Thursday, March 30, 2023

 

Thursday, March 30, 2023


Psalm 72

Exodus 9:13-35

Luke 21:1-19


But when Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunder had ceased, he sinned once more and hardened his heart.


Just as our physical body depends utterly on our physical heart, so does our soul depend on our spiritual attitude. When we speak of the heart in the biblical sense, we are talking about that bit of ourselves that is only known by God and the individual. It is why God desires a holy attitude more than dry religious actions. He didn’t make meat robots; He made material creatures in His image.


The Bible also speaks about how our salvation is wrought by God when He removes our sinful heart of stone and replaces it with a heart of flesh – all spiritual imagery, but illuminating in how it explains why we mourn over our sin. If God had “given us up in the lusts of our hearts to impurity” (Rom 1:24) then we would never feel remorse for offending Him.


This idea of “hardening” the heart is especially curious in the Hebrew. The original word conjures up ideas of heaviness, in the figurative sense. Hardening our heart, that is, to push down our desire to please God, creates in our spirit a heavy burden.


When Jesus told us that to follow Him is an easy and light burden (Matt 11:28-30), this is where He was coming from. To reject Christ’s words is to harden our hearts with an unbearably heavy burden. But to drop our own wants (and trust God to meet them) cracks open the stone, makes us human again, and pours abundant life into our hearts.



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