The Narrow Gate
The distress of my heart has grown great. From my straits bring me out. Psalm 25:17 Robert Alter translation
Distress – What binds you? What hems you in? What makes you feel as if you have no options, no choices? What propels you into the narrow straits? All of these things are tsarot, the plural of tsara. The basic meaning is anything that is narrow or confined. This is imagery of the land. Stand on any hill in Israel. Look at the view. See the expanse. Then proceed along the path that takes you into a narrow canyon. Feel the constraint and the fear. Wide open is good. We can see the enemy approaching. We can defend ourselves. We have room to maneuver. Narrow is bad. There are hidden dangers. We can’t run away. Life presses us into indefensible places. We are squeezed.
David knows distress. He knows that he is experiencing more and more constraints. The vise grip of life without options is closing in on him. Maybe that’s exactly how you feel. Tight. Bound. Obligated. Tied down. What do you do about this?
Yeshua has something to say about narrow places. Perhaps it’s not quite what we think. “Narrow is the gate and few there are who find it.” Suppose that is a statement about distress, not morality. What if Yeshua is saying that being bound, being tied down is the way to faithfulness? What if Yeshua is echoing David’s declaration, “Until I was afflicted, I did not listen to You, O Lord”? What if the narrow way is the way of suffering so that you come to YHWH because you no longer can escape? Few find it. Why? Because we all want to run away from those narrow places that God engineers in our lives. We all do our best to deflect, ignore and break free of His way of getting our attention. We don’t want to be pushed toward God, even if He is doing the pushing. We want FREEDOM—by which we mean we want life as we want it. The narrow way is the way of restraint, of life under God’s direction, of being bound to Torah. The narrow way is the way of true freedom, but for most of us it feels like rule-bound behavior. No wonder few find it. Only the few are willing to go through the narrow passage that leads to life with God.
We know what David means. He means that life is a mess. Life is pressure. Life is limits. Life is boundaries. Those descriptions make us want to get out. But rather than run, perhaps we need to reconsider the engineering of the Master. We are in tight spots for a reason. Our circumstances are purposeful, not accidental. We are constrained by the love of the Father. Maybe God is pointing us to the narrow way even while we drag our heels.
“Bring me out!” shouts David. That’s our plea as well. “Bring me out!” But what if the way out is to go further in?
Topical Index: distress, tsara, narrow, Psalm 25:17
“What propels you into the narrow straits?” When we are going against the norm and going upstream, against odds, against the broad and easy way, and when we disagree with the majority to be “pushed toward” YHWH than to agree with men in a distorted system, not allowing folks to be free from earth-bound, man-made rules and regulations that go against YHWH’s Torah ways. Life indeed has become a mess, what has been right, has become wrong, distorted and corrupted.
“When you are in Yerusalem,” our guide told us when we were there, that “you are never on level, as in flat ground, but it is either uphill or downhill.” That means we can only struggle to go uphill purposefully, or slide downhill which is easier and then have more difficulties climbing up again.
This is one of many songs our Hebrew teacher taught us, hope you will enjoy it:
KOL HA’OLAM KULO GESHER TSAR ME’OD
THE WHOLE WORLD IS A NARROW BRIDGE
Kol Ha’olam kulo
Gesher Tsar me’od
Gesher Tsar me’od
Gesher Tsar me’od –
Kol Ha’olam kulo
Gesher Tsar me’od –
Gesher Tsar me’od.
Veha’ikar – veha’ikar
Lo lefached –
lo lefached klal.
Veha’ikar – veha’ikar
lo lefached klal.
The last sentences means: And the main thing to recall -is not to be afraid at all.
The narrow and strait way is the way of true freedom! Shalom!
Amen!
Very insightful, Skip! Love this!
This makes total sense every time I have surrendered my struggle to remove or to escape the places that are so uncomfortable are the very ones that allow Yaweh to change me. They change my perspective and change my life in ways that they wouldn’t have happened had I not been there. Amen. Glory!
