Chapter 78
Psalm 78:53
[God] guided [His people] safely, so they were unafraid; but the sea engulfed their enemies.
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Preface
Fear has its own language. We recognize fear as much by its words as by its actions. One of fear's favorite words is "impossible." Often fear will use this to retreat from life in the moments that matter, to contract and shrink within self, to bind and limit self-further and further over time.
Internally, fear locks people's minds in a sort of Iron Maiden for the brain, tortuously confining them to the arrogance of painful limitation.
Externally, fear binds people's wings to their sides, believing this keeps them safe from the risk of falling. And then they call anything that looks like flying "impossible" so to remain "safe" on the ground in the pain of resisting their nature to soar.
Imagine being fitted with a straitjacket at birth, bound by having the world's fear imposed upon us, calling the miraculous freedom in love that we possess in faith 'reckless' and 'insane'. Consider how this jacket would stifle the growth of our love and contribution.
Parents will share with the next generation the guide that leads to either personal freedom, or personal imprisonment.
Asaph, one of David's chief musicians, teaches by praying out loud in song. Today he reminds us of the history of faith and fear, of remembrance and selective amnesia, of "impossible" running up against and being overcome by "Im possible."
It's a matter of shifting the space in between the letters of the word. In this way we change our language from F2F. We change the meaning of things, how our mind thinks, unlocking a latch on the Iron Maiden's grasp, allowing for more expansive thinking to seep out. Consequently, the bindings around our wings fray and loosen, giving us some wiggle room. The pain of fear-imposed limitations alleviates. We can stretch and move a little more, in ways never before imagined possible.
We discover room to breathe, realizing it had been there, intended for us, waiting the whole time. And the room is called 'unlimited possibility.'
A friend who knows me well, years past sent me a birthday card. On its cover we're shown a drawing of a square box with a small opening on one side. Inside the box a bunch of butterflies flutter around. Outside the box flies one butterfly.
"Why do you fly outside the box?"
"Because I can."
"But we 'know' the box. We're 'safe' in the box.
"That's why I fly outside the box. Where you're safe, I'm free."
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As an introduction Asaph tells us that he's going to share a parable, that he will "utter hidden things" (78:2).
"Parable" is defined as 'A simple story told to illustrate a moral truth.' (This would mean a truth that relates to principles of right and wrong in thought and action.)
The word "parable" is translated from the Hebrew 'masal,' which means to 'rule,' or have dominion over the mind, having 'superiority' in mental action. But this represents a state of mind that's acquired by remembering or learning the examples of success and failure established by those who've lived before us, our Spiritual ancestors.
By learning what other people's faith has allowed faith and love to do in, through and for them; especially, in the face of what fear would think of as 'impossible' or 'hopeless,' we give our mind an expanded space of possibilities that fear would never allow. Consequently, we give permission for events to occur in our lives; especially, when we need them most, events that aren't necessarily bound by fear's limited expectations as dictated by past experience and a toddler's understanding of the laws of physics.
It's important that we're not confused on this last point--Our understanding of the laws of physics, of "how things work," has only expanded equal to that of a two-year old's growth from being a new-born baby. We have barely scratched the surface.
Only when the laws of the spirit are studied and understood will physics begin to rapidly reveal its "hidden things."
Asaph's phrase "hidden things" comes from the Hebrew 'hida.' This directly translates into English as 'a puzzle.' And it's used to mean 'a trick,' and 'conundrum.' Its root is 'hud,' which means 'to tie a knot,' and 'to propound a riddle.' It's also been biblically translated as "dark sayings."
By "dark" or "hidden" Asaph means forgotten to those who've been told before, and unknown to those who've not yet been informed. His goal is to dispel the darkness of ignorance with the light of knowledge. But he's not wanting to just give information for the purpose of informing. This would be like painting a single coat of watered-down water-based paint on an oily surface. Little to nothing would stick.
There's a difference between informing and educating. Asaph purposes the latter, to provide the information he's about to deliver in such a way that it'll trigger the reasoning, analytical parts of our brains, like when we're presented with a novel, intriguing puzzle.
