I am built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone. Ephesians 2:20 because you have been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. Our faith is built upon the teaching and insight of the apostles and prophets. Prophets are the mouthpieces for God. They don’t necessarily tell the future – they speak what God tells them to speak. This provides a solid foundation that won’t bend or crack and isn’t weak. With Yeshua as the cornerstone, that means the most important stone is eternal and infallible. We can be sure that what He says, teaches, and stands for it true and reliable and strong. Build upon the Word of God and the house that is built will be strong in the storm. That’s why it’s important to learn and study about God’s commands in Torah and about Yeshua’s teachings. Their words are Truth, and what better place to start than the truth.
I am free! John 8:31-32 So Jesus was saying to those Jews who had believed Him, “If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; 32and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” Soak in the Word, snuggle into its depths, and be secure in its shelter. Continue is, walk in, run to, learn, memorize, know the depths of His Word. Truth is so powerful! To know the Truth of who He IS and the Truth of who I AM because of Him. To know what HE created me to do and be. To know the Truth of what He says and where I stand in His eyes. This is freedom. It is for this that I pray. Lord, make me FREE indeed!
Psalm 119:147 I rise before the dawning of the morning, And cry for help; I hope in Your word. In Hebrew this verse actually reads something like: I anticipate (go before) the twilight and cry out for help. I await Your word. A couple of thoughts on this: To me, twilight is a peaceful time. In the morning it heralds the coming of daylight. In the evening, the world prepares to rest. Today I am anticipating the twilight. Circumstances have made life rocky and uncertain. I know God is faithful, and I cry out for His help – to smooth the way, to speed the process, and to give me peace as I wait. I await (anticipate) daylight, when things are settled and sorted and I can see a little bit. I anticipate evening when I can rest from the running around like crazy. I await Your word. When God speaks, things happen. His word is action. He spoke and the world became. He speaks and what He says is done. His word is law. He is never wrong (wrong is different from changing His mind). Therefore, I wait (today, anxiously) for God to speak. I know that what He speaks will be. His word may be “Peace, child, and wait with me.” Or it may be, “Remember my faithfulness!” Or maybe His word will be something I can’t perceive, but the angels know and obey Him. I don’t know. I don’t have to know. My job is to remember. And to wait. So I wait for the knots to untangle and for the unhill climb to level off a bit. And I remember that YHWH has always been faithful in the past. Perhaps He will wait until the 9th hour, when everything is impossible, to move in miraculous ways. Then He will remind me, “I am God! Nothing is impossible for me!”
Psalm 119:41 Let Your mercies come also to me, O LORD– Your salvation according to Your word. I almost hesitate to even try to dig into this verse. Salvation is a confusing and misused word in a lot of ways, and I’m still trying to wrap my mind about it. But, oh well. My ten cents (or two cents, or whatever the saying is). Mercies First, I think I must be missing something because the Hebrew words given for this verse (via Blue Letter Bible) don’t seem to match with what’s written. The word for mercies is checed which means “kindness, faithfulness, and goodness.” No mercy anywhere. Oddly, or perhaps interestingly, checed also means “shame and reproach.” I’m not even going there. So anyway, the very first part of this is about goodness, kindness and faithfulness, not mercy. Come also to me The word for “come also to me” is bow and it means (among many things) “to come to pass, to come upon, and to enter.” So, it seems more like David is asking for YHWH’s faithfulness/kindness/goodness to come to pass or perhaps to even enter into him or his circumstances. Salvation Salvation, my favorite, is teshew’ah and it means: 1) salvation, deliverance a) deliverance (usually by God through human agency) b) salvation (spiritual in sense) Gesenius defines it as “help, welfare, or victory” (Gesenius’ lexicon via Blue Letter Bible). This is pretty different from our particular view of salvation. When this was written Yeshua hadn’t come, and the idea of forgiveness of sins was wrapped up in sacrifices and the Temple altar. So, I doubt David is talking about sin in the same way we do today. I thought that definition 1a was especially interesting because of the parenthesis: usually by God through human agency. In other words, God uses people to deliver others. Deliver them from what? Well, trying to put myself in the context of when this was written, I’d imagine it could be deliverance from many things: the idolatry of the nations that seemed to constantly be trying to steal into the Hebrew culture, the threat of warfare or death by these same nations whose idols were so slippery, even the plots and plans of men to overthrow, kill, or harm