I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving!
Is your Christmas tree up yet?
(If not, don't worry... Neither is ours!)
As we enter the season of Advent—the time of year when we anticipate the coming of Jesus—I'd like to do a little series. Specifically, I want us to look at the names of Jesus found in the Old Testament book of Isaiah.
Isaiah was a prophet who lived about 800 years before Jesus. It was a bleak time for Israel. The Assyrian army was closing in on them, and Isaiah wasn't offering much hope to his people! If you read Isaiah 8, you get a sense of the total despair the people felt. It's so hopeless that when Isaiah has a son, God tells him, "Before this child is old enough to say 'Papa' or 'Mama,' the king of Assyria will carry away both the abundance of Damascus and the riches of Samaria" (8:4).
That's not the kind of thing you'd be eager to put on a birth announcement! My guess is Mr. & Mrs. Isaiah didn't get too many gifts at their baby shower...
But then, in the middle of all that gloom, Isaiah speaks this refreshing word of hope:
For a child is born to us,
a son is given to us.
The government will rest on his shoulders.
And he will be called:
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
His government and its peace
will never end.
He will rule with fairness and justice from the throne of his ancestor David
for all eternity.
The passionate commitment of the Lord of Heaven's Armies
will make this happen! (9:6-7)
A child would be born who would usher in a reign of peace. A helpless baby would be Israel's—and the world's—only hope.
Advent is about remembering the past and also anticipating the future. We reflect on Jesus' first arrival when he broke into this world in a smelly, lowly stable of all places. But we also await the day Jesus will return to usher in his beautiful kingdom. Like Isaiah's original audience, we desperately need a word of hope. We need to remember the child who came to save us from the terrible things we do to each other.
Isaiah gives this child four names. They are not really "proper names" but more like descriptions of his character. Over the next four weeks, we will briefly explore each name. This week, we'll start with Wonderful Counselor.
What does the word "wonderful" mean to you?
In Isaiah's context, the word means incomprehensible or extraordinary. It describes something so full of wonder that it boggles the mind!
We rarely use the word in that way. We typically use it as a synonym for good, great, or nice. Case in point: I started this email by saying I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. You may have had a good Thanksgiving, maybe even a great one. But chances are, the turkey you gobbled down didn't leave you in such a state of wonder that it felt like your head would explode. (If it did, I want to come over to your house for Thanksgiving dinner next year!)
The wisdom that Jesus offers us is so wonderful it can be hard to wrap our minds around. We see this in the Bible when people would be amazed at the things he taught. He challenged his disciples to see the world in new ways and still challenges us to do the same today.
But while Jesus the Wonderful Counselor sounds, well, wonderful, it's not really what I want, if I'm honest. On most days, I want Jesus the Practical Problem-Solver.
I've gone to counselors on and off over the past 12 years of my life. It's good to have a trained professional by your side as you work through your issues. But a counselor's job isn't to give you simple answers to all your problems. It's to help you see what's lying underneath the surface.
Imagine if I went to a counselor and said, "My marriage is crumbling and my wife doesn't even like me anymore. Give me a list of things I can do right now to fix it!" The counselor could just rattle off a list of things like...
Buy her flowers.
Take her on more dates.
Listen more.
Do the dishes.
And sure, maybe doing those things might help a little. But checking things off a list won't lead to lasting change. It's like trying to slap a Band-Aid on a huge leak of a ship. We're still sinking!
Instead, a good counselor will slow down. She'll put my frantic question aside for a moment and invite me to dig deeper. What caused this marriage to start falling apart in the first place? It will be a slow, painful process. But if I engage with it, it has the potential to lead to lasting change.
This is what Jesus does for us on a much grander scale.
So many times in my life, I've wanted simple answers from Jesus. Just tell me what to do next! And sometimes, he does have a specific direction he wants me to go in. But most of the time, as I pray and read the Gospels, I sense he is more concerned with who I'm becoming along the way.
When people asked Jesus questions, he rarely gave straightforward answers. He would usually tell a story in response or throw a question back at them.
When a lawyer asked Jesus to give him clear boundaries about who his neighbor was, Jesus redefined the term.
When a group of Pharisees asked Jesus how they should deal with someone else's sin, Jesus forced them to look at their own.
They wanted simple answers. But Jesus challenged them to see things from a different perspective.
This is mind-boggling counsel!
In John 6, Jesus feeds 5,000 people, and the crowd goes wild for him. They had a problem, and he solved it. He was Jesus the Practical Problem-Solver!
But then he started saying some strange things. He called himself the true bread of life and said anyone who ate this bread would live forever. This was less practical, and people started turning around and leaving. So Jesus looks at his twelve closest followers and asks if they want to leave too. And I love Peter's response:
"Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words that give eternal life. We believe, and we know you are the Holy One of God." (John 6:68-69, NLT)
Jesus' words boggled Peter's mind. We know that Peter misunderstood Jesus so many times. But at the end of the day, Peter wanted Jesus more than he wanted all the answers. He knew that the best place to be was by Jesus' side.
See, as much as we like the idea of Jesus the Practical Problem-Solver, there isn't much intimacy there. He can dole out wisdom from heaven and never get his hands dirty. But instead, Jesus chose to enter our mess and slog through it with us. (As Isaiah also prophesied, later echoed in Mathew, "The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel (which means 'God is with us') [7:14].)
As we begin the Advent season, let's reflect on Jesus our Wonderful Counselor. We face so many questions in life, both personally and in the scope of the world's problems. And the world is quick to offer us easy solutions. Everyone has it all figured out.
But if you (like me!) don't have it all figured out—if you're swimming in uncertainty—it's okay. Let's slow down and spend time with Jesus. We are free to bring our questions to him. And he may invite us to put the questions aside for a moment so he can reveal something more wonderful than we imagined.
Questions of Ponder:
What does Jesus the Wonderful Counselor mean to you? Has any of Jesus' teachings left you with a boggled mind?
How does Jesus the Wonderful Counselor differ from Jesus the Practical Problem-Solver?
Are you facing any big decisions right now? Have you considered that Jesus may be less concerned about what you decide and more concerned about who you are becoming along the way? (Example: Which job you accept may be less important than how you conduct yourself when you start working there.)