Ps 91:15 He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I [will be] with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honour him.

 

I realize now a mistake I have been making in my study of the Psalms.  I have been taking one verse and studying that one verse, taking it apart and drilling down to the depths of each word in the Hebrew, but I have not been studying that verse in the context of the entire Psalms.  As my study partner and I discussed Psalms 91:15 I suddenly realized that you cannot really understand verse 15 unless you study the entire Psalm.  There is a progression that follows through this entire Psalm.  We see the development or the maturing of our relationship with God from just trusting him to be our refuge or atonement and fortress to coming into His truth to be a shield for us to being able to behold Him with our eyes to forming a bond chashaq with Him.

 

When we reach this level of maturity with Him something often happens.  Maybe not all the time, but in many cases it does.  It happened to a woman named Madam Guyan. Madam Guyan lived from 1648-1717 and was called by the Catholic Church as a mystic and apostate.  Madam Guyan wanted to experience a union or bonding with God and longed to enter a convent.  Her parents refused to allow this and forced her into an unhappy marriage with a 37 years old man when she was only 15.  Her husband died when she was 28 years old and from that time she began searching for a deeper relationship with God.  She claimed to have reached an apostolic state with God.  That is that she felt she was absorbed into and united with God.  This is a good description of chashaq bonding love.  She would fast to an extreme and often went without sleep in her hunger for God.  As a result Madam Guyan was accused of not doing a critical examination of spiritual things. Critical examination? I mean come on, she was no theologian, just someone who wanted to love Jesus.  She was condemned for emptying her mind in meditation and prayer.  And just what is a more appropriate definition of devekut as taught in the Bible and practiced among many orthodox Jews?  She was accused of looking for God within herself rather than without.  I mean does not God live within us when we are saved? Then they say that she felt she reached sinless perfection. This is not true, she only believed that she could move in that direction but never reach it in the flesh. Furthermore they called her a heretic because she believed she could achieve a complete union with God and absorption into God.  Pray tell, is that not the definition of chashaq in Psalms 91 and does not the word trust in Hebrew, betach mean that very thing to be welded or melted into God?   Finally she was accused of spending so much time trying to experience the presence of God within herself that she neglected evangelism and the Great Commission.  I mean just what the thousands of people who have found God through her writings. She is still after three hundred and fifty years carrying out the Great Commission in her writings.

 

Madam Guyan was branded a heretic by the church and she still is among many fundamentalist Christians.  She was imprisoned in the bastille because she wrote a paper on the Song of Solomon teaching that we can have a personal relationship with God. She went to prison and was branded a heretic for no other reason than  the fact that all she wanted to do was to love Jesus.

 

If we reach that level of maturity that Psalms 91 takes us to where we are bonded with God, there may be those who will accuse you of the same things they accuse Madam Guyan because they do not understand what the love of God really means.  If they have not experienced it themselves then they will turn on you as being spiritually proud, arrogant and unrealistic in your relationship with God, call you a mystic, too dependent upon your emotions, and too influenced by Eastern religions.

 

I believe this is why verse fifteen tells us that God will be with us in time of trouble. He won’t deliver us because He can’t.  The only way to be delivered from this type of trouble is if everyone else experiences a similar relationship with God, the bonding with God that is described in Psalms 91.  You see this word for trouble is tsarah.  This word is rooted in a Semitic origin used for rivalry between two women. In other words a cat fight. A man having multiple wives was quite common in ancient times.  Men did not experience a long life like women, due to wars, hunting accidents  and so forth so there were fewer eligible men than women in those days and women needed to be married to exist so a man would have multiple wives.  I just mention that to point out the Hebrew is not singling women out by using the word tsarah for female rivalry. It is just that due to the way things were there were more women to create rivalries with.

 

Note it does not say God will deliver us from this trouble, but that He will just be with us in this trouble. The word for with him is ‘imo which can express the idea of sharing a similar thought or idea.  God will be with us, on our side when we go through this rivalry with the other brothers and sisters in the church.  When they accuse you of spiritual arrogance, the Lord will understand.  Tsarah trouble is a  trouble born out of rivalry.  This includes jealousy, politics, and competitiveness.  There are no rules in this type of trouble, it is a dirty fight where there is no respect and it is relentless with no way to smooth it over.  You feel beat up and helpless because nothing you do can stop it or win them over, they just want you and your spiritual arrogance out of the picture.

 

But the promise is that when this jealousy or rivalry arises because you have formed a bond with God, God will be with you, will be on your side, He will understand when no one else will. John 16:2: “They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service.”  Well, they may not kill you physically but they will try their darnest to kill you spiritually.

So God will be with us when people misunderstand or misinterpret our relationship with Him.  But God understands that relationship and there may not be a deliverance but at least we can be sure that when we trust God, return His love and bond with Him He will be there with us when we are persecuted if we dare to just simply love Jesus with all our hearts, soul and mind.

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