Ps 63:1b My soul thirsts (tsâmê) for You; My flesh longs (kâmah) for You; In a dry and weary land Where there is no water. Part 1: The paradox of thirst and the Brave New World of controlled impulse
Introduction
Why is it that God is so demanding and austere in requiring the human person to love Him?
To this rather necessary question, the Evangelist John provides the following answer: Because, he says, God is Love.
As love, therefore, God wants us to love Him, so that in loving Him, we may experience His own love for us.
For love is from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love (I John 4:7-8).
-Nektarios of Aegina (1846-1920), The Privilege of Knowing and Worshiping God
Why are we to love God?
…that in loving Him, we may experience His own love for us.
As we love God, entering into the eternal Reality of Love through the “bond of Love” Who is the Holy Spirit, we, in the language of the Scriptures, become those who are truly
born of God and know God.
That is to say, the call to love give us not mere words “about” love. It is, rather, our entrance into and experience of a Love that will transform us, as the Word operates within the depths of our being through the Holy Spirit (ὁ Παράκλητος [Paráklētos]).
As such, when we love God we experience something that no other person in This Age can give us:
Perfect understanding…that enables us to understand another;
Depths of mercy that makes us truly merciful';
Absolute forgiveness “as far as the East is from the West” that helps us let go of faults done to us;
Abiding presence through every trial, uncertainty, chaos we endure that gives us the capacity to remain present with another in their suffering.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort (paráklēsis—Remember, as above, the Holy Spirit is called the Paraclete (John 16:7): The One Who is literally ‘called’ [kaléō] to stand ‘close-beside’ us [pará]),
Who comforts us (parakaléō) in all our tribulation (thlîpsis), that we may be able to comfort (parakaléō) those who are in any affliction (thlîpsis), with the comfort (paráklēsis) with which we ourselves are comforted (parakaléō) by God.
For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation (paráklēsis) also abounds through Christ.
Now if we are afflicted (thlibó), it is for your consolation (paráklēsis) and salvation, which is effective for enduring (hupomonḗ, the word study of which is here) the same sufferings which we also suffer.
Or if we are comforted (parakaléō), it is for your consolation (paráklēsis) and salvation.
And our hope for you is steadfast, because we know that as you are partakers (koinōnós) of the sufferings, so also you will partake of the consolation (paráklēsis).
In short, our experience of the Love of God in Christ Jesus enables us to truly love another, enduring with them in the sufferings of the wilderness of this life. Dimensions of this, it seems, are what is being expressed in this opening line of the Psalm:
O God, You are my God;
Early will I seek You
My soul thirsts (tsâmê) for You;
My flesh longs (kâmah) for You;
In a dry and weary land
Where there is no water.
Love.
Word and Spirit (Paraclete).
New birth.
Review of Ps 63
In the opening three writings on Psalm 63, we began with a word on what T.F. Torrance spoke of us “kataphysic inquiry” with the “epistemological inversion” required in any study of the Living Word. In approaching God’s Word, we must learn (for it is not natural) to come to God on the terms He has given Himself to be revealed.
When we do this, we come to the divinely-inspired, literally, “God-breathed” (theopneustos [From theos—‘God’ + pneustos—‘breathed’]) Scriptures (II Tim 3:16), and these point us, draw us into the presence of, more deeply reveal and make real to us, the One who is the Word made flesh. Applying this mode of inquiry in our word studies, we, in Torrance’s words, must then seek to allow the “nature of the content” to “condition not only the form but the method of instruction.” If we are approaching the Eternal God, He is the only One Who can truly reveal Himself to us in a way suited to our finite, fallen humanity.
With this as our method of inquiry, we then looked in the next post at the superscription, “A Psalm of David when he was in the wilderness of Judah,” focusing on the concept of the Hebrew word, Miḏbār. This study took us from the desert of warring, pagan tribes to the affliction (anah) of Hagar in the wilderness through which she meets the “God-Who-sees.” From here we were led to the redemptive suffering of the patriarch Joseph who by his very own family was “cast into a pit in the wilderness” then into slavery and a “dungeon” in Egypt.
