Sunburned (4)
O God, You are my God; I shall seek You earnestly; my soul thirsts for You, my flesh yearns for You, in a dry and weary land where there is no water. Psalm 63:1 NASB
Yearns – When was the last time you fainted for lack of God’s presence? Ever? That’s what David is describing. The word is kāmah, “pale faced” in an Arabic cognate. I’ve only fainted once in my life, a long time ago when I was a teenager. Standing tall on that hot August day on the stage at the front of the church, not moving at all during the longer-than-expected wedding ceremony, all I remember was someone asking me if I felt alright as I woke up laying on one of the pews. That minute in my life is completely blank. Do any of you remember anything while you fainted?
Apply that sensation to David’s cry. David’s entire embodiment, the basar, has fainted in this hostile place. He is in a state of unconsciousness. The blood drained from his head and down he went. In that state of total forgetfulness, he senses the absence of God and realizes that he isn’t going to wake up unless God shows His love.
I’m afraid most of us are living in a state of faint. Oh, we think we are conscious. We think we know what’s happening in our world. But the truth is that as long as the presence of God isn’t palpable, we are really oblivious to reality. We are just like the person who fainted. We really have no awareness at all. The state of faint is the seductive phantasm of living. It convinces us that we are fine when the truth is that we are as good as dead to the real world.
Perhaps kāmah is like the experience of Neo in The Matrix. We have swallowed the Blue Pill and returned to the unreal life of fabricated existence. God challenges us to swallow the Red Pill, but the cost is enormously high. Once swallowed, the rabbit trails go deeper and deeper. Our sense of stability is gone. We are not sure what we are doing or why. And all the world of those with Blue Pill eyes seems utterly foreign but tantalizingly available. Why not just forget all this suffering and confusion and go with the flow—the make-believe world of unconscious pseudo-living? That’s where most of our friends are. That’s where we can get ahead, control our destinies and make life work.
But you know it isn’t real, don’t you?
And now that you’ve fainted, don’t you think it’s time to wake up?
Topical Index: kāmah, faint, yearn, The Matrix, Psalm 63:1
TACOMA: Don’t forget. The Tacoma conference is coming soon. All the information is on the web site here.
Is faintlng backsliding when you have taken the red pill? Is the faint from not nurturing faithfulness carefully daily with the daily dose of the red or is it a pointed attack on the water supply when we are not aware that a few blue pills are being dropped in the cistern? Fainting is a most strange recollecting of not recollecting… going down beneath the surface to find nothing…no dreams, no glimpses, no sense and then time begins again. Don’t most of us awake from our usual universal faint to have nothing everywhere we look when our conscience reality is challenged by truth. I am glad God invented repentance. For from the awful place of identifying as nothing Hope can come……. just swallow!
Shalom. FJ
As person with low blood sugar I know that backsliding is not an option. You feel it coming on pop the pill get the spinning head get the high blood pressure… Then the sparks of bursting flashes in the head, blackness and then up you stand and on you go. Allegorically this makes a lot of scenes, tried everything, done everything, yet you keep failing and will continue till you let go and permit God to take control and wait in darkness till He revives and you see the changes without knowing what caused them.
Gets me relating this to the coming or manifestation of the kingdom of God. How it happens nobody knows. We talk, discuss, debate, disagree, give up and when we least expect it we witness changes and accept the son of man coming on the cloud of testimony being changed by God, being reincarnated so to say into the power that God needs. And humbly we acknowledge He is still having mercy and being graceful. Answering that promised prayer for wisdom and whatever we ask in the teachings/prophetic reasons of Yeshua He will grant.
But unless we don’t become nothing, the blackout, God cannot manifest His desire in the transformed life, including our own.
Thanks for the belly laugh, Skip and F J. “That’s where we can get ahead, control our destinies and make life work.” “is it a pointed attack on the water supply when we are not aware that a few blue pills are being dropped in the cistern?” Having fallen for both scenarios and possessing the tshirts hanging in my closet to prove it: looking back, it sure looks different than when I found myself standing there, all bewildered and confused and “lightheaded” and desperate for anything – just ANYTHING – to get out of the relentless wind of the sum total of the past choices of myself and others around me that I found myself stuck with. It sure wasn’t funny then! I drank the Koolaid from that well, too, and fell for the illusion that God had left me and it was ‘all up to me’. I felt I had no choice BUT to believe and to drink. I was cornered by reality, and desperate for a way out of it – reality, that is. My flesh staggered under that reality, and human love just WAS NOT WORKING. Vivid memories.
