Good Morning Yamon Ki Yesepar;

Psalms 119:145: “I cried with  my whole heart; hear me, O Lord: I will keep thy statutes.”

As many of you know Psalms 119 is a poem written in an acrostic style.  You will notice that this Psalm has 176 verses divided into 22 sections with eight verses each. You will also notice that each section has a one word title: “Aleph, Beth, Gimel” etc.  You would probably recognize that David takes you through the entire Hebrew Alphabet with each section representing a letter of the Hebrew Alphabet.  If you check your Hebrew Bible you will see that  each of the eight verses in each section starts with that particular letter of the Hebrew Alphabet that it used in the title of each section.  For instance in this case the title of this section is  “Qof,” thus, the first word in each of the following verses will start with a “qof.”

Ok, you know that, but stop and consider.  If each letter of the Hebrew Alphabet carries a spiritual  attribute, would it not follow that the spiritual attribute of each letter will be addressed in the following eight verses.  For instance, the title of these eight verses is “qof”  or sanctification.

Hence we have the theme of these eight verses  (verses 145-152) as sanctification. This is expressed in the very first verse: “I cried with my whole heart; hear me, O Lord: I will keep thy statutes.”  The cry of David’s heart is to keep the commandments or to be sanctified, to made holy.  When you read through these eight verses you learn that holiness comes from meditating and filling your heart with the Word of God.

The word here for “statutes” is not “torah” as one would suspect, but  “chakak.”  This is spelled “chet, qof, qof.”   Yes this word does mean the law.  You have to remember the only Scripture that David had was the Torah or the first five books of the Bible, plus oral tradition.  So when he speaks of the law he is speaking of the Word of God or Scripture.  However, it is interesting that he uses the word “chakak,” not only because it has a double “qof” to keep within the theme of the passage but because this word is also the word for “hope” or “positive or Godly imaginations.”  David is also saying that holiness comes when we fill our hearts with the mind of God:

The Septuagint uses the Greek word “elpizo” for “chakak.”  That is the same word Paul uses for “hope” in Hebrews 11:1: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”   In other words faith is the substance.  In the Greek the word for substance is “hupostasis” which means actual existence, that which has existence.  Faith is that which has actual existence of things “imagined,” evidence of things not seen.  God created this world with His imagination.  When the woman with the issue of blood touch Jesus, virtue went out of Jesus, yet Jesus said it was “her faith” that made her whole. The moment the woman touch Jesus, whatever that virtue was that went out of Jesus it caused her to see or imagine what Jesus was seeing, ie., seeing her whole.  Once this woman saw herself as whole as Jesus saw her, her faith was made “hupostasis”  or substansive or tangible, which meant she was whole.

Now can you understand why David cried out with his whole heart that he would keep God’s “chakak” or imaginations?  God created this world and he also establish natural laws such as gravity, time, how a physical body reacts to disease etc.  But these exist in the mind of God.  If God created natural laws, then He can alter them at His will. If we can fill our minds or imaginations like David, or like Paul declared to renew our minds or have the minds of Jesus, then like the woman with the issue of blood, if our imaginations are God’s imaginations and He imagines something that changes natural laws such as this woman’s body reaction to her disease, then when she imagines or sees herself as healed as Jesus saw her, that is the substance, the hupostasis or existence.  That is faith, seeing what God’s sees, joining your imagination with His.

So, pastors, try this.  Next time you are alone in your church, go to your pulpit and do what David did in Psalms 118:1: Cry with your whole heart: “Hear me O’ Lord I will keep thy statutes or I will keep your imaginations as my imaginations.  Then look out over those empty chairs and let your imaginations be God’s imaginations.  If you see every chair filled – your faith has made you whole, for faith is the existence of God’s imaginations.  That is the “qof” true sanctification.

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