An Apple a Day Keeps the...

Keep me as the apple of your eye. Psalm 17:8*

     

I like apples but I don’t put them in my eye.  Do you?  Such a curious phrase.  When I ran across it this morning in Psalm 17 I heard the serpent whispering in my ear:”Did God really say ‘apple’?”  Ok, so what the serpent actually asked Eve was whether God had really said they couldn't eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, but you get the idea.  And technically what I’m asking is whether the Psalm writer actually said “apple.” So I went to my favorite Hebrew/EnglishBible website and looked it up—and it says the word “ke-i-sown” means apple—but I was still suspicious.  So I also looked up the etymology, which I’ll admit is a little bit dicey on websites,** but that’s what I have available on short notice.  Anyway, I found that “apple of my eye” has a large gap in usage—besides the Bible, it doesn't show up until the 1600s.  Curiously this is also when the King James Bible was so artfully written.  “Apple of my eye” is just the sort of poetic phrase one might expect from the KJV.  So I went to my trusty VanGemeren dictionary and found that the root of this word means “darkness.”  Aha!  I should have known.  Apples have been at the center of trouble since the very beginning.

Ok, so technically, the “apple” is the pupil of the eye, and the pupil is black, and black is dark, so I could just stop here, but what fun would that be?  Besides, right now in my mind I have a picture of that big red apple sticking out of someone’s eye.  It’s not a pretty picture, and it looks remarkably like the image conjured by Jesus’ words about logs: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” (Matt. 7:3)  (Yes, I did look up the Greek for this verse and it does say ‘plank’!)  Both the apple and the plank are pretty effective at keeping the eye from seeing clearly.  I already know that we frail humans have trouble with this, but why would you want God to have obstructed vision? Oh, wait a minute….

So, what the Psalm writer is really saying here is, “God, don’t see me as I really am.” 

Anybody with any sense knows that God is the one person who will always see us as we truly are.  The really crazy thing, though, is that because of Jesus, it’s as if God DOESN’T see us clearly.  Through faith in Jesus, we put on a coat of righteousness (Eph 4:24) so we look pretty good, despite how we really are.  There is an awesome song about this by Bill Cantos called “New Red Coat.”  The red is because our new coat is made from the blood Jesus shed by dying on the cross for us.  Red coats are also what apples wear.  So now we’re back where we started, and those poetic King James Version translators are looking more clever by the minute.

Phew!  Now that I’ve got that one figured out, I think I’ll go eat an apple.

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*Literalists may enjoy the fact that the NLT, a dynamic translation, actually uses the literal meaning here!

**Yes, I use wikipedia.  It's way too handy not to.

Washing?

 

If I told you that I was dipping my hand into warm liquid and then splashing it around on the corners of the furniture and around the floor, you might think I was getting ready to scrub things.  But then if I told you that the warm liquid was blood, you’d probably think I was insane or having a nightmare.  Reading about the Old Testament temple rituals is kind of like that (Leviticus 9, for instance).   There’s blood everywhere.  In some of the rituals they even sprinkled it on the priest’s clothing.  My first thought in reading about that was, “That’s going to be really hard to wash out.”  I know, because I’ve had to work at getting it out of my family’s clothing.  If you don’t get to it quickly enough with cold water and hydrogen peroxide, it’ll never come out.  Seriously.  Never.  Oh, wait . . . maybe that’s the idea.

In our modern state of hyper-cleanliness it’s hard to imagine blood as something that cleans, but that’s exactly what it meant to the ancient Israelites.  One of the reasons I think this is so hard for us to understand is that we think of cleaning as something we do to wash off the dirt on the outside.  Often it’s dirt we can see—mud, food remnants, ink, grease—leftovers from our daily activities.   In our modern sophistication we’re even aware of washing away things we cannot see—germs, viruses, bacteria—but those are also on the outside.

Have you ever had a tangible feeling of being dirty on the inside?  Often our response when that happens is to take a shower.  And depending on how disgusted we’re feeling on the inside, that shower might take a little longer than our regular shower.  Sometimes afterward we find that the shower didn’t really help quite as much as we’d have liked.  This is sort of like what the Israelites were doing with the blood.  They weren’t washing away dirt on the outside, they were washing away the dirt on the inside, the guilt for the things they’d done or missed doing. 

And just like we wash sometimes solely to get rid of germs we can’t see, that only might be there, they also washed to take away guilt they only might have incurred.  They atoned for their ignorance.  Maybe that’s the most important kind of washing.  Acknowledging our ignorance means admitting that we don’t know everything, despite our great advances in all kinds of learning, and that there are things that only God knows.  This washing also means that we trust God to do what he says he’ll do.  If he says to do certain things to make up for our shortcomings, then we have to trust that this is true, even though we can’t see it happening.

But we don’t have to slaughter animals anymore to accomplish this inside washing.  Jesus was the last sacrifice, the one-time-covers-everything blood washing.  There’s a lot less work involved in receiving forgiveness now—virtually none, actually.  Believe that Jesus already did the work, and acknowledge our need of that work.  Have faith that God does what he says he’ll do.  And just to make it even easier, God gives us that faith.  We just need to use it.

Our modern sensibilities get in the way here, too.  Or maybe just plain old human nature.  The proverb “seeing is believing” rings true because it is true.  We want proof.  Empirical evidence.  But faith isn’t about having empirical evidence.  Faith is having confidence in what we hope for and assurance of what we do not see (Hebrews 11:1).  Trusting that in Jesus all the promises God makes to us in the Bible are true, and living out those promises in how we think and act and interact with other people.

Want empirical proof?  Put some blood on a piece of cloth and let it dry.  Then try to get it to come off.  Some of it might, but probably not all, unless you’ve found some super high-tech cleaner. (And if you have, let me know!)  Or better yet, ask God to show you how he changes hearts and lives.  And then keep your eyes open.  What you see might just surprise you.