“And Joseph said, ‘I am dying; but God will surely visit you…’” (NKJV)

When the NIV translators chose to use “dynamic equivalency” to translate the Bible from Greek to English, they employed a method that sometimes helps the reader understand words and phrases that may not precisely correspond to those of the new language.  That’s the upside.  The downside is that you find inconsistency in translation.  In other words, instead of a translation, you find “translators” giving an interpretation of a word, supported, of course, by the context.  Personally speaking, I prefer a stricter translation so that I may see and discover for myself the fuller meaning of the word with a little digging.

My complaint word for today is “visit”.  In the Hebrew it is paqad, and appears in many Old Testament books.  Not being a Hebrew scholar, I won’t press the issue further except to say that paqad has a variety of meanings, including opposite ideas.  As an example, take the word sanction.  Sanction can have virtually opposite meanings: to approve an action and to penalize an action; to encourage and disapprove.  Paqad does the same.  In its basic form it means to visit.  But it rarely means to drop in for a “visit”.  Applied, it can mean to visit for the purpose of blessing or punishment, to reward or judge.  OK, enough of the dictionary thing.

After years of faithful service to the Lord and Pharaoh, Joseph said on his deathbed that God would “surely visit you [Israelites], and bring you out of this land [Egypt] to the land of which he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob” (Genesis 50:24, NKJV).  So important was his point that he repeated it in the next verse.  Clearly this “visitation” of God would be marked by the Israel’s liberation after centuries of bondage 400 years later.  Looking back on what Joseph saw by faith (Hebrews 11:22), we read about the incredible power encounter it took for Joseph’s words to come true.  Satan and his minions never go down without a fight.  And the bigger the prize, the bigger the fight.

In the middle of a contrast between God’s glory and the world, Psalm 8 (NKJV) asks, “What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you visit him?”  Or as the NIV has it, “care for him” (v. 4).  Additionally we read verses like Psalm 65:9, “You care for [visit] the land and water it; you enrich it abundantly.  What land doesn’t regularly need water, except perhaps a swamp?  Even Jeremiah (27:22) wrote, “They will be taken to Babylon and there they will remain until the day I come for [visit] them…”  Another beneficial visit.  So yes, that’s what it means in the generic.

But in other places it means visiting “to punish” (Exodus 32:34, Leviticus 18:25, etc.).  So why would a good God “visit” people to punish them?  Such questions continue to remind me of both the inconsistency and selfishness of human beings — all human beings, whether they’re Christian or not.  Sometimes people act like Deists, those convenient religionists who think there might be  a ‘god’ out there somewhere doing his/her/its thing, but that doesn’t really affect what’s going on here or impact my life.  So I’m just doing the best I can, hoping things work out for the best.  Such sloppy and ignorant thinking can get us in a heap of trouble really fast.

We forget that there is a God who is the self-declared moral Creator who created a moral universe that quickly descended into immorality. This is the same God who said, “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked.  A man reaps what he sows” (Galatians 6:7).  If a person plants seeds of obedience, he reaps a harvest of blessing; if disobedience, then a harvest of trouble.  And if it doesn’t show up here, then we’ll certainly see it when God rights all wrongs.  What we forget is that when God visits us with punishment — or for the Christian, correction — in the long run it is a mercy.  For in rocking our boat or rattling our cage, God wants us to slow down, think a little, examine ourselves, look up and repent or make other midcourse corrections that will realign us with his will.  Short term negative for a long term positive is always a good thing.  Pity those who believe in no such God, who spend their entire lives living on their own with no recognizable vistitations, no temporary bumps to get eternity right.

The psalmist asked, “Oh, visit me with your salvation” (106:4, NKJV).  He has — personally and incarnationally.  Do you visit others with the same grace and mercy you received from his visit to you?