Tag Archives: Ancient Hebrew

Hey! What Are You Wearing?

20 Monday Jun 2022

Posted by in Isaiah 45:7, Studies

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It’s a new week and I am continuing my study of Isaiah 45:7, specifically the phrase “I make peace.”  I am continuing to look at the Hebrew word asah translated “make” in this passage and, this week, am looking at the third letter comprising asah: the Hey (or Hei or Heh).

Robert Haralick defines Hey as “Power of Being”.  I had to take a moment to think on that because I was once more convinced the ministry of the Holy Spirit was being revealed to me.  I thought about Genesis where God asahs man.  The Ayin revealed the eyes of God focused on His making as well as His being the source of our life.  The Shin revealed the fire that God is inhabiting us and I also pictured that fire like the heat of a kiln, finishing and preparing us.  Now, in Hey, I see He is our Power of Being. The Living Word says, “the shape behind the Hey is of a mouth, breathing, breath”.  God breathed into the nostrils of the man He had made and that man became a living being.  Jesus breathed on His disciples and bade them receive the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit descended on those gathered on the Day of Pentecost as a rushing wind from heaven.  The Spirit is the wind from the heavenly realm, the very breath of Jesus within us: He is our Power of Being.

But, such are concepts I’ve already written about.  I was curious what more I could discover in studying the Hey.  The Shivimpanin video told me Hey represents a unification of giving and receiving as well as completeness for the three lines of Hey represent length, depth, and breadth.  Mr. Haralick shares a similar thought: “The shape of the letter Hey is composed of three lines, one separated from the other two.  The three lines are the three garments, the means of expression, of the soul.  The garments are thought, speech, and action.”  In his entry on the Hey, Mr. Haralick also writes; “The garments of our expression are thoughts, words, and actions.  That which is not manifest we bring into our awareness and our consciousness by our thoughts.  By words and actions we can bring what is in our thoughts to the awareness of others.”

I have been thinking a great deal on garments.  One of my Bible Teachers tells a story of attending a convention where one of the speakers, an Evangelist, took a handkerchief out of his pocket and covered his hand with it.  He likened Jesus to the handkerchief, the covering that hides us from the eyes of the Father and thus Jesus manages sneak us into the Kingdom.  I haven’t heard these exact words myself nor seen this image taught but, with them in mind, I have carefully listened to other believers as they speak.  I hear them speak of being saved but insist they are still flawed human beings and sinners or I hear something like: “God doesn’t see our sins because He sees us through His Son.”  Just this morning I was reading a devotional that said, “One day I’ll stand before a holy God and the grace of Jesus will clothe me.”  I listen to what others say or I read something like that and, while I cannot say I necessarily disagree, there is enough there to give me pause.  I cannot say I agree without more of an explanation of what they mean.

In all my listening, I have found there is very little believers are expecting from their Christian lives.  It seems it is enough to believe in Jesus and get to go to heaven when they die.  While they are waiting to die and go to heaven, they fill their lives with good works and try to be like Jesus and try to convince others to believe on Him so they too can escape hell.  After all, doesn’t Revelation 19 say the Bride of Christ is given fine linen to wear, clean and white, and that the fine linen is the righteousness of saints (verses 7-8)?  That’s the translation in the King James version.  Other translations say “the righteous acts of the saints”.  Doesn’t the Book of James say “faith without works is dead” so we thus prove we are the people of God with our works and, by performing righteous acts, ensure we won’t be found naked when He comes?

This is not the sum of my Christian life.  I expect I now live a life in and flowing out of the Holy Spirit and I do not have this expectation in vain.  I expect that God is faithful to His word and that what He has promised, He will do.  I expect He told the truth in Ezekiel 36 when He promised to give me a new heart and a new spirit and then promised He will put His spirit in me.  I expect the Apostle Peter told the truth when he declared Joel’s prophecy fulfilled and the Spirit of God poured out on all flesh.  I expect God’s word is true and that I know His Spirit is in me because His Spirit bears witness with my spirit that I am a child of God.  I expect that because His Spirit is in me that the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.  I expect that His Spirit in me makes the great work of the blood of Jesus a reality in my life and that His blood has cleansed me from all sin. 

I expect the life I now live I live by the faith of Jesus Christ.  I expect that His blood cleanses my conscience of dead works.  I expect works to prove my faith is alive because it is His faith, His works, and He is in me working both to will and to do.  I expect that because His Spirit is in me, I will do good works which God has before ordained that I should walk in.  I expect His Spirit in me keeps me abiding in Him and Him in me so that my life cannot help but bear fruit.  I expect that it is Christ IN me that is my hope of glory, not Christ ON me.

