Readings:
Isaiah 44:6-8
Psalm 86:11-17
Romans 8:12-25
Exodus 34:6-7
God of One, God of Them
God of Now, God of Ever
God of Next, God of Then
God of In, God Together
Devotional:
Empty. Not “I just cleaned my desk off, and I can think again” or “All the clothes are put away and folded” empty. The other empty. The one you could swear was an actual missing part of your lungs because you can’t catch enough breath to even cry. The one where there’s supposed to be something to feel but instead it’s desolate and abandoned. The despairing kind of empty that isn’t sure which way to look anymore because every direction feels ominous. The emptiness that makes your head hang and your heart feel at its lowest point. Empty as a dark, shapeless, vast desert.
This is what ancient Hebrews heard when they heard “empty”— the very threat of a ransacked house or a destroyed community left with futility: nothing, cold, cleaned out, exposed, useless. You don’t want to be destroyed and desolate. You don’t want to be devoid of substance. Empty means that there isn’t life left in the community; there’s no hope to be found in any direction.
This is the kind of emptiness in the Hebrew word naqah. For individuals, it’s translated as the kind of cleared out/blank slate/fresh start that we like in our modern English thinking. But when it’s used with generations and communities and households, it’s translated as a devastating emptying out.
It seems obvious to say it, but this deadly, hopeless emptying out is not what we associate with God. In fact, quite the opposite. It’s what He overcomes, even from the beginning. The dark is overcome as He creates light. The shapeless depths are lifted and formed into land. The empty earth is overcome with animals, birds and fish. Hollow, empty man gets filled with Breath. God fills, and life emerges with evident fruit.
The word we would readily attach to God’s actions is nasa. Nasa is the act of lifting someone’s burden, carrying what you couldn’t (or even being carried, like an infant). It’s even the picture of raising a sail, where the lifting brings life or aid, just like wind would animate the sails.
And it’s these two words that do not appear in our lectionary readings this week, but we have to take this side quest before we ever get started on our journey. (And buckle up, we have some miles to cover.) Because naqah and nasa do appear in the verse that David didn’t finish quoting in Psalm 86.
Before we get there though, let’s remember the intrinsic quality of God’s love. Triune God fully and perfectly demonstrates and establishes all of our relational baselines in simply His Being. Father, Son and Spirit show what it means to be merciful, gracious, kind, patient before we are ever part of the story. As He declares in Isaiah, He is the first and last, and if another god was there for the establishment of His Kingdom and people, they are going to need to prove it. He isn’t aware of any.
Side side quest: how kind of timeless God to use so many time-constrained words to describe Himself just for us. We really struggle with the idea of forever or eternal without origination or termination points. But God, including the perfection of the Trinity’s expressed relationship, is constant. Merciful and gracious, abundant in love and kindness—these qualities, just like Him, predate timestamps.
And it’s to these qualities that David appeals in Psalm 86. He’s running for his life, pleading to God for help. Arrogant men and violent men are seeking his life, and they aren’t working with God as their counterpart. Then we get the half-quote from Exodus 34:6 in verse 15, “But You, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness and truth.” And then David goes on to say turn Your face toward me, give me strength, show me Your signs of goodness, that those who hate me wouldn’t be glorified (would be ashamed).
We could just stick to the verses in Psalms at face value. We could talk about how God does lift us from the depths of our pits, how He does deliver us just like newborns with the breath that gives life to our souls. We could note that David longs to have his heart united to revere God, almost as though he and Paul had some interstellar conversation comparing notes and benefits on becoming one with the Father. Those are still valid details, but every Hebrew reader would have heard the other half of the sentence from Exodus and would have remembered the rest of that story.
You see, these words that David half quotes are what God tells Moses on Mt. Sinai, when Moses has had to go back up the mountain to get the stone tablets a second time after shattering the first set in his anger and frustration. Moses worships God, who passes right in front of him and then speaks these two verses. Upon hearing them, Moses’s response is to quickly bow in worship, saying, “Let the Lord go along in our midst, even though the people are so obstinate, and forgive our iniquity and our sin, and take us as Your own inheritance.”
