Hidden Treasures of Psalms 119: How Did We Get Here?- Zayin

Hidden Treasures of the 119th Psalm. Well, today's adventure in the 119th Psalm is a little different. I want to climb out of the mine a little bit and just look at, you know, how did we get here?

You know, we're over 60 episodes into this. It's just, you know, go back up to about 100,000 feet or whatever and take an overlook at where we've been, where we're going, and it's really a really neat place to stop and ponder some things, and so I wanted to do that, but I also thought it might be helpful to kind of see, how did we get here to begin with? And so, or how did I get here to begin with?

Maybe that's a better way to put it, so I thought I would just share the story with you. What actually has happened this year is, you might listen to us on The Masculine Journey, but it is my regular thing that I do every year starting in, you know, about November. I'll begin to ask the Lord what's my word for the next oncoming year, you know, a word that He wants to take me through, and I've done this for a number of years based on something that John Eldredge teaches. He's the author of Wild at Heart, and we do his boot camps and that kind of thing, so I just, I begin to ask him what word is for me for the year, and this year, the word that he gave me was engage, which I thought was a great word, but it's kind of hard as you go into the year always to know where he's going with that word, you know, am I supposed to engage in my job, engage in my marriage, engage in my faith, exactly what does this look like, and why does that work, but I've always loved the word itself to engage, and you might even remember, and I always think about the scene from the movie Top Gun where they're asking, you know, Maverick is not engaging. Well, you know, so much of my life, I simply have not engaged like I should, and so I was excited about this word as we went into it, and I certainly was interested in where God was going to take it. Well, where He took it early on in the year, because what I do is in my morning prayer, and I do get up really early, but a lot of mornings around four and other mornings around five, depending on what I've got going into my day, and I like to sit down and pray for a long time, and in that prayer, I like to ask God questions like where we're going for the year, or often, you know, just where are we going today, what, where would, what do you want us, where do you want me to study, and what, where are we headed, and for the first time ever, He's put me on things this year, since my word was engage, that would be longer projects. So it started out, instead of a daily thing, it started out with, well, I want you to memorize the 16th Psalm. I mean, I clearly felt Him telling me, He wanted me to memorize the 16th Psalm, which you may recall, that's the Psalm, you know, we're in His presence, His fullness of joy, which is the end of that Psalm, and I was really wondering how He got there, and that was a tremendous adventure. I really, really enjoyed it, and I have been doing that actually all year long, just reciting that Psalm every morning, and then, after I got done with that, I was like, okay, Lord, where are we going today, and He said, well, I want you to memorize the 13th Psalm, and so my immediate response in my head, and this just shows you, God has this fabulous sense of humor, was, oh man, I hope the 13th Psalm isn't a long one. Well, when I got to the 13th Psalm, the very first words of the 13th Psalm, in God's sense of humor, was, how long, Lord?

I love it. How long will you forget us? Forever?

You know, how long will you hide your face from us? How long will you, how long will we seek counsel in our own souls, having sorrows in our hearts daily? I mean, that was the way that Psalm started, and I just love it, and actually, another Psalm that I get to, you know, but that was where I was going right then. Of course, you could imagine my laughter when I got done with the 13th Psalm, and He really wanted me to engage, because now He said, okay, now we're going to memorize the 119th Psalm, so now you know how we got here, and clearly, I had no idea that when it comes to spiritual warfare, to memorize the 119th Psalm as we were going into the 13th Psalm, I was just like, it's just been a blessing, and no, I haven't memorized the whole thing.

I'm about 20 verses ahead of where we are. I think I'm at verse 66 right this minute, but anyway, as I have been going through that, obviously, you know, as we talked about it, at the very beginning, I noticed that there was this matrix, this sense of eight verses on each letter, and I already had studied, studied over the last three years, I have studied over the last three years, I have studied and studied the Hebrew alphabet, and so I had a lot of understanding about the aleph and the bet and all those things, and so it was just really, really neat for me to see, now here is the psalmist, here's the Holy Spirit giving me insight into these letters that I had been studying for a long time, and so it very much fit into understanding the Word of God, and it very much fit into what I thought was, you know, just a really cool place to engage the Word of God, especially if you're memorizing it. So as we went and got these matrix, you know, I studied, studied, studied to find what, you know, the Jewish sages taught about why there are eight verses, and then the more I've been doing this, the more I realized that, wow, if you set Isaiah 11, which is, you know, there's a rod that's going to come out of Jesse, and I highly recommend that you look at that, and lay it over and say, okay, here's the seven anointings of Christ, and it's just a beautiful, beautiful passage, actually, of kind of the end of the age Isaiah 11 is. So, but it's nonetheless, these seven anointings of the Holy Spirit, which also line up with the seven spirits of God that are in Revelation, you know, in the menorah that's up there, these flames, and you know, that are clearly the seven spirits of God, but then my boss, Stu Eberston, he's also a very, very good friend, and we were friends long before he became my boss, he's the owner of the Truth Network, he wrote a book called The First Words of Jesus, and then he wrote a book called The Last Words of Jesus, and Last Words of Jesus from the cross, there are seven of them. And he mentions, he saw it first, there was a pattern between, you know, the word, you know, into your hands, I commit my spirit, or, you know, I'm going to rest, and so the idea being, and then in the seventh day, God rested, and here you see this rest, which is a delight in the fear of the Lord, if you're looking at the seven spirits in Isaiah 11. And so I started to put together that, wow, this seven thing is connected not only to the days of the week, but the seven spirits of God, and also these seven last words of Jesus, which intrigues which intrigued me, because now we have this number eight. And so as I've been, actually, it's really helpful to me as I've memorized this psalm to know, okay, as I'm going through, I'm trying to think about what's the sixth verse and this letter, you know, and I also know, well, it's got to be about the fear of the Lord, you know, so those things are helpful to me as I'm memorizing it, because as I'm trying to think through what's the next verse, it's almost like a decoder ring for me.

