“Take delight in the Lord,
and he will give you the desires of your heart.” Psalm 37:4 (NIV)
The idea of “taking delight” or pleasure in the Lord is one that we modern Western Christians have a tendency to spiritualize in a way that, I think, David and ancient Israelites did not. We want this word here in Psalm 37:4 to refer to some sort of high-level, spiritual, intellectual, contemplative, non-bodily experience—something unlike any other human experience—something far removed and completely unlike anything we experience in our physical, embodied life—something that only our ethereal soul can understand.
But the Hebrew word here, like much of Old Testament spirituality is earthy, embodied—tied to our physical experience as bodily human beings. We modern Western Christians tend to be less influenced by the worldview of the Scriptures and more influenced by the world of the pagan Greek philosophers like Plato, who believed that anything related to the physical experience of the human body was grubby, dirty, degrading. For them, the goal of spiritual advancement and spiritual life was to get as far away from physical, bodily experience as possible, to suppress it, push it down. They viewed our bodily experience as a hindrance to the true spiritual life, not a help.
David and the Hebrew prophets knew nothing like that. They understood well that God made human beings to be embodied beings. The Bible sees our body as a natural, proper aspect of our existence. For human beings to be apart from the body is an abnormal, unnatural condition. In his incarnation, the Son of God affirmed our human embodiedness. The promise of resurrection is the promise of the restoration of our physical embodiment. Yes, we sometimes use our bodies to commit sin, but the root of that sin isn’t in our bodies. It’s in our hearts (see Mark 7:21-22 and many other references to “heart” in the gospels). God has always intended for us to be embodied creatures and to remain that way.
Here in this verse, David has a bodily experience in mind when he speaks of delighting in the Lord. Isaiah helps us with that. In Isaiah 55:2, he uses the same word that David uses in Psalm 37:4. “Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare”(NIV). God, whom Isaiah is quoting here, says that when we come to him, the experience will be like sitting down to the most rich and gastronomically enjoyable meal imaginable. To be with God is like being at a more appetizing feast than we’ve ever experienced anywhere else. In so many words, God is saying that the pleasure of his presence is like the pleasure of eating great food.
This is a recurring theme in the Old Testament. We find it again in Isaiah 66:11. This passage is a promise that the Israelites will not be in exile forever. They will be restored to Jerusalem, the place where God’s heavenly abode meets our earthly abode. This promise to the people of Israel is, in fact, the promise of the Gospel, that God will redeem and restore us to himself. Look at how God describes what that will be like. He promises that the experience of his merciful grace that restores us to relationship with him is like the deep, earthy pleasure that an infant experiences when it sucks at the full breast of its mother. “For you will nurse and be satisfied at her comforting breasts; you will drink deeply and delight in her overflowing abundance”(NIV).
Why do we find such earthy bodiliness embarrassing? Why do we shy away from it in favor of some sort of ethereal, ghostly, floating-on-clouds sort of vision of communion with God? When we do that, we make the experience of God’s presence beyond our imagination, and so we also make it hard for anyone outside the Faith to really find relationship with God to be desirable or even understandable.
Fasting—depriving ourselves of the pleasures of eating—is an appropriate spiritual discipline. But we can only gain the real benefits of fasting if we recognize that an essential part of the fast is the act of breaking the fast. That is to say, the pleasure of eating at the end of the fast is the way we experience what David and Isaiah are talking about in the passages we’ve just been looking at. When we abstain from food as a spiritual exercise (fasting), we practice saying “No” to ourselves for the sake of God. When we break the fast and satisfy our hungry bodies, the experience reminds us of the delight of saying “Yes” to God.
Further, I write this just after the American feast holiday of Thanksgiving and shortly before the Christian feast holiday of Christmas. So, let me encourage us all to exuberantly engage in the feasting that is at the heart of this season. But as a protective against simple gluttony, let us always embrace our feasting with prayer and thanksgiving, so that the pleasure we experience in good food and drink might impress upon our hearts the remembrance of the delight we can have in communion with our redeemer God who provides us with every good and perfect gift.
© 2024 Gary A. Chorpenning
Photos by GAC
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