How to Study the Bible III - Psalm 111, 112, 119, Lamentations 1 & Isaiah 28:9-13

Okay, so this morning we are comfortably outside of my wheelhouse. So we are going to be talking about acrostics and psalms and lamentations and Isaiah and a few other things. In order to be able to jump into that, it's important to know what an acrostic is. Do you guys know what an acrostic is?

Because I'm the only one who didn't. Only after reading your slide. OK. Perfect. I feel moderately better. So in Acrostic, we actually do these all of the time. Like when we were in elementary school, we just cranked these out like crazy. And if you do a Google search for Acrostic and just look at the images, you can find oh so many. really bad kid acrostics that are, I'm confident, probably presented on somebody's refrigerator somewhere. So Anacrostic is a poem or some other form of writing where there's a tie between that writing and the first letter or syllable or phrase ends up spelling out another word or message or the alphabet or whatever.

As an example, toaster, I actually thought was pretty good. It pleased me so. Thunk goes the strudel as it drops out of sight while I anticipate strawberry cream cheese. Time passes slowly, then it finally ejects, ready for the first delicious bite. So toaster, so that's an example of an acrostic. Yes, sir? I think one that I grew up with is the definition of grace, God's riches at Christ's expense. Yes. Just a nice, easy acrostic. So acrostic can be a way to help us define things, to remember things. You're kind of jumping ahead.

Because the question is, so most of them actually are pretty bad. And so when I went looking, the issue is just let's say you're writing an acrostic about real life animals, and now you've got to somehow throw you in there. You're going to be working pretty hard. You're going to try to curl bar something in there. So it's common that they end up sounding just a little bit clumsy, because they've been shoehorned into place.

So here's a great one that's an example of that. So winter wonderland. Ice is slippery. OK, well, it somewhat relates. Nothing is hot. OK. Hot chocolate might be, but I can see. The weather is cold, yes. And so we're kind of redundant. It's not exceptional. And these are the sorts that we find available and I'm sure are proudly portrayed on people's refrigerators. So if they're hard to do and they're kind of clumsy, then why do we do them? And Vern gave us one of the spoilers.

I'm sorry? Memorization. OK. So memorization might be a reason. If we've got something like grace, then all of a sudden we can remember these five short phrases. What other reasons? Because they're fun? Yeah, why not? So it's an interesting way of just expressing things. So we use these all the time. These tend to be somewhat moralistic often. And so you've got these pedagogical mnemonics. Vernon had a great one that was grace.

Here you've got... in nice elementary sort of colors so that the kids will get excited about them, about how to get along and respect and stay on task and all of these wonderful things that you need to do when you're working together within a group. So it becomes an easy way to remember, OK, now how am I supposed to be acting? What am I supposed to be doing? It's very helpful for teaching kids. Why would we use them for adults? Turns out we need help with memorization, too.

But this one's kind of interesting. So I pulled this one out. It's all about water conservation and the things that you can do. It's like, OK, if I can remember the word water, then all of a sudden I can remember, OK, I need a rain barrel. Because that's going to tie it all together, and now I can remember it. I don't know how the rest of you feel about this sort of thing when you see it presented to you. I feel like maybe talk down to you just a little bit.

You've got this really colorful thing with the slick mnemonic. I have a picture of people wanting me to memorize this and skip and jump rope. I don't respond super well to these. Do you guys respond super well to these? Is it just me? Yeah, so Gemini's feeling a little patronized by our water display.

Well, it turns out that's important in the overall lesson, and we'll get back to that. OK, well, are there flying uses, you may have a theme that you want to talk about, but you don't really have any great way of organizing the material. And so all of a sudden, you can take these disjointed concepts and pull them together and provide an organizing principle. And you wouldn't ordinarily think about good sportsmanship and always always strong and major achievements. These aren't things that you always pull together, but they're sort of a theme.

It's an umbrella. And so we can use an acrostic just to pull them all together. And all of a sudden, you know, OK, now I'm talking about this. Does that always have to spell a word? It does not always have to spell a word. There are lots of different examples in scripture where it spells out the alphabet, so you don't have a full word.

