HEBREW WORD STUDY – PLANS – MAHESHEBETH – מחשבות Mem Cheth Shin Beth Vav Taw

Jeremiah 11:29: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

I hear this verse a lot from preachers and teachers, but I rarely hear it in an evangelistic message. Yet, in my humble opinion, I believe Jeremiah 11:29 is the most evangelistic verse we can offer. I worked with Campus Crusade many years ago and went through their evangelistic training a number of times. What most impressed me was the four spiritual laws. Their first law was of course: “God loves you.” That is a given and we hear that all the time. What we do not always hear is that second part of the first law, “God has a wonderful plan for your life.”

As I write this there is a Democratic Presidential Election Convention and I tried to listen to it but I got tired of being told how much the Democrats loved me and how the Republicans did not love me. The Republicans do not love me because they want to give tax breaks to the rich of which I am not. They want to cut social programs like Social Security and Medicare. They want to throw grandpa off a cliff. That old saying is becoming more worrisome to me as the years go by as I become more qualified to be of a grandpa age. Of course, in a few weeks, we will hear the Republicans say the same thing about the Democrats. The Democrats do not love me but the Republicans do for they want to preserve my freedoms while the Democrats only want to give me everything to control me. Etc. Etc. Etc. for both parties.

The thing about both parties is I don’t care if they love me or not. Love is not important. But love is quite a phenomenon in our Western culture. “Love is all you need.” “Love will keep us together.” The simple fact is that love will not keep us together. We need more than love. There has been much evil in the name of love. The Bible even condemns love in II Timothy 3:2 where we are told people will become lovers of themselves. Many lives have been ruined thanks to love, an emotion that is very unstable. Many have taken their own lives and the lives of others over love.

Love is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end. I love my ministry partner, but you know sometimes I don’t. I know on her end she may love me at times, but there are times she doesn’t love old Chaim Bentorah and I can be very unloving at times. Now, I don’t know what goes through her mind when she finds me very unloving. But I know what goes through my mind when I feel I don’t love her. I come back with: “But, I need her.” She is my best cheerleader, she is my emotional support, she keeps me going when I don’t want to write when I don’t want to evangel. Once that mood passes I am glad she was around to keep me going. I need her.

When I was a pastor I often had two counseling sessions for a couple who come to me to perform their wedding. In the first session, I ask the couple why they wanted to get married and of course, the answer because they love each other. I explained that is part of their vows, “do you promise to love…” Why do you have to promise? Because after a few years of marriage, financial problems, children problems, growing tired of each other and wishing for blessed singleness, they will remember their vow, their promise to keep loving? Their response is always something to the effect, “Of course, we will.” Then I ask the key question to be addressed in our next session. “Why.” “Why, will you try to keep loving when you don’t feel you love that person?” I then tell them the story of my grandparents.

After my grandmother died. I saw my grandfather cry for the first and only time in my life. As our pastor tried to comfort my grandfather I was shocked to hear these words come out of his mouth. Not that he loved my grandmother, He took that as given, but he said: “I needed her, I still need her.”

I realized then just how important my grandmother was to my grandfather and he to her. It wasn’t just loved that they had for each other. I know there were times they didn’t feel they loved each other. But it was more than that, they needed each other. When my grandfather went off to World War I, he depended on my grandmother’s letters. He needed her letters when living in that trench. Whey they started a little farm, he could not work that farm without her.

Love is not an end in itself, it is a tool, a tool to use to bring about an end. A relationship might survive without love, but a relationship will not survive if they do not need each other. That is why God does not say in Jeremiah 11:29: “I love you. He knows we are not yet able to understand that heavenly love called racham.” Instead, He tells us what we can understand: “I need you. I have a plan for you. I created you for a reason.” The word plan in Hebrew is macheshebeth which is in a feminine form. It means plans, schemes, designs, thoughts, hopes, and dreams which is a feminine form that is meant to be nurturing, compassionate, and loving. It comes from the root word chashab which means to combine separate items. God designed us, fashioned us with a purpose in mind that when combined in harmony with our desires and thoughts He is able to carry out His plans to prosper us and not harm us to give us hope and a future.

Love in the physical realm can only achieve ‘ahav which is emotional love. Emotions change, emotions are unstable. That is why telling someone God’s love them isn’t the best approach. Everyone has their own story of how they were disappointed in love. “Big deal, God loves me but if I don’t follow his laws He will stop loving me and send me to burn in hell for eternity. Some love.”

A rabbi once told how he visited a fourteen-year-old in the hospital who tries to kill himself. The teenager was a surly young chap who told him. “Rabbi, just leaves, I already talked to a preacher and it didn’t do any good.” The rabbi asked: “What did he say.” “He said God loved me and other crap like that.” The rabbi who was getting nothing but insults and mockery from the teenager said: “You’re right, it is crap. If I were God I won’t love you. You’re obnoxious, rude, selfish, defiant, and hateful. Why would God love you? There’s just one problem, He created you and if He created you He had a purpose in doing so and even though you are a jerk, you’re his only option to accomplish the reason He created you. You’re all He’s got and He needs you.”

You see ‘ahav is an earthly love. Racham is a heavenly love. ‘Ahav is emotional love, an unstable love, a love that is changeable. But in heaven, we will know a heavenly love. A love that is not unstable, not dependent upon need, not changeable. It will be a love we share with God and everyone. That is why there is no marriage in heaven, we will love everyone in heaven just as much as we love a spouse or child, and just as much as we love God. It will not be called ‘ahavin heaven, we will even laugh at the notice that such was love for we will embrace a new type of love for which God invented a different word, He calls it racham.

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