the monarchy. David could be asking for help or victory over these things. And if Gesenius is correct in his definition as “welfare” then perhaps David is asking even for God’s provision in time of need. Now you see why this word is complicated? Want to add one more layer to “salvation”? The word implies rescue at the very last, most dire moment, when defeat seems certain unless help arrives. It’s at the darkest moment before dawn. And then the light breaks through, help arrives, and the tide is turned. It’s not necessarily the moment of victory, but rather the turning point from defeat to triumph. But it’s only because someone else (in our case, God) arrived at the crucial moment (and not a moment too soon) to reverse the course of the battle. Your word And finally we reach the end – according to Your word. The Hebrew for “Your word” is imrah and it means the “Word of God, the Torah.” Remember, when the Psalms were written, the only part of the “Bible” that these people had were the writings of Moses (the first few books of the Bible). There were no books of Kings or Prophets or Proverbs or probably even 1 & 2 Samuel. There certainly was no New Testament and letters from Shaul or the others. So, David’s salvation, his rescue, would come from or through or “according to” the Torah – the laws that YHWH had laid out through Moses. If this rescue was from the corruption of the surrounding nations, then the remedy was to live according to God’s laws. By living according to God’s law, then Israel would continue to be in line with the covenant and would receive God’s blessings. If not, then the covenant would be broken and, well, we know what happened when Israel failed to keep YHWH first and only. The Point So, what’s the point? The application? I’m not sure. In some ways digging just confuses me. However, it all seems to be tied up in the last phrase “according to Your words.” The first is related to the last – the rescue is related to God’s faithfulness and goodness and it is all according to His law. And it’s recorded there in the Torah, too, so it can be remembered. Not only the law, but also His past faithfulness. Perhaps we need to look there more often to be reminded of His faithfulness, goodness, and kindness, as well as for deliverance from falling into the pattern of the corruption of this age.
From 7/18 – my computer kept crashing, so I gave up trying for the day. :) It was one of those days…. Psalm 119:25 My soul clings to the dust; Revive me according to Your word. Psalm 119:28 My soul melts from heaviness; Strengthen me according to Your word. This is how I feel today. Yesterday was one of those days where I wished I could have crawled back in bed and started over afresh. Everything seemed to go sideways! Of course, looking back, maybe God was trying to do something, and I completely missed it! That would kind of be icing on the cake… I tend to be pretty schedule-oriented and yesterday nothing went according to “the plan.” I need to remember that Kairos time interrupts my plans, and when it does I need to remember to look more closely at what’s going on, instead of getting frustrated. Anyway, these two verses are surprisingly similar. I wish I knew what the pictoral meaning of Daleth is, since that’s the letter that this portion of the psalm falls into. Anyway, there were a couple of things I found interesting: 1. The Hebrew word for dust in verse 25 also means garbage/trash. So the author realizes that his being (nephesh) clings to garbage. How often do I do the same thing! Like my schedule… Hmmmm. I hold onto things that are passing and, truly, worthless in light of greater things. Verse 28 is more literally saying that my being (nephesh again) drops or drips from sorrow/grief/heaviness. The load is too much to carry; my being (even my spirit) is about to collapse. I wonder if this kind of sorrow/grief can be over the blindness of the world around the author? I wonder if it applies to the state of the church. There are certainly days when I am overwhelmed by what I’m learning, and even some days when I wish I’d never stepped out onto this path. Ignorance is bliss, in theory. 2. There are two qualities of God’s words that are mentioned here: the ability to revive and the ability to strengthen. To revive is to give it life again, to restore life or prosperity to something or to refresh it. At the beginning of the book of John, it says that the Word is God, so (as one of my friends pointed out), this is also a quality of God! It certainly sounds like something He loves to do. He gives back life as it was meant to be (that doesn’t mean it’ll always be a cake walk), He refreshes (maybe that breath of fresh air is the breath of YHWH breathing life again to refresh you)! He makes all things new, restoring life! Strengthen is to establish, endure, persist, to confirm, to fulfill. Again, all things that God is. He endures, as does His word, so through Him I am able to endure or persist, even when I’m overwhelmed. His word confirms His plan for us, giving me the ability to trust Him. And He fulfills His Words because He is true, and again, that enables me to trust Him more. He is the rock, and strong and mighty fortress. When I stand in Him, I am strong because He is strong. I’m LOVING this Psalm!
