reH - room to play!

lIj muSHa'taH pung, joH'a', SIQtaH reH.

Your loving kindness, O LORD, endures forever.

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There is a joyful collision in languages - the sort of puns that - by accident or not - give us a pause to think about meaning. One I've noted before is worth thinking of again here - two Klingon words - the adverbial "reH", and the verb "reH."

Both are spelled exactly the same - and we don't know of any connection between their meanings, but... it is worth thinking about what kind of intersection they might have. reH means either "always" (and I've used it as such to mean "forever" in the KLV, as in this passage) OR it means "play," as in "to play a game."

While it's hard to defend this as meaningful overlap, it is worth considering - for the joy we find in "play," that delight that lets us forget the pressures of our day to day concerns is an echo of eternity, the joy that God intends for his people.

I like to think of the confidence that David expresses in this verse "the LORD will fulfill that which concerns me" - despite fears or worries, David looks forward to God's care, and then he goes on to say on what he bases that confidence

lIj muSHa'taH pung, joH'a', SIQtaH reH.

Your loving kindness, O LORD, endures forever.

Spurgeon comments on this portion of the verse:

Thy mercy, O Lord, endureth for ever. ... The first clause of the verse is the assurance of faith, and this second one reaches to the full assurance of understanding. God's work in us will abide unto perfection because God's mercy towards us thus abideth.

So many of our resources -whether personal, or national or global, are limited. Yet God's resources have NO limit. And the greatest of these is his hesed - his loving kindness - his faithfulness. It means that God will see our needs through to the end. The Hebrew term "olam" that is here translated forever, or reH, means something like "the vanishing point" - that distance that is beyond all distance - beyond the farthest horizon.

My family plays an odd game called Kubb - hard to describe, it consists of throwing batons of wood at blocks of wood to knock them down. (It's Swedish - though you could picture it as a sort of Klingon enterprise). As you might imagine you can't play it just anywhere - you need enough room, enough space. When you want to play, you are happy to find a park or field with enough room.

I rejoice with David in God's loving kindness - which unlike our human love it has no boundaries - it lasts FOREVER. In such a roomy love, a love that can take me in, even at my most unlovable - there is space to play, to live, to love in God's company - forever!

lIj muSHa'taH pung, joH'a', SIQtaH reH.

Your loving kindness, O LORD, endures forever.