Hebrew Word Study – Silent – Charesh – Cheth Resh Yod Shin 

Zephaniah 3:17 The LORD thy God in the midst of thee [is] mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.

God will rest in His love.  What does it really mean to rest in love? Does God need to love, in order to rest? Charesh is rendered in the KJV as rest, but in other versions it is, I believe more correctly, rendered as silent. 

This must be the fourth study I have done on this verse in the last six years.  It is amazing how you can study a verse over and over and over and still, you find something new and exciting.  The Word of God is indeed eternal and it is a well that will never run dry.  It seems my only pleasure in life is to study the Word of God.  I know, get a life, well for me to spend hours in the Word of God learning something new about the God I love, is more exciting than anything else.  

First, let me run through this verse.  The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty.  The word midst is qerev, which is really the word for the seat of all thought and emotion.  It is sometimes rendered as your heart.  In the Akkadian language, it is the word used for your intestines and/or stomach.  When you get anxious your appetite is affected, your stomach aches or you may have abdominal pains.  The ancients associated your emotions with your guts.  Did you ever say I have a gut feeling?  So when the Lord is in your gut, or the seat of your emotions, or more politically correct, when the Lord is in your heart, then He is mighty.  The word mighty is gavar which also comes from the Akkadian language. The Assyrians were a warlike people and gavar was the word assigned to the greatest warriors.  It means they are brave, skilled, powerful and unbeatable.  The Lord in your heart is a gavar, the mightiest of all warriors. He is unbeatable.

Then it says that this champion will save us.  But it also says we are highly favored for he rejoices over us with joy.  He is that knight in shiny armor who comes riding up on his white horse to slay the dragon and rescue his beloved princess to live happily ever after.  The word for rejoice is sus which is a loud display of joy. He will make a loud display of joy with rejoicing or simkah which is delight and happiness.  Yes, we, you and I, humble little creatures that we are, bring great joy to the Almighty God. Take that to bed with you tonight.   So the Lord will make a loud display of joy out of pure happiness.  Can you dig it, the God of the universe gets all giddy over us when we tell Him we love Him like some young tenth grader who has just fallen in love?  I mean He is after all God, He can behave any way He wants, and if He wants to sus simkah over us, that is His right and privilege, who is going to scold Him for not being dignified? 

Then this verse says a curious thing, he will be silent in his love.  That is something  I had a problem understanding. Here He is one moment just all gaga over us and then He falls silent. I was pondering this when I was reading through a People magazine in the supermarket while waiting for the woman ahead of me to get her credit card operating when I ran across the words of one of those pop stars talking about her new boyfriend. I mean she is after all a songwriter and an artist in her own right so she would say something quite poetic.  She described her love for her boyfriend as something that has grown to a level that words could never possibly express.  Well, this 22-year-old gal has picked up a new fan with this dusty old 73-year-old professor, but not like the rest of her following for she helped me solve another riddle from the Word of God. However, I am sure a year from now she will read her statement and wonder what trip she was on when she said something like that.  Still, her youthful passion and artistic heart can explain a lot more about some matters relating to the love of God than some old scholar living in his Ivy Tower who hasn’t kissed his wife in 20 years.  When it comes to understanding the love of God I would much rather listen to a young pop star in love than a translator taking a hard cold scientific approach to his translation. 

As the little songbird said, she is so in love there are no words to express how her boyfriend completes her. God is silent because He has no words that can express how much we complete Him. I like to think at this very moment, if our little pop star has not gone on to another male conquest, she is showing her joy over her boyfriend by singing to him. Just as God is so filled with joy over our love for Him and His love for us He will just break out into song.  Singing is meant to be an expression of your heart.  Do you hear Him singing over you today? I hear him singing, I hear him singing to me in that gentle breeze we have outside today, I hear his joyful song from the cooing of my pet doves and I rejoice over the fact that I may have brought some of that joy to the heart of the God I love. 

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