president’s blog – “thankfulness” 11/24/09

Shoot Some Thankful Arrows (11/23/09) 

Psalm 100:4 Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, And into His courts with praise. Be thankful to Him, and bless His name.

 I was doing a short word study the other day and thought I’d look up the root word for “thanks.”  The Hebrew word “yadah” from which we derive the name Judah and even the name Jew/Jewish means in its basic form to “shoot arrows.”  I realize that it is a stretch to go from shooting an arrow to the giving of thanks so I will not try to make a case for thankfulness being like taking aim at someone with a pointy object.  I also found that quite often the word to “give thanks” is followed by the word to “praise” from which we get our word “hallelujah.”  I wondered what the difference of meaning is between giving thanks and praise. Interestingly enough, according to the Rabbis, the “Great Hallel,” the epitome of praise, is said to be Psalm 136.  Its 26 verses are said to parallel the 26 generations of mankind from the Creation to the Giving of the Law on Mount Sinai, and each verse ends with the refrain, “His love endures forever.”  But, the command which is given 4 times in this psalm of praise is, “O, Give thanks to the Lord.”  It would be impossible to separate thanksgiving from praise.  And, just to complicate things, a third word is introduced in the Psalms, “bless” which comes from a root idea, “to kneel.”  It might be true to say that the word “thanks” is about the heart, “praise” is about the actions, and “bless” is about the attitude.  All are really necessary if we are truly going to be thankful.  We must feel thankful, we must give thanks, and we must submit to the one who is worthy of receiving our thanks and praise.

We can be thankful to a lot of people for a lot of different things.  Praise in its truest sense is reserved for God in heaven, even though we sometimes give praise or honor to a mere mortal.  It seems like Thanksgiving has suffered the same man-centered shift as the other once Christian holidays, Christmas and Easter.  Apparently, we can celebrate the foundational events of the Christian faith without ever once evoking the One for whom the event was founded.  It will be common practice for a lot of people this coming Thanksgiving day to try to be thankful.  Some will share a great table of bounty and ask one another, “What are you thankful for?”  It is as if being thankful has become the equivalent of being lucky; of realizing that others are less fortunate than we are. It is no wonder that the description given of the world where God has been relegated to the level of the creature is, “they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful.”(Rom. 1:21) I am almost convinced that we need to go back farther and ask, “to Whom are you thankful?”  It is not enough to be thankful.  Man must lift his focus off of his world and his own good fortune and utter the words of thanks to a bountiful heavenly Father who has blessed us with every good gift and every perfect gift.  The question for this Thanksgiving should not be, “for what are you thankful?”  but rather, “for what are you thankful to God?”  That is where thankfulness becomes the synonym of praise.  Praise is the exclamation of God’s goodness and God’s greatness.  It is taking an arrow of thankfulness and shooting it as high as you can go.  So, don’t just give thanks.  “Give thanks to the Lord, for His love endures forever.”  And while you’re at it, shoot some arrows of praise toward heaven and kneel down before the God of all goodness whose love endures forever.