The Egocentric Gospel (2)
Delight yourself in the Lord; and He will give you the desires of your heart. Psalm 37:4 NASB
Delight – Now we know that this verse is not about getting what you want, at least not until what you want has been transformed by what God wants. But that still leaves us with a question. If we are promised the discovery of God’s desires in our hearts when we delight ourselves in Him, then how do we do that? What does it mean “to delight in the Lord”? What steps do I take? How does this happen?
The root of this word (‘anog) is about being soft and delicate. The word itself (hitanag) is a reflexive intensive, that is to say, the vigorous action applies to the subject rather than to an external object. In this case, the command is to the one who reads it. You and I are to be intensively involved in this action. What action is that? According to the root, it is to treat God with delicacy, to be soft before Him. In other words, we might read this as the act of presenting ourselves with great humility and openheartedness so that we never cause Him offense or injury. We are to treat God “with kid gloves,” as the idiomatic expression goes.
Have you ever thought of delight in this way? We probably associate delight with the feelings of gladness, entertainment or charm. We think of our favorite music, meal or person. We experience that warm, comfortable sensation of calm or the thrill of pleasure. But I would guess we don’t think of delight in terms of gentleness or delicacy. Especially not when it comes to God. We think of God as tough, a warrior, the BIG boss, the controller, the ultimate father, someone who can take it. We rarely if ever think of God’s broken heartedness over the insults cast on His name through our actions. We don’t think of His sighs of regret, His tears, His agony over spurned love, His desperation to bring us to our senses and woo us back into His arms. We don’t treat God gently because we haven’t grown up with a God of sorrows. Since our Greek image of God is all about control, we can’t easily imagine that He needs tenderness from us. And so we think this verse must be about some mysterious spiritual attitude that somehow eludes us. We wish we could delight in the Lord but we find ourselves thinking about ourselves and wishing that our wishes would come true. What is the solution? Replacing our “warrior” images of God as if He were an enhanced version of the Greek divinities with the God of Israel, who is the emotionally rejected Lover, the abandoned Father and the betrayed Husband. Then we will understand that “delight” is a kid-gloves attitude.
The Bible isn’t about us. It’s about God desiring us. He is the central figure in the story, the one most affected by the other characters. Shifting our focus from “genie” to “lover” might enable us to recognize how hurtful we have been and how careful we must become.
Topical Index: Psalm 37:4, delight, ‘anog, delicate, soft
Thank you, Skip. That really helps. After all, I have been the source of all the offense. Repentance is how I soften my heart to relationship. I must repent to you before I can know you.
Skip,
It’s good for us to see and hear that your heart got soft
and delicate in order to tell us that’s what God is desiring
for us all.
If we only knew the half of it!
“He must become greater; I must become less.”
Matthews 11:25-29
John 14:1
Would these be NT references to the Psalm records?
Young children, as probably around ages 2-5 are simply exquisite delight. My 3 year old grand daughter, who was with us at Sukkot recently, had all of us in shame by her child-like innocence. We were playing Hide-and -seek. She realized how hard it was not to find us, that when it was her turn to hide, and we “couldn’t” find her, she would ‘hint’ -“near the ……” , giving away her hiding place. Such delicate innocence. Sigh!
May ABBA find such delight in us, and we in Him.
Thank you so much for this short study. I was suspicious that the word “delight” had a different meaning than my americanized version. I was speaking on motivation and I had to stop to do a word study when I got to this verse. This is going to set up the rest of the lesson perfectly.
This sounds eay more like the right interpretation of this verse rather than a selfish one we always thought of. And anything I find new about my God only makes me fall deeper in love with Him ?
Thank u for sharing, and I pray the Holy Spirit to write this gentleness tenderness in my heart any time I approach God, think of Him, talk to Him… I want to be what pleases Him, although this flesh I live in keeps getting on my way as paul said Rom 7:14-25… sometimes it frustrates me too much. I want to wake up the earliest possible, fast a lot, win many souls for God, pray and inteceed and all, and my humanity gets to barely wake up and focus and do like 1/4 of what I’d like. But regardless of my frustration I just have decided to keep trying and fighting until I leave this earth
You have just described my life, my desires and my reality 😛 I guess we all humans just have to keep walking with God’s mercy until we leave this body 🙂
I have read and enjoyed many of Skip Moen’s responses and commentary on various words and meanings throughout/over the years, but on this one I have to disagree. In the article he wrote “According to the root, it is to treat God with delicacy, to be soft before Him. In other words, we might read this as the act of presenting ourselves with great humility and openheartedness so that we never cause Him offense or injury. We are to treat God “with kid gloves,” as the idiomatic expression goes.”