Just by prefacing what he's about to say with 'I'm going to give you a puzzle,' we approach the information we're about to read from that point onward from a different psychological state than we would without the prompt. It serves the same rhetorical purpose of the drill sergeants call of "Attention!" letting the soldiers know that everything the sergeant's about to say next is important.
Asaph's first order of business is to essentially communicate: Those who forget history are destined to repeat the same mistakes made by those in the past and to suffer unnecessarily the same consequences. But too Asaph wants to show us that, by learning what people before us did wrong and right, we can progress as a society more rapidly if we stand on our ancestors' shoulders, picking up where they left off, instead of wasting yet another generation's worth of time giving into the same fears, making the same mistakes.
As a society, we're either allowing fear to keep us running in place or introducing just enough faith to inch our way forward, or we're finally getting fed up enough to tip the scales toward faith in order to wind sprint into the future of heaven on earth...and beyond.
Asaph's call for attention was a call to expand understanding. Psychologically it's been said that "a mind expanded by a new idea can never return to its original dimensions." Generational expansions--obtaining greater levels of freedom from fear's Iron Maiden hold on the mind--has an accumulative, compounding effect. And one of the symptoms of expansion is a results-oriented person and society.
The expansion of faith reveals that actions come to carry more weight than words. (For those who're predominated by fear, the opposite is true. This is how we can recognize a predominance of fear in a person: They make promises that they don't keep. And they make excuses for why they didn't keep their promises.)
Faith confirms what Benjamin Disraeli wrote: "Man is not the creature of circumstances; circumstances are the creatures of men."
And what Edmund Spenser observed: "It is the mind that maketh good of ill, that maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor."
But what steers the mind?
Either fear or faith.
Then where do we acquire either one of these driving forces?
From the type of information, we most often pay the closest attention to, we choose to learn from and, importantly, we act on. Information gets packaged and delivered in either the promise of pain or pleasure, whether by someone else whom we choose to believe or by our own estimation.
"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment." (Marcus Aurelius)
"Deep within man dwell those slumbering powers; powers that would astonish him, that he never dreamed of possessing; forces that would revolutionize his life if aroused and put into action." Here, Orison Swett Marden points to what Moses (as highlighted by Asaph), and later Jesus, demonstrated.
These powers are the thoughts and emotions born from out of faith.
"Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith." "Go! Let it be done just as you believed it would" (Jesus, speaking to the Centurion, at Matthew 8:5-13).
The Centurion believed that Jesus's power to heal could extend to the Centurion's paralyzed servant.
"When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the man, 'Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven'" (Jesus, before healing the man on the mat, at Matthew 9:2).
"Jesus turned and saw her. 'Take heart, daughter,' He said, 'your faith has healed you'" (Matthew 9:22).
"Then He touched their eyes and said, 'According to your faith let it be done to you'; and their sight was restored" (Matthew 9:29-30).
With each example encountered a chipping away occurs at the hardened clay of the ego that serves as fear's cover over our light. Simultaneously the light of faith expands itself within fear's shell, spiderwebbing it with hairline fissures, weakening fear's ability to prevent the light from exploding outwardly.
"Then Jesus said to her, 'Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted'" (Matthew 15:28).
In each case in the New Covenant the people heard, saw and then brought the faith inspired within them to Jesus. And this faith was the catalyst for God to remove from them the barrier or limitation they had endured prior to faith's introduction. Faith revealed that the type of barriers and limitations found only in fear were unnecessary.
And during each healing, there were witnesses present, of whom it's said, "This amazed everyone, and they praised God, saying, 'We have never seen anything like this!'" (Mark 2:12).
How many times has fear used nearly the same phrasing, "I've never seen it done before," as "proof" that something needed or wanted can't be had or will never happen? This is how fear tries to manipulate people into believing that the past dictates the future.
Imagine if Henry Ford said that a car could never be built because no one had built it before.
And what about the numerous contemporary examples of "spontaneous healings" encountered by doctors, healings deemed to have no known scientific explanation for occurring?
