For his grace has overcome us, and ADONIAI’S truth continues forever.  Halleluyah!

Psalm 117:2

I didn’t understand what it meant that God’s grace overcomes us, so I looked at the words in Hebrew to get a better idea of what that actually means.

The word for grace is chesed.  It means goodness, kindness, and faithfulness.  But it also means, in Gesenius’s lexicon, zeal towards someone, desire.  That’s pretty neat.  God’s zeal towards me, His desire for me, His faithfulness and kindness overcomes me.

The word for overcome is gabar.  Gabar means to prevail, to strengthen, to bind up (especially something broken – from Gesenius’s lexicon).  Wow!

So, here’s my amplified version of this verse:

For God’s zeal towards me and desire for me, His faithfulness and kindness, prevails over me, binds up the places where I am broken, and strengthens me, and ADONAI’S truth, instruction, and reliability continues forever.

Who am I?
Who am I?
Who am I that You should see me
In a world so full of beauty?
Who am I?
Who am I?
How could You love me
When You know me?
When You know inside of me?

I  can’t even start to dream
Of all the million many details that You paint.
I don’t know where to start
When I look around at all Your art.
I don’t understand the greatest lengths
Your love was willing to walk
Just to be with me.

Who am I?
Who am I?
Who am I that You should see me
In a world so full of beauty?
Who am I?
Who am I?
How could You love me
When You know me?
When You see so deep inside me?

My darkness trembles
My fear begins to shake.
My anger melts before Your grace
The light erases me.

Who are You?
Who are You?
Who are You that You can love me
You can change me so completely?
Who are You?
Who are You?
So much holy, holy are You
So much love and passion are You
So much light and life are You
And You yearn for me to know You.
You gave up everything
Just to be with me.

Note:  For some reason, the song “Here’s My Life” by BarlowGirl is stuck in my head:

God I’m crying out tonight
’cause I’ve given you my life
but I’m tired and I’m missing what’s behind
so once more here’s my life

My mornings are insane!  I leave for work at 6am, which has cut my time in the morning in half.  I feel like most of the time I’m posting things from my devotional readings at Skip Moen’s site.  Sigh.  Sorry!

This morning the post I read asked a question about knowing God.  Well, first it explained that knowing God isn’t about knowing Him in my head; it’s not doctrine.  It’s about empathy.  Do I feel His heart-wrenching pain over the betrayal and suffering of His beloved Israel?  Do I feel His anguish over the prodigal children that have wandered from His protective care?  Do I feel His agony as He allows punishment to come to the ones He loves?

I’ve never thought of knowing God like that.  And, sadly, if that is the measure by which I know God, then I don’t know Him much at all.  I can’t comprehend His love for me, nor can I empathize with the way He feels about His people as a whole.  I can in small ways, I suppose.  But it’s not a regular occurrence.  And, in some ways, it’s scary to think of what it would be like to truly feel as He feels.  It would seem to be a gaping wound that refuses to heal.  Perhaps that’s part of the fear of the Lord.  To truly know Him would be brutal in some ways.  But if I understand His sorrow and longing, then perhaps I can also understand His love.

You can read Skip’s article, “Yada, Yada, Yada (pt 1)” here.

2 Samuel 22:7

“In my distress I called upon the LORD, Yes, I cried to my God; And from His temple He heard my voice, And my cry for help came into His ears…”

I am amazed that God listens to me.  Lately I’ve been struggling to understand how my relationship to and with God works.  I’m learning to learn about Him, all over again.  Sometimes it’s easy to think of Him as big and distant and worried more about the bigger picture and not so worried about me.  But, that’s not the case.  Even though He is glorious and mighty and powerful, He cries for help come into His ears.  He hears.  And more incredibly, He responds.

Just like with my children, I wait for them to ask for help before I help them (usually), so does God with me.  He wants me to ask Him for help.  He’s waiting for me to remember that I can’t do this without His help.  And I think He probably delights in showing me how it’s done and helping me get it right.  At least, that’s how I feel when my little ones let me help then learn.  I need to remember those lessons more often.

