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).