Hidden Treasures of Psalms 119 - Different Words for Commandments/Mistvah

Hidden Treasures of the 119th Psalm.

So, we are going on a treasure hunt, and the gold we are seeking in this treasure hunt is actually the face of God, pure light. And how fun to actually mine this treasure with King David, a man who sought God with his whole heart and his understanding of God's expression of the Hebrew language itself as he goes through the 119th Psalm, letter by letter, giving us eight verses, which the Jews teach as eight faces of each letter of expression. So, join us taking this deep dive mining with King David in the 119th Psalm.

Once again, I'm so honored, I really am, that you would join me on this archaeological dig, as we're still in the introduction to the 119th Psalm. We'll dig in soon, but I want to go through these 10 words, and I'm going to create a PDF so that you'll have that PDF to look at these words and their descriptions, because they repeat throughout the 119th Psalm. And again, this is part of our roadmap as we begin to discern what's in there, but I think you'll find this interesting, a very interesting episode, because these words are so helpful in understanding, I think, not only the Torah or the books of the Bible, but also in understanding the Jewish culture and kind of what Jesus, you know, what he came into and really some of the things that we can still look at today. So, the first word of the 10 that I want to talk about is called mitzvah, and you might have heard that, you know, the Jews have 613 mitzvah or commandments that they feel like.

I love that what they translate that as good deeds. And so, when you see the word commandment usually translated, like in the King James Version, this is the word mitzvah. And if you were to look at the word in Hebrew, it's a mem and a zaddy and a vav and a hei. And what that means to me is clearly it has reference to the Messiah, because the mem is, you know, m-m-Messiah.

That also has to do with water. And then the next letter is the letter that means righteousness, and it has to do with like a tree being on a right angle. And as you know, the Messiah got on a tree and he is going to make things right.

He came down from heaven, which is what the vav is, and this is an expression of doing what's right. I mean, if we just did what was right, we would be doing the commandments, again, along the ideas of what the Torah says the commandments are. So, that's the word mitzvah. And under the idea of mitzvah, they have subcategories of these commandments. And so, we're going to talk about those, which are words, again, that are repeated throughout, that you're going to find the word judgment. If you look at the King James Version, the word judgment shows up time and time again.

And the way that the Jews would pronounce that is perhaps mis-pat. And that's because it is similar to a mitzvah, but it has a mem and then a shen and a pe, meaning sort of the presence of God, and then a tav, which is like the goodness of God. So, it's interesting that these judgments, the way that the Jews relate to them in their culture, are these are the mitzvahs, these are the commandments that are easy to understand that govern society, like, thou shall not murder.

I mean, that shouldn't be too hard. But so, this is sort of the low-hanging fruit of the mitzvah, so to speak, the ones that most people can understand and most people see, yeah, that would be something that God would want to have happen. And so, when you see that word judgments, or mis-pat, those are the, again, the easier ones to understand and the ones that most people would be able to do it. The next type of mitzvah that is used and is always, well, I shouldn't say always, but in each case that you see it in the King James Version, it says statutes, okay?

So, when you see that word statutes, this is really beautiful to me because these are what the Jews would call the super rational mitzvah. In other words, these are the ones that you really can't understand. They're so kind of like, if you're in sports enthusiastic, this is the high fast one.

This is a high hard ball. I mean, this thing is coming high and is hard to understand. And so, when you look at these type of statutes, here God is asking us to do something that we really don't understand why we should do it.

And those are a little bit harder to follow. And you're going to see that these high hard ones are the ones that the psalmist will go after time and time again. And again, that word translated is statutes. So, when you see that idea of statutes, you know, time and again, those are the really, really hard, the ones to understand mitzvah, the commandments.

Now, the letters for this commandment are this word statutes. In Hebrew, I suppose it's pronounced Hazak, but the idea is that the first letter is a het, which means life very much. And it's a really beautiful letter that means, when you look at it, you break it down of the yuds and voves that's down inside of it, and actually a Zion. It's a male energy coming down and a female energy reflecting back what the male energy gave it. And then there's sort of a hoop across the top, sort of a hetateric is what they call that, that has to do with a wedding canopy.

So this thing, when you put these together, you get life. The next letter is a kuf. And that letter often means something that is hidden. And clearly when it comes to these particular type of commandments, that word hidden is key to the point because the meaning of this particular life-giving commandment is hidden. And so I think it's an absolutely beautiful thing when you look at this particular word in Hebrew and see that, wow, there's sometimes God's wanting us to do stuff and we don't understand why. So this is a pretty good place to stop for today before we get into some of the other words. So those words kind of summarize the whole idea of commandments. Of course, we got some other words that we're going to go through throughout the introduction. But again, just some neat things to think about as we begin to dig into the 23rd Psalm. What was the psalmist referring to when he used these words judgments or the word statutes or the word commandments? There will be a link to a PDF that has all 10 words on it in their description so that we'll be able to use these throughout the upcoming episodes in this dig on the 119 Psalm. Thanks for listening.