Exodus 23:25, “And ye shall serve the LORD your God, and he shall bless thy bread, and thy water; and I will take sickness away from the midst of thee.”
Yesterday I explained how the Hebrew pronoun you have both a singular and a plural form. In Exodus 20:2 the pronoun your in your God is singular expressing the idea of a personal God. However, Exodus 23:25 the pronoun your in the word for your God is ‘elohykem with the plural second person pronoun em preceded by the word for you shall serve ‘ebadethem which is grammatical correct to end with the second person plural pronoun em. But then you find this grammatical abnormality in the words your bread and your water etlachmeka v’et meimeka and the words from within you where God will take the sickness away from within you mikirebeka. Grammatical these words should be plural but you will notice that they all end with the personal second person singular pronoun ka.
So unlike Exodus 23:25 which speaks of your God in a singular form this verse speaks of your God in a plural form, but then oddly it tells us that God will bless our bread and water and will take out sickness as a reference to the singular. God will bless your own personal bread and water and take away your own personal sickness. Either you or someone else, but it is a reference to just one person that will get his bread and water bless and sickness removed.
Ok is this just a lot of grammatical mumble jumble that has no real meaning except for some eccentric old Hebrew professor who gets his big daily highs and thrills over discovering grammatical anomalies. Yeah, I know, I need to get a life. I probably need to put my Hebrew Bible aside for a while and find out who is pitching for the Black Hawks tonight. What difference does it make if the you or your is singular or plural? So what if it refers to just one person and not the collective?
I woke up this morning still bugged by this plural and singular stuff and cried out to God, “Lord is this really my life. Other people can spend hours discussing batting averages of each player with the Chicago Bulls and their chances of making it into the Super Bowl while I am spending these precious hours trying to figure out why the your in your God is plural and the your in your bread and your water and healing is singular. What’s the diff? I laid awake all night pondering this and I got nothing. No commentary can help as no commentators even care if the you or your is singular or plural. That’s it, I had it, I’m gonna shut off my computer, close my Hebrew Bible and call a cable company and order ESPN so I don’t sound like some fool at work tomorrow when someone asks me “Well how about those Chicago Bulls.” For once I am not going to make a fool of myself, I will be able to say something intelligent like: “Guess who the goalie is for the Chicago Bulls in tomorrow’s game?”
In frustration I grab the first piece of paper I find on my desk and crumbled it up. Just as I was about to toss it in the waste basket I noticed it was a picture of a 22 year old missionary that spoke in church yesterday. After the service I went online to send her a donation for her work and accidently sent her twice the amount I intended forcing me to cut back on my own personal budget this month. “That’s another thing, God, why you make me do stupid stuff like that, I’m supposed to have a PhD for crying out loud and I can’t even get Pay Pal right. Now I have to spend the month with a reduced budg…” That is when it hit me.
I uncrumbled the picture of this 22 year old missionary holding a disabled African child that she adopted. A child no one wanted, a child that her parents and the people in her village would have killed for being different if not rescued by this 22 year old Mother Theresa. This young missionary, just a kid herself went to Ghana, West Africa supported by no mission board, only with money she could raise herself and started a home for disabled children, children with such disabilities not even their parents wanted them and would have been put to death. Yet, God wanted them and this missionary wanted them. She even calls her organization The Treasured Ones www.thetreasuredones.org. These children who, because of their disabilities, look repulsive even to their own mothers are loved by God and a 22 year old missionary.
I look at Exodus 23:25 and then at the picture of this little disabled African child being held by its newly adopted mother, a 22 year old single parent living in Ghana, West Africa thousands of miles away from her home. As I thought about how our church gathered together to pray for this young missionary yesterday I began to paraphrase Exodus 23:25 into modern English, “And all of us shall serve the Lord our God. That word serve is ‘avad in Hebrew it comes from a Phoenician word for slave and in the Old Persian has the idea of worship and obey. Hence in the Chaim Bentorah translation of Exodus 23:25 it reads: all of us shall worship and obey God and he will bless the bread and water of the one,(the little disabled African child).
Why do you worship ‘avad God? So you can be blessed, so God can be blessed? Yes, but how about spending some time worshipping God so that someone who is too disabled, too removed from the opportunity to know God, too rejected by the world around them to hear or think of God, that they may also be blessed as well.
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