And again, this is just, you know, I hope you're spitting out the bones, I don't necessarily know for sure what I'm talking about, and my wife would tell you that, but these are the things I see clearly. But it's still left this question, and everybody's got this question of why there's eight, we know there's why there's seven, okay, we can see that there's seven days a week, but then there's the eighth. And as you study that, we've talked about it, that it was on the eighth day that, you know, a Jewish boy would be circumcised, that would be the, you know, the covenant. And it was certainly, you know, on the eighth day that the temple was cleansed and very, very cool to me is on the eighth day is when after Jesus came in on the triumphal entry is when he rose from the dead. And so as I was just been praying, praying, praying, because I'm trying to understand this eighth verse in each of the sections of every letter, there's an eighth verse, obviously, there's, there's the other seven, and I see an overall pattern. But when it came to this eighth one, it was just a challenge because the Jews teach that, you know, you work as hard as you can for seven days, and on the eighth day, God takes you over the finish line.

I like that. And then also, I like that, you know, these seven things seem to be building towards the fruit of the eighth thing, but there was still something I seem to be missing. And so this morning, as I was praying about that, I thought, I wonder what, if there were seven last words of Jesus from the cross, what was the eighth word? In other words, what was the first thing he said after he came out, out of the tomb? And so I don't know if you've ever thought about that one.

But all of a sudden, it just seemed to unlock just something beautiful for me. Again, I feel like I've got muddy shoes walking around in something that is very, very holy. But think about these first words of Jesus as he came out of the tomb, which were, woman, why are you crying? And who are you looking for?

Okay. Well, when you think about the first eighth verse, which comes with the aleph, you might remember, it, you know, it says, I will keep your statutes, oh, forsake me, not utterly. You see this sense of sadness at the same time, this sense of gladness. And I thought, well, how cool is that? And I started to go through the Psalm this morning, I did, I looked at the eighth verse of every one of them with this whole idea of woman, you know, who are you looking for?

And why are you crying? And so if you look at the 136th verse, which is the last verse in the pay section, I mean, wow, it says rivers of water run down my eyes, because they keep not thy law. And I went, and as I looked at all these different verses, I could see the sense of like, oh, it's unbelievable, but there's still something missing.

Well, what's missing? Just like the 13th Psalm, is he still hiding his face from us? In other words, we're not there yet. I mean, we're on the eighth day, so to speak. But still, you know, we're still, to some extent, we're still weeping. And I think the psalmist was still there, even though that you have this rejoicing as you get through this letter and all the anointings of the Spirit for that particular thing. But you know, then here you go. Now, something that I have thought for years, and I know this episode is going long, but you know, it's okay, I guess, is that, you know, as the bride, I always struggled with the second Psalm, you know, kiss the son, lest he be angry.

Well, how do you do that if you're a man? So this whole concept of the bride of Christ comes in here. And it's so important that we talk about this as we're heading into the Zion, okay? Because if in the Hebrew alphabet, we have just finished the vav section, which is a male energy that is coming down. Well, a Zion, the next letter we're fixing to study is a female energy going back up that reflects, essentially, the male energy that came down.

In other words, that's the the job of the church is to reflect Christ, right? And so you got this female energy going down, and you got a male energy coming up with a letter after Zion is het, okay? And the way you make a het is you put a vav on the right, and a Zion on the left, and a het of terek across the top, and you get the word life, okay? It's really, and marriage, like when they get married under a hupa, it's because of this het, because life is, it's a beautiful, beautiful picture to me of like, oh my goodness, when we marry Christ, then you have a marriage, right? You get the het, you get life, you get born again, which we're going to get to all that after we finish the Zion.

But I want to go into the Zion without you realizing that, oh yeah, this is the church, and it's going to have everything to do with, remember, we're going to talk a lot about that coming into the Zion section. But then I want you to just ponder a couple other things with me as we think about how we're the bride of Christ. You know, something I spotted years ago, I've never heard anybody else say it, but I just think it's absolutely true, that just as the Song of Solomon is the bride of Christ chasing after the bridegroom, or the bridegroom chasing after her, however you look at that, you know, she starts out seeking him, you know, follow the tracks of the sheep kind of thing, but then, you know, in so many different ways, you know, he's chasing her in the second chapter where he's peering through the lattice, and he's jumping over mountains. And so it's a beautiful thing that as the bride of Christ, we look at the whole Song of Solomon. Well, just back up a couple chapters to Proverbs, and think about Proverbs 31 from a standpoint of a Proverbs 31 woman is the church. In other words, I love Proverbs 31 as far as women are concerned, but when you look at the real situation that possibly the Psalmist, I mean, that Solomon was speaking to is, oh my goodness, Proverbs 31 is what the church is supposed to be for Christ, okay?

I know. For those of us who are guys, and I host a masculine journey, so I get it, I don't want anybody pulling my man card, but nonetheless, as the bride of Christ, woman, why are you crying, okay? Who are you seeking? What a great place to be all day long, right? Because it just, that's how we're gonna get what it is that we're looking for in the next letter is if we just keep seeking Him with our whole hearts, realizing that we don't get to see His face yet. Yeah, we get to see it, but not like through a mirror dimly, however that works out in your life. But the beauty of this thing to me is it's just absolutely gorgeous as we come in for a landing on each of these letters.

I know that, for me, it's personally just a really neat place to be, like God's saying to me, and He said it to me really clearly when I saw it this morning, woman, why are you crying, right? Who are you looking for? Who are you looking for? Thanks for listening today. I know we're about twice as long, but I really appreciate your time, and God bless you.