In Hebrew culture, your heart is the seat of your convictions.
Modern medical science knows that the human heart has its own sensory field, projecting out from your body somewhere between 10 and 15 feet (3-4.5m). At that distance, other sources interfere with the signature wavelength from your heart, but in theory, the sensory field goes out into infinity. The same medical science tells us that the heart has its own nervous system and processing nodes. I cover this in more detail in my book, Heart of Faith. What matters here is that science has no idea what the heart does with that sensory field.
That’s because the whole of modern medicine, and Western Civilization, assumes that there is no higher faculty than the human intellect. So everything in the West presumes that your conscious awareness should be in your head. This is precisely what the temptation in the Garden was all about. Satan wanted Adam and Eve to stop listening to their hearts, and pay more attention to their fleshly nature in the human intellect. Human intellect is fallen; it is flesh and cannot be perfected.
However, the Lord can perfect your heart (Matthew 5:8). In the Bible, the heart acts as a higher faculty. It is also the seat of faith, the will to commit to moral truth. It can be darkened by commitment to something else, but it is the home God made for Himself in your soul. If the Holy Spirit is in you, that’s where you’ll find Him. The Hebrew Scriptures presume, as did virtually all of the Ancient Near East, that you could center your conscious awareness in your heart, instead of merely in your head. Most of the time, simply saying so is sufficient for you to instinctively make that transition. Nobody can do this for you.
If you are going to make your convictions the central reference point for everything in your life, then you will need to keep the focus of your conscious awareness in your heart. In my experience, virtually every nonconformist was at least partly there already. Once they became aware of the heart as a higher faculty of moral understanding, it was like the answer to almost every question they ever had. If there is one thing that puts you at odds with the whole world, this is it. Seeing reality from your heart quickly clarifies all the conflicts.
Further, it clarifies how you should handle those conflicts. There is much in Scripture about living in world that is hostile to your fundamental motivations. Oddly enough, letting your heart lead you will bring you into conflict with a lot of churches. How would you expect God to speak from Scripture itself? Through the heart, of course. If conviction does not witness to the truth of the Bible, then nothing any man can do will bring its power to life. Our commitment to God is our commitment to His Word. The power is not in the words printed on paper, but in your heart.
Somewhere shortly after the last of the Twelve Apostles passed from this earth, the church leadership quickly became hungry for social and government approval. Where that leaves us today is with an obsession among church leaders for trying to make faith reasonable. God makes the most unreasonable demands on us. There’s nothing reasonable about faith; it’s just a word for our commitment to doing things God’s way. Nor can we make the Bible somehow more binding on human obedience by trying to make it part of “objective truth.” If God doesn’t burn it into your soul, you aren’t going to obey it.
So all this noise about the Bible being factually infallible is missing the point. It’s not a book of facts as the world views such things. It’s a book of moral truth. We don’t have to prove the Bible to the world; we cannot. The only proof we have is our lives obedient to what it teaches. You cannot pretend that the words printed on paper are somehow magic. We don’t worship the book.
There is much more we could say about this, but the whole point is that we obey it because the Holy Spirit breathes it into our souls. It’s Him we obey. He won’t contradict His Word, but He will use it to indicate things that have meaning to you alone. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. Thus, we dare not restrict His power in us by eliminating the mystical communion with the God who sponsored the book.
It’s enough to study how the book transmits the culture of the Hebrew people and the story of His Messiah. That’s how we know what it says. We have to understand it in the context of the revelation. The Hebrew language and culture was the context God built for revelation, and this packaging for revelation is part of the revelation. We cannot afford to inject Western intellectual biases back into it. The book doesn’t care about answering Western obsessions with factual queries.
So you owe it to God to learn the Hebrew approach to thinking and absorbing what the Bible has to say. No human has any business demanding anything else of you. The Hebrew people would snicker at the idea of “propositional truth” describing Scripture. Your heart will tell you what matters in glorifying the Lord; it needs to be more of a Hebrew heart.