God’s words so deeply move Moses that he wants God to be in their midst, among them despite their shortcomings, adopting them as His own, as a passed down generational gift. From this moment, God restores the covenant, and Moses returns to the people with his face shining from the interaction. One more time: Moses goes back to God for the tablets, God reveals Himself and says these words, which spurs Moses to implore God to be with the people and legally adopt them.
So what did God say? Before you cheat and read ahead, here’s where we have to remember naqah and nasa because English is going to do us dirty. We are going to read these words with our modern mindset, using the translations that were chosen because they kind of work with our grammar rules and legal landscape, and we are going to lose the details of how a Hebrew speaker would have heard them. Ready?
The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin; yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.
This always makes me scratch my (English-speaking) head. God, the same one who is compassionate and gracious and abounding in kindness and forgives, is now not going to cleanse? He’s going to punish sin, but three words earlier He was forgiving all of it? God, constant and intrinsic representation of love and grace, is simultaneously going to forgive sins but not cleanse them? This is what motivated Moses to ask God to adopt them? This is what inspired Moses to ask God to be in their midst? So let’s put on our best Hebrew ears.
First, “forgives” is nasa, or bearing our burdens. God is going to take the burden of our distortions of the truth, our intended and unintended missteps, every moment we miss the mark. This one is pretty easy to find.
But where is naqah? We see the generations mentioned, but nothing reflected about the emptying out. To find it, you need to know that the translators chose the individuals word for naqah, not the generations word. And you need to know that Hebrew uses a strange grammar rule we don’t have. So, using the individuals word, we would have to literally translate, “Cleansing, he will not cleanse” which doesn’t mean anything to us, but means emphatically not in Hebrew. So instead we translate it to “by no means.” But that gets weird too: “He will by no means cleanse.” So then we have to smooth it out a bit more: "He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished" (adding in “the guilty”). That’s a lot of steps to find naqah, but it still doesn’t satisfy the tension of a forgiving but all-of-a-sudden not forgiving God.
Well, what if we took the generations word instead? After all, we are talking about the fathers, children, grandchildren and third and fourth generations. Instead of “cleansing,” we would translate “emptying out, He will not empty out.” Or, to smooth it out for our English ears: "by no means would He empty [us] out."
Maybe God’s promise of His enduring qualities is that He would remove our burdens from us, yet He would by no means leave us emptied out, visiting (or we could say seeing to) the sins of fathers upon generations.
yet He will by no means empty us out, attending to the iniquity of fathers upon the children and upon the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.
Maybe He’s going to lift us, not by clearing out the old and then leaving us desolate and vulnerable, but by removing the harmful things, then filling us and renewing what would have hurt us for generations. Or, as we said a few weeks ago, He’s going to remove the sickness among us and restore us back to health with good bread. Maybe these aren’t two verses that seem to be in conflict, but the compounding promise of a good gardner.
Why does it matter? Why focus on the verse that isn’t even in this week’s reading? Because if we are convinced of God’s love and grace toward us, if we know that He is a good farmer who gives us good bread to eat, then it is easy for us to believe that God is tending us as His soil to produce good fruit. It is of course merciful that He wouldn’t leave us burdened with sin, and it is of course just that He wouldn’t leave us in emptiness and futility. God only ever planned to deal with anything that would keep us separated from Him; He only ever intended to fill us with life; He only ever intended to adopt us into His family as sons of God—learning to reflect His qualities.
Of course He would care if things like arrogance would try to poison our lives from within or violent attacks would uproot our lives from without, just like David literally experienced. Of course God beyond time would patiently wait for the moment that the toxic false wheat reveals itself (which is just before harvest when it turns black) to weed it out, or as Paul says in Romans 8, to put to death the deeds of the body. Of course He would remove the undesirable fruit from us.
