Keep It in the Heart

The Ancient Near East in general, and the Hebrew people in particular, bore an ancient legacy of the heart-mind. While it’s obvious not everyone was heart-led, it is also obvious that Scripture took seriously the existence of the heart-mind as the core of human awareness in this world. Thus, we see frequent references to a “purity of heart” that translates roughly to a clarity of commitment.

So the entire Law of Moses presumes the heart as the highest faculty of human awareness. You could obey the Law without it and probably get by in a Covenant Nation, but you would never understand what the Law was for. It was designed to prepare the mind for proper obedience from the heart. It conditioned the mind to think along the lines of the moral fabric in Creation, God’s moral character. Thus, the mind was properly prepared to respond and implement from this frame of reference the demands of conviction.

Paul assumes this heart-led awareness in his writing. Not that he expected every Gentile to already have it, but that his writing makes little sense without first engaging that higher faculty. His writing presumes an awareness of the very personal nature of things. Not subjective as Western minds conceive of it, but that Creation was alive, and that all things in it were alive; every human experience bore a life of its own. He presumes you understand that spirituality was not cerebral, but a personal and living communion with God. Justice cannot be objectified, but is inherently a matter of personal communion with the Person of God. It’s organic and alive; that’s the nature of reality. Nothing is inert and passive in that worldview. The dominating assumption about reality is that all things are alive and in some sense sentient. That’s the logic on which the heart operates.

Thus, we follow Christ — not as a body of principle, but as a living Person who might as well be walking alongside us every moment of the day. He is the ultimate expression of what the Law meant to offer us. I wrote in my notes on Galatians:

Paul lays the theological foundation for declaring the Law of Moses dead. This is not about good deeds in general, but specifically about the Law of Moses and particularly as expressed in Pharisaical teachings. While we might find that the original Law of Moses symbolized a path to spiritual truth, the Law itself was not that truth. To further remove the Law by making it an empty ritualistic observance as practiced by the Pharisees was utterly pointless. That sort of religion was wholly an effort by man to please a false god of human imagination, a perverted image blasphemously labeled “Jehovah.”

The Law was a gateway, awakening the need for spiritual redemption. Observing Moses had nothing to do directly with saving souls from eternal damnation. It was a system by which deeper truth could be discovered, but the system required a nation to live it. Israel failed miserably, losing it for herself and for everyone who should have looked to them for answers. Pharisaism only deepened their loss. For that reason, God sent His Son to pay the price for our sins, to make a path to come before Him and receive His holiness as a grant of grace. Christ joined lawful and faithful living into a continuity with eternity. A new standard of holiness would arise from a completely new covenant. Every element of the Old Covenant was under review; the Talmud was rejected flatly as a perversion before that process began. Pharisaical Jews doing their best according to the Talmud stand doubly condemned. If God requires that they find their salvation by faith in Christ, how could returning to the Pharisaical Law bring any hope to Gentiles? For a Christian to cling to the Talmud was saying Jesus sponsored sin.

Today we hardly suffer the infestation of the Judaizers as in those days. Instead, most of the mainstream Christian religion is so deeply Judaized that we have to start from scratch all over again. And with the First Century Christians, we don’t organize to dismantle the old dead religion, but we simply move away and hope to attract a few who might notice that we aren’t under that bondage any longer. I don’t know if we should expect a fresh wave of “Judaizers” to infiltrate our work these days, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Keep it in the heart and keep it mystical.