Knowing your heart is harder than you think it is.
Your intentions are often not transparent, even to you. Sin’s dark shadow means we must always think that there’s an iceberg of ourselves we haven’t fathomed, with much unseen and looming beneath the surface. The motivations for our actions, our thoughts, our feelings, even for the questions we grapple with, are more opaque than we like to think they are.
I know myself much better than I did a decade ago. It would be foolish to think that I know myself. We are very skilled at hiding ourselves from ourselves. It’s instinctive, like grabbing figs leaves to cover up something we don’t want seen, even by ourselves. Fig leaf sap is a nasty irritant, which says about everything you need to know about the human condition.
We give ourselves the benefit of the doubt over and over in ways we wouldn’t for anyone else. We allow behaviour in ourselves that deeply frustrates us in others; sometimes that’s why it frustrates us in others. With our souls fogged by sin we are natural hypocrites; knowing ourselves is like trying to drive in a steamed-up car.
Knowing the world is about as difficult. We see what we expect to see. Matthew Lee Anderson puts it like this:
“We will not see if we do not want to see—and we will only see what we want to see.”
Called into Questions, 98.
I think he’s right. Since I first read these words a year ago, they’ve been bouncing around my head. I only see what I want to see. I can’t see what I don’t want to. And, presumably, my sense of my self is blinded by sin enough that I have little awareness of this process or what it is that I wanted to see in the first place.
It’s hard to know yourself. It’s hard to know the world.
Are we stuck between a rock and a hard place? Or, perhaps better, a fuzzy indistinct thingy and a something-or-other?
Anderson’s solution is that it’s only in obeying the law of the Lord that are our souls renewed enough that we can comprehend the harmony of the cosmos and begin for the first time to see. I’d put it differently, but I think he must be right.
I wonder if you’ve had those moments when the gospel lights up your heart and it’s like you can see for the first time? Meeting Jesus is like this, but I’ve had it happen several times when I comprehend what Jesus has done for me on a level deeper than what I’d known before; it feels like it’s the first time each time. I get new knowledge of both myself and the world, new eyes with which to see. That’s what the Bible wants to equip us with: new eyes.
We are masters of self-deception. Masters of not seeing what’s in front of us, especially about ourselves. Even writing this feels like an exercise in hypocrisy because I don’t know what I don’t know about myself. Much of it will be horrible: sin is.
Should this make us despair?
Not at all. Why? Because Jesus loves his people. If God’s love in Christ is the beating heart at the centre of the cosmos, vibrating every atom in song, then my lack of knowledge of myself has a glorious solution.
What the gospel tells us is that someone does know me, all the way down, in horrifying detail. The judge of the world knows all the darkness I can’t even see in myself and finds me wanting. And he came himself to be crushed on my behalf, so that I am loved by the Father as though I was the Son (because I am when I’m in Christ).
Which means the best reaction to my inability to know myself is to laugh, and then wonder at the world that God sung into wholeness for us to witness and enjoy.
I’m really a rather silly sausage.
Does that mean my lack of knowledge of my self or of the world is irrelevant? No, it’s a problem. The beginning of wisdom is recognising ignorance, I guess. Actually that’s not true, the beginning of wisdom is get wisdom, and the fear of the Lord (Proverbs 4, 9). So get wisdom, friends.
I should be concerned by my lack of knowledge of myself. Helpfully I regularly converse with the one person in the cosmos who does know me all the way down and loves me: the very Potentate of time. Here’s a wild thought, maybe I could ask him?
Jesus will answer that prayer. You won’t like what you find, but it will be true. He is kind enough to only show you the next layer, the next thing to repent from.
Ask the same about the world, you will weep in wonder at its grandeur and howl in outrage at the calumny of the powers.
We should know the limits of our knowledge, but we should continue on in joy anyway. You’re loved by God.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
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