Psalm 119:37

Turn away my eyes from looking at worthless things, [And] revive me in Your way

Take my eyes from considering emptiness; return me to life in Your manners/moral character.  Sometimes I’m very selfish.  Probably more often than I’d like to admit.  It’s especially bad when I’m tired.  I also tend towards being non-confrontational and hesitate to voice my frustrations, because I know the reception to them won’t be pleasant.    And then the mousehole/molehill becomes a mountain, and a minor annoyance gets blown out of proportion.  Maybe when I find myself in this kind of situation, I should remember this verse.  Emptiness or emptiness of speech (vanity, worthlessness) is my selfishness.  The true thing to look at is my ability to bless others, to love them even when they don’t deserve it.  Yeshua did that for me.  God does that for me.

All that being said, I’m not always sure how to respond when I get frustrated by a situation, especially if I’m stuck doing something that someone else should have done.  But then again, Yeshua got stuck paying for my failures that I should have paid for…  So, once again it comes down to becoming more like Him in my actions and putting aside my agenda or desires in order to love those around me in the manner in which He first loved me.

This is so much easier said than done!

Leviticus 11:2

“Speak to the children of Israel, saying, ‘These are the animals which you may eat among all the animals that are on the earth:

I think it’s fascinating that God would be so specific in His instructions, even down to what animals, birds, reptiles, etc. could and could not be eaten!  That shows love and care!  And the instructions aren’t random either.  The ones that are excluded as being unclean are all excluded for good reason – some eat garbage and scraps, some are scavengers and eat dead animals, others eat animals that eat garbage or dead animals.  For obvious reasons, eating these animals could be unhealthy!  I’m also all for the regulation on not eating bugs (yuck!!).  The guidelines weren’t restrictive and to keep the Israelites from eating yummy stuff (most of it sounds disgusting anyway).  It was to keep them from getting sick or from eating things that could make them unhealthy (think about the fat content of pork…).

A God who cares about even these details cares greatly about His children.  If He looks after these details, won’t He also be looking after the other, seemingly bigger and more important, details?

Psalm 30:11

You have turned my mourning into dancing for me. You have removed my sackcloth, and clothed me with gladness,

One thing I learned yesterday is that the Hebrew idea of vision is to look at what God has done in the past and align myself with that.  It’s like rowing  a boat.  You face backwards, but go forwards.  This is interesting because I’ve had lots of pastors say that you should face forwards and forget what’s gone before.    This is a very Greek way of thinking.  However, the Hebrew people believed that a person could only go forward if he or she looked at what God  had done in the past and then used that to set the course of the next part of the journey.

That, to me, is interesting.  It makes a lot of sense.  But I get stuck.  I don’t have a problem looking back and remembering where I’ve seen God working.  How do I use that to plot my course though?  Of course, here I fall back into the Greek mindset of wanting to know what’s going to happen next and controlling my world.  One thing I’m finding is that when a person is immersed in a Greek mindset and taught a Greek mindset from birth, it’s really difficult to try and think in a different way.

Yet, You, O Lord, are holy.  God knows my heart and its motivations.  He knows that I am honestly trying to seek Him and know Him.  He knows my weaknesses and my difficulties and the way I think.  I don’t think He’s angry at me for not thinking with the right mindset.  He knows I try.  He cares most about my heart and my motivation and my love.  Those He has.  And I’m sure there are times when He watches me, gently shaking His head with a soft smile on his lips, as I sort through all these new ideas… and He loves me.  He gathers me up in His mighty arms and gives me a quick hug before releasing me to think some more.  The Hebrews believe that God, above all things, loves His children and is completely holy.  If nothing else, that is what I want to remember.  If I can truly remember and believe that God LOVES me, then everything else falls into place.

Psalm 28:7 (HNV) The LORD is my strength and my shield. My heart has trusted in him, and I am helped. Therefore my heart greatly rejoices. With my song I will thank him.

