Speaker 1: What if the most personal thing God ever said to
Speaker 1: you was written down two seven hundred years ago, not
Speaker 1: written for a nation, not written for a congregation, not
Speaker 1: written for people who had their lives together, or who
Speaker 1: prayed enough, or who figured out the right theology, written
Speaker 1: for you. There is a blessing in the Bible that
Speaker 1: has been spoken over human beings for more than two
Speaker 1: and a half millennia, spoken at weddings, spoken over newborns,
Speaker 1: spoken over soldiers going into battle, spoken at funerals, and
Speaker 1: spoken every single week inside synagogues across the ancient world.
Speaker 1: Most people who know it have heard it their whole lives.
Speaker 1: Most of them have no idea what it actually says,
Speaker 1: because what is hiding inside the original Hebrew of this
Speaker 1: blessing is not what the English sounds like. Eeteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: archaeologists found physical proof of this blessing buried inside a
Speaker 1: tomb in Jerusalem, two tiny silver scrolls, smaller than your thumb,
Speaker 1: and what was written on them changed everything scholars thought
Speaker 1: they knew about this text. The blessing is three verses long,
Speaker 1: numbers six twenty four to twenty six, and in those
Speaker 1: three verses, the original Hebrew does something that disappears completely
Speaker 1: in every English translation. It speaks directly to one person,
Speaker 1: not the crowd, not the church. You and the reason
Speaker 1: that matters is the reason you are going to want
Speaker 1: to stay until the very end of this video. Numbers
Speaker 1: six twenty four to twenty six. The aron Ick Blessing.
Speaker 1: Most people who have spent any time in church or
Speaker 1: synagogue know this text. It shows up on wall art,
Speaker 1: it gets recited at the end of worship services. It
Speaker 1: is one of the most quoted passages in the entire Bible.
Speaker 1: The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make
Speaker 1: his face shine on you, and be gracious to you.
Speaker 1: The Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.
Speaker 1: Beautiful words, familiar words. But here is what most people
Speaker 1: have never been told. In the original Hebrew. Every single
Speaker 1: pronoun in this blessing is singular. Not you all, not
Speaker 1: your people, not everyone gathered here. The Hebrew uses a
Speaker 1: second person singular form, meaning this blessing was constructed to
Speaker 1: be spoken directly to one specific individual at a time,
Speaker 1: like the priest was leaning in close and saying these
Speaker 1: words to you personally, just you, no one else in
Speaker 1: the room. That might sound like a small detail but
Speaker 1: it is not. It means that the God who created
Speaker 1: the universe, the God who set the galaxy's spinning, who
Speaker 1: spoke light into existence, who holds every atom of everything
Speaker 1: that exists together right now, designed this blessing to land
Speaker 1: on one human face at a time, not a nation,
Speaker 1: not a category you. Bruce Waltkey, one of the most
Speaker 1: respected Old Testament scholars of the last century, points out
Speaker 1: that this singular structure was intentional from the very beginning.
Speaker 1: God did not dictate this blessing to Moses so that
Speaker 1: it could be prayed over crowds. He dictated it so
Speaker 1: that each person could receive it as a direct personal declaration.
Speaker 1: That is the first thing the Hebrew tells you that
Speaker 1: the English cannot consider what was buried in Jerusalem. Around
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine, Professor Gabriel Barquey was leading an archaeological
Speaker 1: excavation at a site called katef Hinoum, a burial complex
Speaker 1: located southwest of the Old City of Jerusalem. The site
Speaker 1: had been so extensively explored over the years that most
Speaker 1: people assumed there was nothing left to find. At one point,
Speaker 1: the chambers had even been used to store rifles during
Speaker 1: the Ottoman period. Nobody expected anything significant, but a thirteen
Speaker 1: year old volunteer stumbled onto something that changed the field
Speaker 1: of biblical archaeology forever. A partial roof collapse had sealed
Speaker 1: off one chamber and protected its contents, and when the
Speaker 1: team excavated that chamber, they found more than one Sea
Speaker 1: woes are on ancient objects, pottery, bronze and iron artifacts,
Speaker 1: gold and silver jewelry, and two tiny silver ss They
Speaker 1: were rolled up so tightly they could not be unrolled
Speaker 1: for years. The metal was fragile, the contents were unknown. Eventually,
Speaker 1: a team of researchers used advanced photographic enhancement technology to
Speaker 1: read the inscriptions without physically unrolling the scrolls. What they
Speaker 1: found stopped the scholarly world cold. The scrolls contained a
Speaker 1: version of the aaron Ick blessing from number six, and
Speaker 1: they were dated to the late seventh or early sixth
Speaker 1: century before Christ. That makes them the oldest fragment of
Speaker 1: scripture ever physically recovered from the ancient world, older than
Speaker 1: the Dead Sea scrolls by at least six hundred years.
