Simple Things
I lay down and slept; I awoke, for the Lord sustains me. Psalm 3:5 NASB
Awoke – Life as it is. Not life as I want it to be. Just what is now. That’s where I find God. Just waking up. Oh, what a joy! God didn’t decide my time was over when I went to bed last night. He has given me another day to fulfill mitzvot, enjoy His creation and change my life. I am alive! The world is good today.
We have been struggling with the emotions that accompany desiring life as we wish it to be. That is an endless exercise in yetzer ha’ra futility. Life will never be as we wish it to be because our wishing never ends. Remember that old joke, “How many millions does a millionaire need to be happy?” Answer: “Just one more.” That’s the path of the yetzer ha’ra. Just a little more. The life that is never satisfied with what is. The life that is always projected somewhere beyond today. No wonder we couldn’t find peace. Peace is a present tense verb, not a wish in the future. Today is the day of salvation. If I am waiting for “heaven” (in whatever form I hope it to be) in order to find peace, I will never arrive. The kingdom of heaven is here. The olam ha’ba is arriving, not waiting for you to show up later. Moses Luzzatto’s insight that we experience the presence of the divine and the favor of men as we fulfill the mitzvot here and in so doing cause the world to come to be manifest here is crucial for our happiness here. Few of us can postpone any form of human significance and emotional peace for a promise in the bye-and-bye.
“I awoke,” writes David. One word in Hebrew. Heqitsoti. The verb is yaqats. Psalm 17:15 provides the comfort that waking up means experiencing His presence again. Then there is the great promise of Psalm 121:3-4: “He will not allow your foot to slip; He who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.”
So we don’t have to do it all on our own. We tire. We sleep exhausted from our struggles. We fall into unconscious non-existence. But YHVH does not. He is not a god who needs to be awakened. He is there even while we have collapsed. His mercies never fail us. His watchfulness does not evaporate. He is ‘emet—reliable, trustworthy, faithful. The gift God gave you today was being alive. The gratitude you show for that gift is found in your desire to honor Him. But desire is only motivation, not execution. The manifestation of that desire is seen in your willingness to adopt His ways as your ways. It is Ruth’s expression of hesed. “Your people will be my people and your God will be my God.” We all arrived as Ruth. Battered with suspicious backgrounds. Misfits and misunderstood. “Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear-filling grandeur. Sometimes we wish our own hearts would speak of that which made them heavy with wonder.”[1] Awake! Awake to the overwhelming splendor of life—and breathe in the spirit He gave so that you might revel in His wonder. Day 24.
Topical Index: heqitsoti, yaqats, to wake, wonder, Psalm 3:5, Psalm 17:15, Psalm 121:3-4
[1] Abraham Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, p. 16.
The angels sang at the birth of Messiah: “Peace on earth, good will toward men”. When He came to tabernacle among us, He brought all the goodness of heaven with Him. Heaven emptied its entire treasure house, its most precious Gift, and sent Him to us. What gift was that? What did we need to be given? What did we lack? The angels announced the treasure. They were the label on our Package. The shepherds opened it for us. The Gift was amnesty; the Gift announced that we can quit the war now. We don’t have to fall for the lies any more, for the Truth just showed up to show us what we were missing, and that is the truth that we are loved. We forgot that, and when we forgot, we fell for the lies about love. Then Love came.
Love came to unpack the Law for us. He came to show us a picture of what that Law was supposed to look like: a picture of Love with flesh on, a picture of perfect homeostasis with both heaven, earth, and the entire cosmos in between. Love is about peace: harmony: and when the angels sing, they put that harmony into their song, and the air becomes liquid with that love. The angels gave us the best fingernail synopsis of the Law ever given. It is an even better one than the one the lawyer quoted for Yeshua from Deuteronomy, for it gives us what obedience to the first Four and the last Six Commands looks like in execution. The angels’ song was no command: it was completion. He came to restore that completion, that perfection, to us; came to give us in His own Body that peace that the rest of the universe and heaven enjoys with its Maker, as well as peace among our war-torn selves. We defied heaven itself, and operated from a complete lack of trust of each other; we broke the Law in so many ways, and this was heaven’s response. We really don’t know what Love is. We lost all the clues in the dark: we lost the light switch too, and then we fell for the lie that we needed it to be dark, so we didn’t even go look. So the Light of men came to us.
I am lost in wonder.
The Law is about the steps for fallen man to take to restore his broken relationship with G-d, himself, and everyone else. The Law, in other words, is about peace. I think the worst lie we ever fell for was the one that told us we did not need the Law to have peace. Peace is the state of obedience to that Law! If you were caught for speeding, and endangering the lives of others and yourself on the road, and came before the judge, should he then say “I can see this is a bad law, because it got broken: I am going to fix your disobedience by annulling the law about speeding”? Yet, when it comes to G-d’s Law, we can, and do, say nonsense such as this with a straight face, and after long deliberation; even by people with enough degrees of education, so-called, to make a pot of alphabet soup with. Sigh. This has to be the single most breath-taking, audacious presumption of grace that we could have ever devised! And then we accuse Yeshua of coming to annul His own Law of Peace! Worse and worse! May heaven forgive us! Someone please turn on the light!
The very air we breathe, and the breath in our nostrils, is about an advance; a down payment of harmony with the Breath-Giver and with reality, and life itself, that we are not, in fact, yet in agreement with. It is sheer grace that enables me to wake up in the morning, but I presume on that grace when I take it for granted, and forget to turn around and reciprocate with humility and gratitude for that measure of time that grace affords me. Gratitude restores the opportunity for a right relationship with the Giver, but I remain ungrateful to the extent that I am presuming on that grace by neglecting to take advantage of that opportunity. It is a dangerous lie we are skating on when we believe that grace actually restores peace to us. Just because I am still alive does not necessarily mean that I am getting it right; nor does it follow that Someone else got it right for me! Grace is not, in fact, a restoration of peace: grace is not fulfillment of the Law that is the picture of that peace. Therefore, just because I am still breathing does not mean that that breath is actually doing me any good. There is still my part. That air also means that my ears can hear, and that my eyes can see. “Today, if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts”. Gratitude for His grace and mercy keeps my heart amenable to His voice.
“No wonder we couldn’t find peace. Peace is a present tense verb, not a wish in the future.”
Today is The Shabbat. It is the day YHVH has made for us to experience our future millennial rest in the here and now today.
Today (if we were diligent to labor yesterday and prepared to make The Shabbat Holy) we have a 24 hour peak into the hope of our glory at the resurrection.
Shabbat Shalom saints.
I also appreciate that even in this Psalm of sleep, Adonai, wakes us. Daivd slept without realizing the danger he was in. If the advice of Achitofel had been followed, he would never have woken up because he would have been killed that night. However, he did wake up because Hashem supported him. (See II Samuel 17:1-22).
My prayer as well.
Adonai, please heal my heart emotions, may I sense your love, care in this moment, Help me change my resistance to cultivating , perpetration in this area of my heart where it hurts, may I receive your healing as you prepare and go before me. May I see your likeness in me, as you waken me. Help me convince my heart when it is weak and faint to trust you more in the midst of pain, wars within, giants, new lands, title waves of fears, change, deep floods of emotions. May I see you more clearly here in this place this moment. In the good and the bad and connecting to the you, Adonai, you are the source of life even when, My BUTT’s are always in my way .. We love and adore you . AMen!!