Bible Wonders - The Relationship of Family to Banquet

Did you ever wonder? Did you ever wonder?

I do. Did you ever wonder? Why the sun always rises, but the stars never fall?

Why dry land is never satisfied by water? And why fire never says enough? Today on Bible Wonders, I'm wondering if you would wonder with me about the concept of family and banquet. They kind of go together. I looked at the word family this morning. It was just kind of the word that God gave me to look at this morning as I was thinking about a shared vision.

I was amazed as I studied it to see the relationship between family and banquet. And so, when you look at the word family in Hebrew, the first letter is a mem, which we've talked about many times, kind of has to do with water, but it certainly is equivalent with Jesus. And it's very much the idea of a king, because the word kingdom starts with two m's like that. And the word Messiah obviously begins with an m or a mem, or the word king, which itself starts with an m, malek. And so, when you see a mem at the beginning of a word, you realize this is sort of a royal word, okay?

It would make sense that family would be along those lines. The second letter is a shin, which usually means to chew on something, okay, or to oxidize it. And the third letter is a pe, which means essentially a mouth or presence, which kind of goes really well with chewing.

And then there's a het, which means life, and a he, which we've talked about at length, which means to express something or to say hey. Now, when you look at that word and then you look at the word banquet, they're very, very, very similar. The word banquet is a mem and a shin, starts out exactly the same way, so you have this sort of royal eating thing going on. And then you have the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, which is a tav, which really means truth.

And it also is sort of God's signature on something, because it's the end of the alphabet and it's the end of the story. And the last letter in the word feast is also a he, so this is an expression, again, of this godly feast of people chewing together, in this case, on the truth. So isn't it fascinating when you think about the family mealtimes? You know, I was blessed to have a father that definitely believed strongly in that, and we all came to dinner, and that was all what was supposed to happen as we sat around the dinner table. You know, there was a lot of truth, and it quite often was a banquet. You know, when I was raising my own children, we got to do that quite often, and those times are absolutely wonderful.

And sometimes they were in restaurants. You know, it was an amazing thing to sit down with my family and have a meal, and it's something I dearly love to do these days when I get a chance to sit down with all of my grandkids, all my kids. It is a feast. And you can feel the royalty of it, and so I'm not terribly surprised that that mem is at the front of the word. I love the fact that the truth is in that word. And I don't know if you'd ever—and one of the things that I think sometimes we had a chance as a family to talk about the Word of God. I used to drive my kids to school, and we would talk through the Bible every morning on the way to school, and I think about the banquet that is there when we have a chance as families to chew on the Word of God together as an expression of what family or banqueting really is. Something to wonder about today on Bible Wonders.