Do not hide Your face from me on the day of my distress; Incline Your ear to me; On the day when I call answer me quickly. Psalm 102:2 NASB My distress – Why do earthquakes occur? The simple answer is that geological plates move under stress. The shift in the land is what we call…
Do not hide Your face from me on the day of my distress; Incline Your ear to me; On the day when I call answer me quickly. Psalm 102:2 NASB Do not hide – In his book The Prophets, Abraham Heschel wrote: “To be able to pray, one must alter the course of consciousness, one must…
Hear my prayer, Lord! And let my cry for help come to You. Psalm 102:1 NASB Come to You – “‘There are three ways in which a man expresses deep sorrow: the man on the lowest level cries; the man on the second level is silent; the man on the highest level knows how to turn his…
Hear my prayer, Lord! And let my cry for help come to You. Psalm 102:1 NASB Cry for help – Isn’t punctuation wonderful? With these little extra characters in language, we can convey the emotional context of a sentence. Just imagine what writing would be like without ! or “ ”, or ? Why, you’d have to…
Hear my prayer, Lord! And let my cry for help come to You. Psalm 102:1 NASB Hear – Moses and David. The great Shema and the lesser Shema. “Hear, O Israel” and “YHVH, hear my prayer.” Both from the same root and the same consciousness. Both dependent on relationship. And both with multiple Semitic meanings. “šāmaʿ has…
Hear my prayer, Lord! And let my cry for help come to You. Psalm 102:1 NASB Hear – If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear, does it make a sound? An interesting existential question. What is the relationship between a physical event and the perception of the event? If God…
A Prayer of the afflicted when he is weak and pours out his complaint before the Lord. Psalm 102 NASB Complaint – You’re praying. You feel oppressed and downtrodden. You acknowledge your total dependency on God. You’re weak; He’s strong. You kneel before Him—His servant, His child. And you complain? Before we tackle the noun “complaint” we…
A Prayer of the afflicted when he is weak and pours out his complaint before the Lord. Psalm 102 NASB Before – A curious thing has happened in this verse. The English order doesn’t follow the Hebrew order. In Hebrew, the phrase “before the Lord” comes after “is weak (is faint).” The Hebrew verse reads: “A…
A Prayer of the afflicted when he is weak and pours out his complaint before the Lord. Psalm 102 NASB Weak – Amazingly, our word “weak” isn’t found in the languages of Europe until the 12th Century. I guess before that people never knew what it meant to be physically exhausted (No, probably not. There are…
A Prayer of the afflicted when he is weak and pours out his complaint before the Lord. Psalm 102 NASB Afflicted – The Hebrew word ʿānî comes from a root that means “to force,” or “to try to force submission,” and “to punish or inflict pain upon.”[1] Here the noun describes someone who is feeling the…
