Be Still and Know the Lord of Hosts

Posted on October 22, 2017August 19, 2018 by Jordan Spano

One of the most iconic pieces of consolation in the Old Testament is Psalm 46.

Be still, and know that I am God. (v. 10a, NKJV)

This verse usually enters a mind, heart, or conversation in the midst of an emotional maelstrom. If you are frightened, vexed, anxious, sad, etc., you are called to be still.

Don’t move–for he is the Lord above all.

Upon murmuring this verse in the quiet of your heart, the expectation is that all worries will be assuaged, for we believe God, in his prescience, said and had written this verse for us today, for us while we’re in that event which is corralling us into a sordid pen of worry.

This is not a heretical line of reasoning. I wouldn’t plainly call it a “high view of Scripture,” for that can mean different things. It is rather a more literal or narrowed understanding of Scripture. We should still believe and rightly so that all of Scripture is God-breathed and intended to communicate to all people at all times and places throughout all history, today, and to eternity.

However, God’s word is not in a vacuum… except that sometimes it is.

In and Out of Context

Sometimes we think that any piece of Scripture can be extracted and used–played with like dough–safe to be put back to its original place with no harm done. This is kind of what we do with the phrase, “Only God can judge me.”

I mean, that’s phrase is true in a particular sense.

The judgment often talked about in Scripture is not the type of judgment we’re well acquainted with. We think of shallow criticism we throw at someone before we abscond from the scene in fear of being attacked back.

That’s superficial. In God’s kingdom, judgment means something far more serious: the due recompense for our sins; in other words, we get what we deserve. Thankfully, because of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, we get mercy instead of the just payment for our sins.

But Jesus actually says,

Judge not, that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. (Matthew 7:1-2)

He’s telling us not to judge, because

We swiftly become hypocrites; and
We as sinners are in no place to judge,

when in reality, we deserve it and know it–we just don’t want other people to acknowledge it in us.

The “judging” we sinners do is often so far removed from the meaning of judgment God talks about that it’s no wonder he tells us, essentially, “Don’t even try. That’s my thing.”

This example quickly illustrates that not only are we familiar with taking Scripture out of context and marring it, but we’re also quite good at it, and it has become accepted behavior in the Christian sphere.

Psalm 46: The Layout

“Don’t even try. That’s my thing,” is exactly what is happening in Psalm 46, rather than a casual invitation to an oasis of peace amidst a desert of worry.

Through a series of declarations in the psalm [of the sons of Korah], the author establishes that God is…

strength and refuge in trouble (vv. 1-2),

which leads him not to fear regardless of the circumstance (v. 3);

inhabiting the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacle (v. 4),

which demonstrates that God dwells in the midst of their city, so they are safe from their enemies (v.5);

a conqueror over enemies when the nations around them rage (v. 6);

with them, as both a refuge and Lord of Hosts (or “armies,” in a military sense) (v. 7).

At this point in the psalm, the tone shifts from adoration, comfort, and surety to an invocation by all those in Israel to note, declare, and be emboldened by the ascriptions made to God.

“Come, behold the works of the Lord” (v. 8)

who…

has made desolation on the earth,
ceases wars,
breaks bows and cleaves spears in two,
and burns the chariot in fire.

In this context, God interrupts:

Be still and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth! (v. 10)

There is a reason why the psalmist, specifically in this psalm, uses the refrain “Lord of Hosts” twice. He actually couches our main verse in two of these.

The Lord of Hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. (v. 7)

(When you see two similar phrases in one verse like this in the Old Testament, it’s called synthetic parallelism: the expression of one idea with two phrases or sentences. A perfect example of this is Zechariah 9:9 when the Messiah is pictured as riding “on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” Obviously Zechariah means the Messiah is riding one animal, but Matthew funnily messes it up in verse 7 by misunderstanding synthetic parallelism common to Hebrew writing, which evokes this awkward scene where Jesus is positioned riding on two animals at once.)

The psalmist is communicating that God is a God of armies, able to conqueror any army that comes up against Israel. (Notice above the words about “wars,” “bows,” “spears,” “chariots,” etc.)

Psalm 46: The Hebrew

The operative word in our verse is the verb harpu, which is an imperative of the root rapha (not to be confused with rapha, to heal, which has a different “a” vowel).

While we translate harpu as “be still,” it rarely means that per its word usage. Some of its more frequent meanings are lazy, fail, sink, relax, and slack.

