Hebrew Word Study: Wrath- Ebrah עֶבְרָה
Zephaniah 1:18 Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them in the day of the LORD’S wrath; but the whole land shall be devoured by the fire of his jealousy: for he shall make even a speedy riddance of all them that dwell in the land.
There was a conference in France for a large number of international engineers. During a break, one of the European engineers came into the room and announced: “Have you heard the latest dumb stunt by the United States? They sent an aircraft carrier to Indonesia to help the tsunami victims. What do they intend to do, bomb them?A Boeing engineer stood up and calmly replied: “Our carriers have three hospitals on board that can treat several hundred people, they are nuclear-powered and can supply emergency electrical power to shore facilities; they have three cafeterias with the capacity to feed 3,000 people three meals a day, they can produce several thousand gallons of fresh water from seawater each day, and they carry half a dozen helicopters for use in transporting victims and injured to and from their flight deck. We have eleven other such ships stationed throughout the world ready to offer similar humanitarian assistance. A reporter said the room got very quiet.
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Sure our military is trained for war. However, we hear little of the other wars our military is fighting which is a much bigger picture. Our military wages war against piracy, smuggling, drugs, and human trafficking. We have several hospital ships that in one year treated over 1 million nonmilitary, non-Americans throughout the world. They built schools, provided protection and security to the defenseless and we can go on and on. Humanitarian aid is a key component of the U.S. military. Never in the history of the world has a world-class military force devoted so much time and effort to humanitarian aid. Yet, few in the world, even in this country, realize this. That is because we don’t use this for propaganda, and very few people in the world bother to look beyond the surface. Thus, people see a warship and a powerful military, but without further information, they would never realize that the majority of our military is involved in humanitarian pursuits.
We do the same with Scripture, we never look beyond the surface. The Bible speaks of God’s wrath. Ooooo! That is bad. An all-powerful god ready to squash us like a bug. But let’s look at that word wrath. It is the word ‘avar. This is a word that means overflow. It is used to describe a river that overflows its banks. It has the idea of going beyond one’s boundaries. One of our disability drivers is a retired police officer. He told me that in 30 years he never drew his gun, let alone shot it or anyone. He made a lot of arrests without using his gun. To use his gun would be a last resort and really not within the boundaries of his duties. But if the occasion arose to protect a citizen or himself, he would have used it.
The point is, we have a very humanitarian God who will never go beyond the boundaries He has established for Himself, unless there is very good reason, to protect those He loves. Then He will ‘avar, go beyond His boundaries.
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