There are places, another spoiler alert, where it will provide an opportunity for the author to sneak his into a passage that they're writing. And so, as an example, I was reading a Jewish scholar who was talking about how Psalm 1, you've got Moses' name hidden in there as sort of a signature used to use, in response to a past question, how he used to use his lists as an acrostic. He had actually several different acrostics that he would use and they weren't necessarily words, they were just things that people can use to help memorize something.

I know in biology they had, I don't know if this is one or not, but it was like a saying for the nerves in the head. Cranial nerves. Cranial nerves. That's exactly what I was thinking of. It was cranial what? Cranial. On all the lymphocytes, the pen and nerve and buts and ops. And so if you take the first letter, that gives you all the cranial nerves.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be fine. That is an example of a prostate. Or when you have to learn the notes. Yeah, every good boy does fine. Those are fun. And not words, but they relate to a holistic concept. It's to make sense out of random occurrences.

Yes, sure. If you had to copy scripture over and over and over, and if you drop anything whatsoever, it would be a problem. This would be a great way to do some cross-checking. So it might have a good use for that. OK, well, now let's get deeper. So an apecadary? Am I saying that right? We're going to pretend that. A B C D. A B C D. Yeah, not a coincidence that the first four syllables are A B C D. So this is writing the front and back of the alphabet, usually done as practice. So I forget who found this.

It was Ron Cappy. Ron Cappy was doing some archaeology. Rather than focusing on large cities where they can look at huge palaces and stuff, he wanted to see how common folk lived during biblical times, and so targeted small villages and towns. This was an excavation not too terribly far outside of Jerusalem, and superimposed on this picture you can see that you've got the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

Those had been carved into the stone. There could have been multiple reasons for this. The supposition was that it was a scribe perhaps practicing letters, carving them into a screen. That it was in a smaller village, such as written language was pretty common and available to the commoner, which is pretty cool.

So we've talked about how to organize thoughts in terms of some organizing principle that might be a word or something else. We've talked about the alphabet. And so let's pull the two of these together. And you end up with the Jewish alphabet. So you guys should have this slide. So to the Jews, Hebrew. is and was super, super, super special. It was the language that was given to them by God. So it's called the Holy Language. It's been called the Holy Language for quite some time. Every one of the individual letters has meaning, and the Hebrew scholars can go into just a minutiae about why this symbol was chosen here. Each one of the letters corresponds to some sort of number.

And so you'll see, just as a different sort of example, as you're going through Genesis, the repetition of sevenths being the repetition of the seventh letter of the Jewish alphabet. So one thing that I will call your attention to in the upper left of that chart, you have a jot. So when we talk about every jot and tittle, this is where this is coming from, this little tiny nothingness of a letter, that actually gets composed into other letters and has a lot of meaning. So I'll give you an example.

We won't go through all 22 letters, but I pulled this from a seemingly scholarly site where The letter Aleph is traditionally associated with 1, with ox, so sacrificial ox, or 1000. And in this case, 1000 is not necessarily 999 plus 1. It's a big something or other. It's a multitude. So this Aleph is symbol of God's oneness.

So I pointed out the Jat in the previous slide. This one is comprised by a Jat, both on top and bottom, with then a central connecting pillar, which is the symbol of transformation. And so you end up with this transformative sort of human to superhuman. The point being that, number one, you've got made up in this symbol a jap, which is a y, which is the first letter in Fiawe.

So super significant. You've got oneness. And so you end up with this symbol iconifying the concept of there is exactly one God. So it's super fascinating just to go through and look at all of the other letters and see what sort of significance they've got.

So with this intense focus on the language and on the alphabet and the meaning of symbols, then together with the acrostic, now you've got this focus on the acrostic, that hidden unifying form, often being the alphabet. And this shows up in scripture all over the place. These are some examples. These are not all the examples. It's super interesting that this is such a repeated pattern. So, since that works for God's name, is this kind of where they get the meaning of a lot of the Hebrew names? Maybe because of the particular letters that are in that name? Maybe what that name really means? Is that where it comes from? In particular, the first letter tends to hold the most weight for the word. OK. Yeah. So there is meaning that's wrapped around that. I am not a Hebrew scholar, so I think I don't want to go too terribly far down that road before I say something completely heretical. I mean, almost everything was wrapped up in the name.