A few verse examples may be to “sink down in a hay of flame,” letting hands go from work in fear, or ceasing from anger.

While the meaning of harpu can still connote relaxing or being still in the psalm’s context of war, it makes little sense when Israel has no power in the first place–not just as humans, but also as an inferior nation militarily. God, when ascribed the “Lord of Hosts” refrain twice, is saying, essentially, “your efforts are futile.” No bows, spears, guns, or any human contraption can usurp my role on the throne.

No amount of warmongering by any side can beat the God of Jacob. God will win; the people against Israel will lose. The earth will tremble, melt, and fold, and he alone will be exalted.

Notably, Rapha (the root of harpu) does not have a negative connotation, as if “being still” or relaxing is a bad thing. I don’t want to make it sound like the peaceful words of God telling us to “be still” when life is tough is a bad thing.

But when the context of this phrase is war and is conveying the unassailable sovereignty of God, the vast polysemy of words come into play: harpu here means something far bolder than “have tranquility, my child.” There’s power in it, as a mighty king would say to his vassal nations.

Okay, so now what?

Does it mean that God won’t calm the storms in our life? Na.

This contextual take on Psalm 46, rather than removing the personalness of God by reinforcing his sovereignty, actually helps us realize that we are more fragile, more incapable of calming those storms in our life than ever before.

We can’t beat the war on our own. We can’t even beat the petty battles with sin.

God, in his sovereignty, didn’t just choose to rule. All rulers do that.

He actually chose to gave us his Son as a sacrifice for us. Rulers don’t do that. Rulers don’t love like that.

When God says he will be exalted above all nations, above all the earth, he is speaking to us too. When we let him be exalted above our will, we become able to deny ourselves, to deny sin, and to turn to the one in whose hands are lives are.

If there is an army heading straight for us in life, we can be still, but we can also know there’s a mighty God behind us who is fighting our battles… as we await the true hero, Jesus, to return and judge the living and the dead. Amen.

Is God’s Name Properly Jehovah?

Posted on September 25, 2017August 19, 2018 by Jordan Spano

There is only so much theological bandwidth within me to delay confronting the elephant in the room: There is no English version of the “true name of God”; and if there were, it would not be Jehovah.

Perhaps you sense the strong allusion here to a certain cadre of doctrine crusaders that solicit us at our doors and encamp our public walkways. Yes, I’m talking the Jehovah’s Witnesses, when they use the word Jehovah as a bull roarer of orthodoxy.

This is something that, while I contest at a doctrinal level, I do love about them. They have a passion for proper theology, and it drives their lives, their praxis. While I suggest against being stubborn on one issue over and through, we as Christians do the same thing sometimes. We may pigeonhole our audience by laying down abstruse theologies about the Trinity or supralapsarianism. (I’ll ease it on the new vocabulary now.)

Of all of my conversations with Jehovah’s Witnesses, this is actually not the topic that comes up (or that I myself bring up) the most. Do you know why?

It’s futile.

They don’t really know why, or at least can’t articulate or corroborate the evidence for their stance about God’s true, real, bona fide, and exclusively proper name being Jehovah. Let me explain.

YHWH. These are the four letters of God’s name in the Bible. We call this the tetragrammaton: “tetra-” means four, and “gramma-” is “that which is drawn; a picture; a drawing.” In Hebrew, it looks like this:

Starting from right to left, you have YHWH: yod (Y), hey (H), vav/waw (W), hey (H). If you ever hear someone say “yod hey vav hey,” perhaps you’ll get it now!

Okay, so how do you pronounce this? Aha, so here’s what happened.

Long ago, when the Israelites were in thralldom to the Egyptians, and God saw “the misery of [his] people in Egypt,” he appeared to Moses in a bush. God told Moses to go to the Pharaoh and rescue the Israelites, but Moses was like, “Well, what if they ask your name?” God said, “I got you, mate.”

And God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And He said, “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you. (Ex. 3:14, NKJV)

Before this, God was always referred to by two words: God (elohim) and Yahweh (YHWH). Here, though, God gives Moses a new “version” of YHWH, which is “eh-yeh.”

As you see above in the quotes, we translate “eh-yeh” as I AM (for in the verse, God says, “eh-yeh asher eh-yeh,” or “I am that/who I am; I will be who I will be”). He is conveying to Moses before he visits his fellow Israelites that God exists and is–as opposed to him being an ethereal being of creative power and authority or an exalted moral conscience.

