Nourishment in the Desert

I opened my mouth wide and panted, for I longed for Your commandments. Psalm 119:131  NASB

Panted – Decades ago I started writing Today’s Word.  At times it seems like yesterday.  I’ve just scratched the surface of the text.  After a few years of writing, I thought I needed a business card.  The one I created was a picture of ripple in sand dunes with the title “At God’s Table: Nourishment in the Desert.”  It still applies.  And this verse explains why.

The verb šāʾap means “to gasp, to pant after, to long for.”  It’s used in Isaiah and Jeremiah for emotionally-charged seeking.  The same consonants form another verb, found in Amos and Ezekiel, meaning “to crush, to trample.”  Context determines which one applies, but in our case, perhaps both do at the same time.  There is little doubt about our desperate search for determined obedience.  We long for (yāʾab, a hapax legomenon) God’s miṣwot.  Why?  Because they teach us how to live in this world.  Being without these directions is like trying to cross the open desert without a compass.  Surely we know what that feels like.

But šāʾap also explains our wide mouth panting.  We are being crushed by life’s unpredictable turns, trampled by malicious opponents, some we don’t even see.  We often feel battered and bruised, and even though we grasp the Commandments with all our strength, there are times when the world collapses upon us and we fall face down in the dirt. Yes, šāʾap seems to be both, and because it is both, it helps us translate the hapax legomenon of yāʾab.  Perhaps a look at the consonants themselves will help enlarge the concept.

Yod – Aleph – Hey: “work (deed) – strength (first) – reveal (behold).  “A strong act that reveals” might be a way of rendering this.  The degree of desperation is the measure of my action to uncover God’s miṣwot.  Twelve Step programs know this fact.  You’re not ready for change until you reach the bottom of the well.  The psalmist provides a poetic phrase for the same situation.  “I opened wide my mouth.”  I’m a drowning man.  I gasp for air.  I’m a sunburned wanderer.  I pant for water.  I’m buried in the filth of my life.  I’m in spasms for relief.  Perhaps we need to hear something from the Messiah, “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness . . .” (Matthew 5:6).  In my book, The Lucky Life, I point out that this phrase, “hunger and thirst,” is not particularly comforting.  I wrote:

The metaphor of hunger and thirst was not new to Jesus’ audience.  But the imagery carried with it a great deal more than physical deprivation.  In fact, the Jews remembered the passages from Deuteronomy and Isaiah where hunger and thirst were signs of God’s wrath poured out on a disobedient people.  They saw God inflict hunger and thirst on His enemies (Lam. 5:10 and Neh. 5:3) and on His chosen people (Isaiah 65:13).  These people believed that hunger and thirst were signs of God’s punishment and rejection.  Therefore, to hunger and thirst meant to be under the condemnation of God.  This was not just a social condition.  It did not demand a change in mental outlook.  It was about obedience and disobedience.  It was holy judgment.  My hunger was not the result of some social or political or economic circumstance.  Those might be the vehicles that brought about the condition of depravity, but ultimately my hunger was the result of God’s vengeance poured out on my life. . . The idea that God’s verdict produces hunger as a judgment or abates hunger as a reward led the rabbinical world to a nearly fatalistic attitude toward physical calamity.  If calamity befalls me, it must mean that I am unworthy.  God has decreed my punishment and nothing can be done to prevent it.  If God removes or restrains this calamity in my life, it must be a sign of personal worthiness before Him.  We often hear a modern version of the same idea:  If bad things happen to me, I must have done something bad.  If I am successful and prosperous, I must have done something good.  Don’t we say, “What goes around, comes around” and “They got what they deserved”? We could call this belief the Law of Just Rewards.  This is exactly the concept that Yeshua overturns.[1]

When we examine the Matthew passage in relation to this verse in Psalms, we discover something important in the Greek that shapes how we read the Hebrew.  First, the Greek word translated “hunger” is not missing a meal or two.  peináō is a state of chronic malnutrition.  If it continues, more tragic consequences will follow, but it can be reversed.  We are not yet at the point of death through starvation.  Secondly, “thirst” (another reason for panting) is the Greek term dipsáō, a term that carries the figurative sense of intense spiritual longing, particularly in the LXX for salvation.  In this psalm it is essentially the framework of the hapax legomenon that follows.  Perhaps my conclusion in The Lucky Life is appropriate:

In our modern world, it is very important to see that Jesus does not say that they should be happy because they will be empowered.  He doesn’t promise a sudden insight or spiritual trick that will make them acceptable or even capable of getting what they need.  The desire for righteousness is not self-fulfilling.  What Yeshua says is that righteousness will be “fed” to you.  We are not going to suddenly be empowered to belly-up to God’s table and eat our share of righteousness.  No, we can only receive righteousness when we are so malnourished in ourselves that we require God to spoon feed us.  The secret of receiving righteousness from God is to come to God without any self-ability at all.  It is no different than feeding the starving children in Somalia.  Carried in on stretchers, unable to do anything for themselves, hovering near death unless they receive a blessing from someone else’s storehouse, we watch the doctor or nurse feed them one spoonful at a time.  In the same way, God will feed us what we must have in order to live, one spoonful at a time.  But only when we reach the absolute end of our own self-rights.

The psalmist might agree.

Topical Index: šāʾap, gasp, yāʾab, long for, peináō, hunger, dipsáō, thirst, Matthew 5:6, Psalm 119:131

[1] Skip Moen, The Lucky Life