CUTS BOTH WAYS

For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Hebrews 4:12

My wife and I have recently experienced the trauma of a life-changing crisis. God was good. It was only about money, not about our health. Now that we are many months into the consequences of this event, I am beginning to understand why our crisis was a financial one. God knew exactly where we need a new set of priorities. The most interesting thing about this process is that the same event has created two completely different struggles for us. The sword cut both ways. I believe that this is often the case with couples. The “one flesh” of a married couple gets cut in order that two individuals can learn obedience. As they learn individual lessons, they become a stronger unit – a more obedient “one flesh” under God. Let me tell you what happened to us.

Perhaps the greatest fear in my life was the fear of losing my security. For me, that was another way of saying that I had to have a big bank account in order to feel safe. Over the last dozen years, this became a reality. My bank account was well into the seven-figure status. It was growing closer and closer to the “magic” number – the number that I thought would be enough. Of course, my life already had many things that I could only dream about when I was younger. From the outside, it looked as though I had it made.

But the truth was darker. I discovered that the more that I had, the more that I worried about losing what I had. Possession did not lessen my fear; it actually increased it. Each month I checked all the figures from the bank. I watched all the expenses as though my income were meager even though it surpassed all of my previous dreams. No matter how much came in, I was not free. I lived under the dread that somehow it would all be lost and I would be destitute. Of course, this fear focused all my behavior on clutching what I had. Instead of seeing my fortune as a blessing from God to be used for his purposes, I felt its power constricting me. I spent money on things I wanted, but I never shook the fear. I operated on the assumption that what I had was mine and I was not going to get any more so I needed to keep as much as I could.

God knew that I needed to let go of this terror that was turning me away from His purposes. So, one day He called in my loan. Of course, my immediate reaction was utter despair. With one e-mail message, all of the money was gone. I had been thrown overboard without a life preserver. For two days I prayed that it was not true, that God would reverse everything. I promised to be a better person. But life-long fears are not undone with a 48-hour antibiotic. Now five months later, I see that God is reshaping my entire life because I am no longer afraid to lose it all. And the reason that I am no longer afraid is that I have already lost it all. What is there left to be afraid of? My focus today is to recognize and live on the basis that God cares for me. He will provide what I need today. I can trust Him absolutely. My security was never really found in the fortune that surrounded me. It was really with the One who allowed me to have that fortune. I lost sight of the benefactor in the forest of the money. He had to burn down the forest so that I could see Him.

The other side of this same event is the story of my wife. She has experienced exactly the same financial catastrophe. But for her, the battle is on a completely different plane. Her life was perfectly happy before the loss. She did not fear losing because her security was not tied to possessing. She simply accepted and enjoyed the results of God’s blessings.

Now she faces a different struggle. What she enjoyed so much, what she found fulfilling and freeing, has been removed. What God used to re-direct my priority and remove my fear has become the source of anxiety for her. For the first time, she worries about what will happen to her. I worried about what would happen to me when we had it all. She worries about what will happen to her when we have nothing. The sword cuts both ways. I am always amazed that God can use the same event to accomplish multiple purposes. I have to learn to be dependent because dependence is what I feared. She has to learn to be dependent because independence is what she assumed. God knew exactly what each of us needed and He brought us both to the point of crisis with a single event. By the way, the Greek word krisis means “a turning point”. Isn’t that precisely what a crisis is? We were both taught to make a turn through the same experience.

I believe that the Biblical concept of marriage is much deeper than the usual interpretation that “one flesh” means sexual union. Peter suggests that there are covenant commitments in a marriage. The covenant of marriage is a symbolic representation of God’s covenant with Man. So, the concept of “one flesh” suggests that a married couple becomes in some sense a single spiritual unit. When crisis occurs, the impact often opens a wound that separates the one unit into its two components. It is a “turning point” – a place where the couple can re-unite as a stronger single unit or break apart. The direction depends on mutual submission to God’s sovereignty.

The verse in Hebrews 4:12 tells us that God’s word cuts like a two-edged sword. I have often heard sermons preached on this verse pointing to the Bible as God’s word, claiming that it cuts into our souls to bring us to repentance. Of course, this is true. But I am sure that the author of Hebrews had something more profound in mind. We can discover this deeper meaning by paying close attention to the key words in this sentence and applying them to the concept of achieving multiple purposes with a single event.

Hebrews uses the expression “word of God”. The phrase “word of God” is quite special. It has direct Old Testament connections; particularly to Isaiah 55:11 where God says that His word goes out from His mouth and always accomplishes it intended purposes. Isaiah 49:2 also refers to God’s Servant (the Christ) whose mouth is like a sharp sword. Over and over in the Old Testament we are given instruction and information through “the word of the Lord”. When we consider that the writer of Hebrews did not have our current New Testament as his disposal, we must recognize that he is alluding to the Old Testament view of God’s word. In the Old Testament, God spoke directly to His people through their leaders, the prophets and in audible voice. His word carried absolute authority. It was intended to bring His children into conformity with His purposes. Time after time, God’s word brought warnings to those who disobeyed.