No. God is and will be. He will there and present. He is here and present.

The names in Scripture God ascribes to himself or are ascribed to him are not, over and through, about communicating propriety; in other words, he isn’t trying to get the Israelites to pronounce it correctly, or use the right vowels or consonants.

He is revealing his character in his name.

YHWH yireh – The Lord will provide (ex. Gen. 22:14)
YHWH nissi – The Lord is my banner/standard (ex Ex. 17:15)
YHWH rapha – The Lord who heals* (ex. Ex. 15:26)

*It actually says “YHWH raphekha,” or “The Lord who heals you,” in speaking to Israel.

YWHW shama – The Lord is there (ex. Ez. 48:35)
YHWH roi – The Lord is my shepherd (ex. Ps. 23:1)
YHWH tsidkenu – The Lord our righteousness (ex. Jer. 23:6)
YHWH shalom – The Lord is peace (ex. Judg. 6:24)
YHWH tsebaot – The Lord of hosts* (ex. Ps. 46:7)

*Sometimes translated as “Lord Almighty,” but it’s better to preserve the military connotation of tsebaot; as God is usually ascribed “Almighty” when used in El shaddai (God Almighty, ex. Gen. 17:1).

So then, why the emphasis on Jehovah not being the proper name? “I hear ‘Jehovah rapha’ and ‘Jehovah yireh’ in church all time.”

I only make this point to be firm against the JW claim that Jehovah alone is the only proper name

Here’s how we get from YHWH to Jehovah.

First, take the tetragrammaton. Note that there are no vowels, as vowels were only added by the Masoretes circa 600-1000 AD. (Vowels are little dots above, below, or between the letters, and are in addition to the discrete consonants. They are considered diacritics: vowels are diacritics, called niqqud, as are accent marks, called cantillation.)

Now, we don’t know exactly how to pronounce this word. The early Jews, in remaining reverent of God’s holy name, did not record it, or refused to speak it. They would instead say “Adonai.”

Our pronunciation of “Yahweh” is kind of an educated guess. That’s why many people opt for “Jehovah.” To get Jehovah, we take the word Adonai, or “Lord” (literally “My Lord”).

We grab those vowels/markets above and below each of the letters, and we transfer them to the tetragrammaton (pardon the different font).

Boom. Now we have yeh-ho-wa, or via Latinization, Jehovah.

As we see, it’s difficult to pin down exactly God’s name: for he has many, and the origins of which, especially of Shaddai, are very, very recondite. What I hope you have seen here, though, is that Jehovah’s Witnesses have an exclusive claim to accuracy when they say God’s name is Jehovah. And that’s not tenable.

To be safe, we should probably say “rather, we aren’t too sure.” Using Jehovah is romanizing, late, and convenient patch-work–but it’s not heresy. It is using the research and data we have to construct God’s name for use, and we can be thankful he has revealed all to us.

I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty, but by My name Lord I was not known to them. (Ex. 6:3)

So the next time you hear a knock on your door and are confronted by Jehovah’s Witnesses… just love them. Don’t argue the name. Just love.

Fragile Waves

Posted on September 3, 2017August 19, 2018 by Jordan Spano

We are a lot like waves.

I sat at the edge of the half-natural jetty, a few feet from the rocky cliff. It was by no means vertiginous, for I was only seven or so boulder layers up from the crashing of the waves on the shore. I think what was more dizzying was the high-pitched alert of a couple blokes at the beginning of the rock who screamed out, “Dude! Fire ants!”

Oh, what a lovely welcome, beloved fire ants.

Despite their shrieks, the continual crashing of the waves captivated me tenfold. They were, ultimately, far dizzying to a naive human mind than any ant could ever be.

I noticed that, with all these distracting thoughts ricocheting in my head, the waves kept doing the same thing.

Ebb. Flow. Crash. Ebb. Flow. Converge. Crash.

We seem to do that… a lot. And I don’t particularly mean the crash part: In life we’re caught in an inescapable ebb and flow.

I tried to spot myself in the waves. “Which one am I?” Oh, that one… the one that underwent the wave merge from the larger neighboring waves. But I was also that colossal wave… only sometimes, and maybe not so large; maybe just more self-aggrandizing.

Each of the waves seemed to be direct kin of the great ocean behind them. Well, of course they were.

But some of the waves were clearly set apart from the others: nobler, stronger, fuller; more calloused, more encompassing, more intractable; less gentle, less coy, less agreeable.

