RETURN TO THE ABBEY DIARY עננ DELIGHT ENTRY # 11

Transcription

1 RETURN TO THE ABBEY DIARY עננ DELIGHT ENTRY # 11 James 4:8: Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Before we search for God, God is searching for us. Abraham Heschel I find this quote by Abraham Heschel posted all over the Abbey. Odd that a Catholic Monastery will put up a quotation from a Jewish theologian for a Protestant Hebrew teacher to read. Go figure. In a sense Heschel s quote seems to be in contradiction to James 4:8. I mean it appears from James 4:8 that we are in search for God and if we are searching for him then God will begin the search for us. There is a story in the Talmud that might answer this dilemma. A king and his son had a dispute and it was so bitter that the son left his home to live in another kingdom. After some time the king, this father, sent a messenger to his son saying: Come home. The son sent the messenger back to his father with the message, That is too far for me to come. The king, this father sent another message to his son saying: Then come as far as you can and I will meet you. You see many of us just don t want to be found by God. We are

2 too busy with our lives here on earth to even be aware of the fact that God is searching for us. But when we draw near to God, and we begin searching for God we discover that He has been searching for us all along. There is another story in the Talmud about a rabbi who was with his students when he heard a child crying behind some boxes. He went and investigated and found a small child hidden behind the boxes crying her heart out. The rabbi asked what was wrong and she said she was playing hide and seek with her friends but: No one came to find me. The rabbi turned to his disciples and said; In that child s voice I hear the cry of the Master of the Universe. In Deuteronomy 4:29 we learn that If you seek the Lord your God, you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and with all your soul. As I search for God s heart during this time of silence I find I can only go so far, but I have discovered that if I reach out for him as far as I can reach, he will meet me. We must, however, take the first steps. We must first want to be found by God. Notice the passage says we must search with all our soul. Our soul is that part of us that expresses our desires. We desire many things but a like a wife she will not allow herself to become intimate with her husband unless she knows that her husband desires her above any other woman. So too with God, He will not become intimate with us unless we desire Him above any other God. To seek an intimacy with God when we are lusting after other Gods puts God on the level of a mistress or concubine. God does not want to be our mistress, He wants to be our wife, the only God in our life. Only then will He allow Himself to become intimate with us. Only when we desire Him the most. So how do we desire God more than any other? The answer is found in Psalms 37:4: Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart. First step to

3 desiring God which will lead to an intimacy with God is to delight yourself in Him. The word delight in Hebrew is anag which means to be delicate and dainty. It comes from a Persian word for being amorous. A woman becomes amorous when she makes herself desirable. If she is going on a date and wanting to impress the young man, she spend the afternoon going to the beauty parlor getting her hair done, getting a facial. She will choose her best and most flattering dress, in short she will do everything she can to make herself beautiful for the young man. She will appear to him to be very feminine, a delicate and dainty creature that appeals to the male instinct to protect and shelter. Such behavior declares to the young man that she is desirous to be intimate with him. Of course if she goes through all that trouble and he was attracted to her enough in the first place to even ask her out he will give her the desire of her heart which is to be intimate with Him. So how do we become intimate with God, we make ourselves as attractive as we can. We clean up our act, we rid ourselves of other gods, we put on the garment of praise and we let Him know that we want only Him and Him alone. You see the word for desire is sha al which means a request or petition but a request or petition is expressing a desire. This is not just any request but a request from the heart. I have journeyed down to the Abbey to anag to make myself beautiful before God so I could sha al give him a request. The thing is that after having gone through this period of cleansing and purging I find my initial request to be meaningless and I desire only one thing, which is I have only one sha al request and that is to just be intimate with Him. So I begin my search for intimacy with God only to discover as Abraham Heschel said, to find that God was searching for an intimacy with me. As Gary Paxton, the guy who co-wrote the Monster Mash wrote after he found Jesus: He was there all the time, waiting patiently in line.

