God with Us

Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel, which is translated, "God with us.”

Matthew 1:23

The given name on my birth certificate is “Richard”; it means “strong leader.” My wife’s name is “Carol” which means “manly” or “strong.” If you told me what your personal name means, I probably wouldn’t care. There’s usually not a lot of correlation between names and what they are supposed to mean.

Immanuel is Hebrew for “God with us.” That’s not what it means; it is the phrase all sounded out. But you wouldn’t know that if you do not know Hebrew. It is a description, not a name.

People who want others to know the meaning of their child’s name often use an English word for their moniker such as “Faith,” “Hope,” or “Huckleberry.”

Even so, putting a label on someone is no guarantee that they’ll live up to expectations.

Starting in the 1990’s, hundreds of baby girls in this country have been named “Unique.” Since that name caught on, now none of them are. Even with over 30 variations of spelling (which includes Uneek, Euneke, and U’niq) a person’s name usually is a classifier and not a describer.

The New Testament has been translated into more than 2,000 languages. In each case, Matthew 1:23 contains a transliteration of the word “Immanuel”; the name is converted to the script of the native tongue so that it can be sounded out to something that resembles Immanuel in English. That text might be Spanish, Arabic, or Mandarin but the result is mostly the same; the reader comes across a hard to pronounce Bible name that means nothing to him.

But then comes the translation “God with us” and its understood. It doesn’t matter if the person is an Eskimo from north of the Arctic Circle or an Aborigine from the Amazon rainforest; it’s explained to them in their own language. Jesus Christ is “God with us.”