What You Need

For I satisfy the weary ones and refresh everyone who languishes.  Jeremiah 31:25  NASB

Weary– In Hebrew, ʿāyēpa.  Figuratively, wandering in the desert wasteland in desperate need of water. Thirst so harsh your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth and breathing is like sucking in a blast furnace.  This is nepeš negev– soul desert.  Like this picture on the inside:

Weary isn’t just tired.  Weary is exhausted with living.  It would be so much easier to just quit walking and sit in the shade.  Just sleep.  It’s just too much effort to go on.

I’ve noticed something quite disturbing about my nepeš negev.  It seems that I am most creative when my troubles are initially intense. When life is fairly even keeled, when I am just floating along from day-to-day, I find it difficult to stay in touch with the deeper things of the spirit.  It’s as though my sense of God’s presence is numbed by contentment. He’s not absent.  He’s just in the background somewhere, not tangibly connected.  But when my thirst overcomes this apathetic trance, I feel the emptiness.  My creative powers jump to life.  Clarity invades me.  This is the place where the wilderness forces me to recognize my need for God’s goodness.  It’s the place where I encounter Sinai and realize I have been redeemed for a purpose.  Despite the foreboding environment, I see God’s pillar by day and fire by night, and I am willing to follow Him deeper into the wasteland.  I can do so because I know my survival is totally in His will.

But something happens that I didn’t expect. I thought I would just follow along until I came out the other side of the anvil.  But as the days go on, the oppressive emotional humidity shrivels my resolve.  And one day I just can’t go further.  The creative energy that kept me going at the beginning of the Desert of Sin (מִדְבַּר סִין) evaporates like the prickling sensation when skin is exposed to 130 degrees.  This is true ʿāyēpa.  I am Hagar, sitting under the bush, waiting to die.

Now God’s verbs arrive.  rāwâ and mālēʾ finally reveal their true meaning. The first is rāwâ, the perfect complement to ʿāyēpa.  It means “to be satiated, to have one’s fill,” and in this context it is about drinking all that you want and need.  This is the daily-requirement provision.  You and I can’t walk through the desert of the soul without continuous and routine nourishment, and God promises to provide this.  We are not camels.  We might last a day or two, but without steady supply to refreshment, we will wither and eventually die.  No one survives spiritual malnutrition.  The problem is that we often don’t acknowledge this spiritual withering.  We might know it’s real, but it’s so hard to admit that we can’t drink from our own fountain. God wants to provide living water, but we often hang on to the false comfort of our empty canteens.

The second is mālēʾ, also about being full, but in this case it is about finishing, being full in the sense of completing a purpose, reaching a goal. The second verb reminds us that God is not just the God of our daily needs.  He is the long-term God, providing us with true meaning in life. He is the God of things that last. It’s not quite enough for us to make it through the day.  That’s necessary, of course, but just making it through the day, day after day, is also a form of dāʾēb—languishing.  It’s just not an obvious one.  But it still needs to be diagnosed and treated, and the treatment is about alignment with God’s purposes for each of us.  Nothing satisfies more than reaching beyond our grasp.

God’s words to Jeremiah are also for us.  Today is the day of refreshment.  Today is also the one day closer to fulfillment.  We need both if we are going to move out of the shade.

Topical Index: rāwâ, mālēʾ, to fill, ʿāyēpa, weary, Jeremiah 31:25