Shut up, voices!

SOMETIMES you just wake up and say, “Is there anything I haven’t screwed up?”

You don’t say it out loud because someone might answer. He might agree with you, which would make you feel bad. Or he might disagree with you and tell you how wonderful you are, which would make you feel worse.

It’s hard to clearly assess one’s own life. If you compare your achievements to others in your age group, you may feel either sad or smug. I don’t have any grandkids—sad. However, at least I don’t have any incarcerated offspring—smug. 

And why should what my children are and do be my achievement, anyway? Or my fault, for that matter?

(That’s just an example. I don’t obsess about my children all day and all night. I obsess about a variety of things.)

That’s where my thoughts were going when I woke up way too early Sunday morning. I tried to go back to sleep, but the voices in my head wouldn’t shut up. So I took them downstairs and made them a cup of coffee and turned on their favorite early morning TV show.

They still wouldn’t shut up, so I moved to my laptop and went to www.biblegateway.com. I went directly to Psalms, a haven for wretched people having bad mornings. 

David was having a very bad week when he wrote Psalm 52. The priest at a town called Nob had supplied him with food and a sword when David had to go into hiding to avoid Saul’s death threats. Within a few days, revenge landed on Nob. Eighty-give priests were executed, along with all the men, women, children, and livestock of the town. (Read 1 Samuel 21 and 22.)

The first part of Psalm 52 is a diatribe against Doeg, the man who carried out the slaughter on Saul’s behalf. 

For the director of music. A maskil of David. When Doeg the Edomite had gone to Saul and told him: “David has gone to the house of Ahimelek.”

¹ Why do you boast of evil, you mighty hero?
    Why do you boast all day long,
    you who are a disgrace in the eyes of God?
² You who practice deceit,
    your tongue plots destruction;
    it is like a sharpened razor.
³ You love evil rather than good,
    falsehood rather than speaking the truth.^[c]
4 You love every harmful word,
    you deceitful tongue!

⁵ Surely God will bring you down to everlasting ruin:
    He will snatch you up and pluck you from your tent;
    he will uproot you from the land of the living.
⁶ The righteous will see and fear;
    they will laugh at you, saying,
⁷ “Here now is the man
    who did not make God his stronghold
but trusted in his great wealth
    and grew strong by destroying others!”

I wonder if David thought, “I really screwed up. If I hadn’t gone to Nob, all those people would still be alive. Because they helped me, their whole town was wiped out.” If he did think that, he didn’t include it in his psalm. Instead the psalm moves from deriding Doeg to describing David’s life in God’s presence. 

⁸ But I am like an olive tree
    flourishing in the house of God;
I trust in God’s unfailing love
    for ever and ever.
⁹ For what you have done I will always praise you
    in the presence of your faithful people.
And I will hope in your name,
    for your name is good.

The words David used are both soothing and empowering. Even if they weren’t arranged in sentences, they'd be something substantial to grab hold of.

flourishing                   trust                 unfailing love

praise               hope

If the voices taunt me again tomorrow morning, I know what to do. There are 149 more psalms.

Where's that found?

At a Hi-B.A. gathering in the late 1960s—Hi-B.A. is the Christian youth group I attended in northern New Jersey—the speaker quoted a scripture verse, “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.”

“Where’s that found?” he asked the large room packed with teens.

“In the Bible!” a voice yelled, earning the audience’s laughter and applause and perhaps a bit of irritation from the speaker.

Okay. I confess. C’est moi. I’ve been like this my entire life.

Do you wonder, like I did, what kind of scholar the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews was when he wrote,

For somewhere he has spoken about the seventh day in these words: “On the seventh day God rested from all his works.”

Somewhere? Shouldn’t it be in Genesis, like the first or second chapter? Why didn’t he know this when he wrote? I learned later in my Bible student career that the Bible didn’t have chapters and verses until many centuries after the anonymous Hebrew author wrote. To be specific,

The chapter divisions commonly used today were developed by Stephen Langton, an Archbishop of Canterbury. Langton put the modern chapter divisions into place in around A.D. 1227. The Wycliffe English Bible of 1382 was the first Bible to use this chapter pattern. Since the Wycliffe Bible, nearly all Bible translations have followed Langton's chapter divisions.

The Hebrew Old Testament was divided into verses by a Jewish rabbi by the name of Nathan in A.D. 1448. Robert Estienne, who was also known as Stephanus, was the first to divide the New Testament into standard numbered verses, in 1555. Stephanus essentially used Nathan's verse divisions for the Old Testament. Since that time, beginning with the Geneva Bible, the chapter and verse divisions employed by Stephanus have been accepted into nearly all the Bible versions.

[Read more: http://www.gotquestions.org/divided-Bible-chapters-verses.html#ixzz3J9UzIjGo]

So basically all the Hebrew scripture quoted in Hebrews was rattling around in the author’s head. He was a great scholar.

The other day my fellow Bible teacher at Sunbury Christian Academy instructed her young teen students in the use of Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance. As the students groaned under the weight of the volume, she quipped, “It will make your stronger.”

Strong’s and similar concordances were what we used in the pre-internet era when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Its use is pretty simple:  You look up a word in alphabetical order and the concordance lists every place in the Bible that word appears, and a short segment of the verse. Every place. That’s why it weighs twenty pounds. That’s why you need a page magnifier to read the microscopic type.

How on earth did James Strong compile this book without the internet to search the document? I’m glad you asked.

Dr. James Strong was professor of exegetical theology at Drew Theology Seminary when he supervised a team of 100 scholars in creating this index to the King James Bible. (I imagine he chained them to desks like the monks who copied the New Testament.) The concordance was published in 1890, and the old professor graduated to Glory in 1894. You can read more about his amazing accomplishment and other concordances here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong%27s_Concordance

Now I use www.biblegateway.com, though I suppose there are many Bible search engines online. But when I need to know the Greek or Hebrew word behind the English word, I’m back to Strong’s or Young’s Analytical Concordance. There are what-pass-for-concordances at the back of many Bibles, but don’t bother. They’ll break your heart every time.

Reimagine the scene from my youth:  The Hi-B.A. leader quotes the verse and asks, “Where’s that found?” 

Every teen there whips out a smart phone and within seconds multiple voices call out, “Mark 16:15!”

Except that one girl who exclaims, “OMG! There’s a BOGO sale at Payless Shoes!”

Let me offer a better answer, the best answer, when you quote a Bible verse and someone asks, “Where’s that found?” 

In my heart.

Scroll down for obscure Bible college humor.

Here’s how we characterized concordances in Bible college:

Strong’s for the strong

Young’s for the young

Cruden’s for the crude