Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
If you found someone's lost diary (which was anonymous), and you wanted to return it, you would search for clues in the diary that could help you, some little details that could aid in identifying the right author.
Well, we have a very personal "diary" in the Bible that appears to be anonymous. It is intensely personal, revealing secrets that people don't usually divulge to anyone, like secret battles with temptation, or anguish and distress at midnight, or anxieties that get you up before dawn. It seems to be written by a very unusual person.
A clue gives away that the author is a teenager (vs. 9): "How can a young man [na'ar] cleanse his way?" A "na'ar" is someone "from the age of infancy to adolescence," says Strong's concordance, pretty well narrowing down our clue to a teenager. Another clue: this teen, whoever he is, has "more understanding" than all the University professors of his day (vs. 99). Another clue: he even knows more than the Supreme Court justices of his day (vs. 100).
Further, he tells us that he has never set his feet in a path that leads to a sin (vs. 101). I don't know of anyone who could say that except One person.
He is unusual as a boy in that "princes [did] sit and speak against me" (vs. 23). He seemed to have a knack for getting "princes" all stirred up against him (vs. 161).
Young as he was, he had lots of "afflictions" (vss. 67, 75, 107). Boys don't usually cry tears, but this one did--rivers of them (vss. 136, 145). Which must have meant--he was unusually human, as well as whatever else he was.
Rather than the handsome village athlete, he says he was "small and despised" (vs. 141), but people who loved truth seemed attracted to him (vs. 63), so he was never utterly alone until at the very end of his life when everybody forsook him (Isa. 63:3).
Many artists have tried to picture Jesus as a boy; it will do your soul good to ponder this portrait of Him in Psalm 119.
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: June 22, 2003.
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