Fear doesn't need to see in order to believe, as it often likes to say, because it doesn't believe no matter how many times it sees, as displayed by those freed from Egypt. (It could be said that this is the generation being referenced when Jesus said, "A wicked and adulterous generation looks for a sign..." (Matthew 16:4)) It's been shown that signs and wonders don't inspire faith in those who've committed themselves to positions of fear, but that faith inspires signs and wonders.
Fear is afraid to believe, because it's already taken a position on what it believes, has intertwined its identity with that belief and now finds avoiding being "wrong" more important than being healed. It's the same thing for those who find being "right" more important than being in a relationship or being "respected" more important than having their job, or their freedom from prison.
People brought faith to Jesus and received life and healing. God, through Moses, brought signs, miracles and wonders to His people, and they complained, made idols, worshiping other gods, and received sickness and death.
The "hidden things" Asaph writes about are defined by him as "the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, his power, and the wonders He has done" (78:4). Asaph's talking about the forgotten or unknown history of God's deeds. He's using irony as a form of rhetoric, with the implication being "Let me state the obvious for you."
The first deed listed is "He decreed statutes for Jacob and established the Law in Israel" (78:5).
The wise recognize the value of having a mentor, someone who always makes him- or herself available to provide principles for successful living. The statutes and Law are God's mentorship; His guide for us.
Today many take the law for granted, not realizing that when first introduced to people it was like being given a technological advancement far greater than electricity or the iPhone. Before such direction, people banged about in the dark, driven by any fear-based thought and feeling that arose.
If "technology" can be defined as 'a better way of doing things,' then the commandments and Torah given to and through Moses meant for the Hebrews what an intergalactic time-traveling spaceship would mean to us today. It was revolutionary on a scale of miraculous proportions.
What would harnessing fire of meant to the caveman that first discovered how? Or the lightbulb to Edison? What did Freud's discovery of Psychoanalysis mean for the development of the field of Psychology?
Recently we've seen in some cities people repeating the mistake of forgetting the past. As if conducting a social experiment, a few elected officials work tirelessly to dilute the law's value, demonizing it in order to remove its applicability. Consequently, they're getting a glimpse of the beginning expressions of human nature as it existed in the world prior to the law's existence. It's to people like this Asaph sings his prayer.
The escalating pockets of crime are only bubbles in a pot of water being brought to a boil. A symptom of the neglect of our youth.
Though not there yet, we still having time to course correct, if these cities stay the course they're on, it's inevitable that the water will boil over. This is when the scales tip to there being more people committing crimes than people obeying the law, which then rapidly devolves into the city's implosion.
This isn't a political issue, it's a spiritual one. It's fear and darkness working hard to dispel the tools of faith and light. And it does this generationally, by what it exemplifies for and teaches those who'll become the next generation.
It's important to point out that we're not to put our faith in the law, but in love. It helps to think of the law as the package in which love resides, present for those who've not yet matured within themselves to the point of love. It's a guide, like a life coach, that get us to that point.
It's a tool purposed to help with our maturation process.
Without love being the primary aspect of the law's mentorship, then it's not easy for people to make the connection between the two. Consequently, the system ends up representing only judgment and punishment, void of empathy and compassion. And when those in society who're more susceptible to internalizing disappointment, loss and trauma receive the law as a teacher of judgment and punishment, then these are the tools the law's told them to use in turn.
It's only in the "law and order" cities that marry this with compassion and mentorship where the best results occur.
We get more of what we focus in on. If a system focuses in on crime, defining a person as a criminal, then they're going to evolve their systems to make more criminals and crime. This is how systems of fear work. But if a system focuses in on the heart of the person behind the crime, defining a person as someone who's been hurt and--having not had the mentorship they obviously needed--recognizing that they visited that hurt on the society that hurt them, then the system will evolve to make less criminals and crime, and more contributing human beings.
It's true that only hurt people hurt people. It's also true that "If we see a person as they are, they'll be that and worse. But if we see a person as they can be, they'll become that and better."