One of the repeated laments I see in the Psalms and the Proverbs is “why do the wicked seem to prosper?” Good question.
So I assigned myself at some point to ask myself why my life looked so hard, and what in what parts could it been easier. I prayed and asked God to show me. I saw a few things. I saw mostly that every time I acted out of fear, the net result was that I became isolated. Fear ‘gave’ me only bad choices to choose from. I did not know then that fear was not a spirit from God (2Tim. 1:7 “For God hath not given us a spirit of fear…”) I listened to it when it told me that giving heed to fear was the only way to protect myself, and I accordingly chose multiple forms of isolation as ‘safety’ for years. I did not know my Shepherd’s Voice.
But I also saw something else. My most acute stress has always been because I was worried about spiritual danger in my family. It felt like danger to me when I saw myself and my family unable to correctly respond to disaster. The results of that disaster were yet further stressors. Worst of all was that I could clearly sense trouble ahead, but could not stop it or warn myself or others. I felt like a sitting duck. And the more I was afraid, the worse it got.
But I also think I have observed something else. There is always a choice of love. We need to love and be loved. We like it and want it. That is how we were created. But most of our relationships with God,ourselves and others seem to be relationships of convenience. Which is to say, when the going gets rough, I find I want to cheap out. I think people tend to run from fear, from inconvenient truths, from PUTTING OUT. Because to truly love, is to agree to be open and ready to change at every moment: to be willing to give up a pet sin because it is getting in the way of love in any of those 3 dimensions. Or to give up an advantage, or resources. Or to go out of our way. To an extent, I see that people do learn how to do mutual exchanges, and for a ‘good’ person, (i.e. someone you could feel rather certain that they would act on obligation in return) a few of us might even be willing to die. But, even the heathen do likewise.
But the way I read Torah-in-a-capsule (the Golden Rule), I must be willing to go to the line EVERY time. In every situation. In every way. Be willing to get knocked down 70 times 7 times (which is how I read that scripture). As a child, I could clearly see that that is what I needed someone else to do for me, and I had been taught well enough to know that if I could see that, then that is what I must be willing to do. So I tried to do that for the ones I loved. To give up looked like spiritual death, and as I had already been born again, I did not want to lose Jesus in me. But I got creamed. For 40 years it seemed I did nothing but lose ground. The harder I tried to love, the more I lost. I did not want to admit failure, my anger at God and myself, or that I was clearly being beaten.
Long story short, I know to the bottom of my soul that ONLY when I kept choosing love did I see what had to change in me. And have the motivation to change it. How much secret pride, how much generational doubt and unbelief I struggled with, how much cowardice, I never knew, would have never have seen, except on the front lines of this battle. If I had backed down in my love, I would never have even known how bad off I was. Certainly would have not wanted to go through admitting it, or repenting it.
Looking back, I thought it was because I wanted to be ‘good’, and that it was about others. But truly, it was about me. It would have been much easier if I had been able to trust in my attempts to obey. LOL! But I had to see the depths of my lack of trust before I could see what just was not going to work in this love business.
If I had not committed to love, I would have never gotten to see my depravity. The valley of my life was only the pit of myself that I had to repent out of. It is sin that twists that view to look like something else. The glass I was looking through was darkened by generations of refusing to see the light. That was my legacy. I was born into conformity with the world. And that conformity is precisely the refusal to commit to being vulnerable to the requirements of love. Because I can see in me no natural inclination to want to know my own darkness, I am afraid to love. I know it was Jesus in me that held me to that line.
All praise to Him!
Wow Laurita! You really expressed that profound truth well. I’m in total agreement with you, sister.
Good word. Clearly the truth for those willing to see. Thanks, Skip.
That is SO much more meaningful than the standard way of interpreting these “narrow” passages. Makes perfect sense. Thank you again Skip.
~ Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it ~ (Matthew 7.13,14)
“Bring me out!” Yep. Certainly my cry lately.