Well, and I don't, again, I'm very ignorant, From what I understand from Dr. Kuchenbaum's notes, there's also numeral numbers that are associated with the letters. And so, you know, when it talks about the 666, somehow they will know based on a name. I have no idea how that works. But I guess there is some crossover that way, that they also use the examples.

They're not just letters, they're numbers. As a matter of fact, when the translators get there, they have to look at context to figure out, am I getting this number of soldiers, or is that a name? Related to that, they also have a question of, do I translate something or transliterate it? Bring it across, right? So some translation issues because of those multiple meanings. So which one do they need?

OK. What an efficient language. Efficient? Yes, yes. Efficient and confusing. But what do you use? And so you guys can see how this works. So in Psalms 111 and 112, and we can look at those a little bit more in depth. I broke it out for everybody. 10 short verses, but those verses are actually separated into 22 stanzas. There are 22 letters of the alphabet. That's not coincidental. Each one of those begins with the next letter in the alphabet. So that's true for both of those two chapters. Psalm 119 is more advanced.

So this was not acrostic 101 material. This might have been acrostic graduate work, because it has eight verses in each section. It has 22 sections. OK, 22 letters in the alphabet. And so within each one of those sections, every one of those eight verses will start with the same letter. So that was advanced. Lamentations, 22 verses, each one begins with the next letter.

Proverbs 31, so this passage about what one woman wants her son to go and find in a woman, this description is an acrostic. It's 22 verses long, one for each letter of the alphabet. got those slaughtered in. And it's like when one of the common ones that I saw when I was googling about was mother.

And so these Mother's Day cards, just listing out all the properties of what the ideal mother is, you can just see this woman laying out, OK, let me make it simple for you, son. Here's what you need to go find in a woman. And let's start with Alf. And then we'll go to Bette. Just spelling it out so that that fella could not miss his mother's intent. And a great way of taking independent things and pulling them together and providing structure and order to all of these independent thoughts about what this ideal woman would look like for this woman.

Here's what it looks like pictorially so we have our Hebrew Bible, Psalm 119. You can look at the boxes that are outlined in the blue. Those are the first eight verses. And you'll notice that we get our little jot, bottom and top, diagonal slant. That's Aleph. We know that letter. And so you've got eight verses in a row that start with Aleph, and then begins the next set of eight, and we look at the first letter, and oh my gosh, it's that every single time. And so that's how it's structured.

I read one article, which was a data point, that there was some competition about being able to put together acrostics. That was a common thing. Today we have this group in France that will try to compose an entire novel without using the letter E. So this is advanced intellectual sort of stuff. The folks who are supporting this viewpoint to Psalm 119 as, OK, clearly somebody is knocking it out of the park. Because to do this, 22 sections of eight with all of them pretty much tied together fairly well, that's advanced. That's graduate work. OK. Yes, sir.

So is there any indication of who may have written these particular ones? Because I just looked in my Bible, and they don't have an author for 119 or 112 or none of those. I don't know off the top of my head. OK. I just wondered if David ever did those. Sometimes there are other clues about who wrote it, aside from the little notes that were written along with them. So some of the study Bibles, like the Ryrie Study Bible, if there's an identifier of some kind in the text, they'll make note of it. But I don't have any.

Yeah, and one of them that I was reading about yesterday Moses's name being dropped into Psalm 92, possibly as an acrostic, and so that sort of thing would be used as a hint. Okay, so now would be a great time to switch over to... I'd like to dig into Psalm 111 and 112 just a little bit. And so... Thus ends the monologue section and begins the discussion. I'm trying to think of how much of a hint to lay down. So you've got two psalms at this point. And by the way, this was, oh, that's intriguing. I bet if I do that. There we go. Yeah. OK.

So this was put together by a pretty creative Hebrew scholar who reworked some of the Psalms to get the effect in English of what was intended and conveyed in the Hebrew. You should not look at these as, this is an amazing translation that's looking at the the history and the culture and the linguistic properties, this is a loose translation to give you a flavor of what it looks like in Hebrew. That said, it's not bad.

So you've got two psalms, back to back, each with 10 verses, each with 22 clauses, each beginning with the next letter in the alphabet. each beginning with the word Hallelujah, one of which talks about Jehovah, the next talking about the man that fears Jehovah.