I expect that all of this is happening right now because the Spirit is renewing my mind.  In his letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul beseeches us to “be not conformed to this world; but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind” (12:2).  The Greek word translated “renewing” in this passage is anakainosis (G342) and means “renovation-renewing”.  Paul also beseeches us to “be renewed in the spirit of your mind” (Ephesians 4:23).  The Greek word translated “renewed” here is ananeoo (G365) and also has the meaning of “to renovate, reform, renew”.   

I expect the word of God to be true and I thank God that through Jesus Christ I am right this minute being delivered from my body of death!  Right now, because I am in Christ Jesus, I am a new creation.  Behold!  Old things have passed away and all things have become new.  The letter Hey is spelled Hey Aleph and means Lo!, or Behold!, or Here it is!  The letter Hey means Spirit, Revelation, and Receiving Understanding.  This changes how I pray Paul’s great prayer in Ephesians.  “The God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him: the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that ye may know what is the hope of his calling and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints…” (1:17-18). 

His Spirit, that Spirit that is wisdom and revelation and the Jesus Christ-life energy working in me to open my eyes, is in me right this moment.  Because that is true, I no longer worry so much about where I’m going when I die but what I am becoming right now.  Becoming isn’t even the correct word.  His Spirit renovates me, renews me, and restores me to His original plan revealed in Jesus.  God foreknew me before my parents ever came together and, because He foreknew me; He has predestined me to be conformed to the image of His Son.  This transformation and conformation happens first in my thoughts and I thank Him that in His gentleness, He doesn’t destroy me and then build me again.  I am transformed from glory to glory.  My death is swallowed up in His life. 

Proverbs 23:7 says, “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he”.  I look at the letter Hey and see this is true: my very thoughts are my garments.  The goodness of God leads me to metanoia and, as I exchange my mind for His and my thoughts for His, my garments become His righteousness.  I do not fear I will be found naked when He comes because my garments cannot be separated from me.  They are His very life.  “It doth not yet appear what we shall be but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).

Hey!  Lo!  Behold!  Here it is!  Hallelujah!

Note: For ease of reading, I did not reference every scripture I’ve quoted but everything I wrote about what I expect is found in scripture.  I encourage everyone to look these promises up for yourselves and EXPECT!

Unless noted otherwise, all scriptures are quoted from The Holy Bible Old and New Testaments, The Authorized King James Version, Thomas Nelson, Inc., Printed in Colombia, 2003

References

HEI- Secrets of the Hebrew Letters – YouTube

Secret of the Hebrew letter Heh – YouTube

Haralick, Robert M., The Inner Meaning of the Hebrew Letters, Jason Aronson Inc., Northvale, New Jersey, 1995, Pages 69-83

Strong, James, LL.D., S.T.D., The New Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee, 1990

A Matter of Perspective

28 Monday Mar 2022

Posted by in Isaiah 45:7, Studies

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There is a moment in all of my studies where I come to a realization that I don’t know anything at all and, in fact-borrowing from that great sage Yoda-I must unlearn what I have learned.  As I have come to know this great Father revealed in Jesus, to actually know Him personally via His Spirit living in me, to know him not as a second-hand or merely intellectual knowing; I have discovered that what I have been taught to believe about Him is not true.  Not only do I discover God Himself to be very different than what I’ve been taught but I find great many other things I’ve been taught to believe do not, in fact, have their foundation in the bedrock of Jesus Christ. 

Moving from an intellectual knowledge and study of God, as if He’s an object to be studied like one of my school day science experiments, to a vital relationship with the Living God is terrifying.  There was a moment, years ago, when the God revealing Himself to me and the image of the god I’d been taught to know came face to face with each other.  The false image was burned away by the vitality of He who is Alive Forevermore (Revelation 1:18) and I could feel Him moving from my head to my heart.  I know, it sounds odd but it was a real experience.  At once, I felt as if I was dying and being made alive.  It was again, at once, a terrifying and electrifying experience. 

I do try not to be negative in these blog posts but I do have to say the god I’d come to know in religious institutions was utterly destroyed by the consuming fire God is.  This is not a pleasant experience in many ways.  There were Christian friends who were genuinely concerned that, if I continued down the path I was being shown, I would lose my salvation and end up spending eternity in hell.  These are subjects for another time.  For the sake of this post, I want to say to anyone having an experience like this, God is faithful.  The Shepherd isn’t going to let any of His sheep be consumed in the wilderness.  I had to cling to a handful of scriptures while my world was shaken to bits and stripped to the bedrock of Jesus Christ and Him crucified.  One is Isaiah 41:10; “Fear not for I am with you; be not dismayed for I am your God.  I will strengthen you.  Yes, I will help you.  I will uphold you with My righteous right hand.”  I also clung to the various passages in Psalms which promised God wouldn’t allow me to fall, that He wouldn’t lose His grip on me, etc.  I pictured myself held tightly in His hand and submitted to whatever the Holy Spirit thought was necessary. 