But for the cities that "catch and release" people who're currently bound in the darkness of fear, trapped in the throes of the pain they're visiting onto others, their release isn't helping anyone. These cities take the law for granted, as well as both the people hurting and those being hurt.
Maybe the officials are creating a problem that didn't exist before in order to present themselves as the solution.
Or maybe the officials assume people naturally embody the light and guidance of the law within themselves. Or they only think of the law as something stripped of love, like what Jesus recognized in the Sadducees and Pharisees:
Jesus said, "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices--mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law--justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former" (Matthew 23:23). Jesus points to a law plugged into faith, and away from a law connected to fear.
Or the officials think that if they don't like the people who represent the law, then the best way to protest is to return society into the Wild West, which really is only a political expression of a child having a tantrum.
Jesus said to the crowds and to His disciples: "The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat. So, you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach" (Matthew 23:1-3).
Fear confuses the 'person' who breaks the law for the 'law' the person broke. This is because fear compromises rationality, narrowing thinking, making it lazy. It's the same confusion represented by throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Fear confuses correlation with causation.
Faith sees that the law stands separately from the hypocrite who's supposed to represent it. This is because faith expands the space in which the mind's able to operate, allowing for sound reasoning and compartmentalization.
Or maybe the elected officials are just giving the people what they're asking for, letting them experience firsthand Asaph's lesson.
But it appears that the officials involved fail to recognize, first, there are plenty of historic examples of societies living with little to no measures of personal accountability. And second, they don't seem to understand that our society is fed teachings of fear nearly 24/7. There's barely an information platform of any form that doesn't predominantly highlight or promote the worst examples of fear's nature. And 'examples' are humanity's most effective teachers. They're what make a culture.
If the information infrastructure was developed to the point of predominantly highlighting and promoting examples of faith expressions, then we as humans could evolve the mind and heart to the point of becoming an embodiment of faith and its corresponding expansion of love. This, then, would represent a sociological maturation that would allow for not the removal but the fulfillment of the law. (Then and only then could we be deemed an advanced, civilized society.)
This is what Jesus pointed us toward when He said, "So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets" (Matthew 7:12).
Love is the fulfillment of the Law (Romans 13:10).
"For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ" (John 1:17).
This reveals a maturation of faith exemplified by people progressing over time. It points to the direction that we're supposed to be heading, instead of making the same thinking, behavioral mistakes made by generations past.
But until we tap into, learn from, and wire ourselves for faith and love, the law, as an expression of love, is necessary. Without the law, this nation goes the same route as every nation before it--total, absolute destruction.
What Asaph would refer to as sin, most today refer to as crime--the actions that fall short of or violate the law. Like those bubbles in the water, crimes can only be committed in the society from out of which they're born. There's a collective responsibility that few people wish to acknowledge. With little to no contextual guidance, citizens have no problem inundating the impressionable minds of the next generation, from birth to their early 20's, with millions of visual examples of rape, kidnapping, robbery and murder. They call this innocent entertainment. In their ignorance of how the mind develops and works, these same citizens are shocked and outraged when a percentage of these youth pour out of themselves into the world that which has so bountifully been poured into them.
The truth is, there's a percentage of children who're more sensitive than others. They feel more. As a result, they're more prone to internalizing, holding onto the disappointments and hurts they experience. They lack the coping mechanisms most others may naturally have or be able to organically develop. Negative events are recalled more graphically than positive events for these kids. Then they grow up in an abusive or neglectful household. Or they gain the attention of a bully. Or life happens as it does for those predominated by fear. And they have no mentor to provide any alternative positive guidance, teaching the youth how to skillfully, pro-socially process the events that occur in their lives.
Each new pain internalizes and compounds, building inside like the magma of an active volcano. This contributes to a lack of self-esteem and, resultingly, a lack of purpose. These together are the ingredients for criminality. (You can't get acts of violence without these.)
The law's purpose is that of mentorship and guidance; at least, it's supposed to be. But if it's not taught or given to kids, then how are they to have it within themselves to consult and pull from? They grow up in body, but they're only as old as they stopped maturing within themselves, which is the age of that first traumatic event they encountered and failed to properly process.