Yet precisely there in such darkness, we found that Joseph, a prefiguration of Christ, learns the statutes of JHWH; and bearing the yoke of the Messiah, he is not only brought out of bondage himself, but moreover, becomes the very person through whom his people would be delivered.
The actual ex-periences of the flesh-and-blood realities of affliction “in the wilderness” with the 400 years of exile and bondage that follow reveal to God’s people in a way that nothing else can the unconditional mercies of the covenantal love of JHWH that will prepare them to receive the Messianic King Who will come to them as the Suffering Servant.
Again, they are experienced before they are articulated.
And the experience forms in their collective consciousness an archetype of salvation through the Passover Lamb, opening them to the life through and in
Christ our Passover Who is sacrificed for us.
As David before us together with the children of Israel, God’s people themselves are still in a certain sense “in the wilderness” of This Fallen Age. Yet precisely here the Lord makes Himself known to us, giving us the “spiritual food” (pneumatikós brōma) and “spiritual drink” (pneumatikós πόμα) we most truly need (I Cor 10:3-4).
For this reason, we say with David,
O God (ĕlôhîym) You are my God (êl)
Early will I seek (shakhar) You.
From the next writing we found that this opening verse conveys the following meaning:
O God of all creation (ĕlôhîym),
Who is my personal God, the ram of my strength (êl),
Who has given Himself as an atoning sacrifice for me,
At the break of day at the dawning of the light (shakhar) will I seek You.
Remembering the ram sacrificed in the first Covenantal ceremony with Abraham wherein God eternally pledges Himself to His people (Gen 15:9) then the “ram (êl) caught in a thicket by its horns” on Mount Moriah which is sacrificed in the place of Isaac (Gen 22), we encountered JHWH Yireh. And we, with David, seek (shakhar), this God Who Provides (êl—JHHW Yireh) at the break of day at the dawning of the light.
We now move into the concluding lines of this verse, where David declares:
My soul thirsts (tsâmê) for You;
My flesh longs (kâmah) for You;
In a dry and weary/parched (ayeph) land
Where there is no water.
The outline: A question and a paradoxical response
The question for us is in this opening section is,
For what does the Psalmist truly thirst?
And the response, which will take us in this first writing through the opening usage in the Pentateuch through the three appearances in the Histories and the only instance in Job, demonstrates a paradox:
If we thirst for that which can be immediately satisfied by This Fallen Age, our thirst will only intensify. And the more we then drink of its waters, the greater, the deeper, the more overwhelming our thirst becomes.
If, however, we thirst for that which cannot be satisfied by This Age but only in JHWH—Who is The I AM—not the passing ‘now’—then our thirst will not only be continually satisfied, as in the words of Jesus,
Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst.
But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life (John 4:13-14);
But, moreover, in the process of Christ fulfilling our deepest needs with the water and bread of life (ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ἄρτος τῆς ζωῆς), He will begin transforming the depths of our desires so that we begin thirsting for that which can only be satisfied by JHWH Himself.
That is to say, He changes the structures of our very desires, drawing us to seek after, yearn, thirst for only that which can truly fulfill our souls.
A review of the verb, ‘to thirst’
This word, tsâmê (צָמֵא), simply means ‘to thirst.’
It is used ten times in the OT:
1x in the Pentateuch
3x in the Histories
3x in the Wisdom Literature: 1x in Job; 2x in the Psalms
3x in Isaiah
And what we will find from these uses is a development from the physical thirst of the body to the spiritual thirst of the soul with Job and the Psalms as a key transition point.
What does it mean that our soul thirsts (tsâmê) for God?
A not-so-good starting point in the Pentateuch at the waters of Meribah…
The opening occurrence comes “in the wilderness” immediately after the Exodus. Exhausted, having just escaped death, the people
thirsted (tsâmê) there for water (Ex 17:2).
