10.4 Thinking

Scripture has no single word for thinking. It uses several, and each one shows a different side of it:

ḥāšav: to devise, to reckon, to think
maḥăšāvāh: a thought, a plan, a design
yēṣer: an intention, an inclination, a frame
hāgāh: to meditate, to murmur, to utter
dāmāh: to liken, to think, to intend
in Greek, logizomai: to reckon, to consider
in Greek, dialogizomai: to reason, to question, to talk it over

The place where thinking happens is the heart (Chapter 4). This chapter is about what thinking does, and about something I did not expect when I began: how the same act of thinking changes its whole character from one setting to the next.

Where thoughts come from

They come from the heart. "For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts" (Mark 7:21). "The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps" (Proverbs 16:9).

They are not always chosen. Often they simply arise, and often at night.

"To you, O king, as you lay in bed came thoughts of what would be after this, and he who reveals mysteries made known to you what is to be" (Daniel 2:29).
"Amid thoughts from visions of the night, when deep sleep falls on men" (Job 4:13).
Jesus asks his frightened disciples, "Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?" (Luke 24:38).

What arises has also been shaped from outside.

God fills craftsmen "with skill" (Exodus 35:35) "to devise artistic designs" (35:32).
Instruction forms thinking: "discretion will watch over you, understanding will guard you" (Proverbs 2:11).
Thinking can also be darkened. People who knew God "became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened" (Romans 1:21). "The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers" (2 Corinthians 4:4). The enemy has thoughts of his own, and the word for them is the word for ours: "we are not ignorant of his designs" (2 Corinthians 2:11). The serpent's cunning can lead thoughts "astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ" (2 Corinthians 11:3). Yet the same mind can be guarded: "the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 4:7).

The inclination: a shaped thing

The word behind "every intention of the thoughts of his heart" (Genesis 6:5) is yēṣer. It is the same word Isaiah uses for what a potter makes: "the thing formed say of him who formed it, 'He has no understanding'" (Isaiah 29:16). And it is the word in "he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust" (Psalm 103:14).

The inclination in Genesis 6:5 is "only evil continually". The ESV renders the same word "mind" in a promise: "You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you" (Isaiah 26:3).

The word can be turned upside down from either end. In Isaiah, the thing formed says its maker has no understanding. In Habakkuk, the maker trusts the thing he formed: "its maker trusts in his own creation when he makes speechless idols!" (Habakkuk 2:18). And God's knowing of my frame does not end in contempt. The verse before says, "As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him" (Psalm 103:13).

What thinking does

It designs. The verb for devising is used of the craftsmen who worked the cherubim "skillfully" into the tabernacle curtains (Exodus 26:1), and of people who plot. One word, mᵊzimmāh, covers both: "discretion will watch over you" (Proverbs 2:11), and "a man of evil devices he condemns" (Proverbs 12:2).

The same skill is put to three different uses:

The tabernacle craftsmen were given it for God's house (Exodus 35:35).
King Uzziah's engineers turned it to war: "he made machines, invented by skillful men … And his fame spread far, for he was marvelously helped, till he was strong" (2 Chronicles 26:15). The next verse: "But when he was strong, he grew proud, to his destruction" (26:16).
Those "at ease in Zion" (Amos 6:1) turned it on themselves: they "like David invent for themselves instruments of music" (6:5).

It reckons, giving things their worth. People reckon wrongly.

Judah "thought she was a prostitute" (Genesis 38:15).
Eli watched Hannah praying silently and "took her to be a drunken woman" (1 Samuel 1:13).
A whole people looked at the servant of the Lord and "esteemed him not … we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted" (Isaiah 53:3–4).
Opponents reckon the worst: "some who suspect us of walking according to the flesh" (2 Corinthians 10:2).
People reckon by the surface: "Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise" (Proverbs 17:28). Even a good act can be reckoned by its manner: "Whoever blesses his neighbor with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, will be counted as cursing" (27:14).

God reckons truly.

Abraham "believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness" (Genesis 15:6).
The nations "are accounted as the dust on the scales" (Isaiah 40:15). Yet the same God "takes thought for me" (Psalm 40:17).

