SUNDAY: Bible Study - 9:00 AM | Worship - 10:00 AM | PM Worship - 6:00 PM WEDNESDAY: Bible Class - 7:00 PM ~ 8110 Signal Hill Road Manassas, Virginia | Office Phone: 703.368.2622

"If anyone speaks, let him speak as it were the very words of God". I Peter 4:11

 

If you happen to be visiting the Grand Canyon, and your trip takes you westward, through the Navajo Reservation town of Kayenta, be sure and stop at the Burger King there. Along with 99-cent flame-broiled whoppers, this joint also sports an exhibit of memorabilia from the Navajo Code Talkers of WWII.* The owner of this Burger King is Richard Mike, son of King Mike, who, along with his fellow Code Talkers, foiled the best cryptologists Japan had.

They were considered the most gifted, sophisticated cryptologists in the world, but they never cracked the Navajo language. The U.S. Marine Corps enlisted the aid of 400 men from the Navajo nation to transmit messages throughout the Pacific theater. Navajo is unlike any other language on earth and the Japanese could never decode it. The success of the Navajo Code Talkers so impressed the Japanese that Richard Mike's Burger King is featured in most Japanese tour books for Arizona.

The irony is that before the war, if a Navajo child spoke the tribal language at the reservation in Kayenta, that child's mouth was washed out with soap. The Bureau of Indian Affairs had long sought to eliminate any traditional tribal vestiges from the ways of promising young Navajo scholars.

Thankfully, the lives of countless American servicemen (and, no doubt, Japanese civilians) were saved by the stealth provided by the Navajo Code Talkers.

Bible translators have long sought to eliminate ecclesiastical jargon from the text of scripture. The New Testament was written in "common" Greek, the language of the street, with a vocabulary of a mere 6,000 words (compare the 48,000 word vocabulary of Shakespeare's canon), smaller than the vocabulary of the average American 3rd grader. The desire to simplify is in keeping with the text itself.

And yet there are words - redemption, sanctification, atonement...that have specific, peculiar New Testament meanings - meanings based upon the death-burial-resurrection blood-fact of Jesus. Is any desire to be "accessible" (however well-intended that desire might be) more urgent than a desire to be true to the depth and complexity of the words themselves?

If the words describe a unique event how can they not themselves be unique?

Do we even bother to grasp their meaning, let alone, prepare ourselves to share them with the lost?

Like the Navajo Code Talkers half a century ago - we will only be in a position to share saving words if we have defied the prevailing culture and retained them, retained our peculiar way of speaking.

* "Cheeseburgers and Code Talkers," by Bill Papich in American Heritage, Dec., 2000, pp. 11-12

NewManassas Side

8110 Signal Hill Road | Manassas, Virginia

Let us know about your interest in Studying the Bible

Members Login

Bible Study

biblestudysd

Top
                                                                       © 2013 Manassas Church of Christ