The heart assailed

“I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me” (Psalm 131:2).

How so, I always thought? Surely the nursing child is the one who is calm and quiet, not the weaned child. The suckling, not the baby ripped from the bosom, is most to be envied, I insisted. What better state is there in all the world than that of the infant soothed by drawing mother’s milk?

Ah, but there comes the time when the infant must learn to quiet himself. Mother is in the kitchen, and baby no longer has instant recourse to the solace of the breast. What will he do? Well, he will kick and fuss, he will protest—and then he will learn to quiet himself. It is not as if Mother has deserted him; she is nearby and he is never out of her thoughts.

The move is calculated on the mother’s part. She knows what baby does not: that growth must be attained, for a cruel world awaits. Mother will not be accompanying him to school or to his first job. There is a skill to be learned, a habit to be honed, that will stand him in good stead for a lifetime.

God is a God of all comfort (2 Corinthians 1:3). But the passively received comforts of God are not in view in this verse, where the agency is decidedly human: “I have calmed and quieted my soul.”

The psalmist obligingly shows how this is done, this spiritual discipline not attained without muscular human engagement, in imitation of the cloud of witnesses who have practiced it before us:

“Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?” (Psalm 42).

Here we eavesdrop on a man’s inner wrangling. He talks to himself. He wishes out loud. He remembers happier days. He hears the taunts of his enemies and directs an anguished question to God.

The process is messy, but before sleep steals over him, he has landed aright—he has calmed and quieted his soul: “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise him” (verse 11).

“Let not your hearts be troubled,” Jesus says (John 14:1). We should not miss that this is an order, not a Hallmark sentiment. The heart is assailed by trouble the way water runs downhill. But we are not to grant it victory. We are sternly exhorted to “overcome” (Revelation 2 and 3), or the consequences are dire.

Laziness must be exchanged for diligence (Hebrews 6:12). Carelessness, for guarding our hearts (Proverbs 4:23). We are to “wage the good warfare” (1 Timothy 1:18), “resist the devil” (James 4:7), “take captive every thought” and “demolish [every] argument” (2 Corinthians 10:5). For “if you do not stand firm in your faith, you will not stand at all” (Isaiah 7:9).

“Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts,” Paul says in Colossians 3:15. The Greek word translated “rule” is brabeuo, which Paul’s contemporaries would have recognized as referring to the umpire in the Greek Olympic Games. As the human cell, thanks to Watson and Crick, is now known to be not a blob of undifferentiated protoplasm but a teeming factory of diverse operations, so the heart is an arena crammed with fierce competitors, those “authorities,” “cosmic powers,” and “spiritual forces” Ephesians 6 speaks of. The peace of God, the heart’s true “umpire,” must prevail in the Christian.

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11). If putting away the things of the nursery were God’s job and not ours, then why would Paul find fault with Christians of a certain age who still need “milk” (1 Corinthians 3:2) and with fussy spiritual babes who “by this time … ought to be teachers” (Hebrews 5:12)?

Turns out there is a lot for us to do in this salvation that is from God and “by faith from first to last.” And we are able to do it because Christ died and rose.

Away with theologies of passivity masquerading as true doctrines of grace.

We meet the psalmist in Psalm 131:2 just in the aftermath of a skirmish he has won. There has been unpleasantness, but like the weaned child he has settled himself down and learned to quiet his own soul, for he knows that the One who loves his soul is never far, and keeps him always in His thoughts.