Yet, as is often the case with us, the physical desire, when it is not immediately satisfied, leads us to take more extreme action. Yet our actions, we come to find (…only later, unfortunately….) do not actually result in the fulfillment of our desires, but rather intensify their grip over us, making us highly vulnerable to the control of temptations.
In the life of Israel, we should ask whether the desire for food, water, clothing, etc. was their primary desire (and, for that matter, ours too)? Was it for this and this alone that they sought, struggled, became outraged over…to the degree that they were ready even to stone Moses (Ex 17:4)? For we know from the historical record of the wilderness wanderings that the Lord systematically provided for all of these things:
For the Lord your God has blessed you in all the work of your hand. He knows your trudging through this great wilderness.
These forty years the Lord your God has been with you—you have lacked nothing (Deut 2:7).
And later,
And I have led you forty years in the wilderness. Your clothes have not worn out on you, and your sandals have not worn out on your feet (Deut 29:5).
That is to say, everything they needed the Lord provided. Why, then, were they so enraged so many times throughout these wanderings?
So all the congregation lifted up their voices and cried, and the people wept that night. And all the children of Israel murmured against Moses and Aaron, and the whole congregation said to them,
“If only we had died in the land of Egypt! Or if only we had died in this wilderness!
Why has the Lord brought us to this land to fall by the sword, that our wives and children should become victims?
Would it not be better for us to return to Egypt?”
So they said to one another,
“Let us select a leader and return to Egypt” (Num 14:1-4).
This passage marked the tenth time that Israel had put JHWH to the test (14:22) even before the decades of wilderness wanderings had begun.
Was it simply a desire for food and water that drove them to take such actions as threatening stoning, rebellion and mutiny?
We know it was not.
Yet it did reveal a deeper level to their desire. For as Christ Himself declares to us,
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Mt 6:21).
The hunger and thirst in the wilderness, the testing and the heart…where Huxley’s Brave New World begins…
A divine word given to the Israelites provides critical insight. Moses speaks to them when they have, at long last, passed through the wilderness and are on the verge of entering the Promised Land. He declares,
And you shall remember that the Lord your God led you all the way these forty years in the wilderness (Deut 8:2a)
Why exactly?
Three reasons, Moses contends:
to humble you (anah);
and test you (nasah, the word study of which is here), and most critically,
to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not.
So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know (8:2b-3)
And why did He fulfill their hunger with manna?
that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord (Deut 8:2-4).
As will be explored in a follow-up writing, Spirituality and Health: A modern opium in a Brave New World revisited, Huxley offers quite unbelievable levels of insight into the dynamics of desire from, we might add, a purely pagan perspective. To attempt a summary here, we quote the words of the “World Controller” who is responsible for the engineered utopia of the novel:
“Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation…”
Control that “interval of time” and, in short, you can create a Brave New World where an entire people can be placed under the control of their impulses. As soon as the impulse rises in a person, immediately satisfy it. That is the individual level. If, then, you can engineer a world where every impulse of the populous can be controlled to an immediate satisfaction, then such a people can be placed under your control.
Impulse—satisfaction. Impulse—satisfaction. Rinse. Repeat.
“…after the Nine Years’ War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We’ve gone on controlling ever since.”
Yet—and this is the key—if that “feeling” is allowed to continue unsatisfied, something very different starts happening.
The populous begins seeking things beyond their controlling impulses, beyond that which can easily be provided by any sort of external body. In the novel, this is when the people begin seeking for the “meaning” of “truth and beauty” that is found in great works of literature (the “Savage” is well known to quote Shakespeare…). Later, however, if this feeling is not halted, the people will begin seeking none other than God Himself.
In the words of the World Controller,
“Whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably;
For now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false—a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth.
Yes, we inevitably turn to God.”
