Psalms 121:4: “Behold, he that keepth Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.”
“Sometimes exhausted with toil and endeavor,
I wish I could sleep forever and ever;
But then this reflection
My longing allays
I shall be doing it
One of these days”
Piet Hein
The word keepth in Hebrew is shamar which means to be a body guard. It is one who watches over to protect. This body guard is God and unlike other body guards who need to sleep our body guard, God needs no sleep and watches over us 24/7. Curious that He does not slumber or sleep, is not that the same thing? Actually no, you may have a guard who is self-disciplined enough to not slumber, but you cannot get away from the fact that he is going to have to sleep sometime. However, our divine Body Guard not only does not slumber and he also does not sleep. He can be the perfect 24 hour body guard. No bed time, no lunch breaks, nor toilet breaks. We have a body guard who is 24/7. We have His full attention 24 hours a day.
With billions of people you may ask how that is possible. I think C.S Lewis in his book Mere Christianity gives the best explanation. He points out that God does not live in time. In fact God invented time. Time means nothing to God, he moves through time just as easily as we move through air. So when you are born, He is there with you for every moment of every day of your life. He is not distracted by other events. His full attention is on you. If He needs to deal with a crisis in Israel, he just moves through time and takes care of it and then moves back through time to pick up with you, never losing a second of time with you. When you die, He just goes back through time and picks up with someone else. This is how He can be Omnipresent. He is continually moving through time. If you live to be 90 years old, God is right there with you for the full 90 years every moment and every second. He doesn’t have to bother with anything else except you as anything else has its own time line that He can take care of in another time
Thus, He is not only with us 24/7 but we also have the added advantage that He never slumbers nor sleeps. Check out the word sleep which is yashan. It means to sleep, but it also means to grow old. God will never grow old. We can’t outlive God. He is there with us never growing too old or feeble to help us or encourage us.
So God never sleeps. Is that really all that his word yashan is telling us? I believe there is a built in commentary that we can look at that might give us more insight. The word yashan sleep is spelled Yod, Shin and Nun.” I believe these letters are teaching us more than what we think of when we think of sleep. It reveals what went on in the mind of the people of David’s day when they heard that God does not yashan or sleep.
The first letter to yeshan sleep is the Yod which teaches us to be careful not to be so focused on future events that we miss what is happening in the present. The Yod is suspended in the air having no foothold in the ground. By God not sleeping, it means he has His attention fixed on the moment at hand. Whatever you are going through in the very moment he is there and fully aware of it. He is not off planning some future event.
The second letter to sleep or yashan is the Shin. The Shin represents God’s fiery passion. His passion, His deep love for us is available to us 24/7, he is never too tired to give His attention to us. He never has a headache, He is ready to share His passion with us whenever we are ready. He has made Himself available to us any moment, not when He just feels like it nor do we have to wait for Him to wake up.
The final letter is the Nun. As with the word for slumber, the Nun tells us that God will never be distracted nor will he let his attention be diverted because he needs to sleep. We have His attention 24/7.
Thus, when God says that he will stand guard over us and never sleep it means that His watchcare over us is for this moment and every moment in our lives until we see Him face to face. He is watching over us this very moment, not matter what we are going through (Yod). The fact that he does not sleep means His watch care over us makes his passions available to us at any time, any moment, He is never too tired to pour out His love on us (Shin). Finally, the fact that He does not sleep means that there is nothing to divert His attention away from us.
When God says that he is watching over us and never slumbers or sleeps, He is telling us that there are no holes or gaps in His watch care. We could not be any more secure than to put ourselves under His care.
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