JOHN089 - What Are Your Five Favorite Semantic Inversions?

John 1:51

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And one time in class, I remember my teacher was explaining how goofy English is, and she was talking about semantic inversions. I've since learned that the fancy term for this, like semantic inversions isn't already fancy. The fancier yet term for this is amelioration through irony. But this is the thing that we do in English, where we take something that means something bad and we just flip it around to mean something good. And of course, the most famous example of this ever is just the word bad. Oh, that was bad. Well, what did I mean? Like that was a thing that was unfortunate that shouldn't have happened. Or like that was really cool. Because it could just as easily mean either one of those things, right? You gotta look at the context, figure it out. Let's play the game for a minute before we talk about Bible stuff, because this is kind of fun. What else you got? Right there, where you're sitting right now. What else you got for semantic inversions where we take a word that generally means something bad, but if we just say it or accent it a certain way, it means something good. Okay, I stalled for you. What'd you come up with? Here's what I came up with. I got sick. That's sick. I got another one very popular among the Bostonians. That's wicked. Nasty is especially a term for like a really slick move in sports. That was nasty. But it means good, right? Uh filthy uh pitchers, especially when they have a certain pitch that is almost unhittable, you'll compliment it by saying that was filthy. Uh killer, killer means good. Beast, that guy's a beast. Normally you wouldn't want to be a beast. That's bad. You'd want to be like a nice person, probably, but beast can mean good. Insane, that's something you wouldn't want to be. But if something is just, you know, mind-bogglingly cool, we might call that insane. We talked about GOAT a while back. That one's a little bit different. Whereas like GOAT can mean scapegoat or like the one that gets blamed, or goat, if it's just an acronym, can mean greatest of all time. So it's just kind of fun the way that works, right? And likewise, we've got a potential semantic inversion situation going on right here at the end of John chapter one, with this little if you know wink ding comment that Jesus employs where he refers to himself as the son of man. And the reason this qualifies for semantic inversion is because the title means two different things when it's used throughout the Old Testament, or you know, the scriptures that Jesus was reading and the scriptures that all the people at the time of Jesus had in front of them. They obviously didn't have a New Testament yet. Son of Man, as we've discussed for the last few days, would most obviously be a reference back to Daniel chapter seven and that crazy cryptic passage we looked at that has all the stuff about beasts and horns and the ancient of days and his fiery chariot. But then it all kind of comes into focus when we meet this character, the son of man. And as we look at what the son of man is commissioned toward in that scene, and as we look at the way people respond to the son of man, we figure out whoa, I mean, this is this is Jesus, this is the Messiah, this is God. And admittedly, it's kind of confusing when you're reading through Daniel 7. It's one of the most challenging passages in the entire Bible for a whole bunch of reasons. But any questions that might be lingering about what that part about the Son of Man means and whether or not it's good are very quickly answered when we get to the New Testament. And Jesus uses this title on himself. I don't know, I don't remember. It's been a while since I've looked at the number, but it's like 80 plus times that he uses this title for himself. And I think definitively the son of man is his favorite title for himself for reasons we've partially explored so far. So we're talking about semantic inversions, right? Where you take something that could mean something negative, but instead it means something ridiculously positive. And what I'm saying is the son of man in the old testament could have very negative implications or very humbling implications. Or if you look at Daniel 7, like we've been doing, it could have massively positive implications. Well, how do we know which one we're getting here? Well, I mean, you're not dumb. We're not idiots. We can look at the context. We're obviously getting the positive expression of son of man, but the other expression of son of man, or the other place where we see that term used a ton, is in the book of Ezekiel, which is just a whopper of a book. There is so much going on in this one. And if you haven't read Ezekiel for a while or ever, man, I do recommend it. Just going and powering through it over the course of a couple of days. I also recommended, you know, maybe doing it alongside the episode we did on Ezekiel a few years ago, or the Lightning Fast Field Guide on the Bible chapter will help you with Ezekiel. It's kind of hard. But if you stick with it, the thing comes into focus. We're getting a picture of what's going on in the immediate time frame of Ezekiel, which is the very early days of the exile. Ezekiel, like Daniel, lived with a foot on either side of a historical divide. Ezekiel was born into the very last years of the kingdom of Judah, the southern kingdom. Then in the early 500s BC, he gets taken to Babylon as a young, promising hostage, like Daniel and Daniel's buddies, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. But Ezekiel begins his prophetic career at about the time he should have been, becoming a priest, serving in the temple back in Jerusalem, but that's not the way it worked out for him. Instead, he's a prophet in exile, and his prophecies take us to the far ends of reality. Now, in the internet age, Ezekiel is most famous probably for his visions, his descriptions of angels and the beings surrounding the throne of God. But historically, Ezekiel is most famous for a particular vision that occurs in chapter 37 in this valley of dry bones. Well, from the get-go in Ezekiel, God keeps calling him son of man again and again and again. But he doesn't say the son of man, like the title Jesus uses for himself, but still, I mean, son of man, the son of man. It sounds like we're talking about the same thing. But when we hear God using this term to describe Ezekiel throughout this massive book of prophecy in the Old Testament, what we find is that it's not it's not like a terrible negative, it's just a term meant to humble. It's a term that emphasizes what Ezekiel is seeing with his own eyes, which is your God, I'm not. This is all terribly humbling. In Ezekiel 2, 1. This is the first time we see it, I'm pretty sure. It says he said to me, Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak to you. It kind of sounds like the moment that God meets with Job after Job and his buddies spend all that time speculating about things, and God shows up and he's like, Brace yourself, pal, and face this like a man. Here you go. And then God takes him on, you know, Job on a tour of the cosmos, and it's very humbling. Well, this has the exact same kind of rhythm and tone, and God keeps calling this young man, relatively young man, Ezekiel, son of man, son of man. Why not just call him Zeke? Come on, why not buddy up and be peers and solve some problems for the freshly captured Jewish people together as peers and pals? Well, because they're not peers and pals. And one of the central themes of the book of Ezekiel is God is incredible. However amazing you think God is, however worthy of worship you think God is. He is more than that. And Ezekiel is bearing witness to that. And that is both terrifying, but also very encouraging because it means that God holds this calamitous situation with the Babylonians destroying the temple and taking the people away into exile. God holds that situation in the palm of his hand. He'll handle it. Also, as Ezekiel looks toward the far reaches of reality in the distant future, well, guess what? God also holds that situation in his hand. And so as this term gets used again and again, son of man, son of man, son of man, I've heard it said 93 times that term gets used in Ezekiel. The point would seem to be to emphasize again and again, you're down here, I'm up here. And if you or I do that to somebody, it's kind of demeaning, if God, who is perfect and flawless and right in all of his judgments, does that, he's doing the person he keeps humbling a favor by keeping them from getting any silly whim or notion of pride or entitlement. God is God, you are not Ezekiel, even though I am speaking to you as a prophet. Well, I mentioned Ezekiel 37 being the famous of the passages from Ezekiel over time. No, I've done it again. I've changed my mind on the fly. I am going to read you this passage. It's just too good and too important. And maybe you've heard me read it before, and you're like, I mean, I already know this one, man. I don't know what to tell you. I just really want to read the first part of Ezekiel 37 and this dry bones stuff because I think it's rad, one of the best parts of the whole Bible. However, we're up against it. So we'll just pick up where we left off tomorrow and we'll start with reading this passage, and then we're gonna unpack the implications of this almost like inverted levels of meaning of son of man, the seemingly negative connotations son of man from here in Ezekiel, and the unbelievably positive connotations of the son of man from Daniel. I think we're gonna have a lovely time tomorrow. I would recommend coming back. Okay, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.