Which is not at all what I’d intended to say in this week’s post!  Perhaps all of that relates to my study of Isaiah 45:7 because I continue to come to places where I feel cast adrift.  I see that I believe something I didn’t even know I believed and I see that belief is-rather than “wrong” should I say “mistaken”?-that scriptures aren’t saying what I’ve been taught to believe they say and that I don’t know anything.  I am no longer afraid of these places of not knowing because I know I am held fast in the righteous right hand of the Father who loves me and that His Spirit will open my eyes to the Truth.  I also anticipate because my Heavenly Father loves surprises and I know there will be a Wow! moment.

That moment came when I looked up the meanings of the Hebrew letters comprising my study word darkness.  The Hebrew word is choshek (H2822) and the three Hebrew letters are Chet (ח), Shin (ש), and Caph [in its final form (ך)].  Mr. Haralick’s book The Inner Meaning of the Hebrew Letters defines the three letters as Chet = Life, Shin = Cosmic Nourishment, and Caph = The Crowning Achievement.  I had just finished looking up the definition for darkness in the Strong’s Concordance and read through the various scriptures and was still wrestling with my thinking of the darkness as something bad.  These meanings made me sit back in my chair and think, “Wow!” Not only was there nothing bad here but these letters comprising my study word darkness actually contained the word life.  I couldn’t believe it.  I needed verification.

I have another book on the meaning of Hebrew letters titled Hebrew Word Study: Beyond the Lexicon by Chaim Bentorah.  I looked up the three Hebrew letters and was fascinated by what I found.  Mr. Bentorah’s book defines Chet as “new beginnings” and “the binding together of man with God”.  The entry for the word Shin says, “The word Shin (note: the Hebrew letters themselves are spelled with Hebrew letters so there are meanings within meanings) means urine and if you drop the Yod in Shin you have Sen which means to chew, tooth, or jaw.  This tells us that the Shin represents a totality of an overall process from eating, to digestion, to the elimination of waste.  Thus, the Shin has the meaning of whole, entire, intact, or complete.”  I looked up Caph (or Kap in Mr. Bentorah’s book) and found: “The Kap is shaped like a container that is empty and ready to be filled…this is the word for palm, hollow of hand, a pan, dish or a container.”  This might make more sense when you see that my study word uses the final form of Caph and that the regular form of the letter is shaped like a backwards/sideways U:  כ.

I am such a beginner in my studies of Hebrew and Greek that using the word beginner gives me too much credit.  I always verify because the final forms of letters can look like the normal/regular forms of other letters and want to be sure I am looking at the correct letter.  The internet is extremely helpful and, while verifying, I found two more sources that helped to further define these letters.  The website alittleperspective.com defined Chet as “the wall, thus outside, divide, half”, Shin as “two front teeth, thus sharp, press, eat, two, again”, and Caph (spelled kaph) as “the open palm, thus bend, open, allow, tame”.  I found a YouTube channel for studying Hebrew words called Rock Island Books and they defined Chet as “sanctuary or inner room designed to protect, a place of refuge, or a place of separation, cut off”, Shin as “crushed, pressed down, destroyed”, and Caph as “palm of the hand which either covers or uncovers.” 

All four of my sources allow for both a positive or negative interpretation of darkness.  Mr. Haralick writes of our lives being the manifestation of our thoughts and those thoughts either coming from the human mind or the divine mind.  Mr. Bentorah speaks of a shadow meaning to Chet where that life of being bonded to God can turn to arrogance and rudeness or an addiction to newness.  Both internet sources speak of Chet as being a place of protection, an inner sanctuary, or place of refuge but it can also be a place of being cut off like a prison.  The same holds true for Shin and Caph as well.  Which is true?  Is Darkness positive or negative?  Good or bad?

I think it’s a matter of perspective.  Both darkness and light exist simultaneously in our present lives.  This is true on a natural plane where one side of the earth experiences night while the other experiences day and this is equally true on the spiritual plane.  The entire world lies in darkness.  We believers once walked in darkness and there are a host of ideas, thought processes, and identities associated with the darkness.  When our eyes are opened to the light that is Jesus Christ and we enter that light, we are confronted with an entirely different set of ideas, thought process, and identity.  His light shines in our darkness, our death is swallowed up in His life, and we are transformed through the renewing of our minds.  The process doesn’t always feel good: remember the chewing, crushing, destruction of Shin but also remember that Shin means whole, entire, intact, and complete.

