The Word of the Lord

He sent forth His word and healed them;

he rescued them from the grave....

They reeled and staggered like drunken men;

they were at their wits' end.

Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble,

and he brought them out of their distress.

He stilled the storm to a whisper;

the waves of the sea were hushed (Ps. 107:20;27-30).

During his 40 days in the desert, Jesus Himself had to come to know in His innermost soul and mind the truth of Deuteronomy 8:3:  He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

I would have to say that both Scripture passages cited here sum up the experience of the Christian.  Who has not known deep spiritual hunger and thirst? Who has not experienced overwhelming fear -- almost despair and abandonment -- and not turned to the Lord?  And who among us has not experienced Jesus awaking from His sleep in the corner of our boat to still the storm and calm the waves?

Until we go through such an experience, we probably cannot recognize the significance of "manna in the desert," feeding us with food that "neither [we] nor our fathers had known" -- the Word of God that sustains the weary and heals the broken-hearted.

I have heard that a broken bone that heals is stronger than the bones around it; the healing process has filled the bone with more calcium than it had previous to the break.  The ways of nature and of the body

speak volumes to us about the spiritual world:  those who have been deeply wounded are the strongest, those best equipped to heal the wounds of others.  But healing of our spirit comes only through and by the Word of the Lord -- he sent forth His word and healed them; by His word, the storm was hushed.

Psalm 119, the longest in the Bible, is a hymn of praise to the Word of God, calling it by a variety of synonyms:  the law of the Lord; your precepts; your commands; your word; his statutes; your decrees; the laws that come from your mouth; your unfailing love....your promise; the word of truth, your teaching.  Psalm 119 says this:  My comfort in my suffering is this: Your promise renews my life....I will never forget your precepts, for by them you have renewed my life.

The writer of Psalm 119, presumably David, so loved the Word of the Lord, the promises of God, that he used each letter of the Hebrew alphabet as the basis of 8 verses, all beginning with that letter.  The psalm is an acrostic, though we cannot read it that way in English, unfortunately, and each verse contains a different synonym for Word -- again, something we don't always see in our English translations. 

Anyone who has ever spent the night wrestling with an agonizing problem, crying out to the Lord, feeling as if "the cords of the grave [were] coiled around [him]," as Psalm 18 puts it -- and then experienced the Lord "turning my darkness into light" (Ps. 18:28) will, like David, sing a hymn of praise to our God. 

About a year ago, I bought a bracelet at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.  The bracelet bears an inscription from Psalm 46:  God is our refuge and our strength, an ever-present help in distress.  I wear the bracelet every day whenever I leave the house, putting it on with my watch.  As I was praying this morning, after "wrestling" most of the night with a problem, my cat got up on my dresser and tossed my bracelet on the floor in front of me, something she has never done before.  In my spirit, I had been hearing "He sent His word and healed them" (from Ps. 107) ever since I awoke, but I never thought God would literally send His word to me by tossing it on the floor at my feet! 

I am learning never to underestimate the power and the humor of the Most High!