So these are clearly going together. Knowing that we've got an acrostic in both cases, What do you think might be a reasonable sort of approach for understanding how these fit together? Would we just read them in their entirety, each one, and then try to piece it together all at once in our brains? Say again? I don't understand the question. In each one of these two passages, 112 and 111. 111, OK. We have 22 short clauses, each one of which begins with the same letter of the alphabet as the other one.

One is talking about what God looks like. One is talking about what a man who fears God looks like. Do you think that we might be able to use the fact that this is an acrostic to glean some insights? I would assume they went together and they were teaching tools? I would assume the same. So what Crystal said is that they would go together and that they're teaching tools. So let me give you one example.

Take a look at, I'm going to butcher the pronunciation, but say check. So this is like the eighth letter down. Transliteration is CH. So the man that fears Jehovah, for that particular line, you have charitable is he, merciful, and righteous. I wonder if that comes from him. Let's look at what God looks like, and look at Chad, and see charitable and compassionate is Jehovah. And that's interesting.

So maybe just like we have parallel passages with Ephesians and Colossians, and if we don't get it over here, we can go look at it over here. When we've got these two passages, and we know that they're both acrossics, we can start pairing up the individual letters and seeing, OK, are they talking about the same thing? And does one give me a better understanding than the other? Does that make sense, how you might use that?

You have a puzzled expression. No, what I'm thinking is, if you put these two Psalms together, and then you look at places in the New Testament, there's a broad general principle that a man, regardless of New or Old Testament, godliness looks a certain way regardless of what what reign or principle you are under. So whether you are Jewish, whether you are the body of Christ, godliness has the same, it's the same. Does that make sense? It does, it makes sense. Because it's God. There is no shadow of eternity. God is consistent always. His righteousness is the same always. So I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader, and you can pair some of those up and see, oh, we've got Jehovah, and we've got the man who fears Jehovah, and sort of go back and forth with that one.

Songs, if you want to track it all down, you've got a copy of this. It's all broken out by which letter of the alphabet and which verses. It turned out that that was really easy to crank out because it just requires that I know my multiples of 8. got to use my second grade education again, because I think I did an acrostic on Craig in second grade. Lamentations, you end up with the exact same pattern. This is a version by a different person. who did the exact same thing.

So when you're reading this and you're getting that sense of awe and such solitude sits the city and then beside herself with weeping, and gone is Judah, desolate are her gates, you start seeing how that letter pattern plays out. This is useful to give a flavor for what's actually being conveyed within the Hebrew, but again, do not regard this as a solid translation from which to make serious biblical study. So there we go with Lamentations and Psalms.

Now, one other thing that I wanted to cover, I was pretty confident that we were going to finish up early today. But I had said that before, and then we had run late so many times, I was gun-shy. But now I'm starting to get a little cocky. I think that we can actually accomplish this.

So it turns out that there is an Easter egg, so a little hidden gem, in Isaiah 28, 9 through 13. And so I actually want to give more context with this, and since we're sitting pretty on time, coffee must now be waning. I want to just give more context overall. So, God gave Isaiah a specific charter. Then I said, here I am, send me.

He said, God said, go and tell his people, keep on listening, but do not perceive. Keep on looking, but do not understand. and their eyes dim, otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and return and be healed." So God knows he's sending Isaiah out with the truth, and they're not going to accept this particular truth.

Isaiah continually presents the material in a very, very simple way. to such an extent that the recipients then start mocking him. Because how can somebody who's saying something so simplistic be worth listening to when you're putting it in such basic terms? And so, when we get to Isaiah 28, at the beginning, So, woe to the proud crown of the drunkards of Ephraim, to the fading flower of its glorious beauty, which is at the head of the fertile valley, of those who are overcome with wine. And the issue was that the prophets of Ephraim were just getting ripped. I mean, they were just drinking to excess and falling all over themselves and then uttering random things and feeling good about that.

So he's calling online, which seems like a good idea. Behold, the Lord has a strong and mighty agent. As a storm of hail, a tempest of destruction, like a storm of mighty overflowing waters, he's cast it down to earth with his hand. The proud crown of the drunkards of Ephraim is trodden underfoot, and the fading flower of its glorious beauty, which is at the head of the fertile valley, will be like a first ripe fig prior to summer, which one sees, and as soon as it is in his hand, he swallows it."

