When the human heart is in a bad way, radical action is needed, including such things as open heart surgery. If something is not done, the patient may well die. While most folks are not keen about going under the knife, they should realise that if they do nothing, they may not be around for much longer.
Given that I am neither a doctor nor a surgeon, I did a very quick online look at these matters. One site says this:
Open-heart surgery is a general term for surgical procedures performed to treat heart problems by directly accessing the heart through an opening the chest. During open-heart surgery, the surgeon will cut through the breastbone (sternotomy) and spread the ribs to access the heart. Open-heart surgery is used to treat a range of heart conditions, including heart failure, heart valve disease, arrhythmias, aneurysms and coronary artery disease.
Most of us understand these realities in the physical world. Sometimes some quite radical steps are needed to save a person’s life. What is even more important however is that we start to understand all this in terms of the spiritual world. We are in a similar condition spiritually speaking.
Our hearts are not as they should be. Our souls are not as they should be. Our spiritual condition is in a real bad way. We are all in need of radical spiritual surgery or we are all goners. There are many biblical texts that speak to this. Two classic Old Testament passages about the need of a new heart are Jeremiah 31:31-34 and Ezekiel 36:25-27. The former says this:
Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.
And the latter says this:
I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.
There are other famous passages along these lines. Consider also Ez. 37:1-6:
The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones. And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry. And he said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” Then he said to me, “Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.”
All these passages speak about bringing life out of death. Texts like these were of course great news for ancient Israel, and they are also great news for us today. Indeed, they can be applied to New Testament believers: we once were dead in our trespasses and sins, and we had hearts of stone, but because of the transformative work of Jesus, we are now made alive in Christ and have been given hearts of flesh.
The message throughout Scripture is clear: mankind in his fallen and sinful state is in a completely dangerous place, and he is in no position whatsoever to make himself well. Indeed, how can those who are dead do anything? It takes a supernatural work of grace to bring about the necessary changes to make us whole and healthy again.
Thankfully that is just what God in Christ has done for us. As we are told in Ephesians 2:4-5, “God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.” Or as we read in Romans 5:8, “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly.”
A bit of commentary on one of the Old Testament texts I shared above – Ez. 36 – is in order here. While many helpful volumes can be drawn upon, Christopher Wright’s 2001 BST commentary offers much useful thought and reflection on this crucial text. He introduces his remarks on Ez. 36:24-30 as follows:
At last the words of pure gospel come pouring forth in one of the most beautiful passages in the whole Bible. The repeated I will is emphatic. All that will happen will be the work of God himself. Though the word `grace’ is not used here, the whole passage is a portrait of sovereign grace at work, for it is all founded in the wholly unmerited initiative of God. The catalogue of divine activity encompasses every aspect of Israel’s loss and need. It addresses their situation as deportees far from their land (24); the defilement of themselves and their land (25, 29a); their congenital disobedience to the laws of God (26-27); and their disgrace among the nations (28-30). And for each of these desperate realities, it provides an answer, as we shall now see.
The Message of Ezekiel: A New Heart and a New Spirit (The Bible Speaks Today Series)by Wright, Christopher J. H. (Author), Wright, Christopher J.H. (Author)
And he says this in part about verses 26-27:
The ancient saying ‘The heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart’ was never better exemplified than in the long history of pre-exilic Israel — itself, of course, a microcosm of the human race. As chapters 16, 20 and 23 have shown, Israel was not just an occasionally disobedient child, or a sporadically flirtatious wife. They had shown a persistent, wilful and incorrigible determination to disregard the covenant requirements of Yahweh and an unstoppable downward drift towards, and sinking below, the levels of wickedness to be found among the non-covenant nations. The problem lay not just in their behaviour, but in the source of their behaviour — the attitudes and mentality that characterized them. In short, the problem was in their ‘heart’ and ‘spirit’.
The two terms heart (leb) and spirit (ruah) describe the inner human person. In Hebrew idiom, the heart is the locus of the mind, not primarily of the emotions. It is in or with the heart that a person thinks, decides and wills. The spirit reflects the inner feelings and aspirations of the person —again, not merely in the sense of emotions, but in terms of the attitude, disposition and motivation which one brings to choices and actions. The two terms are closely related, but not identical. Israel will have to think differently, and feel differently. Their whole inner world needs to be transformed.
No longer was it enough to expect God to ‘circumcise their hearts’ in the graphic metaphor of Deuteronomy 30:6. Much more radical surgery is needed now. So, in repetition of 11:19, God proposes a heart transplant. He will remove the heart of stone, which has made Israel hard, cold, unresponsive and dead to Yahweh’s words of command or of appeal. And he will implant in its place a heart of flesh — flesh which is living, warm and soft, and which, in Hebrew idiom, speaks of close kinship and intimate relationship. God will transform Israel’s whole mindset and fundamental orientation of will, desire and purpose. The purpose of such transformation is wholehearted obedience….
He goes on to speak of the seeming tension of v. 27: “And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.” He notes how passages like Leviticus 26:3 use similar wording in the command for us to obey. So which is it – the Spirit working within, or us obeying? Wright says this:
A similar paradox is found in Deuteronomy 30:1-10 (on which Ezekiel may well be reflecting here). There, in verses 2 and 10 (cf. 6:5), the fundamental command that Israel should love God with all their heart and soul is echoed in the condition that they must turn to him and obey him with all their heart and soul. Yet in the centre of the passage (v. 6), God promises that he, the Lord your God himself, ‘will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live’. God will do in and for Israel what Israel’s history so gloomily demonstrated they could not do for themselves. God’s grace will give what God’s law requires. The gospel is already breathing through such texts in the law — as it is here in Ezekiel’s prophecy.
There is, of course, a tension here (as throughout the Bible) between the role of human will and choice and the role of divine causation. God commands obedience and we must make our free choice to respond and obey — or not. But at the same time, God gives his Spirit and ‘makes’ that obedience happen. One pole of the tension affirms human freedom. The other affirms divine sovereignty. No amount of theology will ever be able to provide a complete correlation of both truths which does not leave us still conscious of mysteries somewhere beyond our grasp. Ultimately, the proof and the test come through experience. And that seems to be what Paul comes down to when reflecting on the role of the Spirit in relation to the law in actual practical experience of Christian living in Romans 8. The Spirit (whom he significantly calls ‘the Spirit of life’) sets us free from the law at one level, in relation to sin and death and the inability of our fallen human nature to obey God. Yet the very purpose for which Christ died, and for which we are granted the indwelling Spirit, is ‘in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh [‘sinful human nature’] but according to the Spirit’ (Rom. 8:1-4).
That is forever the good news of the gospel: we cannot save ourselves. We are spiritually dead, and unless spiritual emergency heart surgery is performed, we are without hope. But Christ has made all this possible if we avail ourselves of it.