Jesus took the wrong reckoning on himself: "this Scripture must be fulfilled in me: 'And he was numbered with the transgressors'" (Luke 22:37). And reckoning is not mine to turn toward myself: "Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God" (2 Corinthians 3:5).

Reckoning is not only about judging. In the law it serves release: the man who sold himself "shall calculate with his buyer from the year when he sold himself to him until the year of jubilee" (Leviticus 25:50), and pay his way free. And there are times when reckoning is laid aside because there is trust: "they did not ask for an accounting from the men into whose hand they delivered the money … for they dealt honestly" (2 Kings 12:15).

The Greek word carries this on. "I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us" (Romans 8:18). And faith is itself a reckoning: Abraham "considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead" (Hebrews 11:19). Paul says the same of Abraham before his own body: "He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb" (Romans 4:19).

Reckoning from what God has done can answer a fear of dying. Manoah said, "We shall surely die, for we have seen God." His wife answered, "If the Lord had meant to kill us, he would not have accepted a burnt offering and a grain offering at our hands, or shown us all these things" (Judges 13:22–23). Chapter 2 follows the fear of dying.

It likens. The Hebrew dāmāh means both "to be like" and "to think".

Mordecai warns Esther, "Do not think to yourself that in the king's palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews" (Esther 4:13).
Worshippers say, "We have thought on your steadfast love, O God, in the midst of your temple" (Psalm 48:9).
Love likens: "I compare you, my love, to a mare among Pharaoh's chariots" (Song of Songs 1:9).
Comfort tries to liken, and sometimes cannot: "What can I say for you, to what compare you, O daughter of Jerusalem? What can I liken to you, that I may comfort you …? For your ruin is vast as the sea; who can heal you?" (Lamentations 2:13).

Lament likens the self truly: "I am like a desert owl of the wilderness" (Psalm 102:6).
God himself teaches by likening: "through the prophets gave parables" (Hosea 12:10).

Likening can go badly wrong. God says, "you thought that I was one like yourself" (Psalm 50:21). Chapter 12 follows this further.

It murmurs. Hāgāh is the word for meditating, and it is not silent. "On his law he meditates day and night" (Psalm 1:2). "I remember you upon my bed, and meditate on you in the watches of the night" (Psalm 63:6). But the same word devises and plots: "their hearts devise violence" (Proverbs 24:2). And it can "meditate treachery all day long" (Psalm 38:12). Chapter 10.5 picks up its sense of uttering.

It reasons, inside and between. The Greek word for reasoning is used for a single heart talking to itself and for people talking together, with no change of word.

Inside: a thought can be a whole sentence. "In the pride of his face the wicked does not seek him; all his thoughts are, 'There is no God'" (Psalm 10:4). Jesus perceived "that they thus questioned within themselves" (Mark 2:8). The rich man "thought to himself, 'What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?'" (Luke 12:17).
Between: "What were you discussing on the way?" (Mark 9:33).

It can be troubled. Mary "was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be" (Luke 1:29). She is trying to understand. The disciples' worried reasoning about bread is different. "Why are you discussing the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened?" (Mark 8:17). Jesus connects it with a hard heart and "little faith" (Matthew 16:8).

When thinking changes character

Again and again in these words I found the same thought becoming something else.

One word, three faces: mᵊzimmāh.

In the young it is discretion: "to give prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the youth" (Proverbs 1:4). It "will watch over you" (2:11).
In the wicked it is an evil device, joined to arrogance: "In arrogance the wicked hotly pursue the poor; let them be caught in the schemes that they have devised" (Psalm 10:2). It sits beside a short temper: "A man of quick temper acts foolishly, and a man of evil devices is hated" (Proverbs 14:17).
In God it is purpose: "no purpose of yours can be thwarted" (Job 42:2). His anger serves it, and it is understood only later: "The anger of the Lord will not turn back until he has executed and accomplished the intents of his heart. In the latter days you will understand it clearly" (Jeremiah 23:20).

One passage, three plans: Jeremiah 18.