So this path that they're on is not going well for them. But Isaiah is still in education mode. So we get down to, so he's talking about their priests and prophets, and these also reel with wine and stagger from strong drink. The priests and the prophet reel with strong drink. They are confused by wine. They stagger from strong drink. They reel while having visions.

They totter when rendering judgment. For all the tables are full of filthy vomit, without a single clean place. The part that sounds kind of lyrical to us around they're staggering, they're reeling, they're tottering. We don't use totter a lot. The translator is trying to call out the fact that this is really really sing-songy, rhymey underneath it in the Hebrew, and he's talking to them like they're itty-bitty kids, talking about just their silliness, bumping into each other and falling and throwing up and acting like children.

And then we get to verse 9, which is this passage that I wanted to talk about, the Easter Egg. To whom would he teach knowledge and to whom would he interpret the message? Those just weaned from milk? Those taken from the breast? Now explicitly saying, you are itty-bitty kids.

Then he switches and says, for he says, order on order, order on order, line on line, line on line, a little here, a little there. And it pops down again in the bottom. Order on order, order on order, line on line, line on line. In the keyboard, this is a sing song call and response.

So when I was in India on one of my trips, we got to go to a schoolhouse outside of town. And it's a pretty incredible place where these farmer-type parents who are just completely impoverished have kids, and they want their kids to have this great life. They know that they're going to know absolutely nothing but poverty living with them. And so they actually give them to the school. It's a, you have my kid. You will teach my kid. I'm going to go back to farming. Like an orphanage, but it's an explicit charter. It's a handout.

And the thing that was interesting to me there is I got to visit a number of the classes when the classes were in session. And they have chalkboards. They have study desks where they're sitting and writing. They don't have windows, which during monsoon season was interesting. But they're not writing. They're not reading. They're singing. And it's back and forth.

And the teacher has a concept. And she's teaching the concept by singing. And then they sing the response back, and it gets deep inside of them. So this is actually an example of the exact same thing, where it's very sing-songy in the Hebrew. And it's focused on the middle of the alphabet, where the teacher would throw out a call, order by order, order on order, order on order. And the expected response back would be line on line, line on line. And so it sinks on me back and forth, just this really elementary teaching.

Isaiah called them awry, little babies. He's talking about them toddling around like little itty-bitty babies. And he's talking about how he has tried to instruct them. And it's, he who said to them, here is rest. Give rest to the weary, and here is repose. But they would not listen. So the word of the Lord to them will be, Itty-bitty baby bits.

Did you get that? Itty-bitty baby bits. Did you get that too? That they may go and stumble backward, be broken, snared, and taken captive. So even at the most simplistic little itty-bitty granules that built on top of each other, they're not going to get it. So they're lost. fascinating that all of this is just sitting underneath the covers.

I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to teach on it. Paul ends up quoting one of these verses when he's talking about tongues. And the intent in Paul's quoting of these verses when talking about tongues is You guys are thinking about this wrong. Tongues are not this profound spiritual gift that it's going to be that once I've got the Holy Spirit now I'm going to spoon feed And that's the way that this needs to be taught. It is, the recipient is immature, needs to hear it, order on order, order on order, line by line, line on line, for them to be able to get it at all.

With the Word of God canonicalized, written down, for us to read Powered by the Holy Spirit, we can understand scripture. You don't need it. One order, line on line, call and response. We can actually understand the person who created absolutely everything at a deep level. What use have we of tongues? We don't need that simplistic teaching. That's why Paul grabs this and pulls it into the New Testament when he's talking on that subject.

But it does remind me for all the time that we were downstairs with the kids, we did this. I mean, we had simplistic ways of kind of getting it in the kids' heads so that they would always remember it with the hope that one day, if need be, the Lord could pull that and they'd say, wait a second, there was a thing that I learned when I was you know, in Sunday school, so that we could, you know, there were many of those. For some reason, now that I'm talking, I can't remember. Sue, do you? Oh, look at that. Bye. But Sue has them too.

