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November 1 - November 4, 2023
For instance, the word ruach (roo-AKH) means “breath,” “wind,” or “spirit.” When God’s ruach blows through the Valley of Dry Bones to bring new life in Ezekiel 37, we see that all of its various meanings are intended.
No one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, “You must be born again.” The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. (John 3:5–8 NIV) I’ve always imagined that God chose to reveal his Word in Hebrew because the language invites us to think more deeply. As we read the Scriptures, we ask God what he is saying to us again and again.
yirah (YEER-ah), for instance, which is usually translated as “fear.” The word fear is common in the Old Testament,
yirah. Our English word fear narrowly focuses on being afraid. To us, fear is the opposite of trust and is synonymous with worry, dread, or fright. But yirah encompasses a much wider range of meanings, from negative (dread, terror) to positive (worship, reverence) and from mild (respect) to strong (awe).
“revere” or “reverence” in your Bible, the word yirah is
“yirah” (revere) our mother ...
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When we see the phrase “fear of God,” Christians sometimes focus on fearing the punishment that God could give us for our deeds. Certainly, we’ll all stand before God’s judgment seat when we die. But if you know that Christ has paid for your sins, you shouldn’t have this kind of fear anymore. This is what John preaches against when he says, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love” (1 John 4:18 NASB). Yet the Bible speaks about the “fear of the Lord” very positively. Proverbs tells us, In the
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Rabbi Abraham Heschel points out that awe in response to God is far superior to fear.
fear focuses on one’s self, awe focuses on God’s glory. He writes: What is the nature of yirah? The word has two meanings, fear and awe. There is the man who fears the Lord lest he be punished in his body, family, or in his possessions. Another man fears the Lord because he is afraid of punishment in the life to come. Both types are considered inferior in Jewish tradition. . . . Fear is the anticipation and expectation of evil or pain, as contrasted with hope, which is the anticipation of good. Awe, on the other hand, is the sense of wonder and humility inspired by the sublime or felt in the
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Hebraically, the “fear of the Lord” is being aware of the awesome, ...
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The Hebrew word for “fear” can be either positive or negative, depending on the context.
the word pakad can be a wonderful word or a terrible word, depending on where you find it. The King James Version translates it as “visit,” but it has nothing to do with stopping by and saying hello.
It’s a joyous thing when God “visits” us in the sense of caring for us and answering our prayers. But consider how pakad is used in Exodus 32:34: “In the day when I visit, I will visit their sin upon them.” Here it has very negative implications. To “visit” a person’s sins is to punish the person for them. In each of these lines, both positive and negative, pakad refers to the idea of “paying attention to.” When God pays attention to a person, he cares for them. When he pays attention to someone’s prayers, he answers them. But when he pays attention to someone’s sins, he disciplines them.
build a “house”
Often in Jesus’ ministry he spoke about the temple, and he made a key statement that “I will destroy this temple made with hands, and in three days I will build another made without hands” (Mark 14:58 NASB). John’s Gospel says that he was referring to his body, in terms of being raised to life. But there is a bigger picture there as well. Through Jesus’ death and resurrection he was building a “house” of a different type. He was bringing together a “house” of a family of believers who would become that place where God’s Spirit dwells.
At Pentecost, the Spirit indwelt the hearts of the believers. The people of the early church would have recalled other scenes of God’s Spirit entering his temple, as it did in Solomon’s day (2 Chron. 7:1–3). But now, instead of dwelling in houses made by human hands, the Spirit of God had moved into a new temple, the body of believers. This imagery is found throughout the New Testament:
We are the temple of the living God. As God has said: “I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.” (2 Cor. 6:16 NIV) Consequently, you are no longer
foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also me...
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(Eph. 2:19–22 NIV)
(1 Pet. 2:4–5 NASB)
Now we can see a progression of God’s plan to have intimacy with humankind, even though we forfeited our relationship with him through sin.
As a result, Hebrew is firmly rooted in the real world of the physical senses.
Without having the word stubborn, it uses “stiff-necked,”
Without having the word stingy, Hebrew speaks of being “tight-fisted” or of having a “bad eye”—being unable to see the needs ...
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“You have brought trouble on me by making me stink to the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites and the Perizzites” (Gen. 34:30). Hebrew speaks of being obnoxious or repulsive by speaking of a person’s “bad odor,” or ba’ash (bah-AHSH).