“Beloved, do not think it strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened to you” (1 Peter 4:12).  “We are hard pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed, always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifest in our body” (2 Corinthians 4:8-10).  “Being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6).  “But he knows the way that I take; when He has tested me, I shall come forth as gold” (Job 23:10).

What a hope we have!  Truly, in Jesus, God our Father has given us treasures of darkness.  And, I thank Him that this purging and processing and transforming takes place in His sanctuary, a place hidden from the eyes of those who do not see and cannot understand.  He keeps us safe.  He is our covering as He fills us with Himself.  We are filled to overflowing until “as He is, so are we in this world” (1 John 4:17) and we too shine His light into the darkness.

Hallelujah!  Hallelujah!  Amen.

Unless noted otherwise, all scriptures are quoted from The New King James Version of The Holy Bible, Thomas Nelson, Inc., Nashville, Tennessee, 1982

References

Bentorah, Chaim, Hebrew Word Study Beyond the Lexicon, Trafford Publishing, 2014, Pages 92, 108, 148

Haralick, Robert M., The Inner Meaning of the Hebrew Letters, Jason Aronson Inc., Northvale, New Jersey, 1995, Pages 113, 161, 293

choshek, “darkness,” strong’s H2822 (alittleperspective.com)

(2) “Darkness” in ancient Hebrew! (Part I) – YouTube

I Can’t See Clearly

21 Monday Mar 2022

Posted by in Isaiah 45:7, Studies

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I have great fun studying the Bible.  I never know what I’m going to learn and yet I always know I’m going to learn something new about the Father revealed in Jesus.  It’s an adventure every time.  Which doesn’t mean it’s easy.  I will start studies and find I’m utterly confused.  It is difficult to come to a study without preconceived notions about what the study passage means.  I have a background where I’ve experienced different denominations and each one has left behind echoes of its belief systems. I read commentaries and expositions on the passages I study that tell me these passages mean one thing and then, through conducting my own studies, I find these passages mean the exact opposite.

I have already mentioned reading interpretations of Isaiah 45:7 where I’m told God is saying he “permits” or “allows” darkness.  The Hebrew word there is “create” and is translated such in other passages.  That God says He creates darkness was not easy to understand once I discovered I came to this passage with a bone deep conviction that the light is good and the darkness is bad.  I wasn’t aware I felt this way until I was deep into the study and analyzing just what it was I already believed compared to what I was uncovering.  Just over the last week there have been multiple times I’ve either read or heard someone say “Jesus is the light that shines in our darkness”.  That is absolutely true: He is.  Yet I’ve been listening with every fiber of my being not just to the words but the intent and feeling of the context in which they are spoken and I find others have this same conviction that the darkness is bad the light is good.  More than that, I see this conviction carries into how we believers view ourselves: I was bad while in darkness and now that I’m in the light Jesus makes me good.  Is this true?  If God created the darkness, and Isaiah 45:7 directly quotes Him as claiming He did; did He create something bad?

The Hebrew word in Isaiah 45:7 for darkness is choshek (H2822) and is defined in the Strong’s Concordance as: “from 2821, the dark; hence (literally) darkness; figuratively misery, destruction, death, ignorance, sorrow, wickedness–dark(-ness), night, obscurity.”  This doesn’t sound good at all and yet this exact word is the same one for darkness in Genesis 1 which God calls “night”.  Night isn’t bad, it just is.  And yet, if I read slowly and carefully, I find that in verse 4 God sees the light, that it was good and then divides the light from the darkness.  In verse 5 He calls the light “Day” and the darkness “Night” and then the First Creation Day comes to a close.  God never actually calls the darkness “good” although verse 31 says, “Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good.”  These are all interesting points, but I don’t find an answer to my question.

I open the Strong’s Concordance to the scripture listings of occurrences of “darkness” and begin to look at them.  At once, I find the subject of darkness to be far more complicated than I imagined.  There are eleven Hebrew words translated “darkness” in the Old Testament and an additional five Greek words in the New.  I am currently focusing on the Hebrew words and some aren’t distinct per se from choshek but rather are familial words and come from the same root.  For example, Psalm 139:12 says, “Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You, but the night shines as the day; The darkness and the light are both alike to You.”  The first occurrence of darkness is my study word choshek but the second is chashekah (H2825).  According to the Strong’s Concordance, this word is also from 2821 and is defined as “darkness, figuratively misery”.

