HEBREW WORD STUDY – VOICE – QOL קול Qop Vav Lamed

Isaiah 6:8: “Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here [am] I; send me.”

John 10:27: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me:”

Have you ever heard the audible voice of God? Some people claim they have. I make such a claim. I know: “Get the net, get the net, old Chaim has finally snapped his cap.” I realize that someone hearing voices needs to take medication. But I only heard this voice two times in my life of 70 years and there is that doubt that rests in that rational part of my brain that it was all imagined. Indeed, I heard it during a time of great distress, so perhaps it was just an emotional reaction. Except I will never forget that sweetness, tenderness, and love I heard in that voice.

The first time was when I was 21 years old and faced a bitter rejection. I sat alone in that little chapel in Culbertson Hall when I was a student at Moody Bible Institute and just wept before the Lord asking how people could be so cruel and why it had to hurt so bad. Then I heard a voice, very clear, very real and it said: “I understand, my people do the same to me.” That was all, it scared the living pudding out me. I thought someone was in the chapel. I looked around and even went outside the chapel but no one was around, they all were at the event on the other side of the campus, an event I had hoped to attend. I went back into the chapel and meditated on what I heard. Somehow in my spirit, I knew it was the qol or voice of God, like the voice Isaiah heard in his vision some 2,600 years ago.

It was a message I could not have imagined in my 21 years of growing up in a Christian home and environment. I never considered the idea that God could suffer emotional hurt over the rejection of His people, a pain so distressful, hurt like I was experiencing. I could not help but wonder if I had broken God’s heart like mine had been broken. I would never have wanted to inflict such pain on another person but I never considered the fact that I could that to God or that the rejection of mankind has inflicted such pain upon God billions of times over and over again. From that moment and on up to the present I have devoted myself to sharing this message of the tenderness of God’s heart. Seventeen years ago I embarked on a journey to discover the depths of God’s heart and I have barely begun to explore His heart. That is the basic message of Chaim Bentorah Ministries to share God’s heart and warn Christians of the reality of a broken-hearted God. A God whose heart was so broken that He sent his Son to die on a cross who physically died from a broken heart.

One can die of a broken heart. It has been medically suggested. My parents lived together for 67 years. I mean they did everything together. I rarely saw them so much as even bicker with each other. They just enjoyed being together. My father passed away in August a few years back, on my birthday actually, my mother who was not suffering any real life-threatening illness just went into the hospital that following December, just four months later for observation, passed away on Christmas Eve. No reason, it was like she willed her body to shut down. I have no doubt that she died of a broken heart.

I write this on the anniversary of the day I began my search for the heart of God, July 3, 2003. It was on that day that I heard the qol or voice of God the second time. I was in the midst of a very dark period in my life. I pretty well-lost everything, wiped out like Old Job got wiped out. I sat alone in my car bitter toward God, blaming Him for things that were really my fault. I was having it out with God when I heard that voice once again just like it sounded 32 years earlier in that little chapel at Moody Bible Institute. It said: “Do you want to be friends?” God and I have been friends ever since. The next day I was given $700 by someone I barely knew to launch Chaim Bentorah Ministries where I started to go into the inner city of Chicago and recruit inner-city pastors to join a little Bible School where I would teach them the Biblical Languages.

Crazy? Perhaps. It only happened two times and each time it was life-changing. That voice, I believe was the same voice Isaiah heard the voice or the qol of God. Qol is spelled Qop which represents a call of God. The next letter is Vav which is a connection between heaven and earth. For me that represents a heavenly voice entering into a natural realm as an audible voice and the final letter, the Lamed which looks like a hand reaching up to heaven to receive a message from heaven into your heart.

Qol, does not have to be an audible voice, it could be a voice spoken in your heart and spirit. I have not heard that audible voice since that day in 2003 and I do not expect to hear it again until that wonderful day when I see Jesus face to face. I really don’t need to hear that audible voice again for after 17 years of searching for the heart of God I have come to recognize it.

When I heard that voice it was the sweetest, most tender, love-filled voice I ever heard. Even the very thought of it still causes me to weep. I recognize that voice now in my spirit whenever I feel something so sweet, tender and loving fill my spirit, I know and recognize the voice of God and like a little lost sheep, I will follow that voice.

“Jesus calls us o’er the tumult,

Of our life’s wild, restless sea.

Day by day His sweet voice soundeth

Saying: ‘Christian follow me.’” – Cecil Francis Alexander

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