HEBREW WORD STUDY – TEST – NASAH נסה
Exodus 20:20: “And Moses said unto the people, Fear not: for God is come to prove you, and that his fear may be before your faces, that ye sin not.”
So here we have the Lord sending his ten commandments and right after that there is thunder, lightning, smoke and the sound of trumpets on the mountain and the people trembled. Most reading this will assume the people trembled out of fear. Perhaps that is true. I wonder, however, that since Scriptures says they saw the thunder and saw the sound of the trumpet if this is not an indication that their spirits were open before God for you cannot physically see thunder or the sound of a trumpet but you can in your spirit as your spirit has only one sense, all your five senses are wrapped up in one in your spirit. Your spirit can see what your physical eyes cannot see, hear what your physical ears cannot hear and speak what your mouth cannot speak.
So maybe trembling was not so much fear as it was trembling under the power of God. But there was a fear of entering this cloud of going up to the mountain because they told Moses, “You go and find out what God is speaking because we might die if we go.” I believe they were so overwhelmed with the power and presence of God that they felt to get any closer to this power they would die. Perhaps I am wrong but it would help me understand Exodus 20:20 much better.
You see Moses told the people not to fear going up the mountain because God was just demonstrating His power to prove or test them so they would not sin. Sin here is chatah which is missing the mark. They were being tested so they be right on target with God. Keep this in mind. The word nasah is rendered in the KJV as prove other modern translations will say test or try. All are correct but can be misleading to the Western mind when they hear the word test. We automatically think of testing as a means to determine if you pass or fail. We test an engine to see if it works. We take a test at school to see if we learned the material. However, our English word test has another meaning very closely related but with a shade of difference. It is also used in the sense of testing your limits like a mountain climber testing his limits. There are two words in Hebrew for test. One is the word that is used here which is nasah and the other is the word bacan which is used in Psalm 11:5. Bacan has the idea of testing as we immediately think of testing, that is sure that something works or you learned your lesson. The word nasah, however, is very close to this but with a subtle important difference. Nasa’ has more of the idea of a challenge. A mountain climber will climb a mountain to test his skills. If he is doing it for bacan then he is doing it to see if he can succeed or fail, which in this case would be to determine if he will live or die in climbing this mountain. More than like he will climb for nasah to test his skills. That is to push his skills to the limits to see how far he can go. A weight lifter will nasah keep adding more weight until he max’s out, that is he keeps adding weights not until he fails, but until he has reached and discovered his limits and learned just how powerful he is.
In our Christian walk God will test us like he tested or nasah the people of Israel. He will put them through a powerful experience so they will understand just how powerful their strength and faith in God is. When God tests us it is not to see whether or not we will succeed or fail. Failure is not an option. God is testing us, putting us through the kind of trials that have the potential of crushing us so that He can strip away all our trust in ourselves so that our trust is in God alone. In other words, when we go through a testing it is only to show us how strong in God we really are, it is only to show us the power of our faith. It is like the mountain climber climbing a mountain to see how strong and skilled he really is, not to see if he will fail but to test the limits of his strength and skills.
The greater the test God puts us through the greater the opportunity we have to see how strong our faith really is so the next time around we will not fear but actually seek a higher mountain to climb. We will, unlike the people of Israel, go with Moses into that mountain.
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