Psalms 119:56 - What's A Precept?

Hidden Treasures of the 119th Song. Verse 56 today.

How fun is this? And once again, we get to the eighth verse. And this, again, in the Zion section. And, you know, this whole concept of eight, we've talked about it every time we come onto this verse in each particular section. And we've talked about the Zion being the idea of being mindful, this sword that's coming. And so this idea of what does that look like on the eighth verse, since the eight is always connected to infinite, and then continuing on, very importantly, well, this, I think you're going to love this 56th verse, it says, This I had, because I kept thy precepts. And you might remember the verse we did yesterday, or the 55th verse was, I have remembered thy name, O Lord, in the night, and have kept thy law. And so you're getting sort of a combination punch here, like, Oh, well, they were able to keep the law, because they kept the precepts. And they also got to remember thy name at night, because they kept the precepts. And so it leads us back to this, you know, we did the PDF on, you know, what are these 10 repeating words, and the word precepts, again, is front and center in this particular study.

And, you know, this person had this. And again, it's interesting to me that the word this starts with this Zion. And really, you know, this I had is almost like the way that it's spelled in the word had in Hebrew, is once again, getting very close to the idea of the car, in other words, this mindful sword that is coming through my mind so that I still had this stuff, mindfully. And since it's on the eighth verse, you can think of this from an infinite standpoint, because he kept these precepts, which is pakutim. In Hebrew, we've talked about this word several times, it's a intriguing, intriguing, intriguing word to me, because you can hear lots of definitions on what the precepts mean. But as the Hebrews define it, you know, these are overarching concepts that attach to your heart, like grace, or, you know, or, or, you know, the love of God, those kind of things where, you know, hero Israel, the Lord, oh God is one, you know, and love the heart, the Lord, your heart and soul with all your might that were meowed is connected to this.

So, you know, you've got that. And then you've got the root of the word precepts. Well, I should say before I say that, that the word precept doesn't show up in Deuteronomy, it doesn't show up in Numbers or Genesis or Exodus. So the first time you see this chronologically is in the Psalms, right? King David uses it before anybody else uses it. Nehemiah uses it later. But chronologically, even though Nehemiah comes before Psalms, you know, that was after the exile. So here comes this word, it shows up.

And, and again, wouldn't it be nice to know specifically what, you know, these pakutim are. So one of the hints that I think is beautiful to the word is the root of the word means to visit, or to muster. So we got King David here. And, and him being the military man he was, and, and to some extent, you know, this is a visit, this is a mustering with the commandments.

All right. And so one thing I can be certain of about a pakutim is it's something that David did regularly. When you look at the letters in pakutim, I find it just, you know, one of the things that is just my hobby, I guess I just love to look at the Hebrew and think about what it is that he's saying, because pakutim starts with that puh-puh sound, which is a pay, which is literally like the mouth of God.

Like the face of God. So, you know, when you're in his presence, you can hear that puh-puh sound in presence. And so when you pray, it's again, this P that has to do with the mouth of God.

And, and when they were in his presence in the garden, again, that starts with the letter pay. And there's no accident there that we get this sense of the presence of God and certainly of his mouth, that that would begin the word pakutim. The second letter is this kuf, which is the letter that begins the word holy.

Okay. So you got a holy presence. Clearly this is something big and it is something holy. And, and that kuf also kind of indicates that the king is coming down because the kuf goes lower below the line than any other letter.

And so it's a sense of coming after the glory of God, you know, coming down in order to do that. And then it's got a vuv, meaning continual, and then a dalit. And of course we've studied the whole dalit and the idea of servitude and the idea of, um, of humility. Right. And so the M on the end of pakutim, after the dalit, that's the suffix and it just means plural. So we got plural pakut, and that pakut word is clearly, I mean, at the root of the word is to visit or to muster. So I say all that to say, I don't know in my heart of hearts yet exactly what the pakutim are. Okay. And, and I would challenge anybody to tell me, okay, this now just show me all the pakutim right here.

You know, what do they look like? And so you're left to, you know, one of the neat things of the Bible is that sometimes there's things that we just get to meditate on. And so pakutim is mentioned several times is that, you know, I meditated on thy pakutim. I meditated on thy precepts.

And so there's no doubt that, that King David did a lot of that and he mustered that and that this is a critical thing that he, um, got to enjoy on the eighth verse as I'm enjoying it. Right. And so, as I talked about yesterday, you know, how cool is it to be so mindful of God that we get to remember him in our dreams that we get to remember through this idea of the Zion.

Right. And, and, and so as we take this Zion after the vuv, we're going to move on to the word that they actually, the letter, which also is a word, you see the end of the vuv, you beget the Zion. And when you put a vuv and a Zion together, put a hetateric across the top, you get the next letter, which is a het, which means life. But also it's a sense of a female energy going down in the vuv, a male energy going, excuse me, it's a male energy coming down in the vuv and a female energy going up in the Zion with a hetateric across the top. And so is this female energy is like, we reflect God.

Okay. When we think of him, when we remember, like we did throughout the whole Zion section, like we get to be, we get to glorify God. And the way we do that is by reflecting, you know, what it was he put in us right now, our glory is, is, is, as it says, actually in the 16th Psalm where it says our glory rejoices. Well, that's a good part of what the Zion is, is when we actually are completely mindful and we're using the gifts God gives us, we reflect God back to him and this marriage begets life, which is where we're going to het in the very next section. So as we come in here to the eighth part of it, we can see the significance of what King David is saying in his law. That is, we get closer to God through study, study, study of the law of the Torah, you know, of, of the whole Bible, clearly New Testament, Old Testament, all that stuff. The more we get to know God, the closer we become with him, the more mindful that we become with him, the more that we will reflect him with the glory that he gave us, which will end up in a marriage and marriages bear fruit and fruit that is eternal. And so, as you think about this, I'll just leave you all with that. And of course, I would love to talk to anybody anytime in the show notes, my email will be in there as well as again, a link to the 10 words that are repeated often and what they look like in Hebrew. And once again, thank you for listening.