December 29, 2009
Bizarro World
Blessed is the man whom You instruct, O LORD, and teach out of your Torah, that You may give him rest from the days of adversity (Psalm 94:12-13)
I need to stop watching cable news. Too upsetting. Everywhere you look, good is called evil, and evil good. People in positions of power and influence seem incapable of making just, common-sense decisions. It's like we're living in Bizarro World, the fictional, cube-shaped planet in Superman comics where everything done or said is backward.
But despair not. Messiah Yeshua offers us rest in a world of chaos and calamity. But what does that look like? Strong's renders the Hebrew word for "rest," shaqat, as idleness, stillness or quietness. In our western mindset, that can mean a lot of things. But look at the picture that unfolds when we translate the word shaqat in the ancient Hebrew pictographic script, which dates back to Moses. Deciphering Hebrew symbols is not an exact science – this was once a lost language – but we can, at the very least, make a good guess with the aid of resource books like Jeff Benner's Ancient Hebrew Lexicon of the Bible. Here's our picture (Hebrew is read right to left):