We should not conclude that the “word” here is only in written form. The Hebrew stem, dabar, carries a wide range of meanings including speaking, declaring, commanding, promising, warning, threatening and conversing”. Notice that all of these meanings are focused on the idea of the audible word. The importance of this concept can be seen in the fact that it occurs more than 2500 times in the Old Testament. In fact, the same Hebrew root is used to identify the Ten Commandments (literally, the ten words) that were spoken by God.

Now the author adds the description “living”. When God speaks, His word is alive. It is full of the vital energy that produces results. Once again the imagery is from the Old Testament. From the beginning, God’s word is the active agent in creation. God spoke the world into existence. There is no other ancient cosmology that places this power in voiced commands. God’s word, the vocalization of His thought, contains everything necessary to bring the world into being. How much more shall it produce His desired results in the lives of human begins? Life itself depends on the word of God. All of this imagery is used to support the claim that the word of God cannot be ignored or rejected without dire consequences.

This background allows the author to add the further declaration that God’s word is “powerfully working”. The Greek word is energes. It is the verb ergo with the added preposition en. This combination strengthens the concept so that it means energy capable of effective results, giving us the translation “powerfully working”. God’s word is alive and active, capable of doing whatever He says.

Once we recognize this power behind the word of God, we can understand the metaphors that our author uses to show how easily God’s word uncovers our deepest motivations and secrets. First, he compares God’s word to the sharpest sword. In fact, he says that it is sharper than the sharpest sword. The author draws on several pictures in order for us to easily grasp the efficiency and effectiveness of God’s word. It is capable of piercing the deepest recesses of our psyche, of cutting cleanly through every layer of protection and strength and revealing every hidden desire and intention of our will. Nothing is hidden from God. Nothing can resist God’s decisive declaration. No human faculty is able to deflect His scalpel. We are completely exposed, cut to the bone.

This thought echoes Paul’s announcement in 1 Corinthians 4:5 that God will shed light on everything hidden in darkness and reveal every motive of the heart when His judgment is exercised. The focus in both passages is on God’s judgment (Greek kritikos), the act of determining truth. God’s spoken word is tied directly to His judgment. Its ability to cut through all of our masks, excuses and pretensions confirms that fact that the crisis produced in our lives is also a time of judgment – a time when the truth will be determined.

Both the word krisis and the word kritikos come from the same Greek root, krino. Crisis and judgment are two sides of the same coin. But we should not be mislead by our contemporary idea of “judgment”. “Judgment” in the Greek means simply, “the process of deciding between good and evil”. Krino has another amazing connection to the picture painted in Hebrews 4:12. The original meaning of krino was “to sunder” – a verb that is usually associated with the sword. This word is the root word behind a great number of important associated concepts including “answer”, “decide”, “hear” and “condemn”.

If we draw these thoughts together, we can see that the image of a sword does much more than point to the ability of God’s word to cut directly into our hidden lives. That slice through our self-sufficiency brings with it a judgment of our condition. It exposes our true standing. Furthermore, it transports us into a crisis that demands an answer to the question of direction. We must decide how we will respond to this crisis. Hearing will produce either submission or condemnation.

Notice that none of these connected conditions and events requires reading a written word. In fact, the catalyst for all of this confrontation and change is the event of crisis. How much more significant and immediate would the translation of this verse in Hebrews be if we understood that God’s word is not a collection of letters on a page but rather His voice spoken to us in the disruptive power of personal crisis.

Crisis – an event in life that cuts right through us, an event that separates us into what we were and what we will become, an event that slices into the very center of our conceptions of self, an event that literally can separate our joints and bones, heart and soul, body and spirit – and reveal our real intentions and motivations. God’s living voice, spoken into our lives through crisis, cuts to the bone. It is all-at-once a turning point, judgment, decision, condemnation and answer. No wonder the author of Hebrews stresses its power.

There is one additional piece of information that pushes us toward this interpretation of the passage. The Greek word that we usually find translated “two-edged” is the word distomos. The original manuscripts of the Greek New Testament were written entirely in uppercase letters without punctuation or spacing. So, scholars had to decide where the separations between letters should occur. In the case of this particular word, it is word constructed of two components. The question is whether the components are dis-tomos (twice cutting) or di-stomos (two mouths). Even though the translation remains “two-edged”, the root is really found in di-stomos. This is quite literally a word about speaking.

My wife and I have experienced a crisis that spoke two separate ways in our lives. The two-mouthed voice of God disrupted our existence to its core. This spoken word brought judgment, decision, listening (hearing) and condemnation. We were forced out of our old ways of thinking and behaving. We faced a turning point. Now the quest of our life (one single life) together is to make that two-mouthed crisis word into a single voiced answer – “Your will be done”. It will not be an answer (apokrisis – literally “from judgment”) until it is a one-flesh voice in response to the krisis – the judgment brought about by God’s insertion of a turning point in our life together.

Imagine how this turns your world upside-down. Personal crisis is not fate’s malicious attempts to bring you to destruction. Life’s traumas are not evil acts intent on your ruin. Crisis is the living word of God powerfully slicing through life, revealing our deepest needs and our most secret mis-deeds in order that we face the turning point. Crisis is the gateway into God’s view of life. It is the invitation to answer Him with an expression of submission. It is the weight of His glory.

God loves us so much He is unwilling to let us live without answers to our deepest concerns. He is teaching us to place them in His hands.