Seeing Is Believing

You have made Your people experience hardship; You have given us wine to drink that makes us stagger. Psalm 60:3 NASB

Experience Hardship – When the Tanakh uses the verb ra’a in the Hiphil tense, the idea is to be caused to see, to make one feel or know. God makes His people feel. He causes them to see. What? What does God want His people to see, to feel, to know? A heavy yoke! That’s the origin of qasha. “It emphasizes, first, the subjective effect exerted by an overly heavy yoke, which is hard to bear, and secondarily, the rebellious resistance of oxen to the yoke.”^[1] Egypt comes to mind. YHVH rescued Israel from oppression, but Israel didn’t learn the lesson. So YHVH had to subject Israel to His own form of subjugation. David wrote long before the Babylonian captivity, but that episode might be the seminal example of God causing His people to know oppression. As David says in poetic parallelism, “Lord, you made us drink wine that caused us to stagger.”

Why does God do this? Why does He subject His people to this kind of oppression? Without fully understanding the character of YHVH as Father, we might conclude that He is punitive, perhaps vindictive. “Do what I say or else,” might characterize this behavior if we didn’t know Him as a loving Father. But we do, and so did David. A Father who loves His children uses every means to bring them to the truth and to guide them into the fullness of life. Obviously, YHVH knows what fullness of life means, for David and for us. And like loving human fathers, He uses every means, sometimes even difficult ones, to bring His children to the truth that He knows, to the well-being He intends for them, a state that also completely fulfills and satisfies each child. Perhaps one of the measurements we can use to determine whether or not God might apply a heavy yoke to us is our own sense of satisfaction in the role we play in His plan.

We don’t often think of God in this way. Our images of the loving Father are couched in our own desire for blessings, comfort and peace of mind. We attempt to forget our own heartaches, and as a consequence, we forget YHVH’s heartaches. But the prophets remind us that when we depart from His perfect will for us, He suffers. His heart is broken no less than an earthly father’s heart is broken when his children don’t find the best for their lives. The other side of the coin of blessing is not punishment. It is heartache.

Yeshua knew David’s words. While the heavy yoke of the Lord’s correction brings us the experience of staggering under the load, Yeshua uses the same term to console his followers of the other kind of yoke—a yoke that is light and comfortable. This is a fundamental difference between Hebrew and Greek thought. In Greek thought, the goal of human fulfillment is freedom, that is, the absence of any restraint of desire. This is the purpose of eros. Not erotica, but possession. Greek freedom is the attempt to secure what I desire, to bring it under my control, to be the master of a fate that I choose. But Hebrew thought finds this impossible, not because it is beyond human reach but because God is the only sovereign of the universe. The creation was not designed to serve Man. It was designed to glorify the Father, and true fulfillment of all creation, including the destiny of Man, is to participate in this glorification. That means yoked. The only question is how much weight we must bear. Yeshua informs us that being yoked to His destiny is not a heavy burden. It is still a burden, but it is one that we can bear and that is ultimately worth bearing.

This leaves us with just one question. How much are you carrying today?

Topical Index: yoke, qasha, to see, ra’a, freedom, Psalm 60:3

^[1] Coppes, L. J. (1999). 2085 קָשָׁה. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer, Jr. & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (818).

CALENDAR UPDATE:  The event in Portland, OR scheduled on September 4 has been cancelled.  I will be in Portland that day if there is anyone who wishes to just get together, but the event at Heritage House is no longer scheduled.