While
reading Zephaniah 3:17 this morning, my attention was caught by the middle of the verse. In the NASB it is:
17 “The
Lord your God is in your midst, A victorious
warrior. He will exult over you with
joy, He will be quiet in His love, He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy.
Nestled in between the two dynamic statements “He
will exult over you with joy” and “He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy”,
you have a passive “He will be quiet in His love”. Some older manuscripts have “He will renew you in His love”, while other translations say “He will bring you
quietness with His love” (HCSB), or “he will quiet you by his love;” (ESV), but
the phrase “He will be quiet” in the NASB intrigued me.
I am NOT a very good student of English grammar
much less a Hebrew scholar, but these four words, at least to me, imply that God
is going to do something to me, not do something for me as other translations
elude. So I looked up this verse on the
Blue Letter Bible app (Sandra found this phone app and it is awesome. Within it are several translations of the
bible and even options to see the original Hebrew and Greek along with the
definitions of what a word or phrase means in those languages) and discovered
that the phrase “He will be quiet” is the Hebrew word חָרַשׁ charash (khä·rash')
and it means to cut in (as in a stone
tablet), plough, engrave, devise.
And it hit me like a 2x4 upside the head!! God is in my life (midst), He is victorious in
whatever He does. He rejoices, is glad (exults) over me. He cuts in, engraves His love on my heart and He will rejoice over me
with His shouts. God wrote His love on
my heart!
I am a valued possession of the King and He etched His name on my heart and on yours as well!!
