What’s on Your Heart?

This continues the two previous posts.

There’s no shortcut. You just have to do it and find your own path.

I can describe for you how scholars in the ANE would have learned to operate from the heart instead of relying on mere intellect. I’m not sure anyone can put into clinical terms the actual process of doing that. Since everyone they knew did things that way, their instructional materials — what few exist — operate from a broad assumption regarding symbolic language. Most ANE languages shared something with Hebrew: They were indicative, not descriptive. They portrayed things, but didn’t delineate in concrete terms. They could state things rather bluntly, but that was almost an abuse of the language.

Western scholars have often tried to read the ANE texts from a literalist point of view and it results in some godawful analysis. We end up with the conclusion that ANE folks were prone to wild exaggeration and saying things manifestly false. But if you approach such literature from a more ANE perspective, you realize most of it is parabolic. Sure, there are tons of ANE government and business records in mundane detail on clay tablets, but even there we see things stated in figures of speech you would have to know to understand it.

Most ANE scholarship itself was concerned with bigger, more important things. The myths weren’t meant to be historical accounts of real people and events, but symbolism regarding something about human existence. They expected people to grasp the symbolism and come to their own conclusions. The language of parables labels areas for exploration and contemplation; it’s not meant to lock down concrete answers.

When your conscious awareness is in your heart instead of your head, you start to think in terms of moral discernment. It is a kind of reasoning and logic quite different from the factual and abstract reasoning of the intellect. It allows you to sense directly the meaning of life in regards to the contextual particulars. That’s why it also allows us to sense the life force within the natural world. Those things speak to us on the heart level, and they testify of our Creator’s divine moral character.

If you confuse the issue by having a heart committed to obeying false gods, then you would still be able to hear the natural world. That sensory field from the heart does result in a usable interaction with living things. However, their message can be confused by commitment to gods that don’t exist. Yet, Paul testifies that they still had a good grasp of fundamental moral truth in the sense of not trusting their mere intellects to discern the truth. Thus, if you quoted to them the symbolic narratives from the early chapters of Genesis, they would have recognized it immediately for what it was.

The intellect is the core of our fallen nature. It is captured in the narrative of the Fall, when the text refers to the Tree of Knowledge, using a Hebrew word for “knowledge” that includes the concept of judging. It meant “knowing” in the sense of deciding, so a Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil would actually be a Tree of the Judging Good and Evil. And that would mean using mere human capabilities instead of faith in God’s revelation. It means looking at the sensory data and using your reason to decide what is morally true. And while the intellect certainly believes it is capable, it is not. It is mere flesh; it has no direct connection to the Spirit Realm. Indeed, the intellect cannot by itself even grasp the notion of a Spirit Realm.

The intellect has all confidence that it can ignore any external input and come up with a usable answer on its own. So it tends to ignore the heart whenever it can. It can fool your conscious awareness into thinking there is nothing above it. But your conscious awareness is not confined to the intellect. Quite often, simply telling someone that the heart is a separate faculty is enough for someone to realize that it’s true. It frees their consciousness to move more into the heart. From there, they begin to see the world in an entirely new way.

This process is virtually the same as encouraging someone to live by their convictions, if we add that convictions are not mere sentiment, but the finger of God writing on their hearts. Saying it in those terms tends to get people in a position to recognize what it means to be heart-led. Convictions are your personal moral fabric, and will often contradict your reason and intellectual knowledge. If you can fight your fleshly reliance on reason and knowledge, and trust the instincts of your convictions, it’s very nearly the same as being heart-led. The difference is that your convictions won’t put you in a position to make sense of what your heart’s sensory field can pick up from the world around you.

It still requires a conscious effort to move out of your brain and into your heart, and then you have to at least imagine that nature celebrates and worships the Creator. If you can imagine it, then you are likely to begin hearing that worship. Oddly enough, nature responds on a heart level even when you speak audibly with your mouth. It’s designed to do that. Do you recall how Jesus often commanded natural forces verbally and they obeyed?

All I can do is tell you that this is the way ANE folks in general, and ancient Hebrews in particular, looked at their world. Moses held his staff over the Reed Sea and the waters moved to either side to make a path. He heard a message in his heart from a glowing bush. He didn’t trust his fleshly senses to tell him the whole story, but if he had listened to his heart instead of his flesh, he could have spoken to the rock in his halting tongue and made water come forth.

You probably don’t have a promise from God to make water come out of rocks, but I’m willing to bet you could sit on one and eventually catch it talking to you about the wonder of our Creator. And if you get used to the idea of talking to natural life, and hearing back from it in your sensory heart, you can eventually have some useful interactions on things your faith does tell you that you can have from your Father’s creatures. I can assure you that the natural life around you does know when you are heart-sensitive; it can tell when you are trying to learn it. You’ll get help.

But more importantly, you will begin exercising a faculty that is far above mere intelligence. You will become sensitive also to moral truth. It’s all in the same package. Hearing from trees, grass and rocks is part of hearing your convictions speak more loudly and clearly about things God requires of you. You’ll know what matters to Him. Eventually your brain will get used to all of this, and you’ll be able to tell people about what’s on your heart.