“My heart is confident in you, O God; no wonder I can sing your praises with all my heart! Wake up, lyre and harp! I will wake the dawn with my song. I will thank you, Lord, among all the people. I will sing your praises among the nations. For your unfailing love is higher than the heavens. Your faithfulness reaches to the clouds. Be exalted, O God, above the highest heavens. May your glory shine over all the earth. Now rescue your beloved people. Answer and save us by your power. God has promised this by his holiness: “I will divide up Shechem with joy. I will measure out the valley of Succoth. Gilead is mine, and Manasseh, too. Ephraim, my helmet, will produce my warriors, and Judah, my scepter, will produce my kings. But Moab, my washbasin, will become my servant, and I will wipe my feet on Edom and shout in triumph over Philistia.” Who will bring me into the fortified city? Who will bring me victory over Edom? Have you rejected us, O God? Will you no longer march with our armies? Oh, please help us against our enemies, for all human help is useless. With God’s help we will do mighty things, for he will trample down our foes.”
Psalms 108:1-13 NLT
Jeremiah describes the human heart as exceedingly wicked. Other translations say that it is desperately sick. It is a feature of man that has been turned into his greatest failure. The heart, which in Judaism is the seat of a person and the apex of the mind and body, is a broken machine. It is designed to long after God. As such it has a moral design that is naturally a part of its outworking. But sin has corrupted it. It has implanted itself upon the operating system of humanity and made it so that man can no longer do this by intuition. Yet God has made it so that the heart can be bypassed. This is done by an act of faith. If we move toward God despite our intuition, he will be there to catch us when we fall. Our hearts must be made confident and steadfast, despite their sickness. In this we begin to fill in the blanks about our missing code. And all of it tells one truth. God is to be praised and exalted. We must lift him up. This ought to be our inclination, even if it is beyond our intuition.
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