One thing's for sure: The world never takes a break in teaching kids the ways of fear. If society fails in doing its job, then what lessons of faith do the kids have within themselves to mount a defense against the lessons of fear? Little to none.
Biblically, people connected to God through the law. The glue that represented this connection was faith. And this connection allowed them to expand the way their minds saw themselves, providing a perspective above the individualistic level. They had an understanding of how the bad actions of one person could adversely affect everyone else. For example, at Joshua 7, the selfish actions Achan caused devastating results to all of the Israelites. (Review Chapter 25 of this book for more on Achan.)
God sees us as one. Love says, 'I am my brother's keeper.' (1 John 3:11-12) Jesus said, "Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble! (Matthew 18:7) "Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come" (Luke 17:1).
Asaph recognized this, stating: [God] decreed statutes for Jacob and established the law in Israel, which He commanded our ancestors to teach their children, so the next generation would know them, even the children yet to be born, and they in turn would tell their children" (Psalm 78:5-7).
Why?
Because the universe adheres to the laws that govern it. If it did not do so, it would then and only then represent true chaos. And we are part of the universe. If we live in violation of the laws that govern life, then we unravel the order of our lives into chaos.
For example, a man predominated by fear may, externally, have every material provision made available to him. His neighborhood's streets are clean and crime free. There's a regular trash and mail schedule. His refrigerator is always full. Water is readily available. He has a routine he likes and can count on. The bottom three levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs are met. But then his girlfriend breaks up with him. Having never learned how to process everyday life events like this properly, he interprets this one event to be the end of the world. Through fear's eyes, the breakup makes life look like it's in complete and total chaos.
Fears kept this person from entering into the upper two levels of the Hierarchy, which can only be entered with the key of faith.
Fear's unable to separate the one thing from everything. In fact, one of its primary identifying features is how it will have someone exclude everything that exists in life in the face of one unwanted event. It's like someone stubbing their toe in the morning right when they get out of bed, then deciding that one event means the ENTIRE rest of the day is ruined. All 20 or so hours that have not yet occurred, are now ruined because of that one event that took one-tenth of a second to happen.
If anyone is curious to know whether someone's internal scale is weighed more heavily toward fear than faith, then this is one of the symptoms that reveals it to be so.
Asaph's purpose is to provide perspective, like an immortal historian standing atop a mountain, watching the cycles of humanity play out over the course of thousands of years. Asaph points out the Atari "Pong" game people used to play, bouncing back and forth between faith and fear; between annihilation and enslavement, and freedom and abundance; between empires rising and empires falling. Over and over and over again, for the same exact reasons.
Yes, with this perspective, we can say that each back-and-forth bounce of the ball resembles one rep, like with curling a weight when exercising. The expansion-and-contraction reps over the course of thousands of years represent fear/faith antagonistic muscle sets, each one progressing us incrementally forward, to where we are now, contracting once more.
But we don't have to.
Imagine if we were to decide to provide this perspective to our children, giving them a bird's-eye view, teaching them that we no longer have to contract. We can just support each other's unique contributions toward uninterrupted expansion. If we provided the tools of empathy, compassion, loving-kindness along with this information, humanity would progress in 50 years farther than it has from its beginning to now.
If not for this recurring obsession with the way of fear, Egypt would have invented the car alongside the pyramids. And we would have already established settlements on other planets.
The statutes and law teach us how to govern and come to understand the inner workings of the mind and heart. And how it's from these we establish the ideas, attitudes and beliefs; the preferences, drivers and convictions; the perspective and emotional states, that create the world we live in.
Each one of us comes to recognize ourselves as a vital, unique piece in the puzzle of humanity.
The statutes and law are a "how to" manual for getting the best results from life, as the manual in the car's glovebox shows us how to get the best results from our vehicle. The difference between the car and us is when we wire ourselves habitually in accordance to life's best practices, it activates God's Spirit in us to open secrets of God's "obvious" hidden things, revealing they'd been right there, staring us in the face the whole time.
