‘Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God’ – Do these titles describe Messiah? (Isaiah 9:6)

Christian readers and some conservative commentators typically understand the names in Isa 9:6 to describe the royal child. Since the prophecy is seen as a messianic prediction that finds its fulfilment in Jesus Christ, it seems self-evident and a great encouragement to see how Scripture already affirms hundreds of years before that Messiah will be God. However, there are some tension points here. Before I go any further, I want to affirm that I do believe in God’s power to reveal His plans long before they happen. He is not caught by surprise by anything that we do, and His salvation plans were made long before they ever happened. The issue is not about whether God can reveal His plans (of course, He can) but whether it makes sense for Him to. My reflection below is more about the limitations of what we, human beings, can take on board than what He is capable of.

It is important to keep in mind that biblical prophecies were given not to us but to ancient Israel first and God wanted them to understand His message. In a cultural world where other nations believed in lots of gods and even treated their kings as the manifestation or the son of a god (e.g. Egypt), Israel’s central creed was that God is one (Deut 6:4) and no human being should be deified. Therefore, when Scripture refers to Israelite kings as God’s son (2 Sam 7:14), this did not involve divine status, merely representation of God through human rule. On the other hand, a king’s aspirations to be like God is repeatedly condemned. The taunt against Babylon describes its king’s arrogance to be equal with God (Isa 14:13-14). Similarly, the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, elevates himself above all and is made sub-human for a while until he acknowledges God’s sovereignty (Dan 4:30-34).

When we were at school, some of what we learned initially involved basic rules and only as we mastered those, did we learn about the exceptions. Given ancient Israel’s background in a world that believed in many gods and the fundamental teaching they were learning about the oneness of God, revealing that Messiah was going to be divine would have worked against all the basic training Israel was getting at this point. We may also remember that the doctrine of Jesus’ deity and how He relates to God the Father is incredibly hard to make sense of so that the church spent considerable time working out the playing field in which to understand this concept. It would be hard to imagine that God would throw in such a confusing statement when Israel was still learning the basics! Another issue is the reference to ‘Eternal Father’. Theologically speaking, God the Son, and God the Father are distinct entities that should not be mixed up, so once again, this sits uncomfortably with the idea that ‘Eternal Father’ describes the royal child (and by extension, Jesus).

Those who maintain that the names describe the royal child but have reservations about identifying him as divine at this point, tend to look for alternative ways to translate the names to make them applicable to a human king. Thus, it may be argued that kings were sometimes referred to as ‘father’ to express their paternalistic care over the people. While this is true, the adjective ‘eternal’ seems extravagant even if kings were occasionally addressed with the wish ‘to live forever’ (e.g. Neh 2:3). The translation ‘Mighty God’ comes from the Hebrew ’el gibbor. The word ’el, normally a generic word for God, can in rare instances refer to the strong or the great (e.g. in the plural in Ezek 32:21 – eley gibborim, ‘the strong of/among the mighty’). The second part of the phrase, gibbor may be translated ‘warrior’ or ‘hero’ or, when used as an adjective, as ‘mighty’. So, it may be possible to translate ’el gibbor as ‘strong warrior’ or ‘great hero’. However, such a use of ’el is rare and the same expression in Isa 10:21 clearly refers to God, so this option seems like trying too hard to get out of the dilemma and therefore less convincing.

An alternative suggestion is Goldingay’s that the names do not describe the child but God. Since the verb ‘to be’ is generally omitted (e.g. Isaiah’s child is called ‘swift (is) the booty, speedy (is) the prey’ – Isa 8:1-3), the name could be read as ‘Wonderful Counsellor (is) the Mighty God, Eternal Father (is) the Prince of Peace’.[1] This solution has much to commend it in my view. First, names are often reminders of God’s character and do not indicate that the bearer of the name is divine. Thus, Samuel means ‘God hears’, Joshua is ‘Yahweh saves’. Even the child, Immanuel (‘God [is] with us’), initially refers to a human being in Isaiah’s time. Note how much the prophecy is rooted in the historic circumstances of that period. By the time the child can choose between good and evil (i.e. have moral discernment and therefore responsibility, probably seen as being around age thirteen), the two kings that Ahaz dreads – Syria and Israel – will be destroyed (see Isa 7:16 and my post on this here). Finally, the singular ‘His name will be’ rather than ‘names’ (Isa 9:6) may indicate that we should recognise these strings of descriptors as one unit.  

In summary, it seems to me unlikely that God revealed Jesus’ divinity in cryptic form here. Rather, the focus is on God Himself. He is the one who reverses judgment (Isa 9:1), in whose presence God’s people will rejoice (Isa 9:3), the one who breaks the yoke of oppression and puts an end to war (Isa 9:4-5). The Davidic king will bear names that remind everyone of God’s amazing character (Isa 9:6-7). God is the wise and wonderful counsellor, the One who is mighty to achieve all He had planned, the eternal Father who cares for His children and brings peace and well-being. It is His zeal that achieves all of this. Since His appointed king will be just and righteous, he will naturally express some of the attributes that characterise God, and we shall explore these next (see Isa 11:1-9). In fact, we shall find that many of the attributes describing God will be true of the Messiah as well (except perhaps ‘eternal Father’). Further, with Christian hindsight, we recognise that the prophecy is fulfilled in Jesus Christ and, being Himself fully God, He is entirely in harmony with God’s plans and faithfully expresses God’s very nature, so it is no surprise that many of those attributes in the prophecy resonate with who He is.

You might be asking at this point, why it matters then to insist that these descriptors are not about Messiah when in the end we circle back to Him and say that they describe Him too. I believe that how we get to the point is important because we should be responsible readers of Scripture. If we develop bad habits of interpretation and read into God’s Word what we want to hear, we may end up going down paths at other times that will lead us away from the truth. Secondly, wrestling with these issues helps us realise the difficulty that Jesus’ contemporaries faced, why even the disciples struggled to grasp what Jesus was about. It teaches us humility to recognise that Scripture is truly unlocked and transformed in Jesus Christ, but this can only be fully appreciated with hindsight and by faith.

---

[1] John Goldingay, Isaiah, UBCS (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001), 73.

If you enjoyed this post, please share it with others.