Hebrew Word Study – Bestow Favor – ‘Anah  Ayin Nun Hei 

Psalm 20:1 “The Lord will hear you in the day of trouble, the Name of the God of Jacob will defend you.”

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“There are only two ways to live your life, one is as though nothing is a miracle and the other is as though everything is a miracle.” – Albert Einstein

“Earning a living is similar in difficulty to the parting of the Red Sea.” Pesachim 118 a Talmud.

The Lord will hear you. The word hear is not shamah as I expected but anah.  Anah is to answer but to answer with favor, or to bestow favor upon someone one.   The word which is rendered as trouble is Sarah. This is a word used for a shout or cry from a watch tower. We look out from our watch tower and we see the enemy approaching. When we cry out the Lord bestows favor upon us.  

The sages teach that we live in a world of miracles.  The farmers depend upon rain, the sun shining and the seeds growing.  Every day we go to work, it is a miracle.  A miracle that the sun comes up, that we have our health to go to work, and that we even have work to go to. Sure, we can chalk up all of this to just good luck, or the product of our efforts.  Yet, that is probably why David concludes the verse with The God of Jacob will defend you.  The word defend is segav which means to strengthen.  The name of the God of Jacob will strengthen you.  Just hearing his name or speaking His name will give you strength. That is the strength that will help you get through each day. This strength is a miracle in itself.

We get ourselves in a tight situation, we start calling upon God for a miracle.  Yet, we are surrounded by miracles. That is His very name or reputation; He is a miracle- working God. We have the miracles; we just need them directed to a specific situation.  We call from the watchtower where we see our need, and God simply bestows His favor upon us.

We tend to think of miracles as a grand interruption of nature caused by God.  But the miraculous is a routine occurrence in our daily life. When you get up in the morning and the sun comes up, you don’t think anything about it because it has always been that way.  But for the earth to travel over 16,000 mph around the sun and to rotate on an axis at the same time, that is one major miracle, but we don’t stop to think of it that way as it has been going on all the time. 

The children of Israel had to depend upon a miracle every day.  Every morning they got up and found manna.  Like clockwork, there it was, every day.  God was faithfully feeding his children.  Yet, before long they started to get tired of the manna, they wanted some meat, something with a little variety.  They forgot that this was God’s favor upon them.  There were people in other parts of the world, who had no food, but the people of Israel always had food in the wilderness, the desert of all things and they never had to worry about food poisoning, not having enough, or even a famine. In our culture food is always easily obtainable.  We live in a country of abundance, filled with many governmental safety nets such that we never worry about our next meal. We do not understand the mindset of a culture where every day you watch someone die of starvation, where you live from meal to meal wondering if you are going to have anything to eat the next day.  The people of ancient times lived and worked just to eat. Today we go off to a job to earn money to buy a new car, a house, or to purchase some form of entertainment.  Yet, here we have people who lived their whole lives wondering if there was going to be a famine in the land.  If a famine came they knew they might die before the year was out for lack of food.  Then God takes them into the wilderness where He daily provides them with food and all they had to do was to just pick it up.  They were guaranteed their next meal; they never had to worry about a famine.  Yet, before long, they got used to this miracle and began to complain and long for a variety of greater miracles.When I was in college I once read for a blind student.  He had been blind since he was six years old. I asked him one time what it was like to be blind.  He said, “I have not seen the moon in twenty years.”  Every time I look at the moon I think of what this blind student said and contemplate the miracle of sight.  You know something, you get used to the moon.Our whole lives are a miracle. Yet, we get so used to the miracles that like spoiled children we begin to complain that they are not enough, we expect God to do bigger and better miracles for us, to improve upon the miracles He has already given us.  God wants us to live where the supernatural is more natural than the natural.

Yet, despite all this Psalms 20:1 tells us that when it comes time that we need a little extra boost in our miracles and our daily walk in the miraculous we just need to cry out from the watch tower and He will favor us.

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