The following "Question" was asked by a member of the congregation at Grace Community Church in Panorama City, California, and "Answered" by their pastor, John MacArthur Jr. It was transcribed from the tape, GC 70-5, titled "Bible Questions and Answers."  A copy of the tape can be obtained by writing, Word of Grace, P.O. Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412 or by dialing toll free 1-800-55-GRACE.  Copyright John MacArthur Jr., All Rights Reserved.

Question

I want to read a couple of verses first and then ask you a question.  The first one is in Mark 11:23; Jesus is saying, "Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, 'Be taken up and cast into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it shall be granted him."  And now in Romans 10:10 it also says, "For with the heart man believes."  And then in Mark 12:30 it says, "And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength."  I don't want to doubt with my heart, and I want to believe with my heart, and I definitely want to love the Lord with all my heart, but I don't understand exactly what is a heart?  I don't know--it's not this physical thing that pumps blood.

 Answer

That's terrific.  What is a heart?  You know we have so much cultural garbage piled around the heart in our world.  You see them on the bumper stickers, you know with beagles, and dogs, and parakeets, you know--I, and then a heart, "love" K-Mart, or whatever it is.  We associate the heart with emotion--that's our problem.  "I love you with all my heart" means "vooom" you know?  Whatever, more than something that's cold and decisive, it's something that's emotional, but that is not the Biblical use of the term "heart." 

The best way to understand it, the best way to simply your question is this: the heart is the core of our being in the Scripture.  It is that part of us which "knows" and "thinks" and "feels."  The Old Testament says, "As a man thinks in his heart, so is he."  I believe the heart is really the equivalent of the mind.  I think when you look at loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, you cannot sort out all four of those things and say "this is this" and "this is this" and "this is this" and "this is that," and we got four little deals in us all going independently.  I think what he's doing is simply trying to get the message across that we have to love God with every fiber of our being, and every perceivable and imperceptible dimension of existence.  But the heart is the composite essence of my thinking processes: I think there, I know there, I understand there, and I feel there.  It is not emotion without mind--that's what I am trying to say.

Now, if you want to talk about emotion you are going to find in the Hebrew culture that the emotion is, in the Bible, translated in the Authorized Version "bowels."  You go back to the Song of Solomon, and when his lover comes to the door and he's at the door and he says, you know, in effect, "I feel my love for you in my bowels."  That doesn't sound too romantic, frankly, and if you try that on some girl she will probably slam the door in your face.  The truth of the matter is, that is where you feel your emotion, that's where you feel your emotion.  You know you have 1 John 3:16, "If you say you love God and your neighbor has need and you shut up your bowels of compassion," in other words, you don't feel any emotion, you're not hurting over his need, "how dwells the love of God in you?" 

So, I would say that in a general sense the Hebrew understanding was that the heart was representative or equivalent to the mind--to the thinking capabilities.  That means that you can only love God in the sense that you know God, or know about Him.  Therefore, the more I know about God, the more capable I am of loving and adoring and praising Him.  The more I know about God, the more ready I am to believe Him for everything, because I know Him.  I cannot know God, I cannot trust God for something in a vacuum of ignorance.  Do you know what I mean?  I can't believe He will deliver me unless I know that He is a God that has proven to be a deliverer.  I can't believe that He will strengthen me unless I know that he is a God of great strength.  I can't believe that He will comfort me unless I know Him to be the God of all comfort.  But when I know that, it is my knowledge about God that controls my responses. 

That's where Habakkuk was in chapter one; he's crying out to God, "How long am I going to keep crying God, come down and judge this bitter and hasty nation, the Caldeans.  Come down and revive your people Israel."  And then God says, "I'm going to use the Caldeans to judge the Israelites."  And he says, "I don't understand it, why don't you revive your people?  Why are You judging them?  How can You judge them with this bitter and hasty Caldean nation?"  He's got a terrible problem and so he steps back and starts to recite what he knows about God.  He uses the term Almighty God: he talks about God's eternity, that is, He was before the problem and He'll be after the problem. 

He uses the term of God's covenant-keeping character.  He says, God is too holy to look on iniquity; He cannot look upon sin, and God doesn't make mistakes, therefore.  As he begins to recite in his own mind his theology proper, his knowledge of God; it begins to control his emotion and his feeling so that, finally, in chapter 3, after he has recited all the history of what God has done, he says in effect, "If everything in the world goes to pieces I will continue to rejoice in the Lord of my salvation."  "I mean, if all the crops die," he says, "and everything goes wacky in the world, I'm o.k. because of what I know." 

So loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, believing in God with all your heart, trusting God with all your heart, is a question of knowing God in your heart.  Then that has the effect of affecting your feeling and your emotion.  But that is the distinction that you want to make, and we could say more about that, but that is the basic distinction: that the heart is the center of thought, and attitude, and understanding, and knowledge.  It's the mind really.