“Count ‘Em,” Brandon Lake’s new official music video, is packed with powerful images and words. You may need a few views to identify and absorb them. You’ll most certainly want to watch it on replay!
The video opens on a set that mimics a dark city street. Brandon sits and leans against a newspaper vending machine as he reads a flaming copy. Inside the case, The Prodigal Times features a front-page story with the heading “The Greatest Miracle Of All Time.” And, for the next four minutes, Brandon Lake enumerates a laundry list of Jesus’s greatest miracles!
The photo under the newspaper’s headline is an empty tomb, but Jesus’s resurrection is only one miracle mentioned in the song’s lyrics. You might want to reflect on each of them cited, testing yourself on the details of the Bible story-not-story referenced.
Brandon himself portrays a miracle in the video. Looking like a stereotypical problem (or prodigal) adult man-child, he is surrounded by a group of black-clad singers. With tattoos and lots of jewelry, Brandon does not look like the choir boy of our old-school imaginations, even though he grew up in church as a pastor’s kid.
With a quick switch to a brightly lit room, Brandon walks to a clothes rack that holds a single white robe. A tag on the robe reads “Miracle Child” underneath a photo of Brandon. He holds the tag a few moments before we are back in the dark.
Four lines of one verse go as follows:
All those funerals You ruined when You made the dead rise
Heaven’s healer using spit and mud
To open blind eyes
You got wonders I can’t number
The artist doesn’t waste a line, referring to “raging seas” and “prophecies,” Goliath and Thomas.
Just past the halfway mark at 2:13, the lights come on briefly, and the volume goes down. There is a tone change, reflective of the conversion, that is dramatized in the video.
He studies the white robe’s tag once again, pockets it, and puts on the robe. And, within the next minute, all of the black-clad singers do likewise. It’s very impactful!
Brandon and friends smile, dance, sing, and rejoice in their fresh, pristine robes for the next 40 seconds—they represent lives changed by Jesus! After all, He’s still doing miracles every day! The newspaper has been consumed by fire, but the true story lives on.
“He performs wonders that cannot be fathomed, miracles that cannot be counted.” Job 5:9