Revelation explodes, like a Big Bang occurring in the brain, revealing how ridiculously unnecessarily hard we'd up to this point been making our lives. The Iron Maiden falls off, broken into pieces. Everything just shifts into alignment, love--real, 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 love--ignites. And then we see how the world's manual of fear, that had bound us to our own personal back-and-forth rep count for so long, is binding others. And we recognize them as extensions of ourselves, and us as extensions of them. Having been exactly where they are, is it any wonder we'd want to help them trade one manual in for another?
Why did "the men of Ephraim" turn back on the day of battle? (78:9) "[T]hey did not keep God's covenant and refused to live by His law" (78:10). In other words, they chose the world's manual of fear over God's manual of faith. They chose chaos over order. Loss over gain.
"But my righteous one will live by faith. And I take no pleasure in the one who shrinks back." "But we do not belong to those who shrink back and are destroyed, but to those who have faith and are saved" (Hebrews 10:38-39).
The men of Ephraim chose fear over faith and made themselves as part of the club of people who shrink back. They had the external tools they needed to win, being "armed with bows," but they lacked the internal tools, having failed to "keep God's covenant and refused to live by His law" (78:10). So, they contracted.
Comparatively, the people God freed from the bonds of slavery in Egypt bare little resemblance to the people whom Jesus helped according to their faith. But the latter stood on the shoulders of the former.
We wouldn't have the faith we have today if not for God's example to those who had little to no faith in God yesterday. Asaph lists all "the wonders [God] had shown [the Hebrews]." "But they continued to sin against Him, rebelling in the wilderness against the Most High" (78:11-17). Despite all that God had done for them, "they did not believe in God or trust in His deliverance" (78:22). Yet He provided for them the desires of their every complaint.
God did this through them for us. His actions, like all actions, were seeds, sown to become our faith today.
The Hebrews whom God delivered through Moses were all but stripped of their faith and humanity beneath the generations of oppressive slavery they endured. They'd been torn down to the base animal instincts of being solely concerned about food. But God showed that He had to start anew, meeting His people where they were as an investment in the next generation, and each successive generation that would come after. God's actions were a statement of 'Do what you can with what you have where you are.'
Asaph emphasized the Pong effect of God's people bouncing back and forth from fear to faith, faith to fear. They'd pick up the world's fear manual and operate according to that until it led them to the only place it can take anyone: loss, misery and pain. From this place they'd cry out to God for help, though just to get out of the trouble they'd gotten themselves into.
"Yet He was merciful, He forgave their iniquities and did not destroy them. Time after time He restrained his anger and did not stir up his full wrath. He remembered that they were but flesh, a passing breeze that does not return" (78:38-39).
When the Hebrews were brought out of Egypt there was a moment when they stood in "the valley of the shadow of death," the space in between the known and the unknown, the past and the future; between "impossible" and "Im possible." They had to shift from living according to fear to living according to faith. The known past was at their back and the unknown future in front of them. And on the other side of every miracle provision and protection provided, they returned to the way of fear.
How many people do we know who aren't happy unless they're miserable? For them pain is pleasure and pleasure is pain.
Though the Israelites constantly fought against faith with fear, God kept taking care of them like a mother feeds and protects a colic baby. God did this for 40 years on a journey that otherwise, if they'd just believed, would have taken about four days. This is because the adults of the group grew to know only reliance on their Egyptian oppressors to provide for their needs. But the children brought out of Egypt and those born and raised in the wilderness grew up knowing only reliance on God to provide for them.
The scales of consideration within the second generation weren't split between slavery and freedom. They weren't weighed more heavily toward the provisions of captivity. The second generation wasn't institutionalized.
In one generation faith matured to where it needed to be to get God's people from Moses to David. And then it matured further from David to Jesus. And now from Him to where we are today.
We don't want to take for granted the "how to" nature "hidden" behind the law. It has only ever pointed to love as being our source of guidance. Once we internalize the source, we become a walking prayer, a living Psalm. Our life comes to embody the purpose of the law:
"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
"Love never fails" (1 Corinthians 13:4-8).
This is the parable, the "superiority in mental action," that changes everything.