Exodus 14:14: “The Lord will fight for you and you shall hold your peace.”

“If I see ten problems walking down the road toward me, I can be confident that nine will fall into a ditch before they reach me.”   President Calvin Coolidge

Yesterday I faced a problem that just sapped me of all my strength.  I could not concentrate on anything else but that problem.  I could not enjoy the day, I could not even sleep.  Yet before long I discovered the problem was not even a problem at all.  I wasted a perfectly good day fretting over a problem that didn’t even exist.

I don’t know about you but I tend to spend a lot of time fretting over problems that God has chosen to fight for me.  Looking at the literal understanding of Exodus 14:14, it clearly tells us to let God do the fighting and we should just hold our peace. God was fighting my problem yesterday but I was not holding my peace.

The word peace used here is charesh not shalom.  The word charesh is found in a Hiphal form in this verse.  Now there are two possible ways to express this word in the Hiphal form.   You could say: “The Lord will fight for you and just keep your big mouth shut.”   Or you could say: “The Lord will fight for you and you will just go about your business.”  Actually it means both and could be rendered both ways and we could read this passage as:  “The Lord will fight for you so just shut your mouth, quit belly aching and just go about your business.

Do you ever wonder about this idea of God fighting for us?  Does He really have to jump into the ring and duke it out with our problems?  The word we render as fight is this passage is an odd one, it is the word yilachim. Some of my Hebrew students may notice that it is the word for bread, lachim used as a verb with a Yod putting it into an imperfect or future tense.  As a verb the word for bread would mean to feed or eat.  Thus, God will eat it for us.   Yes, the root word for “fight” is “lechem” Lamed, Chet, and Mem, which is the word for bread.   In its Semitic root the word for war or fighting is  MLHMH.  In the Hebrew language it appears as milechemah.  Remove the first letter Mem and the last letter Hei and you have the central word lechem. All wars were fought essentially because people were starving and needed land to raise their food.  War was literally fought over the need for bread. Who or whatever controls the food source controls the world. Monsanto with its hybrid seeds literally has the power to control the world for with their GMO’s they could force the world to come to them for seeds to grow food.  Anyway, that’s not my fight, you can talk to my study partner about that one.

When lechem is used as a verb it means to feed, or devour.  You could use yilachim to mean to fight, the problem I have with that rendering, however, is that this would suggest that God has to duke it out with an enemy.   How many punches does He need to get in before the enemy topples.   Only one English translation  that I read uses something other than  fight for the word yilachim and that is the BBE which says the Lord will make war for you. Now that fits the motif of the passage but it can be very misleading.  That is why I prefer to read a verse in the Hebrew Bible before going to the English translations.   I would have a tendency to just skip over a word when all the translations give basically the same rendering.

Keep in mind that all words in the Hebrew originate as a verb and the noun evolves out of the verb.   In its Semitic origins the verb lechem meant to eat or consume.  The noun form would then be bread.  That Yod at the beginning would suggest that this verb is in a Niphal imperfect form and thus it would mean to devour and lick the plate.   God does not square off with our problems and start punching it out while we sit back cheering him on: “Give him the left, the left, oops, that must really smart, sorry about your black eye God, but you sure showed him, didn’t you. What a pal, what a pal.”  God does not fight, he just walks up to our problem and eats it up “Gulp! Burp!”

How often do we with hands in the pocket, head down, running our toe through the dirt  say: “Well, God is fighting for me, God is handling the problem, it will just take time, keep praying.”  Poor God, he must really be getting tired, must be that ninth round by now bloody and battered like old Rocky Balboa.  Come on, the word is lechem  to eat or devour, it doesn’t have to mean to fight.  Someone decided to use the word fight for lechem  because it fits the motif and translators, like wooden soldiers, joined in locked step and rendered this word as fight giving us poor slobs no opportunity to discover that there is an alternative rendering.

Let’s face it, God does not need to duke it out with our problems.  The bell sounds, he walks out and one punch to the jaw and the problem is down for the count.  But that is not Lechem.   Lechem is the bell ringing and God walks out, faces the problem and in one gulp the problem is history.  If God does duke it out with a problem he is just tenderizing it so it is not so chewy when he devours it.  Also, he may not be removing the problem right away as he wants it to fatten itself so it’s got some meat on it when it comes time to eat.

So when we face a problem, God does not get into the ring and duke it out and knock it to the mat while we are waiting for the count and hoping it doesn’t get up the next day for another round.  Rather, I believe what God is teaching us in Exodus 14:14, is that we simply let God sit at the table as we serve Him up a heaping portion of our problems and like a hungry God we let Him devour it.  So when God steps into the ring, our problems may be here today but the will be just a burp tomorrow.