Paul also used this graphic imagery when he told the Corinthians they were the “aroma” of Christ (the Messiah—the “anointed one”) to those around them: But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. (2 Cor. 2:14–16)
After a war, the victors would lead their vanquished captives in a glorious parade through the streets and burn fragrant incense along the way. Paul was saying that to the lost we are the stench of death, but to those who are saved we are the life-giving fragrance of our richly anointed Messiah.
The way you “smell” is the aroma Christ has to the world. If you’re habitually rude or dishonest, it can be a potent witness against him. Whatever you do, don’t be a stench!
could she ever forget? Understanding the Hebrew words for “remember” and “forget” can
In English, our definition of the word remember focuses entirely on the idea of recalling memories and bringing ideas into our thoughts. To forget is to fail to bring a certain memory to mind. Both words are concerned entirely with mental activity—whether or not information is present. But the Hebrew verb zakhar has a much wider definition than just “remember.” It includes both remembering and the actions that are taken because of remembering. It often implies that a person did a favor for someone, helped them, or was faithful to a promise or covenant.
But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the ark; and God caused a wind to pass over the earth, ...
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Once again, the verb “remember” focuses on the action, not the mental activity.
Here, “remember” means “to intervene,” focusing on what God did, not what God was thinking about.
Hebrew words for “forget,” shakach and nashah,
Often they mean to ignore, neglect, forsake, or disregard a person or covenant.
So watch yourselves, that you do not forget the covenant of the LORD your God which He made with you, and make for yourselves a graven image in the form of anything against which the LORD your God has commanded you. (Deut. 4:23 NASB) The idea here is that the Israelites would intentionally ignore their covenant, not necessarily forget that they made it. When the Israelites lapse into idolatry, we also hear God threatening to “forget” them: Therefore behold, I will sure...
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When God “forgets” something, he does not necessarily lack information. This helps us understand why, in the psalms, we hear people asking God why he is forgetting them: How long, O LORD? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me? (Ps. 13:1 NASB)
Interestingly, forget is almost never used in combination with sin. But often the Bible does say that God will “not remember” our sins. The idea of “remembering sins” takes the idea of acting according to memory and puts it into a negative framework. It suggests that God is going to give the person what he or she deserves for the sin. He will punish sin, not just keep it on his mind. Consider: They have gone deep in depravity As in the days of Gibeah; He will remember their iniquity, He will punish their sins. (Hos. 9:9 NASB)
Because Hebrew focuses on the action rather than the thought, it doesn’t necessarily imply that God loses the memory of sins in his infinite mind. It simply means that he has decided to forgo prosecution.
If you’ve ever been in a close relationship, you know what this is like. A wife whose feelings are hurt by her husband (or vice versa) “decides to forget”—to put the offense out of her mind even though the memory doesn’t go away. Out of love, you simply choose not to act in revenge for the sin. And once you have done this, the memory itself tends to subside.
The idea that we can decide not to “remember” someone’s sins in terms of seeking revenge allows us to remember in order to make a situation better and make wise decisions in the future.
When we forgive a person, we need to choose to put aside our grievances, and often we need to do that over and over again as the memory returns to our minds.
shows more love to be hurt and choose to not remember, time and time again, rather than to simply be able to forget about an incident. But interestingly, the more we love one another, the easier it becomes to remove the memory of the past from our minds. In this sense, perhaps God’s infinite love really does entirely remove our sins from his infinite mind.
At the end of this book is a list of thirty fascinating Hebrew words to get you started, along with some tips and resources to keep learning.
Israel was not untouched by Hellenism, but the Judaism of Jesus’ day retained much of its traditional, Hebraic, Middle Eastern pattern of thought. Jesus’ style of communicating
through parables and concrete images reflects the ancient, time-honored traditional method of communicating truth in his world.
Paul communicated to his Greek-speaking audience in a more Western style, using propositions and logic. Modern readers find his writing much more readable. That was Paul’s mission, of course—to take the gospel to the...
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Greek philosophers also discovered that they could build elegant arguments by boiling down ideas into simple abstractions, which they carefully linked together according to the rules of formal logic. For example: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal. Or I think, therefore, I am.2
But much of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, reflects an ancient form of reasoning and communication that actually worked quite well before Thinking 2.0 came along.
Our culture is a master of droning prose. We believe that religious speakers are effective when they can string out long arguments to defend their points, when they can persuade by the force of argument—this for us is theological sophistication. But this view betrays an important Western prejudice, that storytelling cultures are less sophisticated than prose cultures like our own. They are not!5