Speaker 1: People were carrying these words on their bodies in ancient
Speaker 1: Jerusalem in tiny silver containers worn as protection the way
Speaker 1: we might keep a Bible verse on a note card
Speaker 1: in our wallet. But why why would someone carry a
Speaker 1: blessing on a metal scroll and wear it on their body?
Speaker 1: What did they believe was inside these words that made
Speaker 1: them worth carrying like that? According to scholar Jeremy Smoak,
Speaker 1: who has studied the function of protective inscriptions in ancient
Speaker 1: Israelite culture, one of the scrolls invokes God using a
Speaker 1: title that most people have never heard, the rebuker of evil,
Speaker 1: a being of such supreme authority that even the most
Speaker 1: hostile forces in the universe submit to his command. The
Speaker 1: blessing was not decoration, it was a shield. And to
Speaker 1: understand why, we have to go inside the Hebrew text itself.
Speaker 1: This blessing is built on six verbs, six actions, six
Speaker 1: movements of God toward one specific person, and each one
Speaker 1: of those verbs, when you look at them in the
Speaker 1: original Hebrew, reveals something that completely changes what you think
Speaker 1: this blessing is doing. Let's start at the beginning. The
Speaker 1: first verb is the Hebrew word baraqu we translate it
Speaker 1: bless but the way it appears in this text is
Speaker 1: not the simple form of the word it appears in
Speaker 1: what Hebrew Grammarians call the pe l stem. This next
Speaker 1: detail matters more than it might seem at first. In Hebrew,
Speaker 1: verbs have different intensities. There is a simple form for
Speaker 1: a basic action, and there is the peel form, which
Speaker 1: communicates that the action is being done with maximum force,
Speaker 1: maximum engagement, and maximum personal intent. Think of the difference
Speaker 1: between someone giving you a birthday card and someone driving
Speaker 1: three hours to show up at your door on your birthday.
Speaker 1: Same action comple deletely different level of investment. When the
Speaker 1: blessing says the Lord bless you, the Hebrew p L
Speaker 1: form means God is not passively wishing you well. He
Speaker 1: is actively intensively, with the full force of his divine will,
Speaker 1: empowering you to flourish. Bruce Waltke makes this distinction crystal clear.
Speaker 1: The p L form of baraq is not a declaration
Speaker 1: of good intentions. It is what Waltke calls a real
Speaker 1: transfer of power and favor. Something is actually moving from
Speaker 1: God toward you, something with substance, something that produces results.
Speaker 1: Waltke connects this back to Genesis one Tute Sirchemunds and
Speaker 1: Thorn twenty eight, when God blessed Adam and Eve. The
Speaker 1: Hebrew is the same word the same form, and what
Speaker 1: followed immediately was fruitfulness, multiplication, expansion, the capacity to fill
Speaker 1: the earth. So the very first word of the ironic
Speaker 1: blessing is telling you this God is not crossing his
Speaker 1: fingers and hoping things go well for you. He is
Speaker 1: releasing something real into your life, something that was always
Speaker 1: meant to produce fruit. Now here is where it gets layered.
Speaker 1: The second verb immediately follows schamar, translated keep or protect,
Speaker 1: but the Hebrew root means something far more active than
Speaker 1: our English word protect implies. The literal root meaning of
Speaker 1: samar is to pay careful and continuous attention, like a
Speaker 1: soldier on a city wall who never looks away, never
Speaker 1: steps away from his post, never stops scanning. This same
Speaker 1: word appears in Genesis two fifteen. God places Adam in
Speaker 1: the garden and tells him to shamar it to guard it,
Speaker 1: to keep careful watch over it, because it was precious
Speaker 1: and it needed protecting. Now God is using that same
Speaker 1: word about you. Bruce Waltke points out that the pairing
Speaker 1: of Barak and Shamar bless and keep, follows a pattern
Speaker 1: throughout the entire Exodus story. God first provides and then
Speaker 1: God protects what he provides. He gave manna and made
Speaker 1: sure it did not rot. He opened the Red Sea
Speaker 1: and then shut it behind his people. He gave the
Speaker 1: land and then fought for Israel's ability to stay in it.
