Musing on God’s Ways

The spiritual person is a reflective person. It is by reflection that he becomes acquainted with the mind and ways of God. Consequently, when Scripture wants to speak of the secular man it says he is one who has “forgotten” God (Ps. 50:22; 106:21). By contrast, the godly man is one who “remembers” God (Ps. 119:55; 111:4). This distinction is axiomatic in biblical teaching; few doubt its validity. The presence, then, in some evangelical churches of a form of spirituality that is decidedly if not deliberately unreflective is a matter of no small concern.

Reflective spirituality is exhibited well in the psalms. The psalmists’ food was to think on God, in times of adversity (Ps. 119:78; 143:3–5) no less than of peace, in the night (Ps. 1:2; 63:5–7) no less than in the day. They knew that a man is not other than his meditation; “for as [a man] thinketh in his heart, so is he” (Prov. 23:7). This is a profound lesson to learn. It quite clearly underlies all Jesus’ teaching on personal sanctity (Matt. 15:17–20; 12:34; 5:27).

Apparently the psalmists were in the habit of taking a text or passage of Scripture and ruminating on it during the day. “I will meditate on thy precepts …” (Ps. 119:15) says one author. He decided to do this and then followed up his decision by daily, dogged discipline. The law, he adds, “is my meditation all the day” (Ps. 119:97). Probably no day passed in which he did not reflect on the Word, and it was his intention not to perform any action in the course of the day without consciously aligning it with biblical teaching.

Meditation is more than simply Bible reading. What comes into the mind will just as quickly go out, leaving behind neither joy nor instruction, if it is not actively appropriated. Asaph speaks of musing on God’s ways, turning these thoughts over in his mind (Ps. 77:12). It is the habit of meditating that allows truth to take root in us. Meditation is the plow that breaks up the fallow ground (cf. Jer. 4:3; Hos. 10:12) in preparation for the seed, and it is the harrow that follows behind the planting. No great Christian attained his spiritual maturity without learning the art of meditation.

In Psalm 49:3 the psalmist explains why this is so. “My mouth shall speak of wisdom,” he says, “and the meditation of my heart shall be of understanding.” The first assertion seems to have reference to prophetic activity, but the author immediately links it with reflection. The Spirit who made the prophets eloquent first of all made them thoughtful. In the later prophets especially, the Spirit first led them to ponder deeply the ways of God and the shortcomings of men. Then, when this reflective process came to maturity, they were ready to speak. Their words arose out of the depths and caught fire. Any man who wishes to speak with authority must learn this lesson. If evangelical pastors would relearn the lost art of meditation, congregations would not leave their churches as hungry as when they came in (a situation far more common within evangelicalism than many would care to admit).

To people of today, harried by life’s insidious pressures, its corrosive demands, and the force of its dramatic change, one of the astonishing aspects of the psalms is the unbounded enthusiasm with which the psalmist reflected on the divine Word and ways. He said he loved the law (Ps. 119:97); it was his delight (Ps. 119:15), even “sweeter than honey” (Ps. 119:103). In a summary statement it is said: “My meditation of him shall be sweet” (Ps. 104:34). It is this delight in God, the first fruits of meditation, that made David dance. “It stands out as something astonishingly robust, virile, spontaneous,” says C. S. Lewis, “something we may regard with an innocent envy and may hope to be infected by as we read” (Reflections on the Psalms).

There seems to be a vicious circle involved in this. We do not reflect on God unless we desire to do so; we do not desire to do so unless we habitually reflect on him. The tempo of the inner life was very high when the psalmists spoke of delighting in God. But this hunger for God was always in a tenuous balance with its satisfaction, and the satisfaction, oddly enough, seemed to enlarge the hunger. Deep satisfaction there was (Ps. 63:6), but the soul continued to thirst for God “like a parched land” (Ps. 143:6); the psalmist was like the deer searching for water, desperately needing to drink (Ps. 42:1; 63:1, 2).

There is no easy way into this circle. The desire for God does not appear overnight like the desert bloom. It is, like all life, fragile in its infancy. Like a newborn child it has to be carefully tended, nourished, and trained. Reflection leads to desire and desire stimulates reflection. The utter seriousness of this quest, however, cannot be diluted.

In three incidental remarks in the Psalms a window is opened for us to look into the godly soul. When David retired to bed at the end of the day, his thoughts turned to God. On his bed, he said, he thought about God (Ps. 63:5–7), even into “the watches of the night”; it was “in the night” (Ps. 119:55) and “day and night” (Ps. 1:2) that the psalmists did their meditation. When the darkness and silence of the nighttime enclosed them, they abandoned the worries of the day. Their real concerns now emerged. In their aloneness there were no social or family pressures to be “religious.” Privacy offers no encouragement to hypocrisy. What a man does when he is alone is the best indicator of what he is really like. No one is incapable of “play-acting” before others, but it takes an unusual person to enjoy deceiving himself when he is alone. The unrelenting seriousness in the pursuit of God now becomes clear from the Psalms. It is both instructive and disturbing.

The psalmists’ sense of priorities, their careful preservation of the important things, perhaps gives us the clue to why, by contrast, Christian spirituality today is sometimes unreflective and undelightful. No less than they, we are in constant contention with “the world” for our priorities. But whereas they won the battle, we sometimes lose it.

A witness to this point, though from an alien quarter, is Herbert Marcuse. In his book One Dimensional Man he speaks of the pressures of conformity and control that society exercises over man. These controls begin to resemble prison bars, outside of which the human spirit cannot wander. The economy requires certain standards of living, and the opinion-makers on television blatantly or insidiously insist that we meet them. The struggle for existence becomes a battle in which, more often than not, we lose. If nothing else, he says, we lose our humanity even if we keep our heads above water financially. La dolce vita is, in fact, a rat race.

