Worship Weblog
Friday, March 16, 2007
Meditation on Psalm 9: whole-hearted
Reading 2: Psalms 9-11
Psalm 9 focal phrase: “with my whole heart” focal word: whole-hearted The true opposite of idolatry is not merely faithfulness or obedience, but whole-heartedness. Especially for us today, believers who are seldom tempted to collapse to our knees at the sight of a golden calf, idolatry may not seem to be a very urgent temptation. But many of us live lives of divided loyalties, partial commitments, hedged bets, lukewarm worship. Two masters. Elijah seems to tell the Israelites that the only thing worse than giving your whole heart to Baal is giving half your heart to Baal, and the other half to God. So does the Spirit in Revelation 3, saying to the Christians in Laodicea, “You are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot.” The Hebrew words for “whole heart” are “kol leb.” The word leb and its variants appear over 800 times in the Hebrew Bible, but we seldom get its fullest sense in English (or even in a quick glance at the Greek translation, “kardia,” whose English derivatives are mostly medical, as in “cardiac arrest” and “cardiology”). The Hebrew word “leb” means the totality of a person—one’s mind, will, heart, understanding. This is the totality Jesus is talking about when he says in Luke 12, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” We come closest to “leb” in English when we say “her heart just wasn’t in it,” with “heart” meaning not the muscle but a person’s full commitment, interest, and ability. We’re in the neighborhood when we say “I love you with all my heart”—meaning the entirety of my person, and my faithfulness—although Valentine’s Day has so sentimentalized the icon of the heart that it has further distanced the word “heart” from “leb.” Especially how “heart” is tied to “understanding.” “My mouth shall speak wisdom; the meditation of my heart shall be understanding,” the psalmist says in Psalm 49. This makes no sense if you place the head against the heart, as Plato did when he identified human passions as the enemies of sound reasoning. But in the Hebrew Bible, the head and the heart play in harmony. In fact, when Solomon asks God for wisdom in 1 Kings 3, he asks not for a smart brain, but for a leb shama—literally a “listening heart.” A “listening heart” knows one more thing; while some psalms urge us to give whole-hearted praise, this one calls for whole-hearted thanks. And whole-hearted thanks is even harder to give than whole-hearted praise. In our relationships with other people, and with God, we find it much harder to say “Thanks”—period, or exclamation point—than to say, “Thanks, but ...” We often qualify our gratitude with the realization that what we’re giving thanks for was, after all, a little late, a little small, or a little too short-lived, in our view. Even when we remember to say “thanks,” we don’t always give thanks with all our “leb.” “Give thanks in all circumstances,” said Paul, who endured a lot of circumstances in which it was hard to give thanks. Pray “with thanksgiving,” he tells the Philippians, and “the peace of God ... will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Your hearts and your minds. Your “leb.”
More Meditations on the Psalms
Related Resources
The Biblical Psalms and Christian Worship
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