The response here is not how we think or treat God but how we respond ourselves, which ” with great humility and openheartedness” I do agree with. What I disagree with is the phrase we are to treat God with kid gloves, but the delight is to be in our hearts not our seeing and knowing that God needs to be treated a certain way or manner. The original hebrew “anog” means to be or have a state of being delicate or soft within but all of this orients to our heart. not because God needs to be treated that way but to keep our heart from being hardened. A heart hardened to what is around us, actually to what is within us (which is later where Jesus says heaven can be found (Luke 17:21) would be to cover or layer to the true presence within us. This can be viewed in terms of Pharoah and His response he gave to Moses and the people of Israel when his heart was hardened to the repeated question “let my people go” in the early parts of Exodus. A hardened heart not only misses or no longer has that awareness of what is within us, layered and creating within us a spiritually blindness of sorts, to that which is within, but also will respond to what and more importantly who is around us, often in ways that is harsh, bitter, critical or worse with hate, condemnation, “apart from God” because we have covered the traits of God and fruit of the spirit within us. It must be remembered here what spirit produces within us, through us is what Paul names fruit of the spirit in his letter to the church of Galatia, includes love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self control.
God does not need to be treated with “kid gloves” and in fact God is spirit and has no human attributes at all, which is one of the biggest “gaps” our traditional approach and understanding of God and spirit has created in our thinking and approach to God. And in fact the deeper understanding of this is to see/understand our own heart AS one oriented or joined WITH God in spirit, remembered the profound statement written in the middle of Deut 6:4 “God is one” – not merely there is only one God, but in spirit there is only the singular state, all, complete, only God and merely one spirit as well, which also implies a singular mindset or thought system, meaning there is nothing that is not one or more simply where it is written God is love, God is light, God is truth, God is spirit, there is nothing opposed or opposite to love, to light, to truth nor not joined in spirit with God. More simply in spirit God is ALL there is, for there is no state that is opposed or opposite TO God. This is the state our heart is to be and our perception of ourselves as well. A hardened heart would be separated FROM God. But the only way to have this is to not have a heart that is hardened in anyway, which is where the “delicate or softened” state or condition of our heart really comes in. This also is why Jesus so easily welcomed little children because they had hearts that “delighted in God”, their own hearts were still delicate and softened, they had not been hardened over the years from life, education (which probably is the creator of the greatest distances to God, creating within our heads definition which then says an ever present God is somehow distance or not within), experience, beliefs, etc.
Far far more I could add to this but I made this long enough already. Be well everyone and as I write this we are now in the early part of our Christmas season 2018 and I wish everyone an anog heart in their own life.
I read Ken’s remark today to this TW and wanted to share some thoughts. This is a quote from Skip’s previous TW “Instead of treating mishalot as our personal checklists, we can read the verse so that it says that God will give us the desires themselves. In other words, the reference for “desires” is not another external list of things but rather the actual motivations themselves. In this reading, delighting in God will result in having His desires in your heart.” From personal experience, I know this to be true. I experienced this for a short period of time. But I find myself feeling a little like Moses may have felt when he didn’t get to enter the Promise Land. The realization of a missed opportunity. And I am not sure if Moses would have felt this way, but I have this feeling of it not being fair. I don’t think the opportunity will present itself again. But I feel Yehovah’s presence with me, and I have hope of other opportunities. I have hope of eventually finding myself living in the present and of being in that place of selfLESSness again.
“What is the solution? Replacing our “warrior” images of God as if He were an enhanced version of the Greek divinities with the God of Israel, who is the emotionally rejected Lover, the abandoned “Father and the betrayed Husband. Then we will understand that “delight” is a kid-gloves attitude.
The Bible isn’t about us. It’s about God desiring us. He is the central figure in the story, the one most affected by the other characters. Shifting our focus from “genie” to “lover” might enable us to recognize how hurtful we have been and how careful we must become.”
I have to wonder if anyone in the United States would be willing to think of God in this way. We don’t want an emotional God. And most certainly not a vulnerable one.