And of course we could then recognize the slow (to our finite time-being minds), generational way that we see the creation being renewed. Ugh, how we groan at the pace of change in our own hearts and in our communities. Ugh, how we long to be able to cut away the dead in society without harming the good, how we long to not be useless and desolate, how we long to not return to the fear that makes us flee because we think we are inadequate. Maybe David omits the latter verse because he too is hoping for what he can’t yet see, groaning for the signs of goodness. And though the waiting pains us, we could begin to see His Spirit leading the whole of humanity to its eventual (ah, there’s that pesky time again) glory.
Of course we can then hope for the promised fruits of the Spirit to come forth from our soil, knowing that He tills where we were compressed, sifts where we were rocky, ameliorates where we were choked. Of course we too can hope for our collective revealing as the sons of God, that our faces might shine like Moses’ and be resplendent like the sun. He has chosen to be in our midst and to take us as His own inheritance, adopting us as sons and uniting our spirits to His own.
Emptied out? No, by no means. He wouldn’t and couldn’t leave us that way. God of Forever is helping us and comforting us, slow as it may feel in our mortal and temporal bodies, by removing our weights and replenishing our life. As He has since our beginning, He is filling with His very Breath, and with perseverance and patience, we eagerly await.
A Prayer for Each Moment
God of Always,
You know every moment and meet it with kindness and mercy. Where we feel the pace of time, You peacefully clear space for us to grow and fill us with life. Unite our hearts to Yours, for from You and through You and for You are all things. To him be the glory forever!
Amen
A Prayer for Each Other
Our Father,
You are the catalyst for life, and we desperately and joyfully draw near to You. Let our groanings be matched with revelation, and may our spirits be led by Your Own.
Amen
Blessing
May we hope again and again in the incomparable love of our Father, knowing our hearts are being united to His and our deeds are being led by His Spirit.
Photo by Daniel Olah on Unsplash
Isaiah 44:6-8
Psalm 86:11-17
Romans 8:12-25
Exodus 34:6-7
God of One, God of Them
God of Now, God of Ever
God of Next, God of Then
God of In, God Together
Devotional:
Empty. Not “I just cleaned my desk off, and I can think again” or “All the clothes are put away and folded” empty. The other empty. The one you could swear was an actual missing part of your lungs because you can’t catch enough breath to even cry. The one where there’s supposed to be something to feel but instead it’s desolate and abandoned. The despairing kind of empty that isn’t sure which way to look anymore because every direction feels ominous. The emptiness that makes your head hang and your heart feel at its lowest point. Empty as a dark, shapeless, vast desert.
This is what ancient Hebrews heard when they heard “empty”— the very threat of a ransacked house or a destroyed community left with futility: nothing, cold, cleaned out, exposed, useless. You don’t want to be destroyed and desolate. You don’t want to be devoid of substance. Empty means that there isn’t life left in the community; there’s no hope to be found in any direction.
This is the kind of emptiness in the Hebrew word naqah. For individuals, it’s translated as the kind of cleared out/blank slate/fresh start that we like in our modern English thinking. But when it’s used with generations and communities and households, it’s translated as a devastating emptying out.
It seems obvious to say it, but this deadly, hopeless emptying out is not what we associate with God. In fact, quite the opposite. It’s what He overcomes, even from the beginning. The dark is overcome as He creates light. The shapeless depths are lifted and formed into land. The empty earth is overcome with animals, birds and fish. Hollow, empty man gets filled with Breath. God fills, and life emerges with evident fruit.
The word we would readily attach to God’s actions is nasa. Nasa is the act of lifting someone’s burden, carrying what you couldn’t (or even being carried, like an infant). It’s even the picture of raising a sail, where the lifting brings life or aid, just like wind would animate the sails.
