WORD STUDY – SHELTER – SAGAV
Psalms 9:9 “The Lord will also be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in times of trouble.”
Jacques Lowe was the personal photographer President Kennedy. He had over 40,000 photographs of Kennedy and his immediate family in his collection. Only 400 were ever published. Jacques Lowe was a very careful and meticulous person. He took exceptional care of his negatives and photographs. If a museum or library needed one of his photos, he personally developed the photograph himself. When it came time to find a safe place to store his photographs he researched every possible alternative available and eventually decided that the safest place for them in the whole world would a vault at the J P Morgan Chase Bank in New York City. Today, all 400,000 photographs no longer exist. You see this vault for the JP Morgan Chase Bank in New York City was located in the World Trade Center.
David lived a life on the edge as a warrior and a king. He was more aware than any that even for a king, there was no safe place on earth. Yet when David said that the Lord is a refuge for the oppressed and in time of trouble, he was referring to place of ultimate safety. The word “refuge” is a very unusual word in the Hebrew to be used in the sense of a refuge. The word is “sagav” which means to be high. The picture is a refuge in the heavens or outer space, a place that is inaccessible.
The “oppressed” is from the word “dakak” which means to be crushed under by affliction, or to have a heavy weight on top of something. The word for trouble is “sarar” which means to be bound up. It could also be from the root word, “basar” which would mean a pruning. God is a refuge from those who seek to crush us, hold us down and from those who have us bound up in fear. This refuge or “sagav” is not just a picture of God surrounding us and protecting us, it is a picture of God lifting us up and carrying use away from all those problems and stresses that have us bound up.
I remember one time I was riding in a plane and we passed through a storm. The plane was buffeted around by the winds and turbulence. The pilot announced he would take the plane up a couple thousand feet. When he did we were flying above the storm. We entered a place where it was calm and peaceful. When I looked out the window and looked down, I could see the storm raging and the lightning flashing.
This is what sagav is, this is the shelter that David is speaking about. We are not going through the storms or being protected in the storm, but God is taking us into a new height where the storm is not accessible to us.
David spent a lot of time looking up in the sky, looking off into space. To him those heights were the safest place that anyone could be. No one can touch you if you rose to such heights. Perhaps like David when you face those problems that have the potential of crushing you, those dakaks. Those fears that have you bound up, you can sit back like David and picture God taking you a new height. At these heights you rest in his arms and just look down in peace while you can see the storm raging below.
The promise here is that when the storms of life threaten you, the Lord is your refuge, He makes you inaccessible. We may think we can find shelter in some natural haven, in the arm of the flesh, but just like Lowe’s certainty that he found the safest place in the world for his photographs, we find that even the vaults of the Chase Bank could not protect them. The only real protection or shelter for us, as David knew, was in the arms of God which simply lifts us up and away from the storms of life.
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