You will arise and have compassion on Zion; for it is time to be gracious to her, for the appointed time has come. Psalm 102:13 NASB Have compassion – The first description of God’s character in Exodus 34:6 is raḥûm. It comes from the Hebrew verb rāḥam, a verb that means “to love deeply, have mercy, be compassionate.” The importance of this…
But You, Lord, remain forever, and Your name remains to all generations. Psalm 102:12 NASB Remain – God remains forever. In Hebrew, יְהֹוָה לְעוֹלָם. You’ll notice immediately that David uses the personal name of God, יְהֹוָה , not the word “Lord.” This matters, since he continues the thought with “Your name,” not “Your title.” There were plenty of other divine…
But You, Lord, remain forever, and Your name remains to all generations. Psalm 102:12 NASB But – The lowly conjunction. Not spectacular, as words go. Relegated to expressing relations between other words, we hardly think of them as crucial connectors until someone uses them incorrectly. There’s a big difference between “law came through Moses but grace through Jesus…
My days are like a lengthened shadow, and I wither away like grass. Psalm 102:11 NASB Lengthened – For those of you who aren’t familiar with exposure problems in photography, let me explain HDR. High Dynamic Range is the situation where the light in the picture varies significantly between highs (whites) and lows (blacks). While the…
Because of Your indignation and Your wrath; for You have lifted me up and thrown me away. Psalm 102:10 NASB Lifted me up – As we know, the Hebrew word nāśāʾ is “used almost six hundred times with basically three separate meanings: “to lift up”; “to bear, carry, support”; and “to take, take away.”[1] “To bear”…
Because of Your indignation and Your wrath; for You have lifted me up and thrown me away. Psalm 102:10 NASB Indignation – I’m guessing that if I asked you for a definition of indignation, you’d stumble a bit. It’s not a commonly used word. We have some inkling of its meaning, but not precisely. If we…
Because of Your indignation and Your wrath; for You have lifted me up and thrown me away. Psalm 102:10 NASB Because – Who’s fault is all this? Who’s to blame for the tragedy of human living? When Heschel remarks “history is a nightmare,” we know precisely what he means. Humanity has produced escalating moral entropy since…
For I have eaten ashes like bread, and mixed my drink with weeping. Psalm 102:9 NASB Ashes – “For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Ominous words from Genesis 3:19. We don’t like to think about them, but we know they’re true for every one of us. The psalmist uses a little word…
My enemies have taunted me all day long; those who deride me have used my name as a curse. Psalm 102:8 NASB Deride – The psalmist finally gets down to the real reason for his complaint. It took a while. All those verses about how he feels—abandoned, anxious, abused, avoided, alone—come down to this: “My enemies taunt me and…
I lie awake, I have become like a solitary bird on a housetop. Psalm 102:7 NASB Solitary – From the kitchen window of our home in Parma, we look out on the roof of the condominium next door. Nearly every day a pigeon flies to the corner of that roof and sits. I assume it is…
