There we were; my wife, Susan and our seven children aboard a smallish boat about to cross the Strait of Georgia in British Columbia.  We were departing Vancouver’s False Creek bound for Porlier Pass about 30 miles away.

 

Would it be all right if I give you a very basic course on navigation?  You take your chart (which landlubbers call a map) and identify your current position—False Creek.  Then you draw a line from there to your destination—Porlier Pass, just north of beautiful Galiano Island. 

 

Using the nautical chart’s compass rose, you discover that you must steer a course of 220 degrees.  In theory, things are simple.  You start the engines, untie the boat from the dock, leave the harbor and maintain your course.

 

Actually, not so simple. You need to take into account a strong northerly tidal flow that pushes up the Strait of Georgia.  Otherwise, by the time you are half-way across you will have no idea where you are.  Not knowing where you are means that you have no idea of the direction in which to steer to reach your destination – or how to avoid shallow water or other hazards.

 

A core concept of motivational and management training is identifying goals.  However there is a more basic need.  You first must accurately identify your current location.  If you don’t know where you are, you have absolutely no idea how to get where you want to be.

 

Ancient Jewish wisdom reveals this timeless truth. 

 

When Adam hid from God among the trees of the garden, God called him and said, “AYeKa,” or in English:

 

 “Where are you?” 

                                                         

Everyone reading those lines from Genesis asks the obvious question:  What kind of question is that? Certainly, God knew where Adam was.
 
We see the answer by looking at the first word in the book off Lamentations, - AYKha – which translates as “how”.

                                                       
                         How lonely sits the city that was so full of people—

That looks pretty similar to the word God used to question Adam, doesn’t it?

 

If you have learned from any of my Genesis Journey CDs you probably know that the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible is written without vowels—those strange looking little dots and lines around the letters. The exact same combination of letters can sound differently and have different meaning depending on its pronunciation in each instance.

 

To fully understand any Hebrew word, all possible words its letters could make need to be considered. For instance, if English was God’s language, pan, pen, pin, pun, not to mention pine and open would all be written “pn”. To understand what any one of them means, you would need to understand all of them. What is ridiculous in English is eye-opening in Hebrew. All the implications of a word must be considered rather than only the particular meaning implied by one particular arrangement of vowels.

 

You can see that ignoring vowels as we ought to, “where are you?” from Genesis is exactly the same arrangement of letters as the word that opens Lamentations. These four letters give the book its name in Hebrew and wherever that word appears it heralds impending trouble.

 

What is the connection?  The magic of Hebrew is telling us that not knowing where we are leads to rocky waters ahead, to the lament of despair.  God was not asking Adam to reveal his hiding place.  He was telling Adam that he was spiritually lost; “Where are you, Adam?”

 

Setting goals is wonderful. You cannot lead a family, business or nation without doing so. But in order to reach the goal, you need a brutally honest assessment of where you are right now.

 

In today’s struggle between barbarism and civilization, we desperately need to understand where both sides stand. My audio CD, Clash of Destiny: Decoding the Secrets of Israel and Islam, reveals how God provided the navigational chart with clues given in the books of Genesis and Esther. This week, it is with a heavy heart that we will donate 20% of orders that contain a Clash of Destiny* to the USO’s Fort Hood appeal.

*includes Genesis Journeys Set and Library Pack