4 WORD STUDY THE LORD YOUR ` יהו אלהיכ GOD Deuteronomy 30:2-3: And (you) shalt return unto the Lord thy God, James 4:8: Draw nigh to God and he will draw nigh to you. There is one striking similarity between all these verses that

5 talk of returning to God or drawing near to Him and that is that it is us who must make the first step toward God. The syntax of Deuteronomy 30:2 suggest that returning to the Lord is a separate step from obeying His voice. In other words the first step is to return to the Lord. There is an interesting play on words for the word return. The word used for return is shabata. Looks familiar? It should it come from the same root as the word for Sabbath which means to rest, except that the Masoretes in the seventh century AD put a Pathah (short a) under the Shin rather than a Qames (long a) making the root word shuv which means to return or restore. The original Hebrew was written without these long and short vowels so it is debatable as to whether this word could come from the root word shabbat or the root word shuv and I believe the intent was both in order to have a play on words. Thus, we are to return to our resting upon God and not the arm of the flesh. Note we must do this with all our hearts and souls. The word heart in Hebrew is lavav and the word soul is nepesh. I explained yesterday that the word nephesh or soul means breathe and thus references your physical life as your physical life would not be possible without your breathe. The word heart or lavav represents the emotional and intellectual part of us that part that is not visible but exist nonetheless. When used together means both your intellect or understanding and your passions and your physical being. We can return to God with our intellect but not with our passions, or we can return to God with our passions but not our intellect. We can return to God with our bodies in church and engaged in Godly activities, but our hearts may not be in it. God is saying we must return to Him with our entire being mental, emotional and physical.

6 The passage also says that we are to return to the Lord your God. In the Hebrew this is YHWH (your) Elohim. The Talmud explains that the word YHWH is in a feminine form and the word Elohim is masculine. The feminine represents the caring, nurturing and loving nature of God. The Masculine represents the disciplinary, protection and provision aspect of God. I find a real division among Christians. Some see God as just all loving and caring the YHWH but overlook his discipline and correction. Others go to the extreme that God is just Elohim, ready to send lightning bolts on you if mess up. As a pastor and Christian worker I met numerous single parents who described how hard it was to perform both roles as mother and father. Without exception they said that they were failing in both areas. God never designed for a child to be raised by one parent. I believe he wanted to have two parents involved in the raising of a child to show the distinct role each play so that we could understand that God plays two distinct roles with us and that we can love him in both roles. A child can love his father because his father sacrifices and works to provide for him and he can love his mother because she nurtures him. I find many Christian who love only God Elohim because he provides things for them. Yet, they totally overlook God YHWH who just wants to love and nurture them. Thus when we are commanded to return to God we are commanded to return to both Elohim His protection, provision and discipline as well as YHWH his loving, caring and nurturing nature. When this is done then the Lord God will return to us. There is just one issue that bothers me. This business of returning seems very ambiguous. How do I really know that I have

7 returned with all my heart and all my soul? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that the verb return is in a Qal (simple verbal) form and not a Piel (intensive verbal) form. This return with all your heart and soul is the best you can give even if it falls short. God is not demanding a complete return, that is virtually impossible in our natural state, but He is demanding that we give him the best that we possibly can. If we come to Him in the best possible way that we can, offering our heart and soul to him as best we can, that is enough. James tells us that we just need to draw near to God and he will then move into action to draw near to us. We just need to start the process and do our best. The Lord will take care of the rest. There is a story in the Talmud which Jesus based his story of the Prodigal Son on. It was about a king who had a disagreement with his son. The nature of this disagreement was such that the son left home to live in another kingdom. After a time the father sent a messenger to the son with this message: Please come home. The son sent the messenger back telling his father: That is too far for me to come. The Father then sent his messenger back with this message: Then come as far as you can and I will meet you. The son returned and met his father and was reconciled. God only wants you to come as far as you possibly can come and He will meet you and take you the rest of the way. However, when Jesus told the story and the son returned and the father, the provider (Elohim) met his son before he even arrived home, but when he did He then hugged (YHWH) his son. When we come back to the father both YHWH and Elohim He will not only restore us with His provision, but He will also hug us.

8 WORD STUDY RETURN UNTO THE שׁבת עד יהוה LORD Deuteronomy 30:2-3: And shalt return unto the Lord thy God, and shalt obey his voice according to all that I command thee this day, thou and they children, with all thine heart, and with all thy soul; that then the Lord thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return and gather thee from all the nations, whither the Lord thy God hath scattered thee. James 4:8: Draw nigh to God and he will draw nigh to you. There is one striking similarity between all these verses that talk of returning to God or drawing near to Him and that is that it is us who must make the first step toward God. The syntax of Deuteronomy 30:2 suggest that returning to the Lord is a separate step from obeying His voice. In other words the first step is to return to the Lord. We must return and obey with all our hearts and soul.