And it’s these two words that do not appear in our lectionary readings this week, but we have to take this side quest before we ever get started on our journey. (And buckle up, we have some miles to cover.) Because naqah and nasa do appear in the verse that David didn’t finish quoting in Psalm 86.
Before we get there though, let’s remember the intrinsic quality of God’s love. Triune God fully and perfectly demonstrates and establishes all of our relational baselines in simply His Being. Father, Son and Spirit show what it means to be merciful, gracious, kind, patient before we are ever part of the story. As He declares in Isaiah, He is the first and last, and if another god was there for the establishment of His Kingdom and people, they are going to need to prove it. He isn’t aware of any.
Side side quest: how kind of timeless God to use so many time-constrained words to describe Himself just for us. We really struggle with the idea of forever or eternal without origination or termination points. But God, including the perfection of the Trinity’s expressed relationship, is constant. Merciful and gracious, abundant in love and kindness—these qualities, just like Him, predate timestamps.
And it’s to these qualities that David appeals in Psalm 86. He’s running for his life, pleading to God for help. Arrogant men and violent men are seeking his life, and they aren’t working with God as their counterpart. Then we get the half-quote from Exodus 34:6 in verse 15, “But You, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness and truth.” And then David goes on to say turn Your face toward me, give me strength, show me Your signs of goodness, that those who hate me wouldn’t be glorified (would be ashamed).
We could just stick to the verses in Psalms at face value. We could talk about how God does lift us from the depths of our pits, how He does deliver us just like newborns with the breath that gives life to our souls. We could note that David longs to have his heart united to revere God, almost as though he and Paul had some interstellar conversation comparing notes and benefits on becoming one with the Father. Those are still valid details, but every Hebrew reader would have heard the other half of the sentence from Exodus and would have remembered the rest of that story.
You see, these words that David half quotes are what God tells Moses on Mt. Sinai, when Moses has had to go back up the mountain to get the stone tablets a second time after shattering the first set in his anger and frustration. Moses worships God, who passes right in front of him and then speaks these two verses. Upon hearing them, Moses’s response is to quickly bow in worship, saying, “Let the Lord go along in our midst, even though the people are so obstinate, and forgive our iniquity and our sin, and take us as Your own inheritance.”
God’s words so deeply move Moses that he wants God to be in their midst, among them despite their shortcomings, adopting them as His own, as a passed down generational gift. From this moment, God restores the covenant, and Moses returns to the people with his face shining from the interaction. One more time: Moses goes back to God for the tablets, God reveals Himself and says these words, which spurs Moses to implore God to be with the people and legally adopt them.
So what did God say? Before you cheat and read ahead, here’s where we have to remember naqah and nasa because English is going to do us dirty. We are going to read these words with our modern mindset, using the translations that were chosen because they kind of work with our grammar rules and legal landscape, and we are going to lose the details of how a Hebrew speaker would have heard them. Ready?
The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin; yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.
This always makes me scratch my (English-speaking) head. God, the same one who is compassionate and gracious and abounding in kindness and forgives, is now not going to cleanse? He’s going to punish sin, but three words earlier He was forgiving all of it? God, constant and intrinsic representation of love and grace, is simultaneously going to forgive sins but not cleanse them? This is what motivated Moses to ask God to adopt them? This is what inspired Moses to ask God to be in their midst? So let’s put on our best Hebrew ears.
First, “forgives” is nasa, or bearing our burdens. God is going to take the burden of our distortions of the truth, our intended and unintended missteps, every moment we miss the mark. This one is pretty easy to find.
But where is naqah? We see the generations mentioned, but nothing reflected about the emptying out. To find it, you need to know that the translators chose the individuals word for naqah, not the generations word. And you need to know that Hebrew uses a strange grammar rule we don’t have. So, using the individuals word, we would have to literally translate, “Cleansing, he will not cleanse” which doesn’t mean anything to us, but means emphatically not in Hebrew. So instead we translate it to “by no means.” But that gets weird too: “He will by no means cleanse.” So then we have to smooth it out a bit more: "He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished" (adding in “the guilty”). That’s a lot of steps to find naqah, but it still doesn’t satisfy the tension of a forgiving but all-of-a-sudden not forgiving God.
