What Does Psalm 107:11 Mean?
Because they rebel against the words of God, and spurn the counsel of the Most High.
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
Because they rebelled against the words of God, and contemned the counsel of the most High:THE KEY
The counsel they despise shares its Hebrew root with “counselor,” so the rejected direction is inseparable from the one who offers it.
THE MEANING
This verse speaks now wherever God’s words meet you: they can be resisted, and the counsel within them treated with contempt. In the psalm’s movement from confinement toward release, that double refusal is named as part of what holds the reader in the narrow place.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that feeling bound is unrelated to how you receive God’s words: the verse directly links resistance and contempt with confinement.
THE ROOT
עֲצַת
ʿaṣat
GROWS FROM
יעץ
To advise, counsel, or deliberate.
The Hebrew word for counsel grows from the same root as the word for counselor. The verse’s rejected guidance is not an abstraction; it comes from the one whose nature is to guide.
ALSO GROWS
yaʿats: To advise or counsel.
יָעַץ
This verb is the seed behind the counsel being despised in the verse.
yoʿets: Counselor or adviser.
יוֹעֵץ
This related word shows that counsel and the one who gives it share the same root.
אִמְרֵי
ʾimrê
GROWS FROM
אמר
To say or speak.
The Hebrew points toward utterances, speech coming from a speaker. The refusal in this verse meets a voice, not merely words as marks on a page.
ALSO GROWS
ʾimrāh: Utterance or saying.
אִמְרָה
This related noun keeps the meaning of “words” close to spoken expression.
ʾōmer: Speech or utterance.
אֹמֶר
This branch reinforces that what is resisted is something spoken.
THE PATTERN
Rejecting God’s voice is a refusal of the guidance that could lead the way forward.
You break loose from all my counsel, and you do not want my reproof.But the separated ones and the experts in instruction set aside the counsel of God against themselves, not having been immersed by him.While it is said, Today, if you will hear and respond to his voice, do not harden your hearts, as in the embittering.THE THREAD
For a child is born to us, a son is given to us; the governance shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Father of the Ages, Prince of Wholeness.Psalm 107 calls God’s direction עֵצָה (ʿēṣāh), counsel; Isaiah names a יוֹעֵץ (yoʿets), counselor, from the same י־ע־ץ root. The counsel dismissed here shares its root with the Counselor named in Isaiah.
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