Psalm 130 Continued

I mentioned two thoughts I had about Psalm 130. One was about the contrast between 'fear' and 'revere', which is a contrast I struggle with. I'm never sure what the proper reverence is. A struggle for another day, I think.

The other thought was about the word 'iniquity'. In verse 3 (NKJV) "If You, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?" Because I read too much fantasy, I actually know what the word mark means in this context. Yay. The NIV uses the phrase "keep a record of sins", which means more or less the same thing, but "mark iniquities" sounds so much cooler. HCSB - "considered sins", which is deeply meaningful in its own way, but not as poetic. The next time someone does something that annoys me I'm going to tell them (jokingly) that I've marked their iniquity.

My concordance on my phone tells me that 'mark' is a Hebrew word meaning "to hedge about (as with thorns)", which is really interesting. This word (Strongs H8104) also means "regard, observe, attend to", which is more of what I think of when I think of the word 'mark' or 'consider'. So I'd kind of mentally translated this as "Lord, if you weighed our sins against us, who could stand before you", which is of course the general idea. I really like the mental image of H8104 though, "Lord, if you used our iniquities as thorns to hem us in, who could stand/continue/abide/endure".

This brings me to 'iniquity', which actually is the word I wanted to consider (not 'mark'). According to the NKJV I have which has the concordance notes, it comes from a word meaning "bent or distorted". So in this case, the iniquity thing is like the fallen state of man, in the same sense as "if I do what I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but it is the sin (noun) that lives in me" (Romans 7:20 - HCSB, except for the 'noun', which I added).

Anyway, the whole point of this blog post, which I've only partly arrived at through a very wandering path, is the gospel, which is to say that because of Jesus, God doesn't hem us in, using our fallen state to make it so that we cannot endure. I feel like it's worth blogging about whenever I come to something that brings me to that realization.