Well, what if we took the generations word instead? After all, we are talking about the fathers, children, grandchildren and third and fourth generations. Instead of “cleansing,” we would translate “emptying out, He will not empty out.” Or, to smooth it out for our English ears: "by no means would He empty [us] out."
Maybe God’s promise of His enduring qualities is that He would remove our burdens from us, yet He would by no means leave us emptied out, visiting (or we could say seeing to) the sins of fathers upon generations.
yet He will by no means empty us out, attending to the iniquity of fathers upon the children and upon the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.
Maybe He’s going to lift us, not by clearing out the old and then leaving us desolate and vulnerable, but by removing the harmful things, then filling us and renewing what would have hurt us for generations. Or, as we said a few weeks ago, He’s going to remove the sickness among us and restore us back to health with good bread. Maybe these aren’t two verses that seem to be in conflict, but the compounding promise of a good gardner.
Why does it matter? Why focus on the verse that isn’t even in this week’s reading? Because if we are convinced of God’s love and grace toward us, if we know that He is a good farmer who gives us good bread to eat, then it is easy for us to believe that God is tending us as His soil to produce good fruit. It is of course merciful that He wouldn’t leave us burdened with sin, and it is of course just that He wouldn’t leave us in emptiness and futility. God only ever planned to deal with anything that would keep us separated from Him; He only ever intended to fill us with life; He only ever intended to adopt us into His family as sons of God—learning to reflect His qualities.
Of course He would care if things like arrogance would try to poison our lives from within or violent attacks would uproot our lives from without, just like David literally experienced. Of course God beyond time would patiently wait for the moment that the toxic false wheat reveals itself (which is just before harvest when it turns black) to weed it out, or as Paul says in Romans 8, to put to death the deeds of the body. Of course He would remove the undesirable fruit from us.
And of course we could then recognize the slow (to our finite time-being minds), generational way that we see the creation being renewed. Ugh, how we groan at the pace of change in our own hearts and in our communities. Ugh, how we long to be able to cut away the dead in society without harming the good, how we long to not be useless and desolate, how we long to not return to the fear that makes us flee because we think we are inadequate. Maybe David omits the latter verse because he too is hoping for what he can’t yet see, groaning for the signs of goodness. And though the waiting pains us, we could begin to see His Spirit leading the whole of humanity to its eventual (ah, there’s that pesky time again) glory.
Of course we can then hope for the promised fruits of the Spirit to come forth from our soil, knowing that He tills where we were compressed, sifts where we were rocky, ameliorates where we were choked. Of course we too can hope for our collective revealing as the sons of God, that our faces might shine like Moses’ and be resplendent like the sun. He has chosen to be in our midst and to take us as His own inheritance, adopting us as sons and uniting our spirits to His own.
Emptied out? No, by no means. He wouldn’t and couldn’t leave us that way. God of Forever is helping us and comforting us, slow as it may feel in our mortal and temporal bodies, by removing our weights and replenishing our life. As He has since our beginning, He is filling with His very Breath, and with perseverance and patience, we eagerly await.
A Prayer for Each Moment
God of Always,
You know every moment and meet it with kindness and mercy. Where we feel the pace of time, You peacefully clear space for us to grow and fill us with life. Unite our hearts to Yours, for from You and through You and for You are all things. To him be the glory forever!
Amen
A Prayer for Each Other
Our Father,
You are the catalyst for life, and we desperately and joyfully draw near to You. Let our groanings be matched with revelation, and may our spirits be led by Your Own.
Amen
Blessing
May we hope again and again in the incomparable love of our Father, knowing our hearts are being united to His and our deeds are being led by His Spirit.
Photo by Daniel Olah on Unsplash
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