Apart from the misfits, all the waves featured that familiar behavior we all know ~~and love~~: lack of change. They did the same thing over and over and over every day. That behavior reminded me of what Paul talked about in Romans 7 (yes, the New Testament on Tabernacler!), when he struggles internally about the warfare within him between law and grace–or rather, between flesh and spirit:

O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! (vv. 24-25, NKJV)

Paul could tell that, despite all his efforts, he was a wretched man in need of saving, the same one who boasted of his conscience before God. More importantly, Paul saw that it was a daily struggle, as if there were never respite from the tedium of life and the weight of sin that tear our years away.

There is a deep struggle between the will to do good and the tendency to do evil; when we will to do good, but do evil which we will not to do (It’s a tongue twister, I know). In the same way, we struggle against the tendency in us to be conformed to patterns and rote living versus the capricious, adventurous life we think we want to live–like those Instagram blogs that taunt you with pictures of people upon mountain peaks and selfie sticks soaring an arm’s length over a breath-taking canyon.

So yes, waves.

Each of them is unique, made in the image of the ocean beneath them, of whom they are part. Also, all of them were the same. They would ebb, flow, and crash ad infinitum.

There was something else to the waves, though. They all had an undercurrent, an undertow, a riptide.

The waves beneath the waves, in a sense, were very much dissimilar. It’s as if the waves, a composite of different forms and breadths and strengths, had a driving force beneath each one that was a derivative of the ocean itself, not each wave. In other words, regardless of the waves’ appearance on the surface, they shared the same current beneath them.

(Okay, scientifically that’s not true, as a tsunami has a much stronger riptide than a beach wave over which moms can dandle their babies’ feet in the light surf. Just track with me!)

Each of the waves carried with it the potent force beneath them that pulled toward a destination, like a desire so deep within you that there is no power to hold you from being drawn to it. It’s a bit like love, but so much deeper.

It’s the human riptide in us that drives us to the shore, away from the mystery that is out there: whatever it is, the waves continue to drive us back to reality, though we long to become undone.

The shore doesn’t–yea, it never satisfies. The world never satisfies.

We are so inexorably shipwrecked on the shores–tossed to and fro in this maelstrom we call the human condition. But these waves are part of a mechanism, and I can’t help but wonder what would happen if we stopped flowing to the shore, where technology abounds, people isolate, and we insulate.

What if we ebbed back into the source, back into the deep?

No more flowing; no more crashing. No more monotony. No more work or toil.

This is the yearning for Eden at its core–back to the ocean, the wellspring; back to the deep over which the Spirit of God hovered, for there the waves had no schedule.

Echad: God of the Shema

Posted on August 27, 2017August 19, 2018 by Jordan Spano

The other weekend I revisited a place I go to maunder and ponder in the discord of this age. With phones, applications, advertisements and such all taking us captive every moment of our life, it’s important once in a while to lock your phone in the car, hold nothing in your hands, walk outside, and just shut the…. be still and quiet.

I visited the pier, with the intent to do nothing but stare at the tumult over the waters. It reminds me of Genesis 1:2, really, and the reality we forget daily.

And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. (NKJV)

As I approached the verge where the concrete met the aged planks of the pier, something caught my eye. It was an inspirational call-to-action of some sort, with an emblazoned URL beneath it: JW.org.

Proudly its bold text and assuring promises were nestled in the pamphlets that were freely displayed for the public’s taking. Across from the stand sat two ladies primed for the sunny day, with water bottles in reserve, lawn chairs positioned where they ought not be, and wily grins.

I wasn’t going to engage them: I was going to walk by and head home.

I wasn’t going to speak to them: I was going to just stand next to them and stare at the kids on the beach play in the waves.

I wasn’t going to do anything… so I became one intellectual powerhouse of a nuisance, a faux-Paul of Tarsus rhetorician. The whole conversation was fruitless and vain.

You got past the preface? Great. Here’s the pith of this piece.

One thing the trained ladies couldn’t grasp (despite my approach being a very coarse, regretfully unloving one), was the tension in Scripture that ultimately led to the doctrine of the Trinity.

God is one.

The most declarative instance in Scripture about this idea is called “the Shema.” Shama, in Hebrew, means “to hear.”

Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. (Deut. 6:4)

This verse is by far the most iconic, most memorized verse in the Tanakh (Old Testament), and is ingrained in the hearts and minds of each follower of Judaism.

