12. When the inner being goes wrong

Scripture does not look away from what goes wrong inside a person. When it does, it often names the heart.

The heart as the source

"The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually" (Genesis 6:5).
"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" (Jeremiah 17:9).
"For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander" (Matthew 15:19). What defiles comes "from within, out of the heart of man" (Mark 7:21).
"The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron; with a point of diamond it is engraved on the tablet of their heart" (Jeremiah 17:1).
"Transgression speaks to the wicked deep in his heart" (Psalm 36:1).

The word translated "intention" in Genesis 6:5 is yēṣer: the inclination or shape of the heart (Chapter 10.4). It returns straight after the flood: "the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth" (Genesis 8:21). But there God says it in his heart as the reason he will not curse the ground again. Scripture sets the evil inclination beside God's forbearance, not only beside his judgement. I do not want to quote Genesis 6:5 without 8:21.

The heart is the place where wrongdoing starts, is stored and is written. It is also where God looks when he judges: "I the Lord search the heart and test the mind" (Jeremiah 17:10).

The heart deceives its owner

The heart does not only do wrong. It hides the wrong from the person whose heart it is.

"The pride of your heart has deceived you" (Obadiah 3).
"A deluded heart has led him astray" (Isaiah 44:20), said of the man who bows to a block of wood.
The heart says to itself what is not true: "There is no God" (Psalm 14:1). "My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth" (Deuteronomy 8:17).
It tells itself it is unseen: "God has forgotten, he has hidden his face, he will never see it" (Psalm 10:11). "You felt secure in your wickedness; you said, 'No one sees me'" (Isaiah 47:10).
What it fails to say is also telling: "They do not say in their hearts, 'Let us fear the Lord our God'" (Jeremiah 5:24).
It hides a purpose to catch another: "They hold fast to their evil purpose; they talk of laying snares secretly, thinking, 'Who can see them?'" The next verse says where it was hidden first: "For the inward mind and heart of a man are deep" (Psalm 64:5–6). The trap set in the path was first planned in the heart: "who plan evil things in their heart" (Psalm 140:2, 5). Section 10.11 follows the hidden trap and the wrong that is concealed.
Its evil hides behind the mouth: "His speech was smooth as butter, yet war was in his heart" (Psalm 55:21). "Like the glaze covering an earthen vessel are fervent lips with an evil heart" (Proverbs 26:23).

The soul answers for it

"Behold, all souls are mine … the soul who sins shall die" (Ezekiel 18:4). In the law, "if anyone [a soul] sins" is the ordinary way to begin a case (Leviticus 5:1). The soul here is the person who is accountable. The one who did the wrong carries the guilt, and it is their life that is at stake. The soul can also be harmed by its own wrongdoing: "he who fails to find me injures himself" (Proverbs 8:36).

Scripture follows the wrongdoing through to death. "Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death" (James 1:15). Death can be at work in a person who is still alive: "Whoever does not love abides in death" (1 John 3:14). And some of what kills is named in the inner being itself: "Surely vexation kills the fool, and jealousy slays the simple" (Job 5:2). Chapter 2 ("Death and sin") gives the account.

The Bible speaks of both the heart and the soul here, and I do not want to set one against the other.

Pride and the lifted-up heart and spirit

Pride is placed in the heart and in the spirit.

The heart is "lifted up" (Deuteronomy 8:14). "Everyone who is arrogant in heart is an abomination to the Lord" (Proverbs 16:5).
"Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall" (Proverbs 16:18).
Of Nebuchadnezzar: "when his heart was lifted up and his spirit was hardened so that he dealt proudly, he was brought down from his kingly throne" (Daniel 5:20).

Pride is also a false likeness. "You said in your heart, 'I will ascend to heaven … I will make myself like the Most High'" (Isaiah 14:13–14). The prince of Tyre: "you have said, 'I am a god'" (Ezekiel 28:2). The opposite mistake shrinks God to my size: "you thought that I was one like yourself" (Psalm 50:21). Either way, thinking has gone wrong at the point of comparing. Mary sings of what God does with it: "he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts" (Luke 1:51).

The human spirit is judged here beside the heart. Pride and humility are where the spirit is weighed most: haughty or lowly, proud or poor in spirit.

Hardening and stubbornness

A heart can set itself, or be set, against hearing.

"Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion" (Hebrews 3:8).
"He … stiffened his neck and hardened his heart against turning to the Lord" (2 Chronicles 36:13).
They "did not obey or incline their ear, but walked in their own counsels and the stubbornness of their evil hearts" (Jeremiah 7:24).
Hardness blinds the understanding: people are "darkened in their understanding … due to their hardness of heart" (Ephesians 4:18). "Their minds were hardened. For to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted" (2 Corinthians 3:14).
It stores up judgment: "because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself" (Romans 2:5).
It shows in reasoning that goes round in circles. Just after the feeding of the crowds, the disciples worry about bread, and Jesus asks: "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).

As Chapter 11 showed, God is also said to harden. A prayer lays the loss of fear at his door: "O Lord, why do you make us wander from your ways and harden our heart, so that we fear you not?" (Isaiah 63:17). In the Exodus story Pharaoh's heart had already "changed toward the people" (Exodus 14:5) before the Lord hardened it (14:8).

Anger that goes wrong

Anger itself is not forbidden: "Be angry and do not sin" (Ephesians 4:26). What goes wrong is what anger does, and how long it is kept.

