In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now all the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.

Friday, April 29, 2011

And God Still Speaks

            Jordan’s Wadi Arnon experience was a Na-shama moment in my life. Na-shama (pronounced: NAY SHAH-muh) comes from the Hebrew word “breath” from when God breathed life into Adam/man,1 but the term also relates to when a rabbi gives his disciple an ah-ah moment, a life-changing teaching.  About two years ago, I was blessed to simulate the Exodus experience during a Holy Lands trip from Egypt to Jordan to Israel.  George DeJong led our group, and he teaches in rabbinic style and integrates Hebraic culture, language, history and geography to enhance our understanding of the Bible with its very Hebraic roots.  A wadi is a valley set between mountainous peaks and can be 8-10 ft. deep with torrent waters that often cause many deaths during the rainy season.  Wadi Arnon, which means “noisy” in Hebrew, is 45 miles long and runs through Jordan and ends at the Dead Sea.  After wading through miles of tumultuous waters in the valley of Wadi Arnon, our group finally rounded a corner to see a colossal waterfall pouring out, with all its might, the sound of rushing waters.  “THIS IS THE VOICE OF GOD!  THIS IS HOW GOD SPEAKS TO YOU,” shouts our guide George DeJong, his voice small and broken compared to the mighty roar of the waterfall. 
What? I thought to myself. This is how God talks to me? Like the sound of rushing waters?  I had always imagined God’s Voice as a whisper, like when He quietly spoke to Elijah during his standoff with the Baal prophets on Mount Carmel.2 I had no knowledge that God manifested Himself akin to the waterfall’s “voice,” which embodied the epitome of power—and life. The Israelites’ mikveh came to mind, the cleansing baths that gave new birth, an atoned life through faith in the Divine. I opened my heart and said to God, “Speak to me. I want to hear Your Voice!” I stood under the waterfall and soaked up God into my soul. As the water rushed around me, on top of me, and what seemed like through me, I felt cleansed.  I felt alive. God spoke to me that day at Wadi Arnon like I had never heard Him before, and upon my return home, His Voice impassioned me to explore Him in new ways.
I opened up the Text and found, to my surprise, that God’s Voice is rarely a quiet whisper but is often described in the Text the following ways: “loud’ or “great,”3 “powerful” and “majestic,”4 with the capacity that it “shook” and  “melted the earth,”5 as “thunder” and “lightning,”6 coming from “fire,”7 the sound of “a trumpet”8 “like multitudes,”9 as a “roar” or “shout,”10 and —like that at Wadi Arnon—a voice “of many waters.”11 God’s Voice is powerful because God’s Words aptly reflect His power. 
            I found out something else interesting about God’s Voice. Many times in the Text, God’s Word is actually seen by man, often in the form of nature. In the desert tabernacle, God manifested His Glory and spoke though a pillar of fire and clouds so that He could dwell with man.12  When God spoke to the Israelites on Mt. Sinai, they saw and heard the Voice of God in violent upheavals of nature—thunder, lightning, and a dense cloud upon the trembling mountain.13 God said:  “You have seen for yourselves that I have talked to you from heaven.”14 Rabbi Moshe Weissman explains the rabbinical interpretation of the supernatural phenomena accompanying the giving of the Law, based on The Midrash (which is traditional Jewish commentary on the Torah), saying: "In occasion of the giving of the Torah, the children of Israel not only heard the Lord’s voice but actually saw the sound waves as they emerged from the Lord’s mouth. They visualized them as a fiery substance. Each commandment that left the Lord’s mouth travelled around the entire Camp and then to each Jew individually, asking him, ‘Do you accept upon yourself this Commandment with all the halochot [Jewish law] pertaining to it?’ Every Jew answered ‘Yes’ after each commandment. Finally, the fiery substance which they saw engraved itself on the tablets."15 The pairing of seeing and hearing God’s Voice was not something I had ever even contemplated, but  God revealed more and more examples in the Text where His Voice could be physically seen. 
            In Genesis 15:1, as God is about to seal His covenant with the father of all nations, we are told: “. . . the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision.” The Hebrew root word for “vision” in verse 1 is chazah, which means “to see.”  Abram SEES the word of God in a vision. Stop and think about this.  We typically associate HEARING the spoken word, but here, Abraham SEES the word of God.  What did Abram see? Did he see words spelled out in puffy, cloud-like letters that he could read as God’s contract? Did he see the Bible with words printed on parchment paper, showing Abram how God’s covenant would be fulfilled in our New Testament? Rethink John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning.” The Word of God is God. Abram saw The Almighty as He spoke!  God reveled His power and authority through His Word by both sight and sound. 
                   Our first inclination might be to say, “Well, that is Old Testament when God manifested Himself through nature, prior to His gift of the Holy Spirit where God indwells in His children and speaks to them.” Yet we have an example from the New Testament as well where The Divine’s Voice is seen and heard, as related by Paul the apostle: “About noon as I came near Damascus, suddenly a bright light from heaven flashed around me. I fell to the ground and heard a voice say to me, ‘Saul! Saul! Why do you persecute me?’  ‘Who are you, Lord?’ I asked. ‘I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting,’ he replied. My companions saw the light, but they did not understand the voice of him who was speaking to me”16  In these verses, both sight (light) and sound (words) are inextricably linked to this heavenly voice.            
            After studying these verses, I realized that I had, over the years, put God in a box—a tidy little box that contained preconceived notions about Him and His Voice.   At times, certainly God speaks to us in a whisper, only heard when we sit quietly before Him. But sometimes His Voice comes to us in a thunderous roar.  Under the cascade of the falling mayim chayim (“living waters”) at Wadi Arnon, I could relate to the experiences of Moses, Abraham and Paul. I knew that I, too, had seen and heard the Voice of God.  And that Na-shama moment reminds me that when we open our minds, God will speak to us in new ways, revealing new facets of Himself where we can see and hear Him differently so that we can stand in greater and greater awe of Him and His mighty word.


Biblical references: (All emphasis, such as bold or italics, in Scripture mine.)
1. Genesis 2:7
2. 1 Kings 18:17-40
3. Deuteronomy 5: 22; Revelation 1:12, 12:10, 21:3
4. Psalm 29:4; Jeremiah 10:13
5. Hebrews 12:26; Psalm 46:6
6. Isaiah 30:30; Jeremiah 51:6; Psalm 77:18; Psalm 77:18; Job 37:5; Psalm 18:3;
    Psalm 29:7
7. Deuteronomy 4:2, 4:36, 15:24; Psalm 18:3 
8. Revelation 4:1
9. Daniel 7:11
10. Jeremiah 25:30
11. Psalm 29:3; Revelation 1:15; Ezekiel 43:2
12. Exodus 13:21-22
13. Exodus 20:18-21
14. Exodus 20:22
15. Rabbi Moshe Weissman, The Midrash Says on Shemot (New York, 1980), p. 82.
16. Acts 22:6-9

1 comment:

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