In our last essay I built our case for the fact that most Evangelicals don’t think. You will remember that I said that the basic problem has been that the Church has allowed itself to be more influenced by the culture than by the Bible. The result has been that the Church has been marginalized in the culture to the point that She is without a witness to the culture. She has been forced out of the market square and into the dark alleys of the culture.
In this essay I we will take a brief survey of what Scripture has to tell us about our thinking and our minds. By necessity this will be a very quick survey on the Bible’s teaching regarding the mind and thinking. Hopefully this survey will encourage you to make a more in-depth look at what Scripture has to say about these matters. For now I would like to look at selected verses and offer just a few comments on them.
Scripture on the Mind
Let’s begin our survey by looking at:
Job 38:36- “Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts? Or who hath given understanding to the heart?”
What is the context of this verse? This verse comes in a list of questions intended to reveal the omnipotence and sovereignty of God. The obvious and expected answer to all the questions posed in this section is, “Only God!”
Why is it important for us to be reminded of this? We need this reminder because of our sinful tendency to make ourselves the god of our lives. Nowhere is this tendency more evident than in our thought life. All to often in our desire to gain insight and understanding we can easily fall into the trap of believing we did it- either through diligent study or through our own native intelligence. We can easily forget where the power to think correctly comes from. We can easily get prideful and think we are so smart that we can figure it all out on our own.
This verse reminds us that it is by God’s grace alone that we can even think at all. We are reminded here of Proverbs 1:7- “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction.” Wisdom or knowledge begins with God and we must acknowledge Him as the basis for everything. If we do not acknowledge this fact we will be sent down the path of a secular, or temporal mindset. We can become like the man described in Psalms 10:4- “The wicked in his proud countenance does not seek God; God is in none of his thoughts.”
Prov. 4:23- “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.”
It would seem that God scans our minds, testing or judging what He finds there. We are reminded of this in several other places in Scripture. For example in Jer. 6:19 we read: “Hear, O earth! Behold, I will certainly bring calamity on this people— The fruit of their thoughts, because they have not heeded My words nor My law, but rejected it.” Notice that the fruit these people received came as a result of what they thought. Also notice what the standard is for judging our thoughts. It is God’s Word.
In other words, there is a sense in which our thinking is determinative of our condition in life- whether we are blessed or cursed by God. And the standard God uses to determine whether we are blessed or cursed is His Word. This would seem to make our thinking important as to how we live our lives.
The word translated in Proverbs 4:23 as heart has the root meaning of the center of things, including our intellect. Also, the word translated as issues here has a root meaning of geographical boundary, or fence(issues = totsaah, to-tsaw-aw´; exit, i.e. (geographical) boundary, or (figuratively) deliverance, (actively) source:—border(-s), going(-s) forth (out), issues, outgoings.). The idea here is that what we think forms the fences or boundaries of our lives. This is what our Lord told us, isn’t it? In Mark 7:20-23 we read, “And He said, “What comes out of a man, that defiles a man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a man.”
Matt. 22:37- “Jesus said to him, “ ‘Thou shall love the LORD THY GOD WITH ALL THY HEART, WITH ALL THY SOUL, AND WITH ALL THY MIND.’”
This is a straightforward command to love God with all our minds. The question that grows out of this verse is, “What does it mean to love God with our mind?”
We will be spending a great deal of time later in these lessons attempting to answer this question. But let me introduce the subject now.
One way in which we love God with our minds is to abandon the Hellenic and humanistic way of thinking that views knowledge and truth as impersonal and abstract ideas. What a mouth full!! Let me explain what I mean by that.
Who created everything? What does this fact mean for us and our thinking? What happens if we tell people that we believe that God created everything out of nothing by just the power of His spoken word, in six literal days, and all about 12,000 years ago? They look at us like we have two heads, or they think we are a simple rube with no sense at all. After all, everybody knows that “science” tells us that everything was created by a big bang billions of years ago, and the random collisions of matter and energy produced all the complex life we see around us today, right? And scientists never have any biases.
Because God is the Creator, there is no independent creation, knowledge or counsel in the universe that is beyond Him or apart from Him. In other words, there is nothing we can know or think that does not relate back to God. There is an inescapable unity of all things under God.
Hence, life, faith and knowledge are not in contradiction to one another where they are faithful to God and his Word. In other words, we are not stupid rubes because we have faith in God and believe He created everything. Instead faith and knowledge find their unity in Him. It is an expression of our faith to believe the way we believe, just as it is an expression of men’s faith who believe that everything came from a big bang. (John 1:4- “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.” John 17:3 “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”).
