Let my prayer come before You; Incline Your ear to my cry! Psalm 88:2 NASB Let . . . come before You – The first thing you should notice is the change in syntax. In Hebrew the verb comes first. So, it reads, “Let come before You my prayer.” The action is the important thing. What…
Lord, the God of my salvation, I have cried out by day and in the night before You. Psalm 88:1 (English) NASB Cried out – “The phone’s ringing. Answer it!” Do you find it difficult not to answer a call? Are you annoyed with people who just let the phone ring but don’t pick up? For decades…
Lord, the God of my salvation, I have cried out by day and in the night before You. Psalm 88:1 (English) NASB Lord, the God – Make sure you realize why both of these words are found at the beginning of this poem. YHVH, of course, and ʾĕlōhîm. Today we consider both of these as designations of…
A Song. A Psalm of the sons of Korah. For the music director; according to Mahalath Leannoth. A [a]Maskil of Heman [b]the Ezrahite. Psalm 88:1 (Hebrew) Music director – We investigated this unusual psalm about three years ago (perhaps you remember). At the time I didn’t know the “frightening emotional darkness in [this] psalm that is absent…
But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel; nor are they all children because they are Abraham’s descendants, Romans 9:6-7a NASB Not all Israel – In theological history, Paul’s statement about Israel has been one of the most divisive remarks ever made. The Church has used this and…
Our Father, who is in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Matthew 6:9 NASB Hallowed – Recently we looked at this verse through the scholarship of Ernst Lohmeyer. We discovered that “hallowed” meant changing God’s hiddenness into observable glory. “Hallowed be Your name” really means doing all we can to reveal God in this world. Whether…
This is the way, dearly beloved, wherein we found our salvation, even Jesus Christ the High priest of our offerings, the Guardian and Helper of our weakness. 1 Clement 36:1 (Lightfoot translation) Guardian – Clement was most likely a compatriot of Sha’ul. His letters were considered equally inspired by a large number of believers in…
The record of the genealogy of Jesus the ]Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham: Matthew 1:1 NASB Record – By now you certainly know that Matthew purposely altered the genealogy of Yeshua to fit the Gematria numerical arrangement of the word “David.” The fact that he did this isn’t too surprising. What is more…
“The role of the intellectual is not to tell others what they have to do. By what right would he do so? . . . The work of an intellectual is not to shape others’ political will; it is, through the analysis that he carries out in his field, to question over and over again…
