What Does 2 Samuel 7:21 Mean?
For the sake of your word, and according to your own heart, you have done all these great things, to make your servant know them.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
For thy word’s sake, and according to thine own heart, hast thou done all these great things, to make thy servant know them.THE KEY
God’s great acts make the heart behind the promise knowable to the one who receives them.
THE MEANING
The word, the heart, and the deed meet in one movement: God acts from the divine heart in keeping with the word, and the servant comes to know what those acts reveal. This is knowledge formed through encounter with what God does. Divine greatness becomes personally knowable.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that God’s great acts are detached displays of power, revealing their personal aim: the servant comes to know the heart behind them.
THE ROOT
לְהוֹדִיעַ
le-hodîaʿ
GROWS FROM
ידע
To know or perceive; here, in a form meaning to cause someone to know.
English can make “know” sound like a fact delivered at a distance. Here, God’s acts bring the servant into knowing and perceiving, so the deed itself becomes an encounter.
ALSO GROWS
yādaʿ: To know or perceive.
יָדַע
The shared root connects the servant’s knowing to the action God takes to bring that knowing about.
daʿat: Knowledge or understanding.
דַּעַת
This branch shows the knowledge the verse describes as something the action brings into view.
לִבְּךָ
libbekha
GROWS FROM
לבב
The heart or inner self, including thought and intention.
The great acts proceed according to God’s heart: they carry the character and intention of the one acting. English “heart” can sound like emotion alone, while this Hebrew word also reaches into the inner thought and will.
ALSO GROWS
lev: Heart; inner thought or will.
לֵב
This common form keeps the verse’s source of action inside the one acting.
levav: Heart; inner self.
לֵבָב
This fuller form makes the link between inward purpose and outward action visible.
דְּבָרְךָ
devarkha
GROWS FROM
דבר
To speak; as a noun, a word, matter, or affair.
Davar can name both a spoken word and a matter or affair. The word is not detached from what comes to pass: here, the great acts give concrete form to what God has spoken.
ALSO GROWS
davar: Word, matter, or affair.
דָּבָר
This noun holds speech and the matter at hand in the same word family.
dibber: Spoke or said.
דִּבֵּר
This verbal branch links the spoken word to the acts that make it known.
THE PATTERN
God’s acts make God’s word and identity knowable.
And I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God, and you shall perceive that I am the LORD your God, who brings you out from under the loads of the Egyptians.The LORD makes his deliverance known. He uncovers his alignment before the eyes of the nations.Lean your weight on me, that I am in the Father and the Father in me; or else lean your weight on me because of the works themselves.THE THREAD
And I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God, and you shall perceive that I am the LORD your God, who brings you out from under the loads of the Egyptians.“Make thy servant know” comes from the causative form of yada (יָדַע, yādaʿ: know, perceive), and Exodus uses that same root in “ye shall know.” There, being brought out is the means by which God’s identity becomes known; the act itself is the revelation.
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