oUR LANGUAGE WHEN PRAYING

It has become very evident of late that the language of brethren, when praying, has changed dramatically.
The respect that was held in the past for the majesty of The Deity and His Son has, sadly, been replaced with a humanistic style of language.

Yahweh has been, especially seen through the informal style of language, seemingly brought down to our level within the Divine Order as it is explained in 1 Corinthians 11:3:  But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is Yahweh.
That verse shows very plainly that we are far below Yahweh within the Divine Order; it doesn’t matter where we think we stand, or how important we think we are, we are told directly where we do stand before Yahweh and His dear Son, and we should accept that without reservation.

The main offence of today is the predilection of brethren to address Yahweh with the plural terms “you” or “your” as modern English seems to demand, in contrast to the singular terms, such as, “thee”, “thine” and “thy”.

This must be very unpleasant for the Deity, when things like the horrific doctrine of the Trinity are taken into consideration. We wouldn’t want to be seen as endorsing such a doctrine, because the ambiguous use of the pronouns can easily be seen (by those who wish to) as such an endorsement.

Not only that, but the use of the proper terms, even if they seem archaic, differentiate between Yahweh and His Son and us mere mortals.

They emphasise Their superiority, it is more formal, and surely we wouldn’t want to be informal with Yahweh. We tend to be very formal with those of the world who lord their positions in society over us and whom we want to impress, therefore why wouldn’t we do more so to revere Yahweh and The Lord Jesus Christ?

Simply put, in older English, such as we see in the King James Version of the Bible, the terms ‘thee, thine and thy, and related words’, represent the singular whereas the terms ‘you and your’ are used to represent the plural or more. Yes, they can be used to represent the singular, but plural is also very valid.

If we said “I am giving this food unto thee”, it can only be read as the food is being given to one person, whereas if we said “I am giving this food to you”, and there was more than one person present, it can very easily be taken that all present could be being given the food. It is very easy to see how the modern style of language is able to be very ambiguous.

Even the fact that we have to concentrate upon our language when we address The Father is of benefit to us all because it also emphasises His superiority above our places in society and forces us to acknowledge that.

Colin Tilley-Evans