Thanks for the walk down memory lane. Funny how you can remember so clearly what you were unconscious of at the time; I guess it is because we remember the pain all too well, but the blessing of being able to make sense of that pain and put it in proper perspective causes it to lose its power over us. The Bible promises that God will “wipe away all tears from our faces”. Whatcha wanna bet it will be with a good laugh? Thank you – both of you – for the wise humor of perspective!
Woe to the person who is color blind and to whom both the red pill and blue pill appears grey so he takes neither, but at least he has an excuse. Worse is the one who is indecisive; neither hot or cold, his life is temptingly tepid and ultimately He is spit out because he is lukewarm. In my confused state (as a result of my childhood TBI) I took both the red pill and blue pill and as a result have led an “unreal life of fabricated existence,” but with the suffering and confusion that comes from swallowing the red pill. It is a life which is dull, predictable AND unstable, painful. Both the pain and suffering, as well as the dull and tepid has no joy, gain or reward. My heart faints: my distress is waxing, my hope is waning, but Blessed be the Name of YHWH who hears my cry and will rescue me…someday….soon, I pray.
Words from a scene in the Matrix: “You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
Fortunately, there’s a third option…the Bread of Life and the Living Water of Yeshua…both very important to take along with us on the journey after swallowing that red pill. Hallelujah.
“.….my flesh yearns for You.….”
The verse reads, “YEARNS”, but yes, in the ESV, “faints”. Yet in most other versions, “longs”. And even in another version, “languishes”.
Also, in a similarly themed writing in the JPS Bible, Ps. 84:3, “My soul yearneth, yea, even PINETH for the courts of the LORD; my heart and my flesh sing for joy unto the living God.”
The sense here, to me, is not that of fainting and becoming UNCONSCIOUS, but that of the soul and the body very consciously feeling a strong desire for God and actually, actively DESIRING God HIMSELF, because of a very real and strong sense of a weakened and needy state, and the strong awareness of a lack of His presence and provision.
I don’t get the sense of a lack of awareness of reality, or a state of unconsciousness, but rather quite the opposite, a keen awareness of reality and that also of the absence of the help of His presence to victoriously deal with reality as it is. This is not about having fainted and having become unconscious, but of having become faint, weak, and needy, and being quite conscious it.
“Yearns” – have an intense feeling of longing for something, typically something that one has lost or been separated from.
“Longs”- have a strong wish or desire.
“Languishes” – lose or lack vitality; grow weak or feeble.
“Pineth” – suffer a mental and physical decline, especially because of a broken heart.
So, the general sense, to me, is not just experiencing the suffering of the lack of God’s presence, but actually strongly desiring it because of the awareness of the reality of the missing of it, having known the the reality of His presence in times past.
The problem we have, as I see it, is coming in and out of THAT reality and not yearning FOR Him. We experience it, sometimes for only moments at a time, and sometimes for very long, extended periods of time, but instead of yearning FOR Him, we seek to find ways to get out of this reality by NOT staying “in touch” with it, by NOT feeling it, because it does cause a pining, an anguishing, an ache, a mourning. And we seek to avoid it, escape it.
Also, it is not only the painful sense of His absence IN SPIRIT, but more deeply and truly it is the painful sense of His absence IN BODY, from the earth itself.
THE BRIDEGROOM HAS BEEN TAKEN AWAY!
Now, we who know Him, yearn for HIM. We long for Him. We languish for Him. We pine for Him. We mourn for Him. Or so we ought to! Until He comes back!
In fact, according to Messiah, Himself, this is one of the reasons why we are to engage in the spiritual discipline of “VOLUNTARY WEAKNESS”, becoming “faint”, through the spiritual discipline of FASTING.
“Then John’s disciples came to Him, saying, ‘Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but Your disciples do not fast?’ And Yeshua said to them, “The guests of the bridegroom cannot mourn while the bridegroom is with them, can they? But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and THEN THEY WILL FAST.” [Mat 9:14]
Let us not try to avoid this heartsickness. Let us escape into some addiction or another. Let us embrace the ache. Let us FAST! HE WILL COME to those who yearn. HE WILL COME to those who faint. HE WILL COME to those who long for HIM.
FAST, WATCH, WAIT, PRAY!!!
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EXTRA (find it on youtube if you’d like):
Mourning for the Bridegroom – Song by Jon Thurlow
There is coming a day when the Bridegroom is taken away
And in that day they will mourn; in that day they will fast
Things as they are are not okay
When Someone is missing, Someone is absent
I’ll stay here and mourn for You, I’ll stay here and fast for You
I’ll stay here and watch for You, I’ll stay here and wait for You
Things are not okay right now, things are not okay right now
Things are not okay right now, things are not okay right now
And they won’t be till You come back
And they won’t be till You come back
I will embrace the ache of a lovesick heart
I will embrace the ache of a lovesick heart
CORRECTION: Let us escape NOT into some addiction or another.