Speaker 1: God never gives you something and then walks away from it.
Speaker 1: Michael Heiser, whose biblical scholarship shaped an entire generation of
Speaker 1: serious Bible students, took this even further. Heiser pointed out
Speaker 1: that the ancient Israelite did not live in a way
Speaker 1: world that felt safe the way we imagine safety. They
Speaker 1: understood that there were hostile forces in the spiritual realm,
Speaker 1: real ones, and they believed, based on texts like this,
Speaker 1: that God had placed his own divine authority between his
Speaker 1: people and everything that would try to harm them. That
Speaker 1: is the shamer of God, not a vague feeling of comfort,
Speaker 1: a real, living, watchful presence standing between you and what
Speaker 1: wants to destroy you. Psalm Wonder twenty one is a
Speaker 1: meditation on this one word. The word Shamar appears six
Speaker 1: times in eight verses. He who keeps you will not slumber.
Speaker 1: He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The
Speaker 1: Lord is your keeper. The Lord will keep your going
Speaker 1: out and your coming in from this time forth and forever.
Speaker 1: Twenty one is not a poem about good vibes. It
Speaker 1: is a theological statement about a God who has committed
Speaker 1: to watching over you every moment of every day, without
Speaker 1: a single break. Two verbs Barak and shamar. God empowers you,
Speaker 1: and God guards what he has empowered. Now the blessing
Speaker 1: moves into its second verse, and this is where things
Speaker 1: get almost too beautiful to take in all at once.
Speaker 1: May the Lord make his face shine on you. The
Speaker 1: Hebrew behind make shine is a causative verb form. It
Speaker 1: means God is causing light to radiate from his face
Speaker 1: toward you, and the word for face here pon him,
Speaker 1: is one of the most theologically loaded words in all
Speaker 1: of scripture. In the ancient Near East, the face of
Speaker 1: a god was everything. When a god's face was turned
Speaker 1: toward you, it meant favor, acceptance, joy, protection. When a
Speaker 1: god's face was hidden, when the deity turned away, it
Speaker 1: meant abandonment, judgment, disaster. The texts of ancient Babylon are
Speaker 1: full of prayers begging the gods to stop hiding their faces,
Speaker 1: because a hidden face meant you were on your own
Speaker 1: so when this blessing declares that God will make his
Speaker 1: face shine on you, it is announcing the complete opposite
Speaker 1: of abandonment. It is saying that God is looking at
Speaker 1: you the way a father looks at his child, with joy,
Speaker 1: with warmth, with delight. Heiser connected this to what the
Speaker 1: Hebrew scriptures call the glory of God, that luminous, visible,
Speaker 1: overwhelming manifestation of his presence, the cloud and fire in
Speaker 1: the wilderness, the light that filled the tabernacle so completely
Speaker 1: that even Moses could not enter, the presence that the
Speaker 1: Hebrew people called the sho kaina. When the priest spoke
Speaker 1: these words over one person, he was invoking that same
Speaker 1: living presence to rest on them personally. And then the
Speaker 1: fourth verb hanan translated be gracious. The Hebrew root of
Speaker 1: hanan is the word for grace, but not grace in
Speaker 1: the watered down way we sometimes use it. This is
Speaker 1: favor given to someone who has not earned it and
Speaker 1: does not deserve it. It is pure, chosen, sovereign love.
Speaker 1: In Exodus thirty three, when Moses asks God to show
Speaker 1: him his glory, God responds with these exact words, I
Speaker 1: will be gracious to whom I will be gracious. The
Speaker 1: Hebrew verb is hanan, and what God is saying is
Speaker 1: that his grace is not a reward system, It is
Speaker 1: a sovereign decision of his own heart. Waltke in his
Speaker 1: Old Testament theology connects hanan to the great self disclosure
Speaker 1: of God. In Exodus thirty four, when the Lord passes
Speaker 1: before Moses and declares who he is. The first thing
Speaker 1: he says is this the Lord, the Lord, a God,
Speaker 1: merciful and gracious. The word there is from the same
Speaker 1: root hanan. It is how God defines himself before he
Speaker 1: says anything else, which means when you receive this blessing,
Speaker 1: you are receiving favor from a God who chose grace
Speaker 1: as the very center of his identity. Now four verbs
Speaker 1: in you might be asking, where is all of this going?
