Tag: Sheol

Bless the Lord, my soul

The song for today is a chant from the French Taize community, and is (as John points out) a setting of Psalm 103.  The setting in Sing Praise includes nine short chants for solo cantor, each intended to be sung over a choir singing the 4-part refrain.   The refrain is often used on its own: “Bless the Lord, my soul, and bless God’s holy name. Bless the Lord, my soul, who leads me into life”.    

That last phrase intrigues me – “who leads me into life”.  I have also seen a version of the same song giving it as “who rescues me from death”, both of them probably deriving from verse 4 of the original Psalm, “who delivers your life from the Pit” (NRSV).  I happen to have a Taize prayer book so I looked to see how the community translates the psalm for their own worship: the relevant phrase is “qui rachète à la fosse ta vie” – literally, “who buys back from the ditch your life”. The translation in this English version of the song puts that idea into one of the cantor’s verses: “The Lord is forgiveness and redeems our life from the grave”.

All these carry the same idea, not yet the full Christian concept of Jesus dying to redeem us from our sins, but a foretaste of that, a germ of the idea.  Without God’s blessing we would all end up in the ‘pit’ of death or Sheol – the old Hebrew concept of the afterlife as neither heaven nor hell but an undesirable, eternal nothingness or meaninglessness.  A pit is a hole that is too deep to climb out of unaided, as the biblical Joseph found. To believe in God and accept his blessing is to accept a hand up out of the pit, to find meaning where there was none, to find eternal life instead of merely existence, to receive (as Jesus would later put it) “life in all its fulness”.  Which is presumably why the refrain uses the more positive interpretation: if we are bought back from death, then by implication we are indeed led into life.

Imagery like this seems pertinent at this time of Covid lockdown and isolation.  Today is the tenth and last day of our isolation at home, and even though the freezing weather has not been conducive to going out walking much anyway, it will be good to get out tomorrow, if only to the shop with a mask on.  I can get out of this little pit and get on with life in the limited way currently allowed, and look forward to a ‘new normal’ at a later time. For those who live alone all the time and cannot get out on their own, for those in prison or trapped in controlling relationships, or in unrelieved pain, it must be far worse.  For some people, even death may seem like a positive way out, and God is the only one who can lift them up.

The Christian promise is that the reality is much better than we might dare to hope.  If we give ourselves to God, then we can find peace among the troubles of this life, and know that beyond death is not mere existence in a pit but a new creation where fullness of life will be something more than we can now imagine. Bless the Lord, my Soul!

The Bible in a Year – 1 July

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this, and the introduction to the Psalms for this book of the Bible in particular.

1 July. Psalms 26-31

These six psalms cover all the main themes found in the rest of the book: crying out to God for help in times of trouble, thankfulness when he responds and helps us; praise for God’s goodness and glory; dedicating oneself to holiness, in contrast to the wicked who face God’s judgement; and the fear of Sheol.

 

Sheol (also called “the Pit”) was to Jews what Hell was to medieval Christians, only without the horned devil and lake of fire.  It was, rather, a dark and Godless place to spend eternity, and being away from God’s presence in this life was nearly as bad.  The fear was that if one’s life as not good enough, that is where one would end up.  “To you, O Lord, I call; my rock, do not refuse to hear me, for if you are silent to me, I shall be like those who go down to the Pit.” (28:1); “O Lord, you brought up my soul from Sheol, restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit” (30:3).

 

The Pit can take many forms: the darkness of depression, a sense of unforgiveable guilt (though in fact those who are aware of their guilt are very close to receiving God’s forgiveness, if only they ask), loneliness or physical pain.  The message of the Psalms, indeed the whole Bible, is that although such experiences may make us feel abandoned by God, in fact he is never far away and there will come a time when we can again experience the sunshine of his love. “For God’s anger lasts only a moment; but his favour lasts a lifetime. Weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning” (30:5). I quote here the New International Version, as this was among the first verses that I committed to memory as a new Christian. It is an important lesson: there will be times when we feel the Lord’s displeasure at something we have done wrong, but like a parent telling off a young child, he would much rather be praising us for doing well, and showing us his love.

 

Another of my favourite verses is “Into your hand I commit my spirit; for you have redeemed me, O Lord, God of truth” (Ps. 31:5), which is recited every night in the office of Compline – a good way to end the day, with a feeling of being protected by the hand of the Almighty.

The Bible in a Year – 9 June

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

9 June. Ezekiel chapters 32-34

Chapter 32 continues the woe against Egypt, but with a new dimension in verses 20-32. Here Ezekiel pictures Sheol (or “the Pit”), the land of the dead – not “hell” as we imagine it but the shady underworld where the spirits of the dead live on.  And the picture is of all the warriors from many nations across many centuries, all cast down unceremoniously into the “uttermost parts of the pit”.  This is apparently as a punishment, all for the same offence: “they spread terror in the land of the living”.  Today’s Islamist terrorists who think they are going to some kind of paradise as glorious martyrs would be better reading this, for their fate will be the same – no glory, only the “shame” of “lying with the uncircumcised” (and by implication not in God’s favour).

 

Chapter 33 contains several important principles. Firstly there is the reminder to Ezekiel (whose mouth is about to be opened to speak his prophecies aloud for the first time) that as a prophet he is like a watchman who is obliged to sound a warning when he sees danger, and will be held to account when he fails to do so.   Then, there is the principle (not obvious in the woes and condemnations that have preceded it) that what matters to God is what people actually do now, and not what they say they will do, or their previous behaviour.  To those who think of God as only punishing sin, it is important to understand this: “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live” (33).  At the end of the chapter Ezekiel is told that the people who love to come and hear him speak will in fact mostly not obey the message that he brings – something that all preachers and those who call for change in society are all too aware of.

 

Chapter 34 is one of the key passages of the Old Testament, picturing God as the good shepherd who would look after his sheep.  It is a wonderful picture of a god who cares for each person’s individual needs and wants them to leave in peace. In doing so, though, it is his duty as a shepherd to stop the stronger sheep from bullying and taking advantage of the weaker ones, and to distinguish between sheep and goats.  He also has to step in personally when those whom he has appointed as acting shepherds (the priests and Levites) have failed in their duty and acted selfishly with no care for the sheep. Jesus must have had this passage in mind when he told the parable of the sheep and goats Matthew 25) and also when he described himself as the “good shepherd” (John 10:11) – by implication saying he is taking over control from the religious leaders who had failed their people. No wonder they start to seek to get rid of him after that.