception, however….or a change in status. For example, people promoted into leadership positions most likely will change from singular pronouns to collective ones: I becomes we.)
