We have this certain hope like a strong, unbreakable anchor holding our souls to God himself… Hebrews 6:19 (TPT)

The Promise Beneath the Promise – The Promise Series – Part 7

Go to PART 1  |  PART 2  |  PART 3  |  PART 4  |  PART 5  |  PART 6  |  PART 7  |  PART 8

The word ‘soul' in Hebrew means “breath, the essence of life.”

We breathe in. We breathe out. We continue.

What is a soul, but our essence? The stuff that makes you, you. Not so much the blood and bones of it, but the internal spiritual mechanics of heart and personality and memory and dreams.

And hope.

I was always told that the commandment “Do not take the Lord's name in vain,” meant that I couldn’t say, God or Jesus, as I would a swear word. But for our ancient Jewish mothers and fathers, it meant something entirely different.

When Moses asked the speaking burning bush who he should say sent him to speak deliverance to the captors of his people (Exodus 3), the bush replied:

“I-AM-WHO-I-AM. Tell the People of Israel, ‘I-AM sent me to you.’” (Ex 3:14 MSG).

This is what the ancient Hebrew name for Lord, Y-H-V-H (Yahweh), most closely means, although it's more felt than explained. Y-H-V-H (Yahweh) is the source of being and the essence of being itself. In Traditional Jewish culture, you'd rarely say the name of God, in both written or verbal form, to preserve The Divine's unknowability.

This practice is meant to keep us aware of our inability to fully grasp the essence of God. Y-H-V-H (Yahweh) was (is) unpronounceable on purpose. The second commandment was about how any attempt to say Y-H-V-H (Yahweh); any attempt to capture the essence of God in a single definitive word, was in vain. It had nothing to do with what we say when we hit our proverbial thumb with a hammer.

There’s more.

Y-H-V-H (Yahweh) is a name that doesn’t just try to ‘not try' to capture a single meaning (you may have to read that twice), it also demonstrates the essence of who The Divine is when you attempt to speak it. When you say Y-H-V-H (yod-he-vav-he), and when you say them as they traditionally sound, its designed to imitate and replicate the sound of… can you guess?

Breathing.

“We have this certain hope like a strong, unbreakable anchor holding our souls (breath, the essence of life) to God himself…”

The Genesis poem of our origins paints a picture of Adam lying in the dust, being of dust, motionless, devoid of spirit and essence until something happened:

The Divine breathed into him.

And that breath ignited Adam into Adam. That pile of dust shaped into human became the carrier of the breath of God. We are spirit jars; dust buckets filled with the Divine. “We have this treasure in earthen vessels…” (2 Cor 4:7).

“You cannot ever say “God” and know what you are talking about, but you can breathe God.” (Richard Rohr. 1.)

“We have this certain hope like a strong, unbreakable anchor holding our [breathe] to God himself…”

We breathe ancient and timeless particles; we share them with every soul on the planet, past and present and future. We breathe the same energy that ignited life into Adam. And when we stop breathing, our essence leaves our body, and we return to the dust.

There’s an ancient saying that goes: The way you breathe is the way you live. You can breathe shallow and fast and short, skimming the surface of oxygen. Or, you can breathe deep and slow and full, oxygenating your body to the fullest extent.

The way you hope is the way you live.

In Genesis 18, when Sarah finally gave birth to her long-awaited son, the little life that seemed like such an impossibility, the first thing that tiny baby did was breathe. Hope in the tangible sound and sight of a newborn cycling breath through its body: the physical evidence of the co-joining of the eternal and the human.

The promise beneath the promise is that The Divine is present in, around and through it all, as close as our breath.

Go to You are Not Alone – The Promise Series – Part 8

Written by Liz Milani

1). Rohr, Richard. The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation

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