Speaker 1: What is the point of these six Hebrew verbs? The
Speaker 1: fifth verb answers that question in a way you are
Speaker 1: not a expecting. May the Lord lift up his face
Speaker 1: toward you. The Hebrew word is nasa, meaning to lift,
Speaker 1: to carry, to raise, and scholars, including Chaiem Cohen, who
Speaker 1: have studied the parallel literature of the ancient Near East,
Speaker 1: draw a careful and important distinction between verse twenty five
Speaker 1: and verse twenty six. Making the face shine, they argue,
Speaker 1: communicates emotion, the joy and delight God has toward you,
Speaker 1: But lifting the face communicates something different. It communicates decision.
Speaker 1: It means God has made up his mind to give
Speaker 1: you his full attention, not divided attention, not occasional attention,
Speaker 1: full attention, committed, sustained, turned toward you, and held there.
Speaker 1: Waltke connects this to one of the most staggering statements
Speaker 1: in all of Isaiah, chapter forty nine, verses fifteen and sixteen.
Speaker 1: God is speaking to people who feel forgotten, who feel
Speaker 1: like He has moved on, who wonder if he even
Speaker 1: remembers them, And he says this, can a mother forget
Speaker 1: the baby at her breast and have no compassion on
Speaker 1: the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I
Speaker 1: will not forget you. See. I have engraved you on
Speaker 1: the palms of my hands, engraved, not written in pencil,
Speaker 1: not saved in a file somewhere, engraved on his palms.
Speaker 1: That is Nasa panim. God has looked at you and
Speaker 1: then decided he will never look away. And then the
Speaker 1: sixth verb, the word that closes the blessing, the one
Speaker 1: that wraps everything up shalom. Most of us translate it peace,
Speaker 1: and that is not wrong, but it is dramatically incomplete.
Speaker 1: The Hebrew root of Shalom comes from a word meaning wholeness, completeness,
Speaker 1: nothing missing, nothing broken. Theologian Willard Swartly describes it as
Speaker 1: what he calls an iridescent word, one with many layers
Speaker 1: of meaning in the Hebrew scriptures, but with one consistent
Speaker 1: foundation underneath all of them, well being, wholeness, a life
Speaker 1: where nothing is out of place. Waltgay points out that
Speaker 1: shalam describes the original order of creation. Before the fall,
Speaker 1: everything was shalom, everything was whole, everything was in its
Speaker 1: right place, And the entire redemptive story of the Bible
Speaker 1: is the story of God working to restore that wholeness.
Speaker 1: Here is the thing that lands when you hear it.
Speaker 1: The blessing was spoken in the wilderness, in the middle
Speaker 1: of the desert, surrounded by uncertainty, by enemies, by thirst,
Speaker 1: by the terrifying unknown of a forty year journey to
Speaker 1: a land they had never seen. And in the middle
Speaker 1: of all of that, God spoke Shaloam over each individual person,
Speaker 1: not things, will calm down someday not your circumstances will
Speaker 1: improve eventually. Right now over you, nothing missing, nothing broken,
Speaker 1: everything whole. That is the sixth verb, and it is
Speaker 1: the destination the first five we're all building toward. But
Speaker 1: here is where the blessing stops being theology and becomes
Speaker 1: something deeply personally unsettling. Numbers six twenty seven the verse.
Speaker 1: Immediately after the blessing, it says this, so they shall
Speaker 1: put my name on the children of Israel, and I
Speaker 1: will bless them put my name on them. What does
Speaker 1: that mean? Why does the blessing put a name on
Speaker 1: a person, and whose name? And what does that name
Speaker 1: actually do to the person who carries it. To understand
Speaker 1: what it means for God's name to be placed on
Speaker 1: a person, we have to understand something about the ancient
Speaker 1: world that most people in the modern West have completely lost.
Speaker 1: In our culture, a name is an identifier. It is
Speaker 1: how you know which person to call when you are
Speaker 1: trying to reach someone. It tells people a part. But
Speaker 1: in the ancient Near East, and specifically in the Biblical world,
Speaker 1: a name was not just an identifier. A name was
Speaker 1: an extension of your very being, your nature, your authority,
Speaker 1: your reality. When a king placed his name on a city,
Speaker 1: that city came under his protection. His resources became available
Speaker 1: to it, His enemies became its enemies. His authority covered it.