From the Brave New World of controlled desire to a thirsty (tsâmê) people in the wilderness
What is the Brave New World that the Israelites are seeking to create in their rebellions in the wilderness? Is it one in which their appetites can immediately be satisfied? And if so, how do they go about ensuring that such a society can actually be constructed?
In faith and obedience through the Gospel?
Or in self-will and the “feeling” of bitterness that results when their appetites remain unsatisfied and their collective will questioned?
They respond with murmuring against the God-ordained authority structure; and this is where we find the first occurrence of tsâmê in the OT:
But the people thirsted (tsâmê) there for water and the people murmured against Moses, and said,
“Why is it you have brought us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst (tsama)?” (17:3)
And the Lord said to Moses,
“Go on before the people, and take with you some of the elders of Israel. Also take in your hand your rod with which you struck the river, and go.
Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock in Horeb; and you shall strike the rock, and water will come out of it, that the people may drink” (17:4-6)
This incident of the people testing God at “Massah and Meribah” (17:7) is quite extraordinary.
They believed God was actually seeking to kill them by thirst (or so they say). Yet, as we well know, JHWH Yireh, having just delivered them not only from bondage, but moreover, from the waters of judgment themselves, is now providing for their every need…both of the body and of their soul…and that, in spite of their testing and striving against Him (the root meanings of the Hebrew words, “Massah and Meribah” ).
At the end of the wilderness exile, this same event occurs for a second time. i.e. Pay attention to what is happening here. Decades later, the children of Israel are again in the desert. And again they are striving against God for water.
Now there was no water for the community, and so they gathered themselves together against Moses and Aaron. The people contended with Moses, saying,
“If only we had died when our brothers died before the Lord! (Num 20:2-3)
Again they are thirsty. Again they murmur. Again they beg for their own death.
And, of course, again they place that blame squarely upon none other than God Himself with question after question in quick sucession:
Why have You brought up the Lord’s community into this wilderness?
So that we and our cattle should die here?
Why have You brought us up from Egypt only to bring us to this dreadful place?
It is no place for grain, or figs, or vines, or pomegranates; nor is there any water to drink!” (20:4-5)
The result is Moses’ embittered action against the Israelites and God’s judgment upon Moses and Aaron:
Because you did not trust me enough to show me as holy before the Israelites, therefore you will not bring this community into the land I have given them (20:12).
There is much debate about the particulars of this passage. For our purposes, we will simply state that the New World developed out of anger and bitterness and accusation cuts the people and their leaders off from the presence of JWHW and leads…if not repented of…to their (and our) own death.
An aside on one of our research projects
As an aside, these elements are present in the development of a new measure with our Research Advisory Board on what we are terming, “Transformative Suffering”. Though this is still in process and yet to be validated, the question at the heart of it is,
What is a person’s mindset when entering into suffering?
And How will that mindset affect their experience of suffering?
That is to say, if we believe that our hardships, sufferings and trials are “terrible” and “nothing good can come from them”, will that mindset “transform” us downward, so to speak, into a state of anger, bitterness, resentment?
Or, conversely, if we say, for example, “I did not choose this, but God can work in and through it for my own good…”, will that much different state of mind work to transform our experience of suffering upwards into a place of acceptance, peace, even joy (as has been expressed to us by many, many patients when coming through trials)?
Good questions, we believe.
And we will let the research bear witness to the outcomes.
From Sisera to Samson to Ruth: From the thirst of a dying man unfulfilled to a prayer answered to the Covenant renewed through a kinsman-redeemer (ga’al)…and a Moabite
From the rebellion at Meribah, the next two instances of tsâmê (which will be reviewed in much less depth) speak of physical thirst for one on the verge of death. And this thirst is satisfied…but not in the way one desires…
When Sisera, the General of the invading Canaanite army, is fleeing for his life after his defeat at the hands of Barak and Deborah (“Sisera’s whole army died by the edge of the sword; not even one survived!”, Jug 4:16), he meets a Kenite woman, Jael, and begs her for water:
“Give me a little water to drink because I’m thirsty (tsâmê)” (4:19a)
She does not.
