When men and women in ancient Jewish world committed sins or developed a significant skin disease, they had to offer sacrifices for their cleansing (Lev.
When Jesus died upon the cross, he offered his blood as the final purifying sacrifice. Thankfully, the God who calls his followers to do the impossible does the impossible for them. No man or woman can ascend to heaven for no mind is pure. Even human thought is prone to error and mistakes (Rom 1-2). Jesus has implied that the very center of human personality is fallen. It contains all notions of thinking, reasoning, feeling, understanding, and interpreting. Be Mine.” When Jesus spoke of the heart, he spoke of the essence of a person. Sadly for them, Jesus did not equate the heart with children’s valentine’s day cards that say, “I love you. If men and women will but think, they can find purity.
While they admit the things of the heart such as emotions and feelings are broken by sin, these theologians believe the human intellect has survived the brokenness of the world. Does Heart = Mind?Īt this juncture, some theologians have found hope in a modernist understanding of the analogy of the heart. In other words, Jesus requires his followers to be that which they naturally are not: pure. He proclaims it to be a storehouse of manure that must be cleansed. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone (Matt 15:19-20).” Jesus does not believe the human soul is a diamond mine to be carefully explored and excavated. He said, “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. A few chapters later in Matthew 15, Jesus defines the heart as being the source of all human trouble. In stark contrast to the pop song which proclaims our souls to be both broken and beautiful, Jesus asserts our souls to be broken and vile. Though direct, Jesus’s statement always proves troubling. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus diverges from the preoccupation with self and directs his listeners to the path of purity, declaring, “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God (Matt 5:8).” To see God, men and women must become pure. Christians of all stripes and sizes frequently base their ministries, teachings, and decisions upon their own mystical thoughts, citing their personal encounters with the divine. The lurch towards the god within has also infiltrated the church. To connect with the divine, the modern soul thought it must immerse itself into its own thoughts, impulses, and emotions, believing such activities would lead the soul back down the pathway to god. In his massive volume entitled, The City of God, Augustine chronicled the futility of paganism and concluded that the pagan sacrifices of Rome “do nothing to either injure those whom they hate or to benefit those whom they love.” Following the lead of Augustine, western men and women have stopped looking for the divine in nature and began searching for the divine within their souls.Īs the platonic philosophers of old, people have begun to believe that each soul has been seeded by the universe with a spark of divinity. Men such as Augustine, Luther, and others have repeatedly documented the follies of attempting to find God through animal sacrifices, ritualistic chants, and sacred pilgrimages. While technology has not altered the soul’s yearning for something more, it has rechanneled it. Despite the advancements of technology, philosophy, and political theory, the human condition remains the same. When their plane flying thousands of feet above the mountains dives uncontrollably to the earth, the modern person still longs to know that the blackness of death will open to the glories of heaven. Though the modern man and woman no longer scales Mount Olympus looking for Zeus, both still yearn to experience the divine.
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