God can do anything, anything. Like, we had those things where we would have the kids. we'd say something and then they would say it back, just so we knew. Where do we find truth? Where do we find truth? It's in the Bible. Truth is in the Bible. That's what they would say. Call and response. We would do that with them.

But then you're talking about those who are just weaned from milk, who at that point may or may not be indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God, and so appropriate for the kids. Though you have used it in the adults in your school class. What we studied last week was Psalm 22. And if you look up there, it says, those just weaned from milk. And if you look at verse 9 in Psalm 22, which we had last week, yet you are he who brought me forth from the womb. You made me trust upon my mother's breast. Upon you I was cast from birth. You have been my God from my mother's womb. And so that whole psalm is about trust. basically trusting in God, and how well it fits with your Easter egg up there, because it's kind of saying the same thing, you know, just after waiting for milk.

They have led this stage of trust, and now it's up to them to start trusting in God. And if they don't, then what happened to them? What happened to the order of order and line on line? So it doesn't work for them, because they're lacking the trust as they learned when they were on their mother's breasts.

I think that's a really great way of expressing it. And Christ, what is it where he says, like a child, that they have to become like a child in the Gospels. Where is that found? Where the Lord is speaking. But all has to trust. And like I said last week when Jesus said, you have to become like a child before you can enter the kingdom. Well, you have to trust. And when I saw this, I agreed. I was just so amazed by this attitude. Because that was Psalm. It was about trust.

And then you think about Christ being on the cross. What was the thing that he really needed to do? Obviously, he was divine and he was human. But from the human side, what did he need to do? He needed to trust God completely. Because here he is on the cross. I mean, in this horrendous situation and astronomical amount of pain. So what's left for him is to trust the Father to get him through this, right? What an amazing... I just read that last week and almost cried because it was so... I mean, David just really captured that picture so... beautifully. So this is not the first time I get so lucky with this one, you know, and life in general.

It's Mark 10, 13 through 16 where it says, And they were bringing children to him so that he might touch them. But the disciples rebuked them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, Permit the children to come to me. Do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter at all. And he took them in his arms and began blessing them, laying his hands on them.

So I mean, there is a principle. Now, it seems like Isaiah was being a little bit more mocking, but. This, yes, but receive like a child doesn't mean via baby food and, limericks, it means with an honesty, a willingness, a trust to just, oh, that must be true. And an openness. I think this is a great example of looking at scripture very carefully, and observing, and seeing what's there. Because it's superficial reading.

People have arrived at various other conclusions. And here Paul goes and quotes right from the middle of this. If you've got tongues going on, that's a warning. And it's the middle of some serious problems. And that's frequently not understood. People who are pushing tongues in this modern era don't understand the character. This is a serious spiritual condition and a warning. Yeah. And Jim, do you remember how you felt about that one? Yeah. Pat and I talked about it, too. I'm confident that that same message was very clearly delivered here. Why is that called history? I'm sorry.

Oh, so I don't know if this is a common thing or not, but on Resurrection Sunday, people run around and go and hunt for these things. In the software industry, It's super commonplace for clever yet somewhat bored software engineers to just throw a little bit of goodness into their program that if you're clever enough you can find it as well. And so if you just, you know, hit this weird command sequence and click on that thing right there, all of a sudden a chicken pops up on the screen and it's Microsoft Word. That's unexpected. That's called an Easter egg. And so it may be that I've taken things from my industry, assumed that they're universally understood, and used that to explain this. But now you've learned a little about software engineering culture. So the Ransom software that pops up and says, you owe me a million dollars to get your program back, that's not an Easter egg. That is not an Easter egg. No, it is not, in fact.

All right. An Easter egg is actually found in a lot of big communities. So someone will put in a little Easter egg to have the community be excited. And everyone else is just kind of like, yeah, of course that's there. Why wouldn't that be there? And everyone else is like, that was there. So it's everywhere.

There's a really not so great 1980s song, video, one hit wonder that gets He knows. Anyway, and it's... And we're gonna give you up. And we're gonna let you down. And desert you. But it's kind of like this. What is it called? It's being called... You know what? Let's close this down and then we can talk about that sort of madness. Father, thanks for the life in this classroom. That people are actively wanting to know you. And thank you for being clear in scripture and for giving us the tools that we need to be able to understand how clear you are. In Jesus name I pray. Amen.