But gives him milk…then drives a “tent peg…through his temple” while he was “asleep from exhaustion” (4:19b-22)
The next occurrence comes not in the life (and death) of a pagan General, but in the struggles of an Israelite judge. Samson, after striking down a thousand men “with the jawbone of a donkey” (Jug 15:12-15),
was very thirsty (mə-’ōḏ tsâmê), so he cried out to the Lord and said,
“You have given your servant this great victory. But now must I die of thirst and fall into the hands of these uncircumcised Philistines?” (15:18)
God hears him and
split open the basin at Lehi, and water flowed out from it.
such that
When he took a drink, his strength was restored and he revived (15:19).
JHWH, in short, provides for his people (regardless of their imperfections).
Finally, tsâmê occurs in the narrative of Ruth once she returns with Naomi to Israel after the famine had come to an end. There, she is connected to Naomi’s kinsman redeemer, Boaz, who invites her to collect the grain in his wheat fields during the harvest.
So Boaz said to Ruth,
“Listen carefully, my dear!
Do not leave to gather grain in another field. You need not go beyond the limits of this field. You may go along beside my female workers. Take note of the field where the men are harvesting and follow behind with the female workers. I will tell the men to leave you alone.
Then the next use of tsâmê:
When you are thirsty (tsâmê), you may go to the water jars and drink some of the water the servants draw” (Ruth 2:8-9).
She does.
And much can be said of what follows: a widow, bereft of all her sons, remarried (Deut 10:12-18, 14:29); a Gentile, a Moabite even (Deut 23:3), received into Israel; a family line renewed through a kinsman-redeemer (ga’al: Ex 6:6-> Lev 25:25-55-> Ruth 2:20, 3:9-12-> 4:14); and a son born from whom the Messianic King would ultimately come (Ruth 4:17-19).
The Paradox of tsâmê in the Wisdom literature: The thirst of the wicked intensified by abundance; the thirst of the righteous satisfied in want
From the Pentateuch and Histories, we now come to the Wisdom Literature, where tsâmê occurs three times. And this is where the foundation of meaning begins to be formed which, we again find, is a…paradox.
Here Job continues his confrontation with the religious deception (present in every era…) that obedience and devotion to JWHW will automatically and unconditionally ensure blessing in This Age; and defiance to God’s Law, on the other hand, will bring swift, immediate judgment. Having already demonstrated the exact opposite—namely that the “tabernacles of robbers prosper and they that provoke God are secure; into whose hand God brings abundantly” (Job 12:6)—he now goes to great length to lay out his thesis.
Spending verse after verse documenting the reversals, he shows the injustice that accompanies righteousness and the blessing that follows wickedness. And this is where we find the middle occurrence of tsâmê, yet in a way that reveals true versus false blessing:
They [the wicked] cause the poor to go naked, without clothing;
And they take away the sheaves from the hungry.
They press out oil within their walls,
And tread winepresses, yet suffer thirst (tsâmê).
That is to say, while the machinations of the wicked do, in certain ways, ensure some form of temporary prosperity, as the Preacher (following Moses in Deut 8:18) demonstrated, it offers them no true satisfaction. Their “winepresses” burst out with wine, yet they “suffer thirst (tsâmê).”
Why?
God gives a man riches, property, and wealth
so that he lacks nothing that his heart desires,
yet God does not enable him to enjoy the fruit of his labor (Eccl 6:2).
They have all that their heart desires yet they have no power, no ability to enjoy it. And what is worse (which some researchers have actually termed, the “The Paradox of Modern Suffering”), their prosperity actually works to reveal to them that there actually exists within their soul a depth of misery and scarcity which no material benefit in this life can take away.
So much for the modern project of “happiness.”
And so, What do the Scriptures say?
This is where the Psalms and Prophets enter, which will be continued in the next writing.