Marcuse speaks, too, of a political system that functions without regard for those whom it is supposed to represent. It creates its values and imposes them on people who are powerless to resist. The values it has ordered are dehumanizing ones. If it is the Welfare State it is also the Warfare State; its inherent disregard for life when “policy” requires it now becomes plain.

Further, Marcuse believes that freedom of thought has largely been surrendered, albeit unwittingly. It has been supplanted by the indoctrinating process of mass communication. The opinion-makers, principally those shadowy figures who control the networks, implant in people needs and ideas that they, the opinion-makers, rather than the people, define as important. Priorities are established by the corporation, political parties, and advertisers. These priorities are then accepted with little thought and even less struggle. Man has simply become a pawn in a large game played by impersonal forces, a fly caught in a web of values spun by someone other than himself.

Stated in these terms, Marcuse’s discussion of societal controls in some ways lies quite near to at least one aspect of the Bible’s teaching on the “world.” This word “world” is used in Scripture to designate the web of values that has been spun with man, rather than God, at its center. Man’s pleasures and desires are the end to which all life’s processes are directed. Humanistic assumptions replace religious norms. And so those who build their lives on these values are the enemies of God (Jas. 4:4). To be sure, Christians have an existence in the midst of society, but their life and values are not derived from it (John 17:14–17). Being “worldly,” then, is a far more serious matter than simply succumbing to the trivial do’s and don’ts with which the “world” is usually identified. It means that at one place or another, a Christian has adopted values that assume God is not a meaningful reference point for a value-system and may be disregarded. The Christian lives as if God were dead, however vehemently he might deny this in theory.

A value-system detached from divine reference is open to manipulation, and this is what Marcuse sees happening today. His description, insofar as it is accurate, covers one phase or chapter in this sequence of worldliness. Judged by Christian standards, Marcuse’s view of man and his proposal for liberation from societal controls are woefully inadequate. Nevertheless, his analysis of contemporary society bears careful consideration.

If there are Christians who have succumbed to these societal controls, they are the victims of a value-system that is not only unchristian but also anti-Christian. It aggressively assumes that man has displaced God from His world. This being so, the desire to reflect on God and his ways not only is irrelevant but also runs quite counter to activities that assume that he can be ignored. The extent to which this worldliness reigns in us is the extent to which we neglect the culture of the inner life.

In addition to this, and perhaps as part of it, an all-pervasive activism has infiltrated American Christianity. It is, in fact, the by-product of the element of change that is so much a part of contemporary life. What is paramount is what is now; activity is associated with life (and relevance), while inactivity is associated with death (and irrelevance). Thought is devalued; action is considered to hold the key to Christian life. If a Christian is not out “doing,” he is backsliding.

This attitude is part of a much wider one that has tinged the whole of American life. In his 1964 Pulitzer prize-winner Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter has this to say:

Both our religion and our business has been touched by the pervasive egalitarianism of American life.… At an early date, literature and learning were stigmatized as the prerogatives of useless aristocracies.… It seemed to be the goal of the common man in America to build a society that would show how much could be done without literature and learning—or rather, a society whose literature and learning would be largely limited to such things as the common man could grasp and use.… Ours is the only educational system in the world vital segments of which have fallen into the hands of people who joyfully and militantly proclaim their hostility to intellect and show their eagerness to identify with children who show the least intellectual promise [Vintage Books, 1963, p. 50].

A striking illustration of Hofstadter’s last point was the recent decision of Indiana University to include a course on comics in its curriculum.

Not to reflect on one’s Christian life is all too easy, first because the pressures of life work against meditation, and second because we have all learned to be suspicious about the mind. Unreflective spirituality, then, is a “natural” by-product of our age. But it is natural only in the sense in which all sins are natural (1 Cor. 2:14). It is really a grievous flaw.

The teaching of Scripture and the wisdom of the ages combine to condemn it. If the psalmists are clear on this point, so are those saints in all ages who have in any way sought to recapture the biblical ideal. “Seek a convenient time (Eccles. 3:1) to yourself and meditate often upon God’s loving kindnesses,” counsels Thomas à Kempis. Prayer, meditation, and temptation, declares Martin Luther, makes the man of God. Calvin speaks of the “cares of the world” and the “daily temptations which suddenly overtake us,” leaving “no time or leisure for meditating on the doctrine of God.” He urges Christians to be clear-sighted enough to resist these temptations; we are to “direct all our energies to the subject of meditation on God’s precepts.” A little later, when Protestant orthodoxy was declining inwardly while outwardly remaining impeccably pure, Philip Spener had occasion to speak of this truth again:

This much is certain: the diligent use of the Word of God, which consists not only of listening to sermons, but also of reading, meditating and discussing (Ps. 2:1), must be the chief means of reforming something.… The Word of God remains the seed from which all that is good in us must grow [Pia Desideria].

What Spener said is especially relevant today, for our situation closely parallels his. Now, as then, the Church does not lack for professions of orthodoxy. But orthodoxy, while it is the beginning of godliness, is not a substitute for it. The most urgent need today is to recover a high view of Scripture practically. It is one thing to affirm one’s belief in the plenary inspiration of Scripture; it is quite another to live in accordance with this truth. After all, what profit is there, my brothers, if a man says he believes in inerrancy but does not meditate? Can his bare affirmation save him? Someone will say, “My affirmation shows my faith even as your meditation shows yours.” Yes, but even the devils affirm inerrancy. When will you learn, you empty man, that faith-affirmations apart from works are dead?

David F. Wells is assistant professor of church history and the history of Christian thought at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois. He received the Ph.D. from the University of Manchester.

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