9 There is an interesting play on words for the word return. The word used for return is shabata. It appears to be from the same root as the word for Sabbath which means to rest, except that the Masoretes pointed this with a pathah under the Shin rather than a qammits making the root word shuv which means to return or restore. In the unpointed text, this word could come from the either the root word shabat or shuv and I believe the intent was both. We are to return to God and rest upon God and not the arm of the flesh. The preposition od could mean to or upon depending upon the context. Note we must do this with all our hearts and souls. The word heart is lavav in Hebrew and the word for soul is nepesh. When these words are used together it means both your intellect or understanding and your passions. We can return to God with our intellect but not with our passions, or we can return to God with our passions but not our intellect. God is saying we must return to Him with both. The passage also says that we are to return to the Lord your God. In the Hebrew this is to return to YHWH your Elohim. There are some Christians who seem to be caught up in a fad that it is more appropriate to say YHWH, which is fine, but some seem to go as far as to suggest that they are showing some deeper insight or that they will get some special benefit by saying YHWH rather than Lord. Some even suggested that I should be ashamed of myself, being a Hebrew student and saying the Lord rather YHWH. They tell me, Wouldn t you rather be called by your name than someone else s name? Frankly, I don t care what you call me so long as it is not late to dinner. A wife might even feel hurt if her husband called her by her real name and not the name of endearment that he has

10 given her like sweetheart, honey or dear. For me the name Jesus has also been an expression of endearment when I address God or even praying Dear Lord is an expression of my love for Him. If the word YHWH or Yeshua carried the same amount of endearment for me I would use those words. God does not listen to our words anyways, He listens to our heart s cry. You can use all the Hebrew words you want but if they do not come from your heart God is not listening. A man may call his wife honey child but if it does not come from his heart, his wife is not going to care what words he uses, she will still not listen to what follows. There is no magic or mysticism in the name of God, any power in the use of His name only comes when it the name is spoke in love from the heart. My study partner and I were talking yesterday about the dog whisperer we saw in television. He would walk up a vicious barking down, hold out two fingers and quietly say, Down, Down and the dog would stop barking and lay down. Saying down to a barking dog and waving your fingers is not what makes him stop barking. A dog does not understand your words, he is reading your heart, he is watching your facial expression and he even smells that slight difference in odor you off when you are angry, threaten, or fearful. You can t fool him because he does not listen to your words, he listens to your heart and if there is no fear in you and you truly love and care for him, and he will relax and quiet down. Actually, no one can be sure just what the correct pronunciation is for the name of God as there are no vowel pointings in YHWH, it could be yaway or yahoah, we just can t be sure. Vowel pointings were not added to the written Hebrew until 700 years after the birth of Jesus and then the Masoretes just added the vowels from the word for lord (adoni). What I do find interesting about the word YHWH is that it is in a feminine form. The word Elohim is in a masculine form. The sages teach that when the word YHWH is

11 used it represents the feminine nature of God which is the mercy, nurturing and lovingkindness of God. The word Elohim represents the masculine nature of God, God s protection and provision. Thus you return to YHWH the nurturing, the loving and the caring part of God with your heart and it is to Elohim that protection and provision part of God that you return with your soul. When this is done then the Lord God will then return to you. There is just one issue that bothers me. This business of returning seems very ambiguous. How do I really know that I have returned with all my heart and all my soul? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that the word return is in a Qal form and not a Piel. This return with all your heart and soul is giving the best you can give even if it falls short. If we come to Him in the best possible way that we can, offering our heart and soul to him as best we can, that is enough, He will meet us at that point. James tells us that we just need to draw near to God and he will then move into action to draw near to us. We just need to start the process and do our best. The Lord will take care of the rest. There is a story in the Talmud about a king who had a disagreement with his son. The nature of this disagreement was such that the son left home to live in another kingdom. After a time the father sent a messenger to the son with this message: Please come home. The son sent the messenger back telling his father: That is too far for me to come. The Father then sent his messenger back with this message: Then come as far as you can and I will meet you.