I found a new version of the Bible on the Blue Letter Bible that I use when I read online.  It’s called the Hebrew Names Version.  I think it’s also called the Messianic Jewish Bible.  It uses common Hebrew phrases in the place of some of the words.    I also found a really cool tool – I can look at the Hebrew text and see what the words are in Hebrew.  However, the salt of this is that the translation I get for the word is just that, a translation.  It isn’t the image associated with the word, and sometimes our translated equivalent isn’t quite right because it takes a paragraph to really get the word’s true meaning conveyed.  But, it’s interesting nonetheless.  I found when I looked at it that “therefore” isn’t used.  According to the Hebrew text it just says “My heart.”  After listening to Skip’s teaching on the Hebrew World View I’ve also learned that leb (the Hebrew word for heart) doesn’t just mean our literal heart; it also means the mind and emotions and spirit.  So, the heart that rejoices here is really the writer’s whole self.  Maybe the “therefore” is implied because of the placement of the phrase?

I went back and tried to match the symbols they had for each word with the picture of the textual sentence and also noticed that there seemed to be words that weren’t translated (or maybe they were variations on the translated words given – due to tenses or placement).  And, the words weren’t necessarily translated in the same order as the original text (at least that’s how it seemed to my VERY untrained eye).  I’d imagine that if I actually learned Hebrew, then a lot of these issues would go away because I would understand the grammatical side of things (like, for example, the Hebrew way of writing puts the important stuff first and the less important stuff later).

Anyway, all the technicalities aside, I like the image here.  God is a shield, my strength.  A shield does nothing on the floor, and cannot protect me if I choose not to stand behind it.  It’s the same thing with God.  He loves me and wants to be my shield, but I have to choose to stand in His protection.  That means two things – first, I have to be close to Him so that I am surrounded and within the radius of the shield, and two, I have to trust that shield not to let anything through.  I think that’s a lot of the point of knowing God.  Stay close to Him, be where He is, work where He works, and trust Him, that He is Holy and good and loving.  When I start wandering off to look at rabbit trails and daisies, I get hurt because I’m no longer under the protective shield of God.  Similarly, when I don’t trust Him I’m likely to try to find something else to shield myself with (not a good idea because nothing is as strong and true – I’m ultimately building an idol) or I’m likely to try and start dodging bullets out in the open (how I figure this is a better plan is beyond me).  I think a lot of my tendency to move away from my shield stems from a desire to be in control (a Greek mindset) and a failure to recognize and truly understand the nature of God and His love for me.  And maybe that is much of the purpose of reading His Words and listening to His voice – to learn and understand who He is (or at least as much as my fragile mind can handle).

Psalm 56:9

On the very day I call to you for help, my enemies will retreat. This I know: God is on my side.

I’ve been listening to Skip Moen’s classes on Living the Biblical Worldview where he explains the way the Hebrew writers of the Bible thought and how it differs from the Greek way of thinking that we are saturated with today.  It’s pretty much rocked the foundations of my world.  I’ve realized that many of the things I thought I knew and understood are not what I believed, and are built of a philosophy of thinking that is alien and opposite to the philosophy and mindset of the very people who wrote the book that makes up the basis of what I believe.  I’m not particularly sure I’m even articulating what I’m thinking.  I cannot recommend enough these classes (they’re on downloadable CDs on Skip’s website – http://skipmoen.com/products/).

Anyway, the Psalm in which today’s verse lies is one of my favorites.  It’s one where it talks about God collecting all my sorrows and tears in his bottle.  It’s a beautiful image.  This verse reminds me that God hears me.  He’s never far away and He’s never not paying attention.  His answers come quickly (just not always in the form I expect).  It may be that to answer my cry for help, other events get set in motion, some depending on the obedience of another person, ultimately resulting in the answer I need.

Then we might discover His unfathomable mercy wrapped around His infinite holiness.

This quote is from Skip Moen’s blog entry this morning.  I thought it was beautiful.  I think there’s a tendency to either see God’s mercy or His holiness, not both at once.  But Skip makes the point that even when God has every right to demand things of us, He often chooses to ask gently.  I wonder how often he chooses to discipline gently instead of throwing the book at us…  Here’s the post.  You might want to go back and read yesterday‘s post, too, to understand the first part of the verse.