Guest Post – Hafak – “To flip over or turn around”

Written by Daniel:

Hafak – ‘to flip over or turn around’

Jonah 3:4 – “Jonah began by going a day’s journey into the city, proclaiming, ‘Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.'”

Deuteronomy 23:5 – “However, the Lord your God would not listen to Balaam but turned the curse into a blessing for you, because the Lord your God loves you.“

Many times the urge to cross-dress or present myself as an attractive woman made me feel everything in my life was upside down. Why was my body bony instead of slinky? Hairy instead of smooth? Why did I have to wear boring boy’s clothes instead of beautiful girl’s clothes? It felt like everything was the wrong way round. I was knocked sideways too by other people’s reactions when I dressed up. A few positive responses and admiration, but also disgust and mockery. The opposite of what I was expecting, or at least hoping for.

These opposites and upside-downs play into my walk with God too: darkness instead of light, guilt and shame instead of fun and acceptance, dryness where I’d longed for an abundance of living water. Opposites and upside-downs.

Jonah’s life was full of these extremes. “Get up and go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it!” God told Jonah. But Jonah headed 180 degrees in the opposite direction: down to Joppa, down onto the boat, down into the hold. And ultimately down to the bottom of the sea. When we go in the opposite direction to where God tells us, we start making stupid decisions that don’t make any sense when we think about them later.

But even though Jonah did the opposite of what he should have, God was not done with him. He flipped things around, sending a big fish to bring Jonah back up to the surface and effectively back from death to life. God is the world’s best at giving second chances.

So Jonah went to Nineveh after all, and deep within the enemy city he began preaching a short sermon: “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown” (Jonah 3:4). I discovered that the word “overthrown” is the Hebrew word hafak, which literally means to turn through 180 degrees. Jonah didn’t like these people. He figured they were God’s enemies, and deserved to be “turned over” – overthrown, or destroyed. Have your struggles with cross-dressing ever made you feel like you’re being destroyed? Put into an impossible situation and then condemned by God into the bargain?

But here’s the thing: God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts, and He is full of mercy. Astonishingly, He moved in the hearts of the citizens of Nineveh, despite all their previous evildoing, and they proclaimed a fast, cried out to God and repented. It’s one of the most amazing acts of corporate repentance in the Bible. You could say that God did indeed rotate them through 180 degrees… but it was horizontal instead of vertical. Instead of overthrowing them, He completely turned them around. Instead of a horrible catastrophe, we end up with one of the most amazing examples of grace and repentance in human history: an entire idolatrous city turned to God! Is anything impossible for Him?

This same word hafak turns up in the Balaam story too. Balaam was a prophet, but Israel’s enemies hired him to curse Israel. Then God steps in and turns everything upside down: no matter how hard Balaam tries to curse Israel, he ends up blessing them. Again and again! Moses sums up what happened:

They hired Balaam son of Beor … to pronounce a curse on you. However, the Lord your God would not listen to Balaam but turned (hafak’d) the curse into a blessing for you, because the Lord your God loves you. (Deut. 23:4b-5)

Friend, God is a specialist in turning bad situations around and transforming them for good. He did it for Jonah despite his blatant disobedience. He did it for the Ninevites even though they were his enemies. “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” The Cross changes everything. People living in darkness saw light. Dead people came to life. And the Cross gives us hope when we are feeling everything is upside down and back-to-front. When we trust in Jesus, He gives us a soft heart of flesh instead of a hard heart of stone, and our very desires begin to change. The old idols we used to love start to sound more like nagging salesmen, and we gain a freedom to begin living as the men and women God always created us to be.

Will you invite this “turning-things-around” God to step into your upside-down mess and transform you for His glory?

Written by Daniel

Image from Basile Morin – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66704940