Speaker 1: When a conqueror placed his name on a defeated people,
Speaker 1: he was not just giving them a new label. He
Speaker 1: was transferring them into his sphere of existence. His reality
Speaker 1: now covered their reality. Heiser's scholarship on the structure of
Speaker 1: the ancient world is illuminating here. He spent years studying
Speaker 1: a passage in Deuteronomy thirty two, verses eight and nine
Speaker 1: that describes how the nations of the earth were arranged
Speaker 1: under different authorities. The text uses the phrase sons of
Speaker 1: God to describe divine beings assigned over the different peoples
Speaker 1: of the world. Every nation had a governing power except one.
Speaker 1: The Lord's portion is his people, Jacob, his allotted heritage.
Speaker 1: Israel was not under the governance of any other power.
Speaker 1: Israel was the Lord's own possession, his personal inheritance. And
Speaker 1: that was not a metaphor. That was the spiritual reality
Speaker 1: that defined who they were. And the ironic blessing was
Speaker 1: the mechanism, the repeated, spoken, public declaration through which that
Speaker 1: reality was renewed over each individual person again and again
Speaker 1: throughout their entire life. Every time a priest finished speaking
Speaker 1: those six verbs, the name of God had been placed
Speaker 1: on that person. They were marked, they were claimed, They
Speaker 1: were His. Now I want you to let that land
Speaker 1: in your own life for a moment, because I think
Speaker 1: most of us, even people who have been in church
Speaker 1: for decades, carry a version of the same quiet fear,
Speaker 1: the fear that God maybe paying attention to someone else,
Speaker 1: someone more important, someone who has it more together spiritually,
Speaker 1: someone who prays more consistently, serves more faithfully, struggles less.
Speaker 1: And we put ourselves in the background of our own
Speaker 1: relationship with God, like we are standing in the crowd,
Speaker 1: hoping He notices us somewhere in the back. But the
Speaker 1: Hebrew singular pronoun says otherwise. Every single time this blessing
Speaker 1: was spoken in ancient Israel, it was spoken to one person,
Speaker 1: not the congregation. The grammar points at one face, one
Speaker 1: set of eyes, one specific human being. You are not background,
Speaker 1: noised to God. You never were. And here is the devastating,
Speaker 1: liberating truth of the fourth verb, hanan grace. You do
Speaker 1: not need to earn your way to the front of
Speaker 1: the line. The favor of God is not a reward system.
Speaker 1: It is a sovereign, uncoerced decision of the heart of
Speaker 1: a God who looked at you specifically and chose you
Speaker 1: Isaiah thirty to eighteen. Therefore, the Lord waits to be
Speaker 1: gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himself to show
Speaker 1: mercy to you. He is waiting to be gracious, not reluctantly,
Speaker 1: not with conditions attached, waiting wanting to release blessing, wanting
Speaker 1: his face to shine, wanting to fix his full attention
Speaker 1: on you and keep it there. The question the Blessing
Speaker 1: is asking you is not have you done enough? The
Speaker 1: question is will you receive it? Will you let yourself
Speaker 1: be someone who is barocked, actively, powerfully, in intensively empowered
Speaker 1: by the God of the universe. Will you walk through
Speaker 1: your actual Tuesday morning as someone under shamar, under the continuous, undistracted,
Speaker 1: never sleeping guard of the one who is always watching.
Speaker 1: Will you believe that the face of God is turned
Speaker 1: toward you right now, not in judgment, not in disappointment,
Speaker 1: but with the expression of a father who is genuinely
Speaker 1: glad you exist. This is not wishful thinking. This is
Speaker 1: the architecture of a blessing spoken over human beings for
Speaker 1: two seven hundred years, carried on silver scrolls in ancient tombs,
Speaker 1: repeated in synagogues across the known world every single week.
Speaker 1: And then the apostle Paul did something with it that
Speaker 1: should stop us cold. Paul was a Pharisee. He had
Speaker 1: heard the ironic blessing spoken in synagogue worship his entire life.
Speaker 1: He knew it the way most of us know songs
Speaker 1: we grew up singing in church. It was in his bones.
Speaker 1: And when Paul began writing letters to the churches he
Speaker 1: had planted, he opened every single one with the same formula,
Speaker 1: Grace and peace to you from God, our Father, and
Speaker 1: the Lord Jesus Christ. Every letter Romans first and Second, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians,
Speaker 1: every single one. Biblical scholars who study the way New
Speaker 1: Testament writers echoed the Hebrew scriptures have noted something important here.
