From the Pastor's Study
From the Pastor’s Study
Torah and Missing Mark
May 4, 2022
When referring to the first five books of the Bible (Genesis-Deuteronomy), we normally call them the Pentateuch. This is a word derived from the Greek, and it means “five” (penta, think pentagon) “useful things/books.” Pentateuch is best translated as “Five useful books.” The Hebrew word for those first give books is “Torah,” which is often translated as “law.”
Unfortunately “law” is a rather misleading translation of the Hebrew word. When we hear “law” we think of something legal, something that we must obey. The Hebrew word has a much different meaning.
Torah comes from a Hebrew root which means “to throw or shoot something.” An arrow, for example, is shot from a bow, and hopefully it flies in the direction in which it was pointed. We have made the arrow into a symbol, and we use it on traffic signs and in hospital hallways to give us direction. The word, “Torah,” has the same meaning. The first give books of the Bible are useful not because they are meant to lay down the law as they are to give us direction. As we read those books, we discover that there are many stories of people of the past (Noah, Abraham, and Joseph, as examples), and these stories teach us something about how the world is put together and how God interacts with the world that he created. The Torah, the first five books of the Bible, is meant to shape our understanding of how life is put together and how we should, as a consequence, live our lives in this world. We learn that God shapes his relationship with us around covenantal promises, and we respond by living by the covenantal obligations (the 10 Commandments, for example).
A few days ago, I was reading through Psalm 119 (the longest Psalm in the Bible), and I discovered verse 126: It is time for you to act, Lord; your law (Torah) is being broken. We might initially read this verse as saying that we have been breaking the multitude of laws found in Exodus or Leviticus or Deuteronomy, but that would misunderstand this verse. Again, think of the Torah as being an arrow which guides us in God’s way, and ask the question: what happens if we don’t go in the direction that the arrow is pointing? We go off course. It is significant that the root meaning of the Greek word for “sin,” comes from the idea of “missing the mark.” Another way to think about it is being off target.
Years ago, when a cadet, I attended an International Camporee in South Dakota. One of the activities at the camporee was marksmanship, and the Americans who were in charge of the camporee had acquired about 50 rifles. I’m not sure how much thought went into putting 50 rifles into the hands of school-age children, but that’s what happened. They were also very, very clear about one thing: we had to handle those rifles very carefully, never allowing ourselves to get even close to pointing them at another person. We each were given about 10 bullets and had the opportunity to shoot at a target. Being completely unfamiliar with guns, I’m not sure I even hit the paper. There were no major consequences to my poor marksmanship, but at least I was aiming in the right direction. The consequences would have been a lot more severe had I been aiming my rifle randomly and pulling the trigger. Someone would have been injured and even killed.
God has given us the Torah as an arrow pointing us to how this world is put together and how we are to live in it. Sinning is missing the mark, something that we all do. To sin is to miss the target. Thankfully there is forgiveness for sin, but that does not overlook the reality that we are all missing the mark. God expects that we hit a bullseye very time, and when we don’t, we are held accountable. Again, we are forgiven because Jesus died for our sins. He hit the mark when we can’t, and he gives us his perfect score.
But let’s go back to the text from Psalm 119: It is time for you to act, Lord, your Torah is being broken. This verse could have been written for us today in Canada. Instead of discovering God’s way and trying to follow it (aiming in the same direction that the Bible points), we find ourselves surrounded by people who are aiming in all sorts of directions. Life in Canada today could be closely compared to spending time with 50 unsupervised school age boys who have rifles and bullets to fit them. Someone is going to get killed. When we forget about the Torah, which shows us where to point our lives, we don’t have anything to aim at. Since God has been eliminated from our story, few people even know where to aim. God’s directional arrows have become invisible to them.
Verse 126 from Psalm 119 is a prayer, almost of desperation: “God, please step in and give us some supervision. Life is not going well here on this earth, and we don’t know what to do about it. God, please act so that we will no longer be in danger from others or endanger ourselves.” From my perspective, it is time for God to act. How he will do that is unknown to us, but let us continue to ask him to return us to himself so that we will follow his leading and restore us to the life he created us to live. To do otherwise is to live in danger.
Pastor Gary
