Parched for God
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
Thirsts– The Hebrew word ṣāmēʾ doesn’t take much scholarly explanation. We all know what it means. Water is life and when you don’t have it for a long time, the body tells you that you’re in real trouble. Thirst is an early warning signal for death. In David’s world, thirst was an ever-present harsh reality.
So now we understand the metaphor. But what does it mean for us? The first thing to notice is that this is a full-person situation, not a spiritual soul isolation. The word in Hebrew is nepeš, the whole person. Hebrew does not distinguish body, mind, and soul like Greek. When you thirst for God, all of who you are is involved. Everything about your life is affected by the lack of nourishment from the Creator. That means if I am to earnestly seek I will have to be “all-in.” There’s no advantage to pressing forward with the intellectual study of the text if my emotional and volitional life lags behind. I can know all there is to know about the grammar and vocabulary of the ancient languages of the Bible and still be stuck in my past trauma or my present sins. Thirst affects everything.
This is particularly important for those of us who grew up under the Western mind. We tend to believe that compartmentalization is the solution (or at least the removal of lack of control). We want to break things down into the relevant parts so that we can identify the broken piece and get it fixed. As a result, we operate as if the world is like a machine (even we are machines) and what is necessary is fixing some part of the machine. But ancient Semitic thought doesn’t view the world in this way. To the ancient Hebrews, the world was an organism animated by the divine. Like Eastern thought, “Events do not occur in isolation from other events, but are always embedded in a meaningful whole in which the elements are constantly changing and rearranging themselves.”[1] Therefore, my awareness of “thirst” is not limited to my immediate need for liquid. It is a metaphor about my whole existence in the world, an existence which includes my present situation, my emotional make-up, my community, my place in history, and any and every other factor that contributes to this moment, including the weight of the responsibility this moment carries for the future. To earnestly seek is to become aware of the interdependence of the world, history, and the other—to see as God sees the state of things now and later. It is to see “the world as consisting of continuously interacting substances, so . . . attempts to understand it caused [us] to be oriented toward the complexities of the entire ‘field,’ that is, the context or environment as a whole.”[2]
Thirst is just the beginning.
Topical Index: thirst, earnestly seek, ṣāmēʾ, Psalm 63:1
A bit similar to hopelessness,. Skip you hit a chord today, of cord that I think we all need to ponder from time to time. That was reminded of a song this weekend. No turning back the cross before me. The World Behind Me. No turning back. Our son bored one night, and since my wife and I were singing as we were going to sleep one night, he was weeping, and moaning heavily, we came into the room, to find that he had accepted the Lord that evening. No turning back. Today is life is that a questionable state. But we trust in the Lord. In what he did that night. His life has been a very rough patch. But he has always landed on his feet. The Lord has been very faithful to him, and our prayers. Is the soul that hungers. Do we believe in a heaven and a hell. A hell to shun, and I having to gain. I believe so. It is the old conclusive evidence for some atheists I know. I shared with them, and they still Ponder the thought. To God be the victory. Over death hell and the grave. It has been said that witness to the Lost, and they’re hurt, and the dying, and sometimes use words. If One Believes, he will carry it out. Full circle. We will be fruitful, because God is faithful. Amen, and amen.
This Today’s Word reminds me of a trend in alternative health care–stop treating the body like a machine needing to be fixed, and start taking care of the body like a garden that needs tending.
Excellent word, Thomas. Thank you for sharing that thought. I will ruminate on that throughout the day.
Thomas, I love the garden analogy — I only wish the pruning wasn’t so painful!
The problem is not just that we Westerners have replaced the concept of Hebrew nephesh with Greek psyche, but we have substituted sweet syrupee solutions for pure water, both literally and spirituality. Our thirst cannot be slaked with commercially carbonated concoctions. We too live “in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” No wonder we as a culture are dehydrated, dying and, for the most part, dead. We cannot say with David and Yeshua “I thirst” if what we crave for is anything other than the Living Water.
In prayer once I had a vision. The world apeared to me like an opium den. The air was thick with intoxicating vapors. I was breathing however through my bible rolled up like a scroll it filtered the air for me. In “him we live and move and have our being” Without his living waters I cannot possibly survive a day much less a few weeks. Without Messiah I’m am not alive, simply existing untill we connect agin. He is my life.
I rarely post due to a lot of the times I find that my thoughts may seem off base. So I tend to write them in my daily journal. But as I read this word for the day it makes me think about do we in the western world really thirst. When you begin to read from the ancient Hebraic perspective and you began to see how the ancient Hebrews lived a nomadic life style you begin to see scripture differently. Their were no grocery stores, hardware stores or clothing stores, nothing was done by a flip of a switch or turn of the knob. They relied on God. They seen God in nature, in the change of seasons. In our current day, it’s ease to find some denomination that will seem to support what we believe. So when we thirst we tend to want to satisfy that thirst with something that taste good. So the water that is in the soda, or tea or what ever we are using to quench the thirst helps and harms at the same time. I downloaded the sample book that Skip referenced “The Geography of Thought” on my kindle. I’m looking to read it when I can fit it in. So reading content that comes from other perspectives like a orthodoxy Jew to me can maybe remove some of the ingredients that is in the water to maybe bring us closer to what God’s word is truly saying. So when we thirst is it the water that we are wanting or the ingredients. What’s your Thoughts?
I used to attend Bible studies hosted by a number of different pastors. Each minister had his own take on the scriptures, his own “flavor” of water, so to speak. I needed to sort through the flavors to get the purity of the water of the Word.
Keith, Currently I am in the midst of converting the 42 ft. front porch of our “new” home into a four-season sunroom, dining room and reading room. The existing house looks inward toward the main inside wall which happens to be exactly due west. When completed we will be looking due east that daily features the rising sun over the Salmon River which forms more than 1000 ft. of our boundary in the middle of forest.
I can’t help but think of the difference between holistic Oriental, and Greek, things, thinking as I do this and how this will change our outlook, literally.
George, this makes me think about what my Dad done for his mother my grandmother. She died at the age of 91. Dad built a screen in porch on to her house when Granny was in her 70’s. She could sit outside and enjoy the breeze and not have the sun shining directly on her. As she got into her 80’s the pouch became her place of refuge. She could sit and enjoy the sounds of nature read and think. Just think one day you will be sitting in this sun room that will one day bring inspiration and comfort. But that inspiration will not be just for you I’m sure others will be inspired as well as you share with others what God has spoke into your life.
I sure hope so because at nearly 78, some days it is killing me but the worst of it is almost over.