Left overnight, it opens a door. "Do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil" (Ephesians 4:26–27).
It is cherished. "The godless in heart cherish anger; they do not cry for help when he binds them" (Job 36:13).
It comes from a war inside. "Your passions are at war within you … You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel" (James 4:1–2).
It keeps company. In the lists, anger stands with envy, jealousy and slander (Galatians 5:20–21; Colossians 3:8). In Ephesians the list comes straight after "do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God": "Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice" (Ephesians 4:30–31).
It does not reach where it aims. "The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God" (James 1:20).
It can be turned on God for one's own folly. "When a man's folly brings his way to ruin, his heart rages against the Lord" (Proverbs 19:3).

Fear that goes wrong

Fear goes wrong when it is given to the wrong one. Saul says it of himself: "I have sinned … because I feared the people and obeyed their voice" (1 Samuel 15:24). The fear of the people took the place of the word he had been given. Section 10.1 follows the other ways the verses show fear leading into wrong: the lie, the hardening into enmity, the snare.

Fear can be put into a person for exactly that purpose. Nehemiah saw through a hired prophet: "he was hired, that I should be afraid and act in this way and sin" (Nehemiah 6:13). The fear was the means, and the sin was the aim.

The fear of God goes wrong in its own ways, and each of them concerns the heart.

It can be taught without the heart: "their fear of me is a commandment taught by men" (Isaiah 29:13).
It can be divided: "So they feared the Lord but also served their own gods" (2 Kings 17:33), and of the same people, "They do not fear the Lord" (17:34).
It can be missing, and the verse names what goes with that: "it is evil and bitter for you to forsake the Lord your God; the fear of me is not in you" (Jeremiah 2:19).
It is set against a hardened heart: "Blessed is the one who fears the Lord always, but whoever hardens his heart will fall into calamity" (Proverbs 28:14).

And fear can be present where it has no ground. Of the fool who "says in his heart, 'There is no God'": "There they are, in great terror, where there is no terror!" (Psalm 53:1, 5). I read this as saying that denying God does not free a person from fear. It leaves him afraid where there is nothing to fear.

False peace

The heart can say that all is well. "I shall be safe, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart" (Deuteronomy 29:19). The false prophets say it to a whole people: "It shall be well with you" (Jeremiah 23:17). The guilty say it of God: "surely his anger has turned from me" (Jeremiah 2:35). Chapter 13 follows how the human heart meets God's anger: provoking it, bearing it, and turning under it.

The hardened heart remembered

The quarrel at Meribah is told in the wilderness story without naming any inner word (Exodus 17:7). The psalm that remembers it names the heart: "do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness" (Psalm 95:8). "They are a people who go astray in their heart" (95:10). Hebrews makes it a daily warning: "exhort one another every day, as long as it is called 'today,' that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin" (Hebrews 3:13).

Idols taken inside

Idolatry is not only a matter of statues. God says to Ezekiel of Israel's elders, "these men have taken their idols into their hearts" (Ezekiel 14:3). Their hearts "went after their idols" (Ezekiel 20:16). And Hosea: "a spirit of whoredom has led them astray" (Hosea 4:12). "The spirit of whoredom is within them, and they know not the Lord" (Hosea 5:4).

It also starts in the power to imagine and design. Paul says, "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). Habakkuk sees the maker turned upside down: "its maker trusts in his own creation when he makes speechless idols!" (Habakkuk 2:18). The word for "creation" there is the word for the heart's inclination (Chapter 10.4).

Dispositions that come upon a person, and spirits that act

Chapter 6 showed that Scripture speaks of "a spirit of" jealousy, whoredom, deep sleep and confusion coming upon a person. It uses the same way of speaking for a spirit of wisdom, skill and grace. Some of these come from God. "The Lord has poured out upon you a spirit of deep sleep" (Isaiah 29:10) is judgment on those who would not see. For most of them, the verse does not say whether a spirit-being is involved.

Spirit-beings are real in Scripture. Unclean spirits torment people and are driven out. A harmful spirit came upon Saul "from the Lord" (1 Samuel 16:14). A lying spirit spoke through the prophets by God's permission (1 Kings 22:22–23). In the New Testament, "the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience" (Ephesians 2:2) is at work among people. But I cannot find in Scripture a set of named demons, each responsible for one kind of sin. The verses do not draw that map.

Inner and outer impurity

Scripture separates two kinds of uncleanness. The body can be unclean by touch, by a corpse or by disease, and there are rites for that. But inner purity is another thing. "Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? … He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false" (Psalm 24:3–4). Jesus: "whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach" (Mark 7:18–19). What defiles is what comes out of the heart. Hebrews contrasts the purification of the flesh by ritual with the blood of Christ, which will "purify our conscience from dead works" (Hebrews 9:13–14).

Wind: the image of emptiness

Several times Scripture pictures wrongdoing as wind.

"The wicked … are like chaff that the wind drives away" (Psalm 1:4).
"Our iniquities, like the wind, take us away" (Isaiah 64:6).
"They sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind" (Hosea 8:7).
"Whoever troubles his own household will inherit the wind" (Proverbs 11:29).
Idols have "no breath in them" (Jeremiah 10:14).

The same word that means God's life-giving Spirit is used for the emptiness of a life without him.

Flesh as an orientation

In the New Testament, "the flesh" becomes the name for a whole way of being turned away from God. It has desires "against the Spirit" (Galatians 5:17). It has a mind "hostile to God" (Romans 8:7). Its "works" (Galatians 5:19) and its "passions … wage war against your soul" (1 Peter 2:11). This is not a condemnation of the body. It is a self that lives by and for what passes away (Chapter 7).