Speaker 1: Paul's opening greeting is not a casual pleasantry. It is
Speaker 1: a direct echo of the last two elements of the
Speaker 1: aaran ick blessing. Be gracious to you Hanan in Hebrew
Speaker 1: becomes grace, in Paul's Greek give you peace. Shalom in
Speaker 1: Hebrew becomes peace in Paul's Greek. Paul was not just
Speaker 1: being polite. He was functioning as a priest, opening each
Speaker 1: letter the way a priest would open a worship service
Speaker 1: by pronouncing a blessing over the people he loved. But
Speaker 1: Paul added something that changed everything. He added a name,
Speaker 1: grace and peace to you from God, our Father, and
Speaker 1: the Lord Jesus Christ. In the original blessing, only one
Speaker 1: source of blessing exists, only one name is spoken, only
Speaker 1: one person is invoked. Paul places Jesus alongside the Father
Speaker 1: as the co source of grace and peace. That is
Speaker 1: not a casual theological claim. Scholars recognize this as one
Speaker 1: of Paul's most precise and pointed statements about who Jesus is.
Speaker 1: He places Jesus in the exact position the aharan Ick
Speaker 1: blessing reserved for God alone, which means Paul believed that
Speaker 1: the name being placed on believers through the blessing of
Speaker 1: the New Covenant was the name of Jesus Christ, the
Speaker 1: same name that commands every knee to bow, the same
Speaker 1: name above every name, the same name the silver scrolls
Speaker 1: were invoking from a sealed tomb in ancient Jerusalem. And
Speaker 1: this brings us to the final question, the one the
Speaker 1: entire structure of this blessing has been building toward since
Speaker 1: the very first word. If carrying the name of God
Speaker 1: was enough to make ancient Israelites believe they were protected
Speaker 1: from every hostile force in the universe, what does it
Speaker 1: actually mean to carry that name in your life today?
Speaker 1: What does it look like in the real world, in
Speaker 1: your marriage, your fear, your finances, your uncertainty about your
Speaker 1: purpose to live as someone whose name has been placed
Speaker 1: on the palms of God. And what happens when you
Speaker 1: realize that Shalom, the last word of the blessing, is
Speaker 1: not just something God gives you, It is something you
Speaker 1: have become. Return to the blessing's architecture one final time.
Speaker 1: Verse twenty four has three Hebrew words. Verse twenty five
Speaker 1: has five, Verse twenty six has seven, three, five, seven.
Speaker 1: In the literary tradition that produced this text, numbers were
Speaker 1: not arbitrary. Three represented completeness of action. Five appeared consistently
Speaker 1: in covenant contexts, the contexts where God was binding himself
Speaker 1: to his people. Seven communicated totality, the fullness of a
Speaker 1: divine cycle, the completeness of creation itself. The blessing does
Speaker 1: not begin with peace. It builds toward peace, and that
Speaker 1: building is the answer. Think about what those six verbs
Speaker 1: actually do together. Barak, the peel intensive blessing gives you
Speaker 1: the empowerment of God at work in your life. You
Speaker 1: are not laboring alone. You are not building alone. You
Speaker 1: are not trying to produce something in your own strength.
Speaker 1: The God of creation is actively personally with maximum intent,
Speaker 1: releasing his empowering grace into every area of your life
Speaker 1: where growth is possible. Chamar, the sleepless, vigilant keeping gives
Speaker 1: you the security of God standing between you and what
Speaker 1: wants to harm you. Not every attack lands, not every
Speaker 1: threat succeeds, Not every plan made against you reaches its
Speaker 1: intended destination. The one who neither slumbers nor slim leaps
Speaker 1: has assigned his continuous attention to your protection. The shining
Speaker 1: face of God, the third movement of the blessing, gives
Speaker 1: you the presence of God turned toward you in joy,
Speaker 1: not in evaluation, not in disappointment, not waiting for you
Speaker 1: to improve before he looks your direction. His face is
Speaker 1: already shining right now. The same luminous presence that overwhelmed
Speaker 1: Moses in the wilderness, that filled the tabernacle until no
Speaker 1: one could enter, is turned toward you personally. And here
Speaker 1: is where Second Corinthians Trotter six Chokiphor becomes one of
Speaker 1: the most extraordinary statements in the New Testament. Paul writes,
Speaker 1: this God, who said let light shine out of darkness,
Speaker 1: has shown in our hearts to give the light of
Speaker 1: the knowledge of the glory of God in the face
Speaker 1: of Jesus Christ. The shining face of the aharan Ick
Speaker 1: blessing became a face. Jesus Christ is the face of
Speaker 1: God turned toward humanity. Every person who comes to him
Speaker 1: is receiving exactly what the priest was pronouncing in the
Speaker 1: wilderness three zero zero years ago, the Lord's face shining
Speaker 1: on them directly in person with full divine intensity. Hanan sovereign,
Speaker 1: unearned grace frees you from the exhausting performance trap. You
Speaker 1: are not in a cycle of earning and losing favor.