Psalm 119: 11-12 Your word I have hidden in my heart, That I might not sin against You. Blessed [are] You, O LORD! Teach me Your statutes. Part 1 The first part of this verse is a verse I hear all the time. It’s one children learn when they’re in kindergarten. Today it means to memorize a verse out of the Bible, but when it was written thousands of years ago there weren’t many written copies of Torah floating around. Each king was required to write out a copy of Torah, partly so that they would have their own copy (remember, no printing presses) and partly because when I write things down I tend to remember them better. The western world today is both blessed and cursed by our printed words. It’s awesome to be able to look up things in the Bible at the drop of a hat. I need to know something, and I have instant access via my phone, or via my printed Bible (usually there’s more than one running around). But the down side is that we don’t memorize anything anymore. When I was in school I used to have to memorize things like poems and little sayings and rhymes to help me remember things, like prepositions or states (remember those?). With the advent of the Internet, I don’t make my students memorize anything because they can just “google it.” Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the Internet, but we’ve definitely lost something valuable since we’ve stopped having to memorize things. Anyway, Biblically, Torah was transmitted from person to person through speaking. Rabbis learned by listening to and copying the lives of their Rabbis. In Torah school students memorized Torah by reading it. And every week Torah was read in the synagogues. Each holiday celebrated Torah. And temple sacrifices kept Torah at the forefront. At least, that’s how it was when it was done correctly. The point is that people wrote it in their hearts by hearing it out loud. By speaking it. By living it. And because Torah was something they did (instead of just another fact crammed into their head), it was something they lived and breathed, hiding in their hearts for quick and easy access was a way of life. Part 2 The second part of the verse asks YHWH to teach me Your statutes. The word for teach means to train/instruct/exercise in. It’s not about learning facts and storing them up in my mind. It’s about practicing them in my life. It’s about doing them. They’re exercises for my life. Sometimes they’re easy, and sometimes they require discipline (both mental and physical). Both of these verses hit home for me. I keep saying that I will memorize scripture, but I’m so bad at it that I don’t know where to start or even the best method to start with, nor do I know particularly what to memorize. And training is hard. It’s tiring. A part of me feels like I’ve been in training for so long and the race is even longer. But, for whatever reason God has brought me to this point and brought me to this place, where I’ve learned more about Him and His people than I ever thought there was to know. Ignorance isn’t an excuse. So, my question for myself is, will I step up and do what He asks? Will I learn the lessons and hide His word in my heart, learning to think differently and act differently? I want to, but I’m not entirely sure how. Perhaps that’s part of this hunt now, too. For more reading about this topic by Skip Moen, check out this post. Read more>>>
Psalm 119:9 How can a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed according to Your word. This is about living, clean living. Or rather, it’s about cleaning up my life. Most people I know have something in their life that’s a mess. Heaven knows, I’ve made lots and lots of messes in my life! So, how do I clean it up? By to keep or to guard my life according to His word. In Hebrew, the word for word is dabar, and it means speech, spoken words. This isn’t just about reading the Bible (although that’s God’s written word), it’s about hearing His voice and doing what He asks. There are two important things we must do to clean our ways up, so we’re not walking through garbage every day: know His word (by reading and listening to Him) and acting on His words (to measure my life by what He says). We tend to think of knowing something as a purely cognitive practice, but if I don’t act on what I know, do I really know it? It’s easy to say I know how to obey, but if I don’t obey, do I really know what it is to be obedient? Similarly, I have the ability to go online, on my phone, or in a physical Bible to find God’s written words. This is a blessing, but it’s also a bit of a curse, in that I don’t know His words anymore. I can just look them up. They’re not written on my soul to be recalled at any time. Memorizing is not something I’m a huge fan of, especially when I can “google it”, but when it comes to God’s words I need to start trying to improve my memorization skills. However, the same question applies: if I read God’s words and “know” them but don’t obey, them how much do I really know?