The two words translated “darkness” in Job 28:3 are a different story.  My New King James Version has this verse translated, “Man puts an end to darkness and searches every recess for ore in the darkness and the shadow of death.”  The first occurrence of darkness is again choshek but the second is ophel (H652) and means, “dusk–darkness, obscurity, privily.”  For those of you wondering: privily is the adverb form of privy and means, “private, hidden, secret, clandestine.”  Here we do have two different words coming from different roots and with different meanings although they’ve been translated by the same English word.  As I continued to look at scriptures containing my study word, I found plenty more to confuse me.  There are scriptures where my study word means physical darkness or night.  This is true in Genesis 1 and is also true in passages like Exodus 14:20.  And yet, while the meaning of darkness or obscurity doesn’t change, there are far more occurrences where “darkness” is used in a metaphorical rather than physical sense.  I found this to be true in many passages of Job, Proverbs, and Psalms but reading all of these did not make it any easier to discern whether darkness was good or bad.

Chapter 20 of Job is titled “Zophar’s Sermon on the Wicked Man” and verse 26 states, “Total darkness is reserved for his treasures”.  Those who lose their treasures would call this bad but there are many who would call it good.  Then I read in Isaiah 45:3 quotes God as saying, “I will give you treasures of darkness and hidden riches of secret places.”  There is nothing bad here at all.  Proverbs 2:13 speaks of men who “leave the paths of uprightness to walk in the ways of darkness,” which of course is bad.  But then Psalms 107 speaks of those who rebelled against the words of God (very bad) and thus sit in darkness and in the shadow of death; when they cried out to the Lord in their trouble He saves them out of their distresses and “brings them out of their darkness and the shadow of death” (verses 10-16).  That’s good: the darkness was no match for God.  Then, most confusing of all, I read in Amos: “Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord!  For what good is the day of the Lord to you?  It will be darkness, and not light” (Amos 1:18).  The darkness does sound bad in this passage but how can it be in any way associated with such a certainly good thing as the day of the Lord?

Good or bad.  How can I know?  I certainly can’t rely on my own judgment because there have been so many bad things that have happened to me and yet, as the transforming light and life and love of Jesus has come in to the circumstance I called bad and redeemed it, it has become good.  I can attest to the truth of Romans 8:28: “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.”  Nor can I rely on anyone else’s judgment because one person will say a thing is bad and another will say the very same thing is good.  I can attest to the truth of Isaiah 5:20: “woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”

I think a great deal about the first few chapters of Genesis, specifically the two trees named in the Garden.  There was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life.  I have a book I have not yet read in its entirety but there’s a passage that has stuck with me.  The book is Is God to Blame? by Gregory A. Boyd.  He addresses the Serpent’s lie in the first chapter and writes, “Our role as God’s creatures is to receive, enjoy and reflect our Creator’s love and goodness as we exercise the authority over the earth he entrusted to us.  But we can’t do this if we try to be wise like God, “knowing good and evil”.  To fully reflect God’s image in the way he intended, we must resist the serpent’s temptation to be “like God” in the way God has forbidden.  Unlike God, our knowledge and wisdom are finite.  We simply are not equipped to make accurate and loving judgments about good and evil…When we try to go beyond this boundary and try to know what God alone can know, when we try to be “wise” like God, it destroys us.” 

I don’t yet know whether I agree or disagree with this statement.  Perhaps the truth is closer to I see where Mr. Boyd is coming from but, in Jesus; I have His life and mind and wisdom because His Spirit lives in me and teaches me to think as He thinks and know as He knows.  “In Jesus” is, I think, the key.  I find my confusion begins to clear when I cease trying to understand darkness in terms of good and bad and begin to think of it in terms of Life of Jesus Christ and Not-life of Jesus Christ.  Can there be life in the midst of darkness?  Since life is Jesus, His life is the light of us all, and the life and light that He is shines in the darkness, then I would say that answer is yes.  I would also say this subject of darkness requires further study.

Unless noted otherwise, all scriptures are quoted from The New King James Version of The Holy Bible, Thomas Nelson, Inc., Nashville, Tennessee, 1982

References

  1. Boyd, Gregory A., Is God to Blame? Beyond Pat Answers to the Problem of Suffering, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, Illinois, 2003, Page 23
  2. Guralnik, David B., Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, William Collins + World Publishing Co., Inc., Cleveland • New York, 1970/1976
  3. Strong, James, LL.D., S.T.D., Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee, 1990