Speaker 1: The grace of God toward you is not a score
Speaker 1: on a spiritual scoreboard. It was decided before you were born.
Speaker 1: It holds regardless of your worst day. It is not
Speaker 1: your behavior that determines his grace toward you. It is
Speaker 1: his character, and his character is defined by his own words.
Speaker 1: The Lord, the Lord, a God, merciful and gracious nasa panim.
Speaker 1: The lifted face, the committed gaze of God upon you
Speaker 1: tells you something about yourself that no amount of self
Speaker 1: help or positive thinking can actually deliver. You are seen,
Speaker 1: not generally, not vaguely, not as part of a category
Speaker 1: of people. You the specific, individual, unrepeatable human being who
Speaker 1: is alive right now. God has fixed his gaze on
Speaker 1: you with the full weight of his attention, and he
Speaker 1: has no intention of looking away. Isaiah says, your name
Speaker 1: is engraved on his palms. Engraved. That word does not
Speaker 1: describe something that fades with time or washes off in
Speaker 1: the rain. Engraved means permanent. It means your name has
Speaker 1: been cut into the reality of who God is. You
Speaker 1: are held in his awareness permanently. And then shalom. This
Speaker 1: is where everything lands when you accumulate all five of
Speaker 1: what came before, When you are empowered, protected, seen by
Speaker 1: the shining face of God, covered by sovereign grace, and
Speaker 1: held in his permanent, undivided attention. The result is not
Speaker 1: just a feeling of peace. The result is shalom, wholeness, completeness,
Speaker 1: a life where nothing essential is missing, not because your
Speaker 1: circumstances are perfect, not because your problems have been resolved,
Speaker 1: but because the God who designed you has placed his
Speaker 1: fullness into your life from the inside out. The ancient
Speaker 1: Israelites in the wilderness understood this. They were surrounded by desert,
Speaker 1: by enemies, by uncertainty, by their own fear and failure,
Speaker 1: and God spoke Shaloam over them in the middle of
Speaker 1: all of it, not someday, not eventually, now over you.
Speaker 1: In this Philippians four seven, Paul writes, this, and the
Speaker 1: peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your
Speaker 1: hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. The Greek word
Speaker 1: Paul uses for guard is fru re oh, a military
Speaker 1: term for a garrison of soldiers stationed around a city
Speaker 1: to defend it. Scholars of the Greek New Testament recognize
Speaker 1: that Paul's use of this word is a deliberate echo
Speaker 1: of the Shemar in verse twenty four of the Blessing.
Speaker 1: The peace of God does not just arrive and sit
Speaker 1: there quietly. It guards, it stands, watch it keeps, it
Speaker 1: chamars your heart and mind from the inside. Paul was
Speaker 1: not writing theology. He was writing a blessing. He was
Speaker 1: a priest putting the name of God on people he loved.
Speaker 1: And now we can finally answer the question that has
Speaker 1: been building since the beginning of this video. Why did
Speaker 1: those ancient Israelites carry the words of this blessing on
Speaker 1: their bodies inside silver scrolls. Why did they believe that
Speaker 1: the text of number six engraved on metal and worn
Speaker 1: close to their skin protected them from hostile forces because
Speaker 1: they understood something about the nature of God's name. The
Speaker 1: name of God is not an abstract concept. It is
Speaker 1: not religious language. It is a living, active, present reality.
Speaker 1: When you carry the name of God, when the blessing
Speaker 1: has been spoken over you, when you have been claimed,
Speaker 1: when His name has been placed on you, something has
Speaker 1: actually happened, something real. You have been transferred into the
Speaker 1: sphere of the one whose authority exceeds every other authority,
Speaker 1: whose power is unchallenged, whose attention toward you is unceasing.