It bespeaks God’s oneness: and, since God’s story takes place in the context of polytheism and the worship of those false gods by his people, it doubles down on the truth that there is only one God.

Not two, three, or 3,000. One.

Now this is numerical. Quantifiable. It’s a number, and it’s probably been conveyed to you this way. It’s probably how you would convey this verse to someone else, too (especially if you were in Greece in the first few centuries, where the number of gods were multiplied a thousand-fold).

It may be part of your arsenal when evangelizing: to a smarmy opponent who numbers Yahweh with all thousands of God, but tritely “believes in one less god than you.” One here is a number.

Now, while in Hebrew words can have several meanings (i.e., there is a semantic domain for the word), usually one definition (cp. denotation vs connotation) takes precedence over the others. (If you’re really brave, see polysemy.)

For example, the word day, yom, is understood as a single day, one earth’s full rotation, far more than it as understood as a vague, indefinite period of time (for those who like conjecturing about the Gap Theory. I don’t.).

The word for God in the Old Testament, elohim, can mean God but can also mean “mighty [ones/men]” or “gods” (lowercase), as elohim is a plural noun. This word’s referent, though, is much more often God than it is mighty men or [pagan] gods. (For a thorough article discussing whether elohim can mean “mighty men,” see here.)

So it is with the word one, echad: It overwhelmingly refers to the cardinal number “1” than it does express another concept…

…like unity, wholeness–bordering the idea of shalom.

What if the word echad, one, in the Shema, “the Lord is one,” is expressing something other than the number? What if the author is not saying that there is one God, but God is united–not disparate?

It’s true that Hebrew hearers in the context of Deuteronomy would have known God’s injunction to avoid polytheism (worship of other gods), as their time was replete with worship of false gods. (You can read the whole Book of Judges to see that.) Therefore they would have well conceded that there is one God only, vis-a-vis the thousands of false gods.

But they, called to be a holy and set apart people, would also need to function as a united body and serve the Lord together, much like a cadre of prey form together to protect themselves from a predator. The Hebrews would see that the united behavior he had planned for his people would derive from his own character: one who is not divided in thought or being (cf. Jn 10:38).

Consider below some instances of echad in the Old Testament that allow for a wider semantic domain than just “quantity.”

Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. (Gen. 2:24)

Now the whole earth had one language and one speech... And the Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. (Gen. 11:1, 6)

[T]hen we will give our daughters to you, and we will take your daughters to us; and we will dwell with you, and we will become one people. (Gen. 34:16)

Then Joseph said to Pharaoh, “The dreams of Pharaoh are one; God has shown Pharaoh what He is about to do… (Gen. 41:25)

This is a small litany of examples and is in no way exhaustive, but you can see that a few of the examples are reaching deeper than simply cardinal numbers, than quantity. The ideas expressed in echad here seem to intimate unity and oneness–a non-dividedness that pervades the Hebrew culture and is a reflection of God’s character.

I concluded in another article that Scripture can have multiple meanings that are not immediately apparent or realized: much like God’s kingdom is here but not fully; Jesus’ work is done but not in entirety (for he will come again). I think this double entendre in echad is much the same.

The Shema can express both the quantity of one and the quality of one/oneness.

But why does this matter? It affects the way we see God’s word.

I was at a youth group some weeks ago that was lush with teenagers and budding adults, all there to have fellowship with each other and worship. The youth pastor emerged about twenty minutes in, and he began covering the rich theology in Hebrews 1, specifically verses 1-4 which highlight Jesus as nonpareil to angels and sets him apart unequivocally.

The teacher, in hopping between Old Testament verses to bolster his point, cited Deuteronomy 6:4, the Shema, as an instance of there being one God, not many (quantity). He left no room for a double meaning, a portent of deeper meaning, or anything of the sort. And that’s okay.

But if you base your theology on single verses that appear so intuitively in favor of your point, you won’t be equipped to answer when someone has hard questions about your beliefs.

But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear… (2 Pet. 3:15)

When we say “the Lord is one,” we should be declaring more than just number.

We are declaring there is one God, not many.
We are declaring God is united, not divided against himself.
We are declaring in him there is no change… that the promises he has made and the redemption we and creation groan for is coming.
We are declaring that as is his character, so will be ours: which means we are to be one as a people.

One day, the church will be united. There will be no great chasm between us, and the remnant that was holy and set apart by God will be together again.

One day, we will all be one. YHWH Eloheinu, YHWH echad.