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Zephaniah 3:17: “The Lord your God in the midst of you is mighty. He will save, He will rejoice over you with joy. He will rest in his love, He will joy over you with singing.
If you read my book Hebrew Word Study A Hebrew Teacher’s Call to Silence you may recall where I made a deal with God that if He would weep when my heart was broken, I would weep when His heart was broken. Yesterday was one of those days where I wept and knew I had entered God’s heart and felt His grief.

I have been curious about the Wiki Leaks revelation that key governmental figures were involved in Satanic worship. Not that I am into the claims of conspiracy theorist but I was curious as to what this Pizzagate thing was all about. So I started to search on You Tube and pulled up something that was really unrelated to the conspiracy theory but I just felt I had to listen to this report. It was a interview from British television, a counterpart to our 60 Minutes, with a fifteen year old girl who was taken to a Satanic cult by her grandmother at the age of two and for thirteen years was tortured and sexually -abused by these Satanist. Up until four years ago before I made my deal with God, I had heard of such rituals and was pretty much unaffected. I do have Asperger’s Syndrome and I am not easily affected by gory sights or descriptions, but this time I just found a deep grief well up in me and I could not stop weeping, I know it was God who was weeping and I was feeling His heart.

This young fifteen year old girl told how from the age of 2 until her rescue at the age of 14 she and others were continually sexually violated by adult men and women. She became pregnant at the age of eleven. When the baby was almost full term a Satanist doctor performed an abortion and before her eyes they killed this baby as a sacrifice to Satan. Then they ate the baby and forced this young child, the mother, to also eat her own child.

Like I said, I have heard these stories before. I worked 17 years with a deliverance ministry and heard similar stories. As I listened to this story, I was instantly reminded of a remark by a woman who came through our ministry, had been a Satanist priestess and revealed that she also gave a baby up to be sacrificed to Satan and she said: “The baby was just total love and we had to destroy it.” The enemy wants to destroy love because that is what God is all about. He is more total love than a baby.

Intellectually, I have a hard time believing in a hell of fire and brimstone. Not that I don’t believe it, but that I just can’t wrap my brain around an eternity of a physical fire tormenting a spirit which has no physical body. But if this is what the Bible teaches I am going to believe it, all I am saying is that I personally cannot wrap my brain around it. But I will tell you what I can wrap my brain around and for me it is worst that eternity in a lake of fire. For me hell would be to have to spend eternity with such evil as I heard on that interview and with such an evil entity that would cause men to do such horrific things and to never know or experience the loving presence of God for eternity, that would more horrible than a fiery torment. You imagine your hell, I will imagine mine but I guarantee we are both imagining our idea of the worst possible fate a human can experience.

It is with that thought that I come to this verse in Zephaniah 3:17. Someone on our ministry Facebook page mentioned this verse in response to a meme I posted on God singing to us. I did a study on this some time ago but decided to revisit it after listening to this interview. I just could not get this evil out of my mind and so I needed to focus on the love of God for a while. For me this verse is the best expression of God’s love, next to the sacrifice of His Son, in the Old Testament. I mean read this carefully. He is saying that He will rejoice over us with joy, He will rest in His love, He will joy over us with singing. This description caused me to think back to when I was teaching in Middle School and I had a student, a little ninth grade girl who had her first love. I mean she was gone, totally gone. A normally attentive student I had difficulty keeping her on target. She would just drift off onto Cloud 9 and I swear when she did she would give a sigh. I was teaching English and the class had to write a poem. You can guess what she wrote about. It went something like this:

When he looked at me
I was happy, so happy
I was happy in my happiness

I sang to him in my heart
I sang to him a song of love
A love song from my heart.

And then he touched me
His touched enchanted me
And I fell into nothingness.

I gave her an “A” although I was a little concerned with this nothingness. I also gave her a warning that she must be careful to express what she had only personally experienced. Looking over my glasses I said: “I assume you have never been drunk.” I will leave her answer to posterity.

But look at her poem, it bear a striking resemblance to Zephaniah 3:17. It is almost like God is a giddy little school girl experience her first love. Note my little student’s words “his touch enchanted me.” We can get away with that word enchant in a love poem for we know it means that her love for this young man had totally captivated her like he has put a spell on her, but she and the reader knows no such thing happened.

Let me ask you a question, what in the blazes does it mean God says He will rest in His love? This phrase is a very troubling one for translators. The Hebrew word that is render for rest is charash which in its root meaning is very troubling in the context of this verse. Yet, it makes perfect sense when put into a proper context. You see the word charash means to be enchanted or bewitched. Those are not words we like to associate with God. I mean in its literal sense the English word enchant and bewitched implies putting a spell on someone. We obvious do not put a spell on God. However, if we trace this word charash to its Semitic root it does not really imply a real spell but the idea of being so taken with an object or person that you become obsessed with them. In other words the word charash really means an obsession. So we could say: “He will rejoice over you with joy. He will be obsessed with His love for you, He will joy over you with singing.” I like to use the word enchanted: “He will be enchanted with His love for you.”

You see God just loves to be in love. Just like my little student, like you and like me and any other human being. We love to be in love. No matter what age we are. I heard on the radio today about a place called The Village in Florida, a retirement community. These are people in their so called Golden years. They have a practice that if you are available then on a certain day you wear a certain color. If you wear that color you will likely have some elderly gentleman or lady hit on you. No matter what age we humans love to be in love. Never forget we are created in the image of God and He is the granddaddy of romance who loves to be in love and when we return that love, he is charash, enchanted.

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