Speaker 1: The six verbs are not promises waiting to be activated
Speaker 1: at some future point. They are descriptions of what is
Speaker 1: already right now, actively happening in the life of the
Speaker 1: person who belongs to him. He is already blessing you
Speaker 1: with the full intensity of his divine will. He is
Speaker 1: already guarding you with the vigilance of the one who
Speaker 1: never sleeps. His face is already shining, His grace is
Speaker 1: already covering you, His gaze is already fixed on you,
Speaker 1: and the shalom he has placed inside you is already whole,
Speaker 1: even when everything around you feels broken. Two seven hundred
Speaker 1: years ago, a priest stood in front of one person
Speaker 1: and spoke six verbs, and God said, that is what
Speaker 1: I am doing for you. That is how I see you,
Speaker 1: That is who you are to me. The silver scrolls
Speaker 1: found in that Jerusalem tomb were not carrying magic words.
Speaker 1: They were carrying a testimony, a declaration of what the
Speaker 1: people who carried them believed to be absolutely and permanently true.
Speaker 1: That they were seen, that they were kept, that the
Speaker 1: face of the Living God was turned toward them with joy,
Speaker 1: that his grace covered them freely and fully, that his
Speaker 1: attention never left them for a moment, and that he
Speaker 1: had placed his wholeness inside their lives like a seed
Speaker 1: that could not be uprooted. They carried it on silver,
Speaker 1: because silver in the ancient world was purified by fire.
Speaker 1: The more you refined it, the purer it became. Psalm
Speaker 1: twelve six says the words of the Lord are like
Speaker 1: silver refined in a furnace, purified seven times. These words
Speaker 1: have been refined for two seven hundred years, spoken over
Speaker 1: generation after generation, carried into battle, whispered over the dying,
Speaker 1: pronounced over the newborn, engraved in ancient metal, and preserved
Speaker 1: in a tomb for two and a half millennia until
Speaker 1: a thirteen year old volunteer accidentally found them. They have
Speaker 1: survived everything because the God behind them has never stopped
Speaker 1: keeping his word. So here is the question I want
Speaker 1: to leave with you today, And it is not a
Speaker 1: theological question. It is a personal one. Are you living
Speaker 1: like someone whose name has been placed on the palms
Speaker 1: of God? Not performing for his approval, not trying to
Speaker 1: earn your way back into his good graces, wondering from
Speaker 1: a distance whether he might notice you living like it
Speaker 1: is true, waking up in the morning under baraqu walking
Speaker 1: through your day under Shamar, facing the hard things, in
Speaker 1: the awareness that His face is shining on you right
Speaker 1: now receiving his grace not as a reward, but as
Speaker 1: a gift that was already chosen for you, before you
Speaker 1: had done anything to deserve or disqualify it. That is
Speaker 1: not religious language. That is the oldest blessing in the
Speaker 1: physical archaeological record of Scripture, and it was always addressed
Speaker 1: to you. If you're hungry for biblical truths that most
Speaker 1: people never get to hear, subscribe to this channel. We
Speaker 1: go into the original languages every single week. What you
Speaker 1: just sat with is not a lecture. It is not
Speaker 1: a sermon in the traditional sense. It is an encounter
Speaker 1: with a text that has been calling your name for
Speaker 1: two seven hundred years. If something in this video landed
Speaker 1: on you today, if something shifted, share it. Someone in
Speaker 1: your life is walking through exactly the kind of season
Speaker 1: where these six words could change everything, share it with them.
Speaker 1: And if this channel has been a place where the
Speaker 1: depth of Scripture has come alive for you, subscribe. Hit
Speaker 1: the notification bell. We go into the original Hebrew every
Speaker 1: single week, into the layers that most Bible teaching never reaches.
Speaker 1: Because we believe the God who hid treasure in the
Speaker 1: ancient text did it on purpose. He did it so
Speaker 1: that the people he loves would eventually find it. Every
Speaker 1: resource used in this video, the scholarly works of Bruce Walke,
Speaker 1: the biblical scholarship of Michael Heisser, the archaeological work of
Speaker 1: Gabriel Barquey on the ketteff Hinham Scrolls is listed in
Speaker 1: the description below. Oh every claim in this video is
Speaker 1: rooted in verifiable research. We do not speculate, We excavate.
Speaker 1: May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the
Speaker 1: Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious
Speaker 1: to you. May the Lord lift up his face towards
Speaker 1: you and give you peace shalom,