Hard Head, Soft Heart

Behold, I have made your face as hard as their faces, and your forehead as hard as their foreheads.  Like emery harder than flint have I made your forehead.  Fear them not, nor be dismayed at their looks, for they are a rebellious house. – Ezekiel 3:8-9     

I know this person – actually, there are several people I know that are like this – this one who thinks I am easily deceived.  Ben was talking the other about giving and when it is appropriate to give money to someone who might misuse it.  This person comes and gives me a story, usually pretty elaborate, fairly desperate.  It always starts out, “I hate to even ask you.”  One of these days I may reply, “Not as much as I hate to hear you say that.” 

The thing is, I know I am being lied to.  One of the things I prayed for when I first became a Christian was the gift of discernment.  I don’t know if I got that, but I certainly have the gifts of suspicion, skepticism, and cynicism.  None of us probably tell the whole truth all the time.  I don’t, but it’s not with the intent to deceive.  It’s more like changing the names to protect the innocent – and sometimes to protect the guilty.  There are details that people really don’t need to know.  It’s good to be laconic. 

Anyway, Ezekiel in general, and these early chapters in particular have always meant a lot me.  Ezekiel and Thomas, and, to a lesser extent Gideon, are the men in the Bible that I identify with most closely.  Not that I was ever called like them, but they did their jobs.  They did what they had to do.  If I had a motto it would probably be something like “Stick to it.”  To do that, you have to be a little hard-headed.  There is a form of stubbornness that is positive, a refusal to quit even when it’s hard and when it hurts and it’s not going your way.    

There is another side to all this, though, for the same God who made Ezekiel’s head harder than flint said, Be not like a horse or a mule, without understanding, which must be curbed with bit and bridle, or it will not stay near you (Psalms 32:9).  Later on, in Ezekiel 11:19-20, the Lord spoke of a change He wanted to make in His people:  And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God.

There is nothing wrong with being analytical and skeptical in terms of the intellect, but, in the end, the intellect must be informed and guided by the heart.  And the heart must be open and sensitive to the Spirit, to hear God and respond.  This has become something of an expansion of the comment I made on OC yesterday about love and logos.  We can be intellectually rigorous with regard to doctrine so long as it serves love and is motivated by love. 

What my deceptive friend does not understand is that I do not help a person because they can come up with a good story.  Usually the better the story, the less apt I am to buy it.  My head is too hard.  It’s my heart that responds to the plea the Spirit makes between the lies.

Feeling A Little Sheepish?

Who perceives his unintentional sins? Cleanse me from my hidden faults. … May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to You, O LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer – Psalm 19:12-14

The verse does not speak about secret sins, those things we know of and hide from others. It says that there are things below our level of awareness that are wrong. As Lynyrd Skynyrd said, “There are things goin’ on that you don’t know.” The Psalmist prays to be free even of those. If there are sins we know not of, could there be virtues of which we are unaware? I think so. In fact I think the true saint often does the good unconsciously. It could even be that what we do unaware reflects who we really are.

It is always a struggle for me to keep my motives pure. I can do the right thing all day long – provided I get full credit. Jesus taught us that when we give or do righteous acts we are not to let the left hand know what the right hand is doing. Keep it secret, even from ourselves. That seems a little bizarre, but it means we should not think of what we are doing as righteous. We should not think of it at all.

Luke 17:10 – In the same way, when you have done all that you were commanded, you should say, ‘We are good-for-nothing slaves; we’ve only done our duty.’

The old man is always hanging around to take credit for anything righteous. It’s like humility. An indication that I may have missed the point is having the thought flash through my head: “Damn! Ain’t I humble though!” So, too, if I find myself thinking that I must be an awfully good person to have done so much for others, I may be edging toward the ditch. Obviously I can only speculate on what is in the mind of a true saint, but I’m fairly certain they do not get caught up in thinking about their own good deeds. For one thing that draws us back into the past, while the saint is normally focused on right now.

I probably shouldn’t have gone down this road because I don’t really have any practical way to deal with what I see as my problem. I mean, if virtue is hidden from me, if I am not aware of it, how can I do anything about it one way or the other? The Psalmist prayed that God would cleanse him from hidden faults. Then he prayed that what he said and his thoughts would be pleasing to God. That might be something I could do. I could meditate on, as Paul said, those things that are true, honorable, just, pure, beautiful, and commendable. Proverbs does say that as a man thinks within himself, so he is. If I meditate on Jesus and all that He did, on how He lived as well as His death, burial and resurrection, if I keep Him before me then possibly I would be cultivating that hidden virtue. And when you think about it, that’s what it means to have Christ in my heart – not spatially but relationally.

One more passage that illustrates this concept that I’m trying to get hold of is in Matthew 25 where Jesus tells us about a coming judgment and a division of the nations as a shepherd would separate the sheep from the goats. This reference to dividing sheep and goats speaks of a difference in the very nature of the groups about to be judged. I suppose a goat might occasionally or at times act like a sheep, or the odd sheep might exhibit some goatish behavior now and then, but basically they are different creatures, with different attitudes and characteristics, different hearts, you might say. Jesus condemned the one group, the goats, for their neglecting and rejecting Him. He blesses and rewards the sheep for accepting and caring for Him. Strange as it may seem, both groups ask the same question. “When did we do that?” You see, the goats were simply being goats, and the sheep were acting like sheep. Neither one thought they had done anything special, good or bad. They were simply following their hearts.

And I will give them one heart and put a new spirit within them; I will remove their heart of stone from their bodies and give them a heart of flesh, so they may follow My statutes, keep My ordinances, and practice them. Then they will be My people, and I will be their God. -- Ezekiel 11:19,20