God says, "Behold, I am shaping disaster against you and devising a plan against you. Return, every one from his evil way" (18:11). Even this plan is open: "if that nation … turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it" (18:8).
The people answer, "We will follow our own plans, and will every one act according to the stubbornness of his evil heart" (18:12).
Then they turn on the messenger: "Come, let us make plots against Jeremiah" (18:18).

God's plan is against, and in the same breath he says "Return" (18:11). The people's plans are, in their own words, "the stubbornness of his evil heart" (18:12). The word "against" is the same in God's plan and in their plot.

What it keeps company with. Plans fail alone and stand with counsel: "Without counsel plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed" (Proverbs 15:22). "Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established" (16:3). The same togetherness can go the other way: "All who hate me whisper together about me; they imagine the worst for me" (Psalm 41:7).

The state it rises from. Paul names the order of cause in so many words: people are "darkened in their understanding … due to their hardness of heart" (Ephesians 4:18). A hard heart makes for dark thinking. Ease does it too: "In the thought of one who is at ease there is contempt for misfortune; it is ready for those whose feet slip" (Job 12:5). A comfortable mind looks down on those who fall.

Its pace. "The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance, but everyone who is hasty comes only to poverty" (Proverbs 21:5). Haste is named again in Job 20:2 (below).

Where it is done. Thinking alone can stall. "When I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end" (Psalm 73:16–17). The bed, as I show below, is a place that holds both ways of thinking.

Reasoning that becomes a quarrel. The Greek word for inner reasoning is also the word for a quarrel. The disciples' reasoning about greatness became an argument: "An argument arose among them as to which of them was the greatest. But Jesus, knowing the reasoning of their hearts, took a child" (Luke 9:46–47). Paul uses the word for dispute: "Do all things without grumbling or disputing" (Philippians 2:14). And he uses it beside anger: men are to pray "lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling" (1 Timothy 2:8).

Imagination that makes gods. The power to design can be turned to making a god: "we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man" (Acts 17:29).

None of these is a rule I have laid on the verses. They are what the verses themselves put beside the change. Chapter 11 gathers them across all the activities.

When anger thinks

Anger does not stay a feeling. It starts to reckon, and it reckons badly.

It reads another's heart, and misreads it. Eliab, angry at his young brother, says, "I know your presumption and the evil of your heart" (1 Samuel 17:28). The reader knows David came because his father sent him.
It calculates the future. "They have ascribed to David ten thousands, and to me they have ascribed thousands, and what more can he have but the kingdom?" (1 Samuel 18:8). Seventeen verses later it has become a plan: "Now Saul thought to make David fall by the hand of the Philistines" (18:25).
It soothes itself with a plan. "Your brother Esau comforts himself about you by planning to kill you" (Genesis 27:42).
Rage and plotting stand in one line: "Why do the nations rage, and the peoples plot in vain?" (Psalm 2:1). The apostles read that psalm over what was done to Jesus (Acts 4:25–27).

But zeal can also be reckoned rightly. When Phinehas acted with God's own jealousy, "that was counted to him as righteousness from generation to generation forever" (Psalm 106:31). This is the same reckoning word that was used of Abraham's faith.

The night and the bed

The bed is where several kinds of thinking happen.

People plot there: "He plots trouble while on his bed" (Psalm 36:4).
Unbidden thoughts come there, and God's revealing with them (Daniel 2:29).
The psalmist meditates on God there (Psalm 63:6).
The angry are told: "ponder in your own hearts on your beds, and be silent" (Psalm 4:4).

Night thoughts are not all the same. For Nebuchadnezzar they became revelation, because God made them known and Daniel interpreted them (Daniel 2:29–30). For Belshazzar, with no one to read the writing, they only frightened: "his thoughts alarmed him" (Daniel 5:6), until the queen pointed to the one who could "show the interpretation" (5:12). And a night thought can be claimed as revelation and still be wrong. Eliphaz tells of "thoughts from visions of the night" (Job 4:13). At the end God says to him, "you have not spoken of me what is right" (Job 42:7).

What fills the heart in the night shows by morning. "Woe to those who devise wickedness and work evil on their beds! When the morning dawns, they perform it" (Micah 2:1).

Thoughts that turn on the thinker

Thoughts do not only go out. They also come back and act on the one who thinks them.

They answer back: "my thoughts answer me, because of my haste within me" (Job 20:2).
They alarm: "As for me, Daniel, my thoughts greatly alarmed me, and my color changed" (Daniel 7:28).
They multiply: "When the cares of my heart are many" (Psalm 94:19).
They wear out: "it seemed to me a wearisome task" (Psalm 73:16).

What is done with them differs. Daniel did not act on his alarm: "but I kept the matter in my heart" (Daniel 7:28). The psalmist's cares were met: "your consolations cheer my soul" (Psalm 94:19). The wearied thinker took his thinking into the sanctuary (Psalm 73:17). And the psalmist hands the whole of his thinking over to be searched: "Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts!" (Psalm 139:23).

What is devised comes back

What a person devises does not stay where it was sent. It returns to the one who devised it.

Haman's "evil plan that he had devised against the Jews should return on his own head" (Esther 9:25).
"Let them be caught in the schemes that they have devised" (Psalm 10:2).
"He makes a pit, digging it out, and falls into the hole that he has made. His mischief returns upon his own head" (Psalm 7:15–16).
"I am bringing disaster upon this people, the fruit of their devices" (Jeremiah 6:19).
"He catches the wise in their own craftiness, and the schemes of the wily are brought to a quick end" (Job 5:13).

Micah shows it in the words themselves. "Woe to those who devise wickedness and work evil on their beds!" (Micah 2:1). Two verses later, "Therefore thus says the Lord: behold, against this family I am devising disaster" (2:3). The same verb comes back to them, now with God as its subject.

It comes back for good as well. "The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance" (Proverbs 21:5). The wicked who forsakes "his thoughts" finds that God "will abundantly pardon" (Isaiah 55:7).

Thinking grows up

"When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways" (1 Corinthians 13:11).

Small, passing, and wholly seen

Human thought is real, and it is also small. "The Lord — knows the thoughts of man, that they are but a breath" (Psalm 94:11).

And none of it is hidden.

"You discern my thoughts from afar" (Psalm 139:2).
"The Lord searches all hearts and understands every plan and thought" (1 Chronicles 28:9).
He knows the inclination before it is acted on: "I know what they are inclined to do even today" (Deuteronomy 31:21).
Jesus "perceived their thoughts" (Luke 5:22).
What is hidden will be brought out. Simeon says the child is set for a sign "so that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed" (Luke 2:34–35).

The same psalm that says God knows my thoughts uses the same word for his thoughts: "How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!" (Psalm 139:17).

God thinks too, and his thinking is not like mine. "The Lord takes thought for me" (Psalm 40:17). "For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope" (Jeremiah 29:11). He even thinks for those who have put themselves outside: "he devises means so that the banished one will not remain an outcast" (2 Samuel 14:14). "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways" (Isaiah 55:8). Chapter 11 returns to this.

Connections

From hearing (10.2): what is heard and remembered becomes the material of thought (Psalm 143:5).
Into speaking (10.5): murmuring becomes uttering.
Into choosing and the deed (10.7, and the path in 10.0): devising becomes doing, and what is devised comes back.
From remembering (10.3): what is remembered is meditated on.
With feeling (10.1): anger reckons and plots (1 Samuel 18:8, 25). "his thoughts alarmed him; his limbs gave way" (Daniel 5:6). "When the cares of my heart are many, your consolations cheer my soul" (Psalm 94:19). A quick temper and evil devices stand side by side (Proverbs 14:17).
From wanting (10.6): the rich man's thinking serves his wanting (Luke 12:17–19).
Under right and wrong (10.8): "their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them" (Romans 2:15).
With others (10.10): reasoning together, and reasoning that becomes a quarrel.
Before God (10.9): reckoned by him, seen by him, and brought to him (Psalm 73:17; 139:23).
Across all the activities (Chapter 11 §4): what changes the character of an activity.