So knowledge is not an abstract, intellectual matter, but rather it concerns the whole being of man. For example, we cannot seek to know Jesus as just an idea. He is the living Lord that changes men’s lives totally. Also, God’s Word is not merely abstract history, or a collection of aphorisms. It is rather the living law-word of our King that cleaves men’s hearts and minds like a sword, revealing the sin that resides there. Ideas, and the world of the mind are just as real as this physical world we live in. Ideas, and not just armies, wage battles throughout history that determine the course of events.
We will have much more to say about how we are to love God with our minds as we go through this study. Suffice it to say that it involves a reexamination of our presuppositions and sinful ways of thinking, and this is a task to which we look to the Holy Spirit for help.
Rom. 1:28- “And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;”
What is going on in this verse? What is the cause, and what is the effect? The point we need to see in this verse is the relationship between our thinking and our actions. There is an indissoluble link between our thoughts and our actions. The beginning of all outward expressions of sins is a denial of the knowledge of God. How does this work?
As we have already seen there is a sense in which God scans the mind and judges what He finds there. One form of judgment described here in Romans is that God may ‘give over’ that mind to debasement that results in all kinds of gross outward sins (convenient = becoming, fit).
Men cannot break with God in their thinking and expect to live like covenant-keepers, or think like covenant-keepers. As we just pointed out, ideas have very real consequences for how we live our lives. Once we begin to acknowledge presuppositions that are in error, we can expect more and more error to creep into our thinking, and produce bad fruit in our lives.
Rom. 8:7- “Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.”
Here in stark contrast is presented to us the antithesis in humankind. Men are divided into one of two categories, those who love God, and those who do not love God; those who keep God’s covenant, and those who do not. This antithesis was established right after Adam fell (Gen. 3:15), manifested itself immediately in the first two sons Adam and Eve had, and continues down to this day.
Nowhere is this antithesis more apparent than in the thinking of these two groups. There is a great difference between the mind of the covenant-keeper and that of the covenant breaker. One example of this difference is given to us in this verse.
We are told that the mind of the carnal man cannot be subject to the law of God. In other words, it is subject to something other than God’s Law. It is dominated or controlled by something else. This subjection to something else means it is at war with God, and at war with those who’s thinking is subject to God and His Law.
Let’s look at an example of what is meant here. Many people in our day deny that there is anything beyond this material universe. They deny the existence of God and the spiritual realm. “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die.” “Grab all you can now, you only go around once.”
For those who deny the immaterial, they are left with having their minds dominated, controlled and limited by this world. All that they see and think is limited to the material world they see around them. They have no understanding of the spiritual, and thus are not influenced by the spiritual or eternal in their thinking. If you try to tell them about spiritual things they laugh at you, or curse you. All they know is what they perceive with their senses. They are closed off to the vast realm of the eternal and the spiritual.
And thus were we before we were saved. Our minds were bound by this world until God’s Spirit brought life to them. But the influence of this worldly thinking did not disappear with the entrance of the Holy Spirit in us.
Which leads us to:
Rom. 12:1-2- “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” (Eph. 4:23 “and be renewed in the spirit of your mind”)
What did we say renewal meant? It means to renovate, to make over and make new. Renewing our minds involves changing their orientation and thought patterns so that they conform to those that please our Lord. This is a process that requires the knowledge of the gospel, the power of God’s Spirit, and an orientation towards the eternal.
In particular this involves re-orienting our minds away from a secular and temporal point of view to an eternal and spiritual orientation. When this happens our whole view of the world changes. Our minds are made new, and things which we did not believe or understand before now make complete sense. (My views on creation.)
We will have much more to say about this question of renewing our minds in the lessons ahead.
Phil. 2:5- “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus,”
This verse is really the crux of the whole matter. It gives us the target we should strive for as we work to renew our minds.
What is the ‘mind of Christ’? How is it different from our minds? As we think about the life of Christ and how He acted and reacted we begin to understand His mind. It is first of all a mind that is not driven by pride or ambition. It is one that recognizes its dependence on the Father, is content to do His will, and which views all of reality from His perspective. It is the Christian mind that we hope to discuss in detail in a few weeks.
This is really the purpose of our study. It is my hope to encourage you to begin developing the mind of Christ. That is to say, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to renew your minds and think God’s thoughts after Him.
So let’s summarize what we have learned in this brief survey. First, God is vitally interested in what we think. He is actively scanning our thoughts, judging them and giving us the fruits of those thoughts. Second, in this way our thoughts are determinative of our condition in life as well as the actions we engage in. Third, when we exclude God from our thinking it sets a course for our lives, as well as a way of viewing the world around us that is different from those who do not exclude God. Finally, we are to work at reorienting our minds and developing the mind of Christ. This takes active effort on our part, along